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C h a p t e r 3 Embracing the Medium: Metaphor and Resistance in John Donne The practices that we have seen in the poems of George Herbert and Edward Taylor call attention to the way that poetic form and structure refuse to be sublimated into the transparency of semantic content. In the work of those poets, the material and substantial valences of the poetic text are themselves significant, objectively present and full of the substance of meaning in themselves. As the architectural elements of poetry constitute the site in which meaning inheres, they serve as organizing principles of perception, propounding, to return again to Allen Grossman’s phrase, ‘‘the presence of presence.’’1 In this capacity, poetic form is not unlike metaphor, which, as Renaissance rhetoricians were aware, presented ‘‘the formes of knowen things . . . to mans use’’—or, to put this description by Henry Peacham another way, metaphor serves as an apprehensible object of knowledge, neither incidental nor merely ornamental but operative and substantially constitutive.2 For John Donne, it is the very apprehensibility of metaphor that makes of it such an optimal presencing engine, a feature that God uses to fullest advantage in biblical text. Donne singles out the ‘‘livelier’’ effects of figurative language in a 1623 sermon, noting that metaphor ‘‘may work greater impressions upon the Readers.’’3 Donne’s homiletic description of the palpable force brought to bear by metaphor helps illuminate the poet’s energetic experiments upon figuration. As Taylor does, Donne leaves in his sermons a healthy metacommentary on the concerns that animate his poetry; not surprisingly, over the course of his numerous extant sermons, Donne turns frequently to the subject of figuration, its operation, its use, and its effects. In his sermons, Donne both explains and enacts his tropic 90 Chapter 3 poetics. As he says in a 1620 sermon, ‘‘It is true that S. Augustine sayes, Figura nihil probat, A figure, an Allegory proves nothing; yet, sayes he, addit lucem, & ornat, It makes that which is true in it selfe, more evident and more acceptable.’’4 Donne’s formulation here, based on his reading of Augustine, is that metaphor works to manifest, to make ‘‘acceptable’’—by which he means receivable—that which is. Trope is, in Donne’s symbolic metaphysics, not a referential tool but a presencing machine, working to accomplish a pleroma of substance in itself. The relationship between the perceptible and substantial impression available in metaphor and Donne’s investment in the singular significance of materiality, so crucial to his poetics , is most explicitly theorized in his prose, to which we must first turn. Perhaps the best place to begin an examination of Donne’s interest in material substance is with its disintegration. The fate of the body after death is the subject of repeated rumination throughout Donne’s work, and the topic becomes the center of gravity in the last sermon that Donne preached, a few weeks before his death. This final performance from the pulpit, preached at Whitehall before the king at the beginning of Lent in 1631, was published after Donne’s death as Deaths Duell, or A Consolation to the Soule, against the dying Life, and living Death of the Body. Though the title is not Donne’s own invention, its paradoxes capture well the sermon’s themes of mortification and redemption, death and resurrection, and hint at Donne’s sometimes disorienting method of collapsing those terms together. As Donne considers the ‘‘dying Life’’ of the mortal body, doomed to death even from the moment of its birth, and the ‘‘living Death’’ of the resurrected body, recompacted by God’s power out of decomposition and dispersal , he reveals a deep concern with what happens to the body, in life and in death. The frail and fragile flesh, whose susceptibility to disease and infirmity Donne had chronicled and spiritualized in his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, is for Donne ever in peril of corruption and vulnerable to the depredations of mortality; and when death finally does overtake the body, as it must sooner or later, the repugnance of its decay exceeds Donne’s imaginings. ‘‘Painters have presented to us with some horrour, the sceleton, the frame of the bones of a mans body,’’ Donne says in a 1620 sermon on Job 19.26, ‘‘but the state of a body, in the dissolution of the grave, no pencil can present to us. Between that excrementall jelly that thy body is made of at first, and...

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