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

HSMade

HSMade Textual Introduction As is shown on Figure 2 in the General Textual Introduction (p. lxii), HSMade is the introductory poem in both the earlier, Group...III sequence of "Diuine Medita... tions" and in NY3'S later replication of that sequence at the beginning of its collec... tion of "Holy Sonnets." The poem is discarded in the restructuring that gives rise to the subsequent Group...IjII sequence, however, and thus does not appear in A in 1633. In the editorially constructed sequence of 1635 (B), the poem is recovered from H6 and restored to its original place at the head of the set, a position it occupies in all subsequent editions save those of Alford, who reproduces the 1633 sequence; Lowell (M), who combines the Holy Sonnets with Corona in a continuously numbered series; Gardner, who prints it as the first of the "penitential" sonnets "added in 1635"; and Shawcross, who essentially follows Gardner (see Figure 6 on p. lxxvi). The primary manuscript texts exhibit little substantive variation and none that is unquestionably authorial. Within Group III the Historical Collation reports HHI 's "my" (for the normative "myne") in line 2 and a split between "I can my selfe" (B46, H5, HHI) and the very likely scribal "my selfe I can" (C9, H6) in line 12; and the second...stage text of NY3 differs from its predecessors only in giving "towards [for it t'wards] hell" in line 8. Since NY3 never entered the contemporary stream of tex'" tual transmission, however, and since-save Shawcross (Z), who lists the variant in his apparatus-no editor (including Gosse) has even noted the absence of "it" in NY3'S rendition, the reading has practically been lost until now. "[T]owards hell" conveys essentially the same idea as Group Ill's "it towards [or t'wards] hell," how... ever, and may represent Donne's attempt to unclutter the line and clarify its meter. Introducing the editorial "feeble" (for the manuscripts' "feebled") in line 7, B sets the H6 text into print, and the poem subsequently appears in C-G without further change. The texts in the remaining seventeenth...century sources derive, respectively, from one or another of these collected editions. As the inscriber's marginal note indicates (see the Format section of the Historical Collation below), the text in AFI is taken from G. Although evidence within HSMade per se is lacking, the fact that among its Donne entries B6 includes the spurious "On the Sacrament" (first printed as Donne's in the 1635 Poems [B]) combines with a number of readings in SecAnin line 96 (where B6 avoids B's erroneous "patch'd" [for the correct parch'd]), in line 103 (where B6 avoids G's erroneous "trust" [for the correct thrust]), and in line 350 (where B6 matches C's unique lowercasing of "suns" [where Band D-G capitalize the word])-to suggest that B6's copies of all its Donne texts, including HSMade, derive from C. H II consists of handwritten additions to a copy of A that is now in the Harvard library, and the cataloguer's assertion that these stem "largely from the 5° HSMade Textual Introduction As is shown on Figure 2 in the General Textual Introduction (p. lxii), HSMade is the introductory poem in both the earlier, Group-III sequence of "Diuine Meditations " and in NY3'S later replication of that sequence at the beginning of its collection of "Holy Sonnets." The poem is discarded in the restructuring that gives rise to the subsequent Group-I/II sequence, however, and thus does not appear in A in 1633. In the editorially constructed sequence of 1635 (B), the poem is recovered from H6 and restored to its original place at the head of the set, a position it occupies in all subsequent editions save those of Alford, who reproduces the 1633 sequence; Lowell (M), who combines the Holy Sonnets with Corona in a continuously numbered series; Gardner, who prints it as the first of the "penitential" sonnets "added in 1635"; and Shawcross, who essentially follows Gardner (see Figure 6 on p. lxxvi). The primary manuscript texts exhibit little substantive variation and none that is unquestionably authorial. Within Group III the Historical Collation reports HHl'S "my" (for the normative "myne") in line 2 and a split between "I can my selfe" (B46, H5, HHl) and the very likely scribal "my selfe I can" (C9, H6) in line 12; and the second-stage text of NY3 differs from...