Holy Sonnet 10

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Holy Sonnet 10

John Donne 1633

Donne most likely wrote “Holy Sonnet 10” in 1609 but, like most poetry of that time, it did not appear in print during the poet’s lifetime. The poem was first published in 1633, two years after Donne’s death; during his life, however, his poetry became well known because it circulated privately in manuscript and handwritten copies among literate Londoners. “Holy Sonnet 10” belongs to the latter part of Donne’s output, the religious works known as his “Divine Poems,” famous because they dramatically create a feeling of a personal and often agonized relationship between the speaker and God. Before composing his “Divine Poems,” Donne had achieved fame for writing skillful and often cynical poetry in celebration of sexual love. But no strict chronological line splits his secular poems from his religious ones; for example, he probably wrote his great love poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” at about the same time as some of his religious works.

Donne apparently loved the intellectual challenges of paradox, one of the key characteristics of metaphysical poetry. He constructs “Holy Sonnet 10” around one of the central paradoxes of Christianity: that Christ’s sacrifice will ultimately mean the death of Death. The sonnet addresses Death directly as if it were a person, an example of the devices of apostrophe and personification. Systematically the poem instructs Death to give up its pride, since it will ultimately be defeated. Further, even though Death has power, its power is severely limited. Death also unknowingly does God’s work,

since only through Death can humanity achieve the eternal life God promises.

Author Biography

Donne was born in London in 1572. His family was of Roman Catholic faith (his mother was a relative of the Catholic martyr Sir Thomas More), and he grew up experiencing the religious discrimination of the Anglican majority in England against Catholics. It has been speculated that it was this very discrimination that prevented Donne from completing his studies at Oxford University. After leaving Oxford, he studied law in London and received his degree in 1596. Seeking adventure, Donne sailed with the English expeditions against the Spanish, and his experiences inspired the poems “The Storm,” “The Calm,” and “The Burnt Ship.” The following year, Donne returned to London and became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton. In December, 1601, he clandestinely married Egerton’s sixteen-year-old niece Ann More. When the news became public, More’s father unsuccessfully endeavored to annul the marriage, but did succeed in imprisoning Donne for a short period of time. In 1602 Donne was released and, now unemployed, spent the next thirteen years trying to gain financial security for his family. Eventually, he converted from Roman Catholicism to Anglicism, and was enlisted by Sir Thomas Morton to aid him in writing anti-Catholic pamphlets. In 1610 he published his first work, Pseudo-Martyr, which attempted to induce English Catholics to repudiate their allegiance to Rome (home of the Catholic Church) and take an oath of allegiance to the British crown. From 1611 to 1612 Donne accompanied Sir Robert Drury to France on a long diplomatic mission, during which he composed some of his most acclaimed verse letters, funeral poems, holy sonnets and love poems, in particular “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” Returning to England in 1612, Donne considered becoming an Anglican minister, but hesitated because of self-doubt. He was finally ordained in early 1615 and quickly became one of the most respected clergymen of his time. He was elected dean of St. Paul’s in 1621 and devoted the majority of his life to writing sermons and other religious works until his death in 1631.

Poem Text

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’ st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must
     flow;
And soonest our best men with thee do go—
Rest of their bones and souls’ delivery!

Thou’rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate
     men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke. Why swell’st thou
     then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die.

Poem Summary

Lines 1-4

The poem begins by addressing Death dramatically and directly. Such an address to something that we realistically know can’t be listening is called an apostrophe. In treating Death as if it were a person, the poem also uses the device of personification. The first quatrain of the sonnet attacks Death for its pride, denying that it is “mighty and dreadful, ” as some have called it. The poem then introduces a paradox, stating that the people Death “overthrows” do not really die, and that Death is not even strong enough to kill the speaker. In asserting Death’s powerlessness, the speaker even goes so far as to express a note of pity, calling it “poor Death.” But “poor” also suggests a note of contempt for Death’s impotence, its poverty of resources, as much as the ability to be pitied. And if we think of Death as total negation, of the absence of all the richness that we think of as Life, we can imagine how Death might be seen as “poor.”

Lines 5-8

The second quatrain develops the idea that Death is not to be feared. In fact, much the opposite is the case. The speaker draws the conventional analogy between Death, on the one hand, and “rest and sleep,” which are Death’s “pictures” or likenesses, on the other. We find rest and sleep pleasurable, so by analogy, we should find Death much more so. The speaker introduces evidence of Death’s pleasantness, namely, that “our best men” die early. Here, however, the poem argues unconventionally, saying it is no tragedy that the good die young. Rather, they die willingly, eager for rest for their bodies in the grave, and release or freedom for their souls in heaven. Donne’s development of the pleasantness of Death appears to be without irony; that is, Donne is not implying that the speaker is naive about Death’s terror or power. Instead, the poem seems truly to argue that Death is not powerful, that the terror we traditionally associate with death is unwarranted, and that Death provides the believing Christian a genuine and pleasurable reward.

Lines 9-12

The ninth line of an Italian sonnet, the form whose rhyme scheme this poem follows, usually marks a turn: a shift in the theme or tone of the sonnet between the eight-line octave and the six-line sestet. However, “Holy Sonnet 10” behaves structurally more like a Shakespearean sonnet. Instead of a strong change in tone or argument, line 9 continues developing the speaker’s attack on Death in a similar tone. Death is no one’s master, claims the speaker; in fact it is a slave, subject to those who deal death to others, including the forces of fate and chance, here personified, and the real persons of kings. Death also is a slave to “desperate men,” that is, people in despair who commit suicide. Further, Death’s fellows or family are not the noble companions befitting a proud monarch, but a horrible and disgusting crew: poison, war, and sickness, all personified. Death’s ability to make us sleep—and here again the speaker uses the conventional analogy of sleep and death—can be equaled or bettered by drugs such as opium (the “poppy” being opium’s source) or by magic spells or “charms.” The speaker ends this third quatrain by asking death why it puffs itself up with pride, in direct defiance of the warning in line 1 to “be not proud.”

Lines 13-14

The sonnet’s concluding couplet resolves the poem by offering the ultimate evidence of Death’s powerlessness. In lines 5-6 and 11, the speaker has introduced the conventional analogy of sleep to death. In the close of the poem, however, the speaker argues that this analogy is actually an identity: Death really is asleep, from which we will awaken into eternal life. This assertion explains all the paradoxes in the poem: Death is not an ending but a beginning. Further, Death provides the means for its own defeat, since by dying we will overcome Death, and Death will be destroyed. In the ultimate paradox, Death will die.

Donne loved puns, and it is worth noting that he daringly used sexual metaphors and similes in several of his religious poems, such as “Holy Sonnet 14.” A favorite pun of Donne’s was on the word “die,” which in his time carried the slang meaning “to consummate the sexual act.” Donne makes extensive use of this pun in his great love poem “The Canonization.” In “Holy Sonnet 10,” Donne might similarly be punning on the word “die” in the final celebration of the death of Death. The speaker has just asked Death in line 12, “why swell’st thou then?” which, in addition to attacking Death’s pride, might be Donne’s playful joking about the sexual swelling of a man’s erection. If so, then for Death to die would be for Death to be emptied, to be spent, and for Death’s purpose to be consummated. In Christian terms, this would make sense, since the consummation of Death in the poem really does “father” us into the afterlife, making our eternal rebirth possible.

Themes

Death

The most prominent theme of Holy Sonnet 10 is that one should not fear death. Death is admonished directly to “be not proud”; it is belittled vehemently as a slave whose job—providing rest and sleep for the soul is better done by humble drugs or simple magic charms. The poem asserts the Christian doctrine that Christ transformed death through his own death and resurrection, making it a passageway to the soul’s rest and, after the resurrection of all people at the final judgment, the eternal pleasures of heaven.

However, the very forcefulness with which the speaker berates death indicates some doubt on the poet’s part. If death were truly vanquished, the speaker would not have to rail so loudly against it. The poem implies an unspoken fear that death can still pack a wallop—only good and faithful Christians will enjoy eternal life, while everyone else will spend eternity suffering the pains of hell, a fate that Christians believe to be much worse than death.

There is evidence in the poem that the speaker feels his faith in Christianity is not very strong, and thus believes he might himself be headed for eternal damnation. The speaker does not put forth a very convincing case, for example, that death is a “slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, / And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell.” It could be said that these things are death’s weapons or agents, rather than the other way around.

The poet also downplays the significance and permanence of the change that death brings when he states “poppy or charms can make us sleep as well / And better than thy stroke.” One might awake from an opium induced sleep after a short period of time; one might break a sleep-inducing magic charm. When one awakens from either of these, it is to the life one knows already. Though the poet believes that humans will awake from the sleep of death, he cannot say with any certainty whether it will be to the pleasures of heaven or the pains of hell. His uncertainty is underscored by the statement in the second stanza that death “must” bring even more intense pleasures than the rest and sleep we know on earth, because rest and sleep are mere pictures—images that do not reflect the full character of death. If sleep and rest do not reflect death’s complete nature, then the poet is forced to guess that it is a doorway to better things. After all, rest can be uneasy, and sleep can be populated with nightmares.

Appearances and Reality

A major theme of Holy Sonnet 10 is that death seems mighty, but in reality, it is not. Though the stillness death brings seems to be permanent, the

Topics for Further Study

Address your own letter to Death, in poetry or prose, expressing your feelings of defiance, fear, hatred, etc.
“Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” and Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” both also included in Poetry for Students, portray Death as a friendly companion. Compare their position to Donne’s, and which you agree with and why.
What techniques does Donne use to define Death at the same time that he is pointing out its weaknesses? How does this help him make his point?

poet asserts, we will awake from it on Judgment Day. Though death seems proud and overpowering, it in fact is always attended by the squalor of poison, war, and sickness. Though it appears dreadful, death is but a slave to “fate, chance, kings,” and even lowly “desperate men.” Despite its apparent ability to strike humans down, the poet claims that humble drugs or magic spells can do death’s work much better. Above all, death’s permanence is an illusion. According to the poet’s Christian faith, death will come to an end at the final judgment day, when the world will end and all people who ever lived will come back to life. On this day, Christians believe, God will bring good people to heaven and send evil people to hell, where they will live for eternity, never to die the death of death itself.

Style

In its form, “Holy Sonnet 10” is an Italian sonnet (also known as a Petrarchan sonnet), written, like most sonnets, in iambic pentameter. The Italian sonnet’s thematic organization usually has two well-developed movements corresponding to the eight-line octave and the six-line sestet. The the-matic organization of “Holy Sonnet 10,” however, more closely resembles the structure of a Shakespearean sonnet (also called an English sonnet), with its four shorter movements: three quatrains and a concluding couplet. The octave follows the conventional Petrarchan rhyme scheme of abbaabba, while the sestet rhymes cddcee, one of several conventional patterns. The octave, however, behaves like two quatrains, the first attacking Death as less powerful than it thinks, and the second arguing that Death is not a horror but a pleasure, the most rewarding sleep of all. The sestet behaves like a quatrain that continues the belittling of Death, and a final couplet, a fitting conclusion proclaiming Death’s ultimate defeat.

Historical Context

In “Holy Sonnet 10” Donne alludes to the events of his time in the third stanza, telling death that “Thou’rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, / And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell.” Death was a very prominent part of life in the era during which “Holy Sonnet 10” was composed. Though it was not published until 1633, three years after Donne’s death, the poem was probably written in 1609, during the period when Donne was working for the English church as an anti-Catholic propagandist.

Life in England at this time was unsettled and violent. One hundred years before, Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic church, sparking religious persecution, political conflict, and social upheaval that would increase in intensity until the Puritans, under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, began a civil war and beheaded Charles I. Donne himself was the son of a prominent Catholic family whose members, which included the Catholic martyr Thomas More, suffered at the hands of Protestant persecutors. The poet himself was unable to receive a university degree or a government post until he converted to Anglicanism.

Henry’s heirs were divided in their support of the new church. Mary I, known as Bloody Mary, instituted a reign of terror during her short rule in an attempt to restore Catholicism as the religion of the land. Elizabeth I attempted to maintain a tolerant stance toward both Protestant and Catholic faiths, but was forced by a strongly Puritan, virulently anti-Catholic Parliament to consider Catholics traitors and press severe penalties on them, including the drawing and quartering of 200 priests and the torture and execution of other Catholics and Catholic sympathizers. The Puritan government led by Cromwell collapsed after his death, and relative peace did not come to the kingdom until Parliament summoned William of Orange and Mary II to the throne in 1688 and secured a Bill of Rights from the new sovereigns the following year.

The theater of the time was as blood-soaked as political life. Revenge tragedies including Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (1592) and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600) and tragedies of blood, a more violent, horrific type of revenge tragedy that included Richard Webster’s The White Devil (1612) and his The Duchess of Malfi (1613), appealed to audiences who were also entertained by such spectacles as cock-fighting, bear-baiting, and the public mutilation, burning, hanging, and beheading of criminals.

The sickness and desperate men that Donne refers to in “Holy Sonnet 10” were not in short supply in the first decade of the seventeenth century. In 1603, London suffered an outbreak of the dreaded bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death. At least 33,000 died in the epidemic. To put the death toll in perspective, one may note that the population living inside the city walls of London in 1605 was 75,000 people. In 1605 Guy Fawkes and three other Catholics conspired to blow up the Houses of Parliament in retaliation for the persecution of their English co-religionists. Fawkes was caught by chance as he entered the gunpowder filled cellar of the parliament houses. Under torture, he revealed the names of his accomplices. Fawkes and one of his co conspirators were convicted and hanged for their Gunpowder Plot. The other two conspirators were killed resisting capture. In 1607, vagrants demonstrated outside Northampton against the landed gentry’s enclosure of common lands; several protestors were killed in the riot, and three were later hanged for inciting the incident, known as Captain Pouch’s Revolt.

“Holy Sonnet 10” asserts the idea that death is not an absolute power: “Death be not proud, though some have call’d thee / Mighty and dreadful .... / those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow / Die not.... This antipathy to the idea of absolute power was very much a part of the political landscape of England at the time the poem was written and before.

The political conflicts of Donne’s time were symptoms of England’s ongoing transition from absolute monarchy to constitutional state, which had

Compare & Contrast

1603: An epidemic of the dreaded bubonic plague (the Black Death) in London kills 33,000 people.
Today: Contagious diseases are better understood by medical science; efforts to prevent or contain epidemics are far more effective than in previous centuries. Penicillin and other drugs have been developed to cure bacterial diseases including the bubonic plague.
1605: Guy Fawkes and others conspire to use gunpowder to blow up the Houses of Parliament in retaliation for the government’s persecution of Catholics. Fawkes is caught in the gunpowder filled cellar of the parliament houses before the plan can be carried out. Under torture he confesses the names of his accomplices. All members of the “Gunpowder Plot” are killed while resisting arrest or convicted and executed.
1995: Timothy McVeigh uses a truck filled with explosives to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City. The blast destroys the building, killing 168 people and injuring many others. McVeigh is convicted in June 1997 on eleven counts of murder and conspiracy. Meanwhile, the number of terrorist attacks is on the rise worldwide.
1589: Donne completes studies at Oxford and Cambridge but cannot receive a degree because he is a Catholic.
Today: Discrimination against people because of their religion or race is illegal in many nations, but still remains a serious problem worldwide. Governments in the United States and elsewhere continue to debate the legality of discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation, mental or physical disabilities, and other factors.
1604: England’s King James I anonymously publishes the essay “Counterblaste to Tobacco,” arguing that smoking is offensive to the senses and bad for health.
Today: Doctors agree that smoking causes a variety of cancers and many other health complications. In the United States, a strong anti-smoking movement arises during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Anti-smoking advocates succeed in having smoking banned from many public places and lobby to have tobacco heavily taxed or outlawed altogether.

begun long before. Absolutism is the tendency of ruling parties and individuals to centralize national power within the small sphere of their personal influence, usually by means of military force, economic and civic subjugation in the form of oppressive taxes and laws, and some form of religious conformity. In England and other parts of pre-industrialized Europe, the Divine Right of Kings, which claimed such power in the name of God, was usually used to justify absolute rule.

Constitutionalism is an opposing form of government in which rulers wield power in the name of and by the consent of the people. Constitutional rulers are forbidden to use military force against their subjects. They are bound to seek universal religious and civil freedom and to honor a constitution, which is a social contract between rulers and their subjects that usually defines rights, establishes several branches of government, and institutes a system of “checks and balances” designed to keep any one branch from assuming absolute power.

England had an anti-absolutist tradition that dated to 1215, when King John Plantagenet was forced by his barons to sign the Magna Carta (literally “Great Charter”), which granted basic personal rights and civil liberties to the English people. In 1381, farmers and other workers formed mobs in Essex, Kent, and Norfolk, sacked palaces in Norwich and Canterbury, took hostages, and elected a worker named Wat Tyler as their leader. The uprising, known as the Peasants’ Revolt or Wat Tyler’s Revolt, arose to protest oppressive labor laws, poll taxes, and severe poverty among peasants.

On 14 June 1381, Wat Tyler, who was probably a tile-layer from Essex, affronted custom by presenting a list of demands to 14-year-old King Richard II, who, the beliefs of the time held, ruled by the will of God. Though Tyler was killed the next day, and the reforms that were instituted were repealed in 1382, the people of England grew to distrust the absolute authority of the Crown, expressing their bitterness in ballads celebrating the outlaw Robin Hood.

From the start of the Hundred Years’ War in 1453, Parliament’s power grew to encompass the ability to initiate legislation and impeach crowned heads. Its pressure on the monarchy for civil rights and Protestant religious freedom culminated in the beheading of Charles I; though it twice failed to draft a constitution during Oliver Cromwell’s rule and was compelled to crown Charles II, Parliament succeeded in ousting James II, Charles’ heir, preventing his effort to restore Catholicism to England. In 1688, Parliament solicited William of Orange and his wife Mary, both of whom had rights to the English throne, to assume the Crown jointly at the behest of the English people. In 1689, William III and Mary II signed a Bill of Rights that secured important rights for Parliament and Protestant citizens and set England firmly on the path toward a constitutional government.

Critical Overview

Some decades after Donne’s death, his poetry’s metaphysical style and extravagant wit came under attack from important English Neoclassical writers. These included Restoration poet and critic John Dryden, whose 1693 essay “A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire” considered Donne’s ingenuity “unnatural,” and the eighteenth-century critic Samuel Johnson, who in his Lives of the Poets first applied the word “metaphysical” to the work of Donne and his followers, but in a derogatory way. In the early twentieth century, however, Modernist writers “rediscovered” Donne’s poetry and praised its integration of intellect and emotion, as well as its rhythmic invention. Chief among Donne’s modern champions was poet and critic T. S. Eliot in a 1923 essay published in The Nation and the Athenaeum.

“Holy Sonnet 10” is compared favorably with Donne’s love poem “The Sun Rising” by critics A. E. Dyson and Julian Lovelock, in their Masterful Images: English Poetry from Metaphysicals to Romantics. The doctrinal paradoxes of Christianity, they find, suit Donne’s conceits better than the ingenious paradoxes he devises regarding sexual love. “For the Christian, death has lost all power to hurt.... Such a triumph can scarcely be portrayed without extravagance or be seen as less than aggressive in its hope.... But such triumphs must belong, by their nature, to religion, and to hopes which transcend ... the flesh.” Love’s ability to defeat time, they claim, is far less convincing than Christianity’s. Critic Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, in her Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, finds the sonnet full of the speaker’s confidence that he “is able to face down the fear of death which has haunted him in the foregoing sonnets.” Further, the horrors of death that terrify the speaker in “Holy Sonnet 7” “are here wittily transposed into the unsavory masters of or companions to death,” an indication of the speaker’s faith in “the resurrection as an ultimate victory over death.”

Criticism

Joanne Woolway

Joanne Woolway is a freelance writer who recently earned her Ph.D. from Oriel College, Oxford, England. Woolway here elucidates the argument that the speaker of “Holy Sonnet 10” directs against a personified death. The critic contends that, despite its seemingly conclusive last line, the poem’s ending is ambiguous.

Part of any belief in a religious creed is an understanding of death and the after-life. John Donne’s sequence of Holy Sonnets is an exploration of his relationship with God, dealing with the love, anger, fear, and joy that his conversations with God bring to the surface. “Sonnet 10,” (Death, be not proud) is a determined attempt by the poet to show that his faith can overcome his fear of death. It takes the form of an argument against a personified figure of Death at whom Donne’s comments are directed.

The poet uses four arguments to demonstrate that Death is not to be feared. The first, in lines 1-4, claims that Death is not really capable of killing people: people do not always die when we expect them to and sometimes they even survive when we least expect it. Death, therefore, does not really have the power that everyone assumes it has. Secondly, he notes, rest and sleep look just like death and death is often depicted in paintings or literature as being like sleep (they are “but thy pictures”). If this is so, and if we know that sleep and rest are experiences that are pleasurable to us, then death cannot be as awful as it seems. Thirdly, death is not as powerful as it seems because fate, chance, and worldly power can use and abuse it. Also, it is often the result of such unpleasant things as poison, war, and sickness. These associations take away from death the glamour and importance usually associated with it. Even man himself can control it in the form of suicide, thereby proving that Death is not a ruler, but is always ruled by others. Fourthly, he notes, there are other ways of sleeping that are more pleasant—such as the drugs derived from poppies (i.e., opium) or magic—and so death cannot even compete in that way. In conclusion he notes that if Death is considered to be such a sleep, then it is a sleep from which we awake at the Resurrection.

The poem is a sonnet, which means that it consists of fourteen lines arranged in a special way. The sonnet form became popular in the sixteenth century following a fashion set by the Italian poet Petrarch who used it to explore his feelings for Laura, his lover. Sonnets were used for a variety of subjects in later years and were particularly associated with the writings of William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser. Donne’s poem follows the pattern most commonly employed by Shakespeare: the sonnet is divided into three sets of four lines with a concluding pair. The inner and outer lines of each set of four lines rhyme—so, in the first set of four “thee” and “me” rhyme and “so” and “overthrow” do the same. This pattern continues in the next two sets of four—“be’/ “delivery” and “flow”/ “go”; “men”/ “then” and “dwell”/ “well.” The last two lines are usually a rhyming couplet, but, unusually in this poem, they are not. The sound of “Eternally” takes us back to “thee” and “me” and “be” and “delivery” in the first eight lines of the poem, but there is no rhyme created by the end of the following line, “And death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die.” Thus, the poem is denied any sense of a decisive or happy conclusion. It is as if this were a piece of music which ended on a discordantly triumphant sound and without any resolution of the notes that had gone before.

This irregularity in the rhyme scheme of the poem can be understood if we also look at the rhythm of the sonnet and see how Donne uses the formal conventions of poetry to show how he overcomes his fear of Death. A typical line in a sonnet

What Do I Read Next?

H. J. C. Grierson’s 1912 edition Poems of John Donne is the definitive text of all of Donne’s poetic works. It also includes an introduction, translations of Donne’s Latin poems, and poems of questionable authorship that were attributed to Donne in early editions of the poet’s works.
R. C. Bald’s 1970 work John Donne: A Life is the most authoritative biography of Donne.
Helen Gardner’s 1965 edition, John Donne: The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets is a more recent definitive edition of Donne’s secular poetry. It contains an introduction and appendices that outline some of the intricate textual problems faced by modern editors and critics of Donne’s works.
John Carey’s 1981 John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art offers an imaginative analysis of the way conflicts and contradictions in Donne’s intellectual and public life may have affected his poetry and sermons.
The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted Larry Pebworth and published in 1986, contains a selection of essays that take a fresh look at Donne’s poetry and sermons.

would have ten syllables, divided into five metrical “feet” each consisting of a unstressed and a stressed syllable. An example of this regular form can be found in line 5, “From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be” where the emphasis falls on “rest”, “sleep”, “but”, “pic-” and “be.” But not all of the lines in the sonnet follow this pattern. When Donne wishes to draw attention to the power that Death seems to have, he changes the rhythm to put more emphasis on significant words: the second line, beginning “Mighty and dreadful,” starts with an inverted foot where the first syllable is stressed rather than the second (this type of foot is called a trochee). Death’s “mightiness” is depicted more powerfully than it would be if the word were differently placed or if the beat were to fall on the second syllable. Further on in the poem, though, the very regularity of the verse can suggest the poet’s power to overcome death’s threat: the line “Why swell’st thou then?” suggests, through its almost casual or impertinent questioning in light and regular tones, that Death only seems to be awful. It tries to convince us that the author, by daring to question in such a way, holds little fear himself.

Most notable for their deliberate irregularity are the first and last lines which are almost a mirror image of each other. The opening and concluding phrases, “Death, be not proud” and “Death, thou shalt die,” both contain four words, divided with a comma after the first word. This comma has the effect of placing a stress on all four of the words in each of the phrases; these stand out further because of their difference from the (unusually) regular beats of the remainder of the lines: “though some have called thee” and “And Death shall be no more.” Both of these phrases have three regular feet consisting of an unstressed and a stressed syllable (an iamb).

Perhaps we could say that the discordant ending reveals Donne’s success in conquering Death—it is not allowed to triumph or to have the last word. Instead, the focus is placed firmly on life after death. These ideas are expressed in the terms of Donne’s deeply held Christian faith (he was ordained priest in the Church of England in 1615 and went on to become Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral). The “short sleep” which Donne refers to in the penultimate line suggests the Christian idea of resurrection of the human soul that has lain asleep between the time of death and the Second Coming of Christ. At this time the souls of the faithful are believed to be raised to heavenly life and so, following the metaphor of sleep that Donne has threaded throughout the poem, “wake eternally.” The poem’s grounding in Christian biblical theology is signaled by the allusion to a passage from 1 Corinthians 15, particularly verse 26, “the last enemy to be destroyed is death” and verses 51-54, “We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.... When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory’.” Donne makes a similar point to that made by Shakespeare in his Sonnet 146, which was published in 1609: “And death once dead, there’s no more dying then.”

However, while understanding Donne’s hope for this salvation, we have to see that the effort that writing this poem has obviously taken (a fact the discordantly triumphant ending also points to) suggests that the conquering of Death which Donne would have us and himself believe he has achieved is not altogether successful. In trying so hard to assert that he has conquered death, Donne reveals that the task is more difficult than even he has realized. The poem does end on a note of absolute triumph for the author, but on a note that, like the verse, rings hollow as both the speaker and reader realize the impossibility of avoiding death.

Like the rhyme and rhythm, the very metaphor of the poem gives away the false defense that the poet has constructed. Death in this sonnet is personified, but death is not really a person and is indeed the end of our own personhood. The poet can seem to make death less fearful by humanizing it and making it into a person whom he can defeat in clever images and metaphors. But it is only in words that Donne can defeat death: the reality of the world outside the poem is harsher than he, in his carefully crafted poem, can dare to admit.

Source: Joanne Woolway, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1997.

Roberta J. Albrecht

A discussion of the structure, composition and interchangeability of the female role in presentation and adaptation in John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 10.”

The vexed question of the composition and definitive order of Donne’s Holy Sonnet sequence seems to have been resolved by Patrick O’Connell’s 1981 article. Understanding which sonnets are included in exactly what order should throw additional light on the meaning of individual poems. It is my contention that the fixed sonnet sequence is based upon structuring principles similar to those of the cinema. The filmmaker has two basic methods at his disposal. He can tell his story in a logical, chronological manner, beginning at the beginning and, when he comes to the end, stopping. This is termed mise en scene. The alternative is to fragment the narrative into its constitutive elements and then to arrange these elements, disregarding logic and chronology, somewhat in the manner of a cubist painting. This latter is called montage.

Applying theories of the cinema to an early seventeenth century art form may at first seem unorthodox. However, Donne has provided many of the sonnets with what amounts to stage directions, controlling images, actors, and even selecting the actor’s voice according to a specific point of view. Examples of this are: “What if this present were the worlds last night?” (Sonnet IX); “This is my playes last scene” (Sonnet III); “Spit in my face yee Jewes” (Sonnet VII). Such openings allow Donne to place the “camera” where he will, controlling his reader’s visual perceptions through the director’s choice of scene construction, lens activity, and sound. Donne’s definitive ordering of the sonnets establishes the cinematic process, what I am calling mise en scène.

Montage is defined in various ways. Most people nowadays use the term to mean, simply, editing. However, Sergei Eisenstein meant more by the term; for his idea of montage was that adjacent shots relate to each other in such a way that new meaning is created by the dialectic between them. Eisenstein’s conception of montage was “imbedded among the earliest Chinese hieroglyphics, which combined pictures of ‘things’ to express otherwise undepictable ‘concepts.’ For example, the Chinese combined pictures of a dog and a mouth to create the concept ‘to bark.’ The picture for water combined with the picture for an eye created a new idea, ‘to weep.’” I believe that Donne has used both of these techniques, mise en scene and montage, and that the latter, in particular, gives the sequence as a whole a meaning greater than that of the sum of its parts. The 12 sonnets actually consist of two series of six each, forming something like a diptych, with each sonnet in the one half corresponding very closely to its counterpart in the other ...

Once these correspondences are accepted, the reader is in a position to discover new meaning by applying the idea of montage which operates as described above. As a matter of fact, it becomes impossible to read the last six sonnets without reference to their correspondents among the first six.

One must remember that Donne’s audience was highly visual and that he worked within a longestablished emblematic tradition. The scenes sketched in both “Sonnet III” and “Sonnet X” would have called forth in Donne’s audience visual images similar to those of the emblems so often collected during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The highly cultivated visual sense of Donne’s readers would allow them to retain the one image or scene he paints for one dramatic situation when encountering a similar but different dramatic situation later. In other words, the image serves as a mnemonic device when the reader moves to the corresponding piece. Meaning, which resides somewhere between the two paired poems, is created

“In ‘Sonnet X’ we have yet another case of what Elizabeth D. Harvey calls ‘transvestite ventriloquism,’ or the male writer choosing to speak in the feminine voice.”

by the reader, who is forced constantly to revise, to re-read the one poem in light of its counterpart. At least that is what happens with “Sonnet III” and “Sonnet X.”

The actor-persona of “Sonnet III” seeks to free himself from sin, declaring his final walk upon the stage in his opening lines:

This is my playes last scene, here heavens appoint
My pilgrimages last mile; and my race
Idly, yet quickly runne, hath this last pace,
My spans last inch, my minutes latest
      point... (Lines 1-4)

Ironically, the speaker will “play it again,” and numerous times: “Sonnets IV, VII, and IX,” two of them retakes of this same scene. Moreover, “Sonnet X,” its complement on the chiasmic scale, shows the actor seeking the same or similar goals: purgation from the world, the flesh, the devil (in “Sonnet III”) and purgation from the flesh, along with divorce from Satan (in “Sonnet X”). Reading either of these sonnets in a vacuum without reference one to the other would entail considerable loss of meaning. For if, when the reader encounters “Sonnet X,” he does not make mental and emotional references to “Sonnet III,” all the echoes and resonances between the two go for nought. It is as if one were to blink continuously during a film, never seeing the first shot of a montage and thereby missing not just half, but all of the meaning. Differences, however, are at least as important as similarities. Ambiguity emerges from shifting meanings which the reader must interpret.

The persona of “Sonnet III” has recognized his need to be purged in order to wrench himself free, but he is still far from despair. For one thing, the argument unfolds in a somewhat academic or studied manner:

And gluttonous death, will instantly unjoynt
My body, ‘and soule, and I shall sleepe a space,
But my ‘ever waking part shall see that face,
Whose feare already shakes my every joynt:
Then, as my soule, to heaven‘ her first seate, takes
       flight,
And earth-borne body, in the earth shall dwell,
So, fall my sinnes, that all may have their right,
To where they’ are bred, and would presse me, to
       hell.
Impute me righteous, thus purg’d of evill.
For thus I leave the world, the flesh, and devill.
       (5-14)

The tone here is very similar to that of The Anniversaries, written in the two years following the completion of the Holy Sonnets. These poems commemorate the death of Robert Drury’s daughter Elizabeth in 1610 at the age of fifteen. Since it is probable that Donne never knew the girl, and since Drury was his patron, critics sometimes complain that the poems are insincere, financial considerations being more important than a sense of personal loss. The hyperbole and studied artifice of The Anniversaries is reminiscent of “Sonnet III.”

But it is not only in tone and style that The Anniversaries are related to “Sonnet III.” The theme is also the same: the need for purification from corruption. A short quotation from “The First Anniversarie” will illustrate this:

Shee tooke the weaker Sex, she that could drive
The poysonous tincture, and the stayne of Eve,
Out of her thoughts, and deeds; and purifie
All, by a true religious Alchimy. (179-82)

This is but one of numerous references to corruption, almost an obsession in The Anniversaries, as well as an important theme in both “Sonnet III” and “Sonnet X.” The desire to escape corruption quickly, as expressed in “Sonnet III,” is elaborated in “The Second Anniversary,” written a few years afterwards. Here the speaker describes the soul as a string stretched between Heaven and Earth, like some cosmological rosary.

And as these stars were but so many beades
Strunge on one string, speed undistinguish’d leades
Her through those spheares, as through the beades,
       a string,
Whose quicke succession makes it still one thing:
As doth the Pith, which least our Bodies slacke,
Strings fast the little bones of necke, and backe;
So by the soule doth death string Heaven and
       Earth. (207-213)

Here the speaker is telling his beads, but only in one direction, from Earth to Heaven, from below to above. The rosary, however, is a continuous circle. What is attempted in “Sonnet III” and repeated in “The Second Anniversary” proves to be a facile solution to the problem of the escape from corruption. Donne realized that following the rosary from bottom to top, from Earth to Heaven, entailed continuing telling the beads from top to bottom, from Heaven to Earth again, forming, in a literal sense, a vicious circle.

By the time the actor who speaks “Sonnet III” gets to “Sonnet X,” he is desperate for a quick escape, or at least closure. He can either break out of the circle quickly or be thrown back into the sequence at the end of “Sonnet XII,” condemned to plod the weary round unceasingly. Studying contrasting elements between “Sonnet III” and “Sonnet X” will show that this is indeed the case.

The final couplet of “Sonnet III” requests purgation and release: “Impute me righteous, thus purg’d of evill, / For thus I leave the world, the flesh, and devill” (13-14). The tradition invoked here is that of medieval theology, a tradition seriously undermined by the time that Donne was writing. The medieval devil had become little more than a bogeyman, incapable of true harm. But it took no special perspicacity to see the true harm caused by “the enemie” of “Sonnet X,” a figure kept ever fresh by man’s penchant for incessant warfare. The theology in “Sonnet III” is replaced in “Sonnet X,” its complement in the schema printed above, by military science.

I, like an usurpt towne, to ‘another due,
Labour to ‘admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue,
Yet dearely I‘ love you, and would be lov’d faine,
But am betroth’d unto your enemie,
Divorce mee, ‘untie, or breake that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you enthrall’ mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee. (5-14)

John Parish has identified two standard Petrarchan metaphors operating here: 1) the body as besieged town and 2) the lady’s heart stormed by force. It is clear from the above that the speaker of “Sonnet III” has by this time undergone not a sea, but rather a sex change. Here it is the woman who speaks, demanding to be ravished, a deliberate reversal of the female role and totally contrary to the Petrarchan mode.

Donne’s dramatic personae assume female roles in other parts of the canon. “Break of Day” and “Sapho to Philaenis” are just two examples. In “Sonnet X” we have yet another case of what Elizabeth D. Harvey calls “transvestite ventriloquism,” or the male writer choosing to speak in the feminine voice. Harvey has noted the radical shift represented by this sexual transformation:

The erotic conquering that the speaker [in “Sonnet X”] so ardently desires entails an entering, possessing, and radical refashioning that has in Western culture tended to be the prerogative of the male... Donne is writing within well-established conventions, and the employment of the feminine perspective as central inverts and remakes tradition, establishing Donne as master rather than slave of inherited forms. The male poet’s use of the feminine voice...would thus seem to afford a means of countering a received poetic tradition whose authority always threatens to overwhelm the poet’s singular identity.

Why a woman? Keeping in mind that montage works by creating a dialectic between adjacent shots, it might be illuminating to reel back to the previous shot, “Sonnet IX.” The mise en scene here shows the lover attempting to woo Christ just as he has so often succeeded in wooing women. The line that had so moved women, “Beauty, of pitty, foulnesse onely is / A signe of rigour,” proves impotent to move Christ. The speciousness of the argument, coupled with the blasphemous equation of a series of violated women with the godhead, precipitate the speaker into such a sense of guilt that he resolves to identify with his erstwhile victims.

The male speaker of “Sonnet IX,” having failed in his endeavor and smitten in his conscience, tries to “play it again” in “Sonnet X,” but this time as transvestite ventriloquist, assuming the woman’s role. This attempt too is doomed to failure, this time because the actor is unable to strike the right tone.

Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to
       mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, ‘and
       bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me
       new. (1-4)

But the transvestite ventriloquist fails miserably. The supplicating female is immediately replaced by the imperious male. He opens the engagement with a barrage of b’s, beginning with “batter,” continuing with “breathe” and “bend” in the middle two lines, and rising to the crescendo of “breake, blowe, burn” in the final line of the quatrain. Furthermore, the stress in the first line transforms an iambic pentameter into something other, into vertical, accentual verse. Arnold Stein notes that modification of the rhythm through an unusual degree of metrical stress was a practice of Donne, Daniels and Wyatt, all of whom learned to alter the usual iambic line. The initial trochee is succeeded by two hammer blows, to which Stein might assign more than the usual stress—two, for example, rather than one ...

If the line is scanned with the third foot as a trochee, then the stress on “three” is likewise unusually strong. The hard rhythm is further developed by spondees in successive lines: “knocke, breathe, shine,” and “breake, blowe, burn.” This vertical, accentual, male voice lurks behind the ventriloquized female voice, creating a form of linguistic rape. Ironically, the motive behind this language is seizure of power, raping God with words while pretending to be passive. Never has actor so fluffed his (or her?) lines.

Donne’s impetus seems always to have been to push whatever genre he was working in to its limit, to try its capacities beyond expectation. In “Sonnet X” he attacks the court of God by utilizing the dialectic between feminine and masculine discourse to suggest something rather daring: that somehow woman must be confronted if man is ever to achieve salvation and that woman, as God, speaks a different language from man. For the expressed masculine voice of “Sonnet X” allows a certain degree of jouissance or “play” or counter-movement toward the repressed, unrepresented feminine voice. The I is both male and female, suggesting bifurcation. The sonnet reveals the impotence of woman, traditionally the condition of the Petrarchan lover, but also, ironically, the impotence of masculine discourse to satisfy the female’s demands. At any rate, this woman cannot control either of the masculine forces pinning (penning?) her down. Satan has enthralled her; so has the masculine discourse of the transvestite ventriloquist. No matter how much the masculine mind may demand structure, the repressed feminine voice of “Sonnet X” refuses to cooperate. God does not answer the speaker’s prayer because it is the wrong prayer. It is a masculine prayer, demanding ravishment.

What Donne succeeds in doing here is the poetic equivalent of counterpoint in music. Two different voices sing simultaneously, producing a richness of texture otherwise impossible. My contention is that the jouissance between the two voices makes this sonnet rich. When Donne introduces a second voice, he creates an ambiguity of the same sort as counterpoint does in music or as montage does in film. One sound (or voice or image) intrudes upon the other, creating a resonance of meaning heretofore unknown or strange “music” heretofore unheard. Whereas the beads of Elizabeth Drury’s rosary take her straight to Heaven where she may sing with the choir, this speaker is left to fumble with contrary sounds.

The argument of “Sonnet X” is a failure. Interestingly, failure is what pushes the actor through the sonnet sequence, plunging him forward into ever new attempts to run through Death on his way to the arms of God in “Sonnet XII.” The final sonnet, ending with “Thy lawes abridgement, and thy last command / Is all but love; Oh let that last Will stand!” (13-14), defies closure simply because it reverberates with its complement, “Sonnet I.” The word love throws the reader forward, or back, to “Sonnet I,” where the persona complains that God loves mankind well, but not him. Though the sequence does describe a circle, it is not a perfect one, for the sonnets reside in a state of perpetual dalliance. By embedding complementary motifs in parallel poems, Donne has been teaching his reader to hear, to see, to think in such a way that the total experience becomes extremely rich and complicated. Because Donne seems to work out of a matrix or rich repository of motifs, most of which can be discovered in The Anniversaries, his reader is forced to read referentially, making visual, auditory, and intellectual discoveries in a manner similar to montage. Furthermore, Donne, as dramaturgist, is keenly aware of audience response, inviting his reader to participate actively in the process of making meaning.

Beyond this, the last lines in Donne’s Holy Sonnets adumbrate Gethsemane. The sequence as a whole represents the human side of Christ’s agony in the garden. The Saviour’s desire as man was, “Let this cup pass from me,” while his desire as God was, “Thy will be done.” The triumphal entry was a progress toward the satisfaction of His divine goal but also an agonizing and humiliating death march. The persona of the sonnets emulates his Lord, almost achieving his goal by means of role-play. However, he is motivated by pride and imprisoned by masculine discourse so that when he seeks to accomplish salvation, he fails. The vision of future gain both woos and frustrates the one who must run through physical death on the way to salvation. Significantly, when the speaker claims Love in “Sonnet XII,” he runs beyond it to the complaint of “Sonnet I” that he is, after all, not loved. Whether as orator or as actor, the persona holds up the cup and even tipples, but he cannot drink deeply. He simply does not know how to die. Rather than transcend the moment, he is trapped in an endless now, ever going around in circles. In this sense the Holy Sonnets express failure to accomplish the just circle of such works as “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.”

Source: Roberta J. Albrecht, “Montage, Mise en Scene, and Miserable Acting: Feminist Discourse in Donnes Holy‘ Sonnet X,’” in English Language Notes, Vol. XXIX, No. 4, June, 1992, pp.23-31.

Sources

Dryden, John, “A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire,” in Essays of John Dryden, Vol. U, edited by W. P. Ker, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1900, pp. 15-114.

Dyson, A. E. and Julian Lovelock, “Contracted Thus: Donne’s ‘The Sunne Rising,’” in Masterful Images: English Poetry from Metaphysicals to Romantics, 1976, reprint by Barnes and Noble, 1976, pp. 21-8.

Eliot, T. S., “John Donne,” in The Nation and the Athenaeum, Vol. XXXIII, No. 10, June 9, 1923, pp. 331-32.

Johnson, Samuel, “Cowley,” in Lives of the English Poets, Vol. I, 1906, reprint by Oxford University Press, 1955-56, pp. 1-53.

For Further Study

Gardner, Helen. Introduction to John Donne: The Divine Poems, edited by Helen Gardner. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, pp. xv lv.

In the introduction to her definitive edition of Donne’s religious poetry, one of the most eminent Donne scholars presents an overview of Donne’s religious poetry, placing particular emphasis on the Holy Sonnets.

Holdsworth, R. V. “The Death of Death in Donne’s Holy Sonnet 10.” Notes and Queries 235, New Series 37, No. 2 (June 1990): 183.

Asserts that the biblical source for lines 13 and 14 of the poem is Hosea 13:14 as translated in either the Geneva Bible of 1560 or the Bishops’ Bible of 1568.

Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, “John Donne: Writing after the Copy of a Metaphorical God,” in Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, Princeton University Press, 1979, pp. 253-82.

Lewalski maintains that Donne’s religious poetry exhibits a view of Protestant theology grounded in the Scriptures and asserts that the poems include a picture of God that is both witty and metaphorical.

Poetry for Students