Always Autumne
A reflection I always associate with the fall of the year:
“God made Sun and Moon to distinguish seasons, and day, and night, and we cannot have the fruits of the earth but in their seasons: But God hath made no decree to distinguish the seasons of his mercies; In paradise, the fruits were ripe, the first minute, and in heaven it is alwaies Autumne, his mercies are ever in their maturity. We ask panem quotidianum, our daily bread, and God never sayes you should have come yesterday, he never sayes you must againe to morrow, but to day if you will heare his voice, to day he will heare you. If some King of the earth have so large an extent of Dominion, in North and South, as that he hath Winter and Summer together in his Dominions, so large an extent East and West, as that he hath day and night together in his Dominions, much more hath God mercy and judgement together: He brought light out of darknesse, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy Summer out of Winter, though thou have no Spring; though in the wayes of fortune, or understanding, or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintred and frozen, clouded and eclypsed, damped and benummed, smothered and stupified till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spiring, but as the Sun at noon to illustrate all shadowes, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penurees, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.”
( John Donne, sermon on “God’s Mercies” preached at St. Paul’s on Christmas Day, 1624)
Fr. Komonchak,
This is incredibly beautiful. I love the way the fullness of God’s mercy/ judgment is described as “the Sun at noon.”
But I’m wondering whether Donne’s imagery harmonizes with biblical imagery of the coming of the Lord. In the Bible we seem to be always waiting for the dawn. It seems to me that this imagery reveals something that is true, about gradual awakening.
I have no doubt that there are real experiences of full-heat grace. But I wonder why Donne makes the contrast so sharply.
Doesn’t he say why: “to illustrate all shadows”?
Sure–that’s why it’s noon.
But he also says, not-morning, not-spring. The negation is interesting.
Nobody uses image and paradox like Donne (except maybe Jesus Christ). Here’s another illustration of that in this sonnet that seems especially written for bad Catholics like me:
“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 mee,’and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due, 5
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 loved faine,
But am betroth’d unto your enemie: 10
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.
Yes, one of my favorite poems. There is a battering pace to it. It picks up and continues, of course, the sexual, marital metaphors of the Scriptures and Tradition. These could be used more freely, and more concretely, it seems, in ages when sexuality was taken far more seriously, that is, far more openly, than it is since our Puritan and Victorian ancestors surrounded it with cultural chastity-belts. And I don’t know that the fabled “sexual revolution” has done much to restore a proper balance.
Donne, of course, himself knew both kinds of eroticism. Read, for example, “To his Mistress Going to Bed”: “O, my America! my Newfoundland!”
Sexuality and the Resurrection were both taken more seriously, and I would think there’s a connection.
When my grave is broke up again
Some second guest to entertain,
(For graves have learned that woman head,
To be to more than one a bed),
And he that digs it, spies
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,
Will he not let us alone,
And think that there a loving couple lies,
Who thought that this device might be some way
To make their souls, at the last busy day,
Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?
If this fall in a time, or land,
Where mis-devotion doth command,
Then he that digs us up will bring
Us to the Bishop and the King,
To make us relics; then
Thou shalt be Mary Magdalen, and I
A something else thereby;
All women shall adore us, and some men;
And since at such times, miracles are sought,
I would have that age by this paper taught
What miracles we harmless lovers wrought.
First, we loved well and faithfully,
Yet knew not what we loved, nor why,
Difference of sex no more we knew,
Than our guardian angels do;
Coming and going, we
Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals;
Our hands ne’er touched the seals
Which nature, injured by late law, sets free:
These miracles we did: but now, alas,
All measures and all language I should pass,
Should I tell what a miracle she was.
Fr., K, yes all those fricative K’s and B’s at the beginning drive home the point. Donne really begs to be read aloud.
Kathy, thanks for restoring the above to memory. I had it in my head that that was an Andrew Marvel poem. My memory (and heart) are in sad need of repair …
Re: Batter my heart:
It’s an amazing blend of eros and Machiavelli.
Machiavelli? Not sure I get that reference.
Donne seems more to me in the tradition of “Song of Solomon.” Is it eros? Is it caritas? Or, to the priveleged soul, is there a difference?
Fr. K makes an interesting point about the sexual revolution.
When we read Donne 30-some years ago in my Brit lit survey class, some students snickered over the erotic language and some thought it was just dirty and sick to talk about God that way.
Our professor, who would be 93 if she’s alive today, slammed down her book and congratulated us for having become so secually sophisticated that we could no longer distinguish between eroticism and pornography,. that she wasn’t going to allow Donne to be treated with that kind of rank stupidity, and we moved on to “Volpone.”
Jean, I’m hoping that, in the end, there’s no difference. My guess is that heaven is better than sex, but just as. Hmm. Hot.
Sorry, I was obscure. The thing I remember most from Machiavelli is that he thought a conqueror shouldn’t actually send a viceroy, but should occupy his territories personally. So here, God’s viceroy, reason, is not a powerful enough governor. God himself must invade.
I found a website with the sermons of John Donne, including the one from which I drew the lines I quote above. http://www.msgr.ca/msgr-3/john_donne_sermon_10.htm
It’s a sermon on God’s “occasional mercies,” what non-believers call mere “accidents, contingencies,” moments of God’s special Providence toward an individual, provoking startling insights. This helps to explain the stark contrast about which Kathy inquired, from darkness to all-illustrating Noon.
While we’re on the subject, I thought I’d offer another one from that era: George Herbert’s “The Collar.”
For some reason, this one always seemed autmnul to me–but in a different way. The reference to corn, for one, as well as wine, point me toward the time of harvest. And then there’s the whole image of a man in the autumn of his life questioning the usefulness of all the years he’s spent so far in his ministry. These aren’t typically the words of an idealistic youth.
And the final lines always undo me: For a middle-aged man to be called “My Childe” again–and for him to return to childlike innocence, trust, and surrender to his Lord. Always stirring.
I struck the board, and cried, “No more!
I will abroad.
What! shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit?
Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the year only lost to me?
Have I no bays to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted?
All wasted?
Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands.
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures; leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit and not; forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
Away! take heed;
I will abroad.
Call in thy death’s-head there; tie up thy fears;
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need
Deserves his load.”
But as I rav’d, and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, “Child”;
And I replied, “My Lord.”
Fr. Komonchak,
Thanks. That explains it quite completely.
What’s nice is that these autumn graces have a direct match to the full-grown life of heaven. They have that harvest fulfillment, and it seems to happen in the conscience. Fascinating!
Here’s a Google Book of Herbert: http://books.google.com/books?id=WRgfAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA173&lpg=PA173&dq=%22the+call%22+%22george+herbert%22&source=web&ots=CyW2I2tQQU&sig=bZlM6yB46ka-zXXMuzjGrJ6wpFE#PPA39,M1
Donne was a great poet. But are we supposed to read his work as “confessional”? Or is that he had a remarkable imagination and an equally remarkable way of translating imagery into words?
Joseph, I don’t think anyone was calling Donne’s poems “confessional.” I wasn’t, anyway; they are, just as you say, remarkable in imagery in that we wouldn’t talk about God in sexual language today.
Or maybe you felt we were being confessional in our interpretation? I do take lean toward reader response criticism, but with a dollop of Hume’s “delicacy of taste” and Johnson’s “teach and delight.”
Taken as a whole, Donne’s work drives home the notion that neither eros nor caritas can be achieved by the will of one person; they are gifts bestowed by Another, and gifts that can only be bestowed when we are willing to ask for them and to make ourselves vulnerable.
I, too, would like to know what you mean by “confessional”. Can you elaborate?
I meant to ask whether Donne’s poems are in any interesting sense autobiographical. Of course they tells us what he, a certain man in a certain set of circumstances, could produce by the way of literary artefact. But do they tell us how he himself was feeling or thinking in his own person at some time? Or do they exemplify his ability to imagine, to whatever end, states of mind and of human interaction productive of and/or arising from such states of mind and to clothe all these in marvelously intricate language, to impart to them the life that the most vivid art can lend. In a word or two, do we see in them the gorgeous art of Donne or his life and his very thoughts about that life?
Most novels and poems are confessional are they not?Basically these authors are baring themselves to the world. Then most of them, like J.D. Salinger, balk when people empathize with their sentiments. It is like a second confessional which many authors run from and begin to hide from the public. Yet they are the ones that told the public how they felt.
That has always intrigued me. To a certain extent it is true of other writers also.
Joseph Gannon’s question is an interesting one, given Donne’s checkered history as a Catholic, who finally went over to to the Anglicans, though Catholics still seem to “claim” him.
Donne’s conversion has been a source of speculation (I’m referring to my mouldering notes in my ancient marked up Norton Anthology, which I must have saved for just this purpose).
There is a gap between his leave-taking of Catholicism and taking up of Anglicanism. In those intervening years, he wrote some anti-Catholic pamphlets. He told Catholic hold-outs that swearing loyalty to the king did not conflict with their allegiance to the Pope.
He seems to have reluctantly taken Anglican orders, only because King James, a fan, told him he couldn’t get preferment outside the Church. He eventually became an Anglican priest fairly late in life, and dean of St. Paul’s.
My reading of Donne is colored by my own conversion experience, I’m sure, but I see in his poems someone who is less concerned about doctrine and churches, and more with God as a presence in his individual life, inviting the reader to see God in a similar, personal way.
Given that the English Reformation was forcing people to choose up sides and imposing hardships on Catholics, perhaps “transcending” the politics of religion was the only way to keep one’s faith.
Donne’s meditations and sermons are full of concrete, sensual (sometimes sexual as above) images which have the effect of conveying a very real sense of God’s presence. They are neither Catholic nor Anglican–or anything else. They seem universally Christian.
Donne’s work was popular and fresh in his lifetime. If they seem almost modern, it’s because moden poets “discovered” them in the 20th Century and imitated his use of imagery.
I think his work also helped build a uniquely English/Anglican way of talking about God. I suspect that one of the reasons I prefer the Psalter in the BCP is because of the influence of writers like Donne.
It might be worth noting, since we’re on confessionalism, that Donne’s erotic images certainly could have been drawn from his early life. He traveled extensively, was handsome and had lots of women!
But he also fell deeply in love with Anne More and married her on the sly. Her family cut them off, but he loved her his whole life (see Kathy’s poem above).
I’ll quit sermonizing now, and offer the last poem Donne wrote, when he was dying and bedridden. Truly, only God could give someone in those straits the gift of a last poem like this:
Since I am coming to that Holy room,
Where, with Thy choir of saints for evermore,
I shall be made Thy music ; as I come
I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think here before ;
Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie
Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown
That this is my south-west discovery,
Per fretum febris, by these straits to die ;
I joy, that in these straits I see my west ;
For, though those currents yield return to none,
What shall my west hurt me ? As west and east
In all flat maps—and I am one—are one,
So death doth touch the resurrection.
Is the Pacific sea my home ? Or are
The eastern riches ? Is Jerusalem ?
Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar ?
All straits, and none but straits, are ways to them
Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Shem.
We think that Paradise and Calvary,
Christ’s cross and Adam’s tree, stood in one place ;
Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me ;
As the first Adam’s sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adam’s blood my soul embrace.
So, in His purple wrapp’d, receive me, Lord ;
By these His thorns, give me His other crown ;
And as to others’ souls I preach’d Thy word,
Be this my text, my sermon to mine own,
“Therefore that He may raise, the Lord throws down.”
Ooops, just when you all thought I’d gone away:
Here’s a good Donne site, with a pretty comprehensive collection, some in audio form:
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/
Jean? Are you donne?
Heh.
I hope not. How often does anyone have a chance for real education? I appreciate these things you have to say, though I am still leary of cold blended soups. (Gazpacho I can live with.)
I was also intrigued enough yesterday to pick up an old Norton at a used bookstore, John Donne’s Poetry. I found these paragraphs from a 1952 essay by Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, who, if I understand correctly, finds the oldest criticisms of Donne to be best:
“Giordano Bruno, the first critic to attempt a conceptual formulation of “concettismo” [conceit], as the “metaphysical” style was known in Italy, began his argument to De gli eroici furori with an attack on the Petrarchan theory of poetic inspiration. For the older notion of “amore” directed towrard personal beauty, Bruno attempted to substitute the idea of “heroic love” directed toward the universe. This second kind of love he interprets as the gift which both the philosopher and the poet have for perceiving the unity of dissimilars or, in other terms, for making heterogeneous analogies. Thus, for Bruno, “metaphysical” poetry was essentially concerned with perceiving and expressing the universal correspondences in his universe.
This conception of the poet as one who discovers and expresses the universal analogies binding the universe together was later developed by the theorists of the conceit in the seventeenth century, the most familiar of whom are Baltasar Gracian in Spain and Emmanuele Tesauro in Italy, and was made the basis for a poetic of “concettismo” or, as I have called it elsewhere, “a poetic of correspondences.”"
-What I like about the Bruno/ Mazzeo theory is that it gives some rationale for the sense of scope that one finds in Donne. The smallest, most particular thing, set against a dissimilar thing whose relationship the poet has “discovered” somehow gives the sense that the universe is both larger and stranger than I’d ever thought before, yet, paradoxically, much more coherent.
Okay, I’m dun.
I wonder if, short of biographical evidence, it would be possible to answer Joseph Gannon’s question. A great poet, like a great playwright, can describe a character, a condition, a situation, as if from within, even if it is one he has never encountered or experienced. In one sense it is not a matter of decisive interest to the reader who, after all, does or does not discover the “truth” in the poem, whether it is confessional or not..
On the other hand, knowing that it is confessional can add sometning to the appreciation, perhaps an element of communion, as, for example, by knowing that Hopkins’ “terrible sonnets” were written in and out of an experience of depression.
My question really was a question and not a rhetorical one. I also agree that it is difficult to answer. I became interested in Donne during my year or two as an English major, partly under the influence of Eliot’s essays. I remember wondering whether it was appropriate for an R.C. to read his religious poems. As best I can recall, there was a canon law that forbade reading works on religion by apostates, schismatic or heretics. How did know that? I believe a read about it in a book by a priest who was a librarian by profession. The name that comes to mind was Burke. (No, this is not a sly reference to a certain prelate.)
But to return to Donne, I do believe that some recent critico-biographical writing has questioned his sincerity. I recently–within a year, perhaps–read a review in the NYRB, I believe, which seemed to portray Donne as very much a man on the make. I’m sorry I can’t provide the reference. Now that I have gone this far, I will try to come up with it.
Fr. Komonchak, your answer souinds right. Any kind of allusion that adds *frisson* to a poem, skillfully, intensifies the poem’s power. Allusions can be interior–patterns of sound or meaning–or exterior. Autobiographical allusions aren’t easy, because self-knowledge is so difficult and poets are often, as Bill points out, conflicted about self-revelation.
Speaking of depressed poets, the poet and hymn writer (and failed lawyer) William Cowper is supposed to have written God Moves In A Mysterious Way after he was saved from suicide by one of Donne’s “occasional mercies.” Apparently his cab couldn’t find its way to the bridge in the fog, so it circled round and round and ended up on Cowper’s doorstep. He went inside, lit his lamp, and wrote:
Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take;
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy and shall break
In blessings on your head.
Cowper seemed to write often in an attempt to dissuade himself from despair, though sometimes simply to express these dark feelings:
My soul is sad and much dismayed;
See, Lord, what legions of my foes,
With fierce Apollyon at their head,
My heav’nly pilgrimage oppose!
See, from the over-burning lake
How like a smoky cloud they rise!
With horrid blasts my soul they shake,
With storms of blasphemies and lies.
Their fiery arrows reach the mark,
My throbbing heart with anguish tear;
Each lights upon a kindred spark,
And finds abundant fuel there.
I hate the thought that wrongs the Lord;
O, I would drive it from my breast,
With Thy own sharp two-edged sword,
Far as the east is from the west!
Come then, and chase the cruel host,
Heal the deep wounds I have received!
Nor let the pow’rs of darkness boast
That I am foiled, and Thou art grieved!
-That expresses the despair that he chides in the hymn below. To my ear, both seem constrained (hymns are almost bound to be constrained because convention demands that each line must convey a meaning on its own, without trailing halfway into the next line like every other kind of poet gets to do), and the “cheerful” hymn is the lesser poem, but neither seems exactly dishonest.
By whom was David taught
To aim the deadly blow,
When he Goliath fought,
And laid the Gittite low?
Nor sword nor spear the stripling took,
But chose a pebble from the brook.
’Twas Israel’s God and King
Who sent him to the fight;
Who gave him strength to fling,
And skill to aim aright.
Ye feeble saints, your strength endures,
Because young David’s God is yours.
Who ordered Gideon forth,
To storm th’invaders’ camp
With arms of little worth,
A pitcher and a lamp?
The trumpets made His coming known
And all the host was overthrown.
Oh! I have seen the day,
When with a single word,
God helping me to say,
“My trust is in the Lord,”
My soul hath quelled a thousand foes
Fearless of all that could oppose.
But unbelief, self will,
Self righteousness, and pride,
How often do they steal
My weapon from my side!
Yet David’s Lord, and Gideon’s Friend,
Will help His servant to the end.
Every Elizabethan was a man on the make, including Shakespeare and Marlowe.
Chaucer was a man on the make. So was Boswell, Samuel Johnson’s biographer. So was Sam Johnson, for that matter.
Lit criticicims is leery about moving off the printed page and judging the work on the moral standards of the writer or even in veering too much into the realm of what the author intended vs. what the critics say the work meant (which proves that the critics are on the make, too).
I’m sure Helen Steiner Rice is sincere and pious woman.
Is she a better and more worthy poet than Donne?
You decide.
P.S. to last, perhaps we should consider the possibility that what is best about Donne has already been said (except by ME of course), and questioning his sincerity is the only new light that can be shed in order to get published (and not perish).
I am reminded of the passage in Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians 1: 12-17, where he notes that while some have been emboldened by Paul’s imprisonment to undertake preaching the Gospel themselves, there are some who are doing so out of envy, rivalry or partishanship. Paul’s response is a kind of “Whatever!” “Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ be proclaimed, and in that I rejoice.”
I invite you all to read John Carey’s review of a biography of Donne in the NYRB for June 14, 2007. He reports that Donne said to a friend, speaking of his poems, “I did best when I had least truth for my subjects.” One can disagree with Carey, but he is worth a look. I am no Donne scholar, but I did recall this revuew as haveing a rather different tone than I had expected.
This kid in the parking lot at the grocery store sold me a CD of his own music, which is in its way not bad! But I found myself listening for something behind the music, which I guess is this sincerity that we’re talking about. A friend of mine says that the stamp of real art is being able to communicate experience such that the receiver of the art experiences some version of the same thing.
The CD talks a lot about life in Ward 8 (not the best area of DC) and shows real talent, especially in singing, but I did find myself thinking that if he could change the subject from what he is earnest about, he might be able to do a better job of art.
Joseph, I will be happy to read the review when I’m back on campus Tuesday and can look it up online, and report back.
It does strike me, from the isolated quote you provide, that Donne MAY be talking about the way in which writers sometimes find that they often sound a lot more insightful and sure of their ideas than they feel.
A writer of genius may look at his own writing, in retrospect, and say, “That’s so good, I really can’t believe I was smart enough to write that.”
The other theory is that the creative genius will visit the most inappropriate and undeserving individuals. John Milton comes to mind.
How much writing (especially journal writing) is whistling in the dark?
Kathy, if there is a hymn that you hoped you wrote it would be this one. I may have heard it before but it brought me to tears this past Easter Saturday and it had the same effect on my wife who heard it today as we sung it at the Lords Supper. The refrain has great power though the other words are great also.
We Remember
Refrain:
We remember how you loved us to your death,
and still we celebrate, for you are with us here;
and we believe that we will see you when you come
in your glory, Lord. We remember, we celebrate, we believe.
1. Here, a million wounded souls are yearning
just to touch you and be healed.
Gather all your people, and hold them to your heart.
Refrain:
We remember how you loved us to your death,
and still we celebrate, for you are with us here;
and we believe that we will see you when you come
in your glory, Lord. We remember, we celebrate, we believe.
2. Now we recreate your love
we bring the bread and wine to share a meal.
Sign of grace and mercy, the presence of the Lord.
Refrain:
We remember how you loved us to your death,
and still we celebrate, for you are with us here;
and we believe that we will see you when you come
in your glory, Lord. We remember, we celebrate, we believe.
3. Christ, the Father’s great “Amen”
to all the hopes and dreams of every heart.
Peace beyond all telling, and freedom from all fear.
Refrain:
We remember how you loved us to your death,
and still we celebrate, for you are with us here;
and we believe that we will see you when you come
in your glory, Lord. We remember, we celebrate, we believe.
4. See the face of Christ revealed
in every person standing by your side,
gift to one another, and temples of your love.
Refrain:
We remember how you loved us to your death,
and still we celebrate, for you are with us here;
and we believe that we will see you when you come
in your glory, Lord. We remember, we celebrate, we believe.
By Marty haugen
1980 G. I. A. Publications, Inc.
Bill, that sound you hear is the cab dithering outside while I make up my mind whether or not to order it to the bridge. But thanks.
Jean, I thought journals were about getting tenure.
Kathy, sorry, I was called away to yell at the neighbor dog. I sometimes miss living up north where the policy on dogs running amok was “shoot, shovel and shut up.”
Anyway, poor editing on my part. Should read:
It does strike me, from the isolated quote you provide, that Donne MAY be talking about the way in which writers sometimes find that they often sound a lot more insightful and sure of their ideas than they feel.
How much writing (especially journal/diary writing) is whistling in the dark, written to buck us up?
Doesn’t writing help to isolate one idea in the mind, to take it, with emotional discipline, and thread it out?
In the mind, a thought circulates and hangs out with dubious company. But in writing it is free to adopt a linear form with the strength of solitude.
For those of us who just haven’t been able to accomplish anything what with worrying about whether Donne was a big fake (and I’m only half in jest here; I feel as if the integrity of Anglicanism as a sincere manifestion of Church is at stake), I’m hoping to access the article Joseph Gannon refer’d above so we can put this issue to rest and get the rest of the housework done/donne.