The Grammar of Salvation and the Poetics of Possibility in Donne's Holy Sonnets

One of the difficulties facing early seventeenth-century Protestants in England, as Catherine Gimelli Martin has argued, was how to reconcile God's decree of election, which is made before and outside time, with the temporal human experience of coming to be assured in one's salvation. The question of "am I saved?" is thus closely allied with the question "when will I know that I am saved?" This article explores the tension between these two questions in Donne's Holy Sonnets, examining the Sonnets' temporal ambiguities in order to suggest that Donne uses this ambiguity as a strategy to recast the question of his salvation within a framework he controls. Through careful reading of Donne's use of shifting verb tenses and moods, this article shows how the Holy Sonnets struggle to develop a concrete narrative of salvation, a struggle consistent with Donne's widely noted distrust of time. Instead of tracing a linear temporal progression toward assurance, the Sonnets shift from the indicative and conditional to the imperative mood as a way to stop time and reframe the question of the speaker's salvation as a matter of possibility rather than of future promise. Instead of asking whether he is saved or when he will know whether he is saved, Donne's speaker refigures the problem around the question of whether he is able to be saved, using the poetic and grammatical tools at his disposal to produce the answer he wants.