The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, Volume 7, Part 1: The Holy Sonnets

HSSpit

~ HSSpit COMMENTARY General Commentary In an eighteenth..century Moravian Brethren's hymn..book (A Collection ofHymns) (1754 [1966, 19-20]), four Holy Sonnets-HSMade, HSDue, HSSpit, and HSWhatare used, slightly altered, and combined to make up hymn number 383. Herbold (1965, 279-81), reading HSSpit against the backdrop of a study of dia.. lectics, refers to the poem as a "single dialectical syllogism" (279), holds that "the keynote of Donne's dialectics is his search for an equilibrium between balanced po.. larities" (280), and generalizes that Donne's dialectics in the Holy Sonnets is "chiefly between Faith and Doubt" (281). Carey (198 I, 48) interprets Donne's attempt at identification with Christ on the cross as a sign of his "hunger for pain." Even though Donne "flings himself on the nails and the sword," nothing happens, Carey says, for "he is not fit, he realizes, for those bloody joys." The poem reflects, in Carey's opinion, Donne's "spiritual paraly.. sis, which signals God's desertion." Grant (1983, 115-17, 166) analyzes the sonnet in the context of his view of the cross as that which "remains with us, as Thomas aKempis says, calling for our con.. stant self..correction and vigilant discrimination." In Grant's view, HSSpit "expresses the turbulence of a man coming to realise the paradox ... of God's redemptive ac.. tion, his 'strange love'" (I 15). Grant finds that the sonnet can be divided according to the Ignatian meditative model, "adapted by Donne for his Protestant purposes." Grant cites Lewalski's study of Protestant poetics (1979) in relation to Martz's study (1954, 1962) of what Grant describes as the"older 'Ignatian' view" (I 66n16). Grant divides the three quatrains according to the Ignatian process and the three faculties of the mind: "the first, evoking the scene of crucifixion," which "uses especially the power of memory," with Donne's speaker seeing himself "actually on the cross." The second quatrain, Grant observes, "brings understanding to bear on what memory has presented as phantasm," while the sestet "resolves the poem in a traditional colloquy or prayer, representing will," thus showing forth the Trinity (I 16). But at the end of the poem, according to Grant, the "strange love" is not available to the speaker and he is therefore "left waiting on it." For Grant, "the imagery rather pre.. sents the tension of faith that precedes contemplation" (I 17). Grant notes further that the poem "especially dramatises the'!' in process of discovering, before the cross, the central importance of mortification, and its own radical impotence to overcome separation from God" (I 16). ~ HSSpit COMMENTARY General Commentary In an eighteenth-century Moravian Brethren's hymn-book (A Collection ofHymns) (1754 [1966,19-20]), four Holy Sonnets-HSMade, HSDue, HSSpit, and HSWhatare used, slightly altered, and combined to make up hymn number 383. Herbold (1965, 279-81), reading HSSpit against the backdrop of a study of dialectics , refers to the poem as a "single dialectical syllogism" (279), holds that "the keynote of Donne's dialectics is his search for an equilibrium between balanced polarities " (280), and generalizes that Donne's dialectics in the Holy Sonnets is "chiefly between Faith and Doubt" (281). Carey (198 I, 48) interprets Donne's attempt at identification with Christ on the cross as a sign of his "hunger for pain." Even though Donne "flings himself on the nails and the sword," nothing happens, Carey says, for "he is not fit, he realizes, for those bloody joys." The poem reflects, in Carey's opinion, Donne's "spiritual paralysis , which signals God's desertion." Grant (1983, rr5-Q, 166) analyzes the sonnet in the context of his view of the cross as that which "remains with us, as Thomas aKempis says, calling for our constant self-correction and vigilant discrimination." In Grant's view, HSSpit "expresses the turbulence of a man coming to realise the paradox ... of God's redemptive action , his 'strange love'" (rr5). Grant finds that the sonnet can be divided according to the Ignatian meditative model, "adapted by Donne for his Protestant purposes." Grant cites Lewalski's study of Protestant poetics (1979) in relation to Martz's study (1954, 1962) of what Grant describes as the "older 'Ignatian' view" (166nr6). Grant divides the three quatrains according to the Ignatian process and the three faculties of the mind: "the first, evoking the scene of crucifixion," which "uses especially the power of memory," with Donne's speaker seeing himself "actually on the cross." The second quatrain, Grant...