Women Writing of Divinest Things: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Pembroke, Wroth, and Lanyer

8. Crowns of Devotion

Crowns of Devotion 153 153 CHAPTER EIGHT Crowns of Devotion Throughout my discussions of Pembroke’s Psalmes and Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, I have aimed to show how rhetoric plays a crucial role in devotional expression, whether that devotion centers on “erotic attachment or religious worship” or, as it sometimes does in Wroth’s sonnets, “both at once.” 1 In this final chapter on Wroth, I focus specifically on how the use of rhetoric compares between what seem to be clearly secular or sacred expressions of devotion in Wroth’s “crowne of Sonetts” and Donne’s “La Corona.” Though there is much in Wroth’s sonnet sequence to suggest a fruitful comparison with other poets, her apparent admirer Ben Jonson in particular, the formal similarity of Wroth’s and Donne’s crowns of devotion makes their verse an especially inviting comparison; that the intended objects of devotion differ between the two crowns makes the prospect even more intriguing. As with the diverse works of the three poets this book investigates, considering these two sequences together may tell us much about how rhetoric can be used toward expressive ends that are as different as they are similar. It is important, Quilligan indicates in her discussion of Donne and Wroth, to read women’s writing within its literary-historical context, and it is also true that, in both biographical and thematic terms, these poets have much in common.2 The two crowns also 154 Women Writing of Divinest Things share some significant rhetorical similarities. It is possible that Wroth may have even known Donne’s corona, likely written before her “crowne of Sonetts,” but this may not also mean that poetic influence only went one way. 3 Emphasizing the literary context in which Wroth wrote, Quilligan is quite right to maintain that “To take Wroth up as not merely a member of her family or her gender, but of her generational cohort, promises to add something that heretofore has been missing from our sense of the dominant poets themselves.”4 Comparing Wroth’s and Donne’s crowns of sonnets also seems especially promising in light of the latter’s status as one of the most admired rhetors of his age: considering his crown in relation to Wroth’s should tell us much about her place in rhetorical culture. Donne’s crown is, it is true, explicitly Christian, but much of Wroth’s “crowne of Sonetts” is at least implicitly so. Donne’s sacred content, though, is far from metaphorical: that his crown is a Christian one he makes crystal clear from the beginning. After its opening sonnet prayer, the remaining six poems present the stages of Christ’s life in chronological order: “Annunciation,” “Nativity,” “Temple,” “Crucifying,” “Resurrection” and “Ascension.” Like the poems of Wroth’s crown of secular love, though, Donne’s corona also suggests that what is sacred and what is secular are not always diametrically opposed; rather, “the knowledge of diuine and humane thinges”5 is as interdependent as Peacham’s linking suggests. Donne’s coronal sequence, like Wroth’s “crowne of Sonetts” and many of Pembroke’s Psalmes, confirms that the sacred and the secular are equally important to the poetic expression of devotion. The meeting of contraries in Donne’s corona is, of course, most obvious in that its explicitly sacred verse takes a recognizably secular form: “La Corona” is part of a group of devotional poems that are, oxymoronically perhaps, known as the “Holy Sonnets.” The convergence of the sacred and the secular is also apparent, as it is in Wroth’s crown, in other ways as well. Most notable is that Donne’s corona, like all complete crowns of sonnets, brings the sacred and the secular together within the larger coronal form: as Crowns of Devotion 155 much as the sonnet suggests secular love, circularity alludes to divinity. 6 “La Corona” uses circular and sonnet forms, and it also uses the conventions and figures of rhetoric in a way that affirms the necessary interconnection of the sacred and the secular. Though not all of his readers believe this to be the case, I must disagree and suggest that Donne’s corona, like Wroth’s, depicts this particular binary in terms that suggest something less than absolute opposition. 7 Like Wroth’s “crowne of Sonetts,” Donne’s “La Corona” uses rhetorical technique in a way that emphasizes the crown...