Abstract
This essay examines the poetry of John Donne in the light of its “apocalyptic” dimension, which will be here understood as a philosophical, literary, cultural, and experiential category. It also proposes a method for discerning the apocalyptic as a tone or theme in authors who are not usually classed in the genre. My discussion of “the apocalyptic” will be literary, rather than strictly theological; however, detailed reference to one of Donne’s sermons (on Apoc. 7:2–3) will confirm the unity of his mindset in approaching both the secular and the religious understanding of this subject. His imagination is imbued with apocalyptic fears vis à vis the deep uncertainties concerning traditional hierarchies that were driving the contemporary exploration of new worlds and new forms of knowledge in a still largely uncertain cognitive horizon. The experiences of a new beginning and of an incumbent end, specifically the experience of falling in love and of a moment of religious fervor followed by loss of love or of religious enthusiasm, cast a metaphorically “apocalyptic” light on Donne’s love poems, as well as on his religious poems and sermons.
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Notes
- 1.
E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto & Windus, 1943); Arthur A. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936); Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background: Studies in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967); and Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
- 2.
John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (New York: Crossroad, 1984), 1: “The word ‘apocalyptic’ is popularly associated with fanatical millenarian expectation, and indeed the canonical apocalypses of Daniel and especially of John have very often been used by millenarian groups. Theologians of a more rational bent are often reluctant to admit that such material played a formative role in early Christianity. There is consequently a prejudice against the apocalyptic literature which is deeply ingrained in biblical scholarship. The great authorities of the nineteenth century, Julius Wellhausen and Emil Schürer, slighted its value.”
- 3.
Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination, 2.
- 4.
Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination, 5, where he goes on to argue that “This definition is sufficiently broad and yet remains usefully specific,” and that it can be shown to apply to “various sections of 1 Enoch, Daniel, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, Apocalypse of Abraham, 3 Baruch, 2 Enoch, Testament of Levi 2-5, the fragmentary Apocalypse of Zephaniah, and with some qualification to Jubilees and The Testament of Abraham (both of which also have strong affinities with other genres). It also applies to a wide body of Christian and Gnostic literature and to some Persian and Greco-Roman material.”
- 5.
E. Ann Matter, “The Pseudo-Alcuinian ‘De Septem Sigillis’: An Early Latin Apocalypse Exegesis,” Traditio 36 (1980): 111–37. See also Matter, “The Apocalypse in Early Medieval Exegesis,” in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 38–50.
- 6.
Katrin Ettenhuber, Donne’s Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). See also Mark Vessey, “John Donne (1572–1631) in the Company of Augustine: Patristic Culture and Literary Profession in the English Renaissance,” Revue des Etudes Augustiniennes 39 (1993): 173–201.
- 7.
E. Harris Harbison, The Christian Scholar in the Age of the Reformation (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1956).
- 8.
Vessey, John Donne, 188.
- 9.
Matter, “The Pseudo-Alcuinian ‘De Septem Sigillis’,” 1.
- 10.
Donne did, however, also preach on Apoc. 4:8 upon Trinity Sunday at St. Dunstan’s: sermon XLII. See: Henry Alford, ed., The Works of John Donne, vol. 2 (London: John W. Parker, 1839), 247–70.
- 11.
Donne writes: “This Angel which does so much for Gods Saints is, not inconveniently, by many Expositors, taken to be our Saviour Christ himselfe,” sermon XLIII. Alford, ed., Works, 2: 278.
- 12.
Ibid., 271.
- 13.
Ibid., 272.
- 14.
Ibid., 292.
- 15.
Warren Johnston, Revelation Restored. The Apocalypse in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011). Earlier studies have convincingly suggested that political interpretations of the Book of Revelation were widespread and highly influential in Sixteenth and Seventeenth century England: C.A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich, The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents and Repercussions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1972); Robert Ashton, The English Civil War: Conservatism and Revolution, 1603–1649 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1989); Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988); Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); and Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).
- 16.
Alford, ed., Works, 2: 291.
- 17.
Ibid., 273.
- 18.
Ibid., 271, 274, 283, 284.
- 19.
Both ibid., 288 and 289.
- 20.
Ibid., 274, 284, 285, 286, 292.
- 21.
Ibid., 271, 272, 273, 274, 294, 295.
- 22.
The Latin “brachio” is, of course, literally “arm,” but “hand” is Donne’s own translation in the sermon.
- 23.
Donne, s. XLIII, Alford, ed., Works, 2: 296.
- 24.
Ibid., 294.
- 25.
Ibid., 286.
- 26.
Ibid., 291 and 292.
- 27.
The very brief (and vague) quotation is ibid., 288.
- 28.
Recent studies on angels include the following interesting contributions: Angels in the Early Modern World, ed. Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); David Keck, Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Meredith J. Gill, Angels and the Order of Heaven in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
- 29.
Unless otherwise noted, poetry quoted from A. J. Smith, ed. John Donne: The Complete English Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996).
- 30.
Alford, ed., Works, 275, 276.
- 31.
In sermon XLIII, the four angels of Revelation 7 are also taken anthropomorphically as equivalents of the human activities of “worldly profession,” “bodily refection,” “honest recreation,” and “religious service of God” (ed. Alford, Works, 2: 289). Donne also suggests (ibid.) that there is an angel of temptation at every corner to whom “power was given to hurt,” ex potestate data.
- 32.
Ibid., 282–83.
- 33.
Ibid., 278.
- 34.
In other poems the bed is associated with the grave, and the image is supported by the current early-modern meaning of “to die” as a synonym of “experiencing orgasm.”
- 35.
The dichotomy that several of Donne’s interpreters have wished to outline, between a young, libertine, immoral Donne versus a mature, repentant, and finely theological persona fails, in my opinion, to acknowledge the richly contradictory elements of his personality, the wit of his poetic voice and the depth of his theological knowledge, as well as his ability to simultaneously experience (and successfully convey in extraordinary poems) faith and doubt, sexual desire and yearning for divine grace. The often proposed contrast between the “wanton” youth and the “latter-day Augustine” of his biographers (starting with Izaac Walton’s 1640 ‘agiography’ of Donne), has, reductively in my opinion, also been applied to the amorous and the religious poetry, thereby emphasizing a questionable determinism between his art and biography, and thus establishing a clear-cut separation between the love poems and the devotional poems. Among Donne’s biographies I recall: Izaak Walton, The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Robert Sanderson (London: Oxford University Press, 1927); R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind, Art (London: Faber & Faber, 1981); and David Edwards, John Donne: Man of Flesh and Spirit (London: Continuum, 2001).
- 36.
T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets” (from 1952), in Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), 281–91.
- 37.
Helen Gardner has traced the four Novissimi (Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell) in Donne’s Sonnets. See Helen Gardner, ed., The Divine Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978); Helen Gardner, ed., John Donne: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962).
- 38.
In his Ignatius His Conclave (1610–1611), Donne mentions Galileo and the new views of the moon and the planets disclosed by his “glasse.” Astronomical imagery is abundant in the love poems and in the Anniversaries.
- 39.
J. Sparrow, ed., John Donne: Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923).
- 40.
Copia was a dominant strategy of rhetorical elaboration, essentially consisting in the ability to express an idea in a number of different forms, usually by enriching the bare sentence conveying the essential message. This art was taught in most grammar schools throughout the humanist period and the Renaissance. One of the most famous textbooks was Erasmus’ De Copia, a text which was very popular at Cambridge, where John Colet, a friend of Erasmus recommended it to his pupils. Angela Locatelli, “The Land of Plenty: Erasmus’ De Copia and English Renaissance Rhetoric,” in Silenos: Erasmus in Elizabethan Literature, ed. Claudia Corti (Pisa: Pacini, 1998), 41–57.
- 41.
“Wrangling schools” may of course refer to the schoolmen, but also to the Stoics and to the second letter of St. Peter indicating that the world would end in fire. The concept was a commonplace in biblical readings that maintained that God had promised to spare humankind from a second universal flood.
- 42.
Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination, 5.
- 43.
Here quoted from T. W. Craik and J. R. Craik, eds. John Donne: Selected Poetry and Prose (London: Methuen, 1986), 131–44.
- 44.
Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Angela Locatelli, “This Phantasie May Be Resembled to a Glasse’: Collisions and Collusions in Early-Modern Literary and Scientific Discourse,” in La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, vol. VII, ed. Angela Locatelli (Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Sestante, 2008), 157–72.
- 45.
Craik and Craik, John Donne, 272.
- 46.
The quotations from “A Nocturnall” are taken from Alessandro Serpieri and Silvia Bigliazzi, eds., John Donne: Poesie (Milan: BUR, 2007), 312–19.
- 47.
The word “nothingnesse” is Donne’s own creation and gift to the English language, just like the neologisms “interanimates” (l. 42) in “The Exstasie” and “inter-assured of the mind” (l. 19) in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.”
- 48.
Angela Locatelli, “The Common desire of Representation: or How to ‘Express’ in Literature and Science,” in La conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature, vol. VI (Bergamo: Bergamo University Press/Sestante, 2007), 7–22.
- 49.
Angela Locatelli, “Discursive Intersections on the Subject of ‘Light’ in English Renaissance Literature,” in Representing Light across Arts and Sciences: Theories and Practices, ed. Elena Agazzi, Enrico Giannetto, and Franco Giudice (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2010), 69–87.
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Locatelli, A. (2019). Religious and Amorous “Apocalypses” in John Donne’s Metaphysical Imagination. In: Knibbs, E., Boon, J., Gelser, E. (eds) The End of the World in Medieval Thought and Spirituality. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14965-9_12
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