Refiguring the Sacred Feminine: The Poems of John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer and John Milton

DONNE

13 DONNE John Donne’s poetics, his explorations of human sexuality and love, and his portrayals of spiritual struggle are all intricately entwined with his response to post-Reformation theological issues. Whether a Donne persona is hoping to turn a bug bite into a seduction (as in “The Flea”), complimenting English ladies while traveling abroad in Catholic France (as in “A Letter to the Lady Carey and Mrs. Essex Rich”), or contemplating the image of the crucified Christ (as in “What if this present?”), his discourse will be loaded with theological freight.1 For Donne was raised on the language of religious debate, having grown up in a fiercely committed recusant family, and he came to embrace the English church only, as he would put it in a famous passage from the preface to Pseudo-Martyr, after he had “suruayed and digested the whole body of Diuinity, controuerted betweene ours and the Romane Church” (B3r). This process of surveying and digestion never really ended for Donne. Though he ceased at some point to call the Roman Catholic Church his own (the precise date remains uncertain), he never abandoned the ecumenical spirit with which he undertook the study of debated theological and ecclesiastical questions . He would eventually become a priest of the English church, dean of St. Paul’s, a preacher, and a Protestant theologian of great subtlety and depth, but his commitment to the Church of England did not prevent him from continuing to believe what 14 Donne he asserted in a 1609 letter to his friend Henry Goodyer: “that in all Christian professions there is way to salvation” and that the Roman Catholic and English Protestant churches are “sister teats of [God’s] graces, yet both diseased and infected, but not both alike” (Donne, Letters, 100, 102). This graphic gynecological image is a good starting point for reflection upon Donne’s idea of Ecclesia, which acknowledges both the painful mastitis of the established church (the breast at which he was feeding by 1609) and the more deadly cancer that he and other English Protestants believe to be afflicting the Roman breast. Both ecclesiastical paps, Donne implies, nourish souls; grace flows through each. But neither is untouched by the corruption of the fallen world. In light of this image, it is no surprise to find that the poems Donne was writing during the same period as the letter grapple constantly with genderoriented versions of the questions central to the theological and ecclesiastical issues debated by Roman Catholics and English Protestants of various persuasions during the early seventeenth century: To which incarnation of the bride of Christ should one be loyal? And what does the true bride look like? What role does the mother of Jesus play in our salvation, and how should we honor her? Is grace made manifest in physically tangible ways? And, if so, how are we to respond to the streams of grace that flow through maternal and material channels? Donne’s poems never provide simple, definitive answers to these questions. Even in the sermons he preached after he was ordained in 1615, his theology and ecclesiology are nuanced in ways that defy easy categorization. But in much of the poetry he wrote during the Jacobean period—from “The Annuntiation and Passion” in 1608, through “Since She whome I lovd” (which grapples with the 1617 death of his wife) and “Show me deare Christ” (which may have been written as late as 1620)2 —Donne seeks answers to the theological, political, cultural, and ecclesiastical issues of his time and to his own spiritual, emotional, and physical desires through encounters with and meditations on female figures. The church, the Blessed Virgin, the “shee” of the Anniversaries, and his own beloved Anne all serve as sacramental intermediaries between God and man, between the spiritual and the physical, between the sacred and the profane. These encounters vary in part because they take place within several different genres. In “The Annuntiation and Passion,” a 46-line meditative poem inspired by the liturgical and political events of 1608, Donne’s persona is filled with quiet awe, and his vision of a feminine Trinity is unclouded by fear or doubt. In the sonnet on Anne’s death, however, and in “Show me deare Christ,” the speaker is vexed and uncertain, torn by conflicting emotions Donne associates with the sonnet form itself; his vision is blurred or...