Abstract
‘A FUNERALL ELEGIE’ AND ‘THE FIRST ANNIVERSARIE’
Her name defin’d thee, gave thee forme and frame, And thou forgetst to celebrate thy name. Some moneths she hath beene dead (but being dead, Measures of time are all determined). (‘The First Anniversarie’, ll. 37–40, p. 272)
In 1610, on or near the solemn feast of the Immaculate Conception, a rich but nondescript young heiress passed away.1 Donne’s officious friend, Joseph Hall, remarked that Elizabeth Drury chose a propitious moment to die. Nothing so became her unexceptional life as the leaving of it when a distinguished and yet undervalued poet was standing by, keyed up to formulate her elegiac praises:
Thrise noble maid, couldst not have found nor sought A fitter time to yeeld to thy sad Fate, Then whiles this spirit lives, that can relate Thy worth so well.
(‘To The praise of the Dead, and the Anatomy’, 11. 12–15, p. 270)
For Donne too this was the ultimate critical hour.
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Notes
Bald, A Life, p. 238, notes that Elizabeth Drury died in the early part of December 1610 and was buried on 17 December. The Immaculate Conception fell on 8 December and was the major feast day in proximity to these two events, though Hughes, The Progress, p. 209, argues for the importance of the minor feast of St Lucy on 13 December.
T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays: 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1932) p. 292.
It will be obvious that I differ with the critics who turn their admiration for Donne into an occasion for Crashaw-bashing. Kerrigan, for example, draws his discussion of the Holy Sonnet ‘Show me deare Christ’ to a close by noting that ‘the poem is close, too close, to the tactless exercises in accommodated devotion we find in Crashaw, daring with no sense oof danger, creating neither mystery nor wit, but leaving us aghast at the combination of great verbal power, unquestioned faith, neurosis, and stupidity’ ‘The Fearful Accommodations’, pp. 359–60.
See Donne’s letter to Garrard (14 April 1612), in Hester (ed.), Letters … of Honour, p. 255, where he protests: ‘I cannot be understood to have bound my self to have spoken just Truth: but I would not be thought to have gone about to praise any bodie in rime, except I tooke such a Person, as might be capable of all that I could say’.
It is remarkable how frequently critics dismiss Jonson’s judgement of the Anniversaries on discriminatory religious grounds. Frank Kermode, English Renaissance Literature (London: Gray-Mills, 1974) p. 71, believes that as an ex-Catholic, Jonson felt it was wrong for Donne to use language ‘really only appropriate for a woman so exalted as the Virgin Mary’. Barbara Lewalski, Donne’s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode (Princeton University Press, 1979) p. 140, thinks that as a Roman Catholic, Jonson failed to understand Donne’s poetic intentions in the Anniversaries. Williamson, ‘The Design’, p. 184, draws a similar conclusion about ‘this erstwhile Catholic’. Rosalie L. Colie, ‘“All in Peeces”: Problems of Interpretation in Donne’s Anniversary Poems’, in Peter Amadeus Fiore (ed.), Just So Much Honor: Essays Commemorating the 400th Anniversary of the Birth of John Donne (Penn State University Press, 1972) p. 211, depicts ‘Ben Jonson confessing a religion different from Donne’s’.
Smith (ed.), The Critical Heritage, p. 69.
Marius Bewley, ‘Religious Cynicism in Donne’s Poetry', KR, vol. XIV (1952) p. 623, felt as far back as 1952 that ‘most of our criticism of Donne has been written by men in the English Protestant tradition, more equipped to understand the late Anglican than the early Roman and transitional Donne’, a view which Low has more recently reiterated in the opening of Love’s Architecture. (Further references to this work by Bewley may be indicated by page number in the text.) In his review of ‘Recent Studies in the English Renaissance’, Studies in English Literature (SEL), vol. XXV (1985) pp. 191–2, Gordon Braden applauds the challenge to ‘recent insistence … on the specifically Protestant character of English religious poetry’ and agrees that Reformation and Counter-Reformation adversaries will increasingly be seen as close in thought and art.
Martz, ‘John Donne in Meditation’, in Keast (ed.), Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, p. 131.
O. B. Hardison, The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1962) p. 170.
Lewalski, Donne’s Anniversaries, p. 162.
Carey, et al., ‘Donne and Coins’, English Renaissance Studies, p. 151.
Patrick Grant, ‘John Donne’s Anniversaries: New Philosophy and the Act of the Heart’, in Patrick Grant, Literature and the Discovery of Method in the English Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1985) p. 94. (Further references to this work may be indicated by page number in the text.)
Ilona Bell, ‘Revision and Revelation’, pp. 74–5, sees similarities between Reformation Protestantism and the modern literary theory of deconstruction. She equates Catholicism with formalism.
See Harold Love, ‘The Argument of Donne’s First Anniversary’, MP vol. LXIV (1966) p. 126; Frank Manley, introduction to John Donne: The Anniversaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), pp. 10, 14 (further references to this work by Manley may be indicated by page number in the text); Patrick Grant, ‘John Donne’s Anniversaries’, pp. 77–9; and Lewalski, Donne’s Anniversaries, pp. 4, 13. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral: A Study of the Pastoral Form in Literature (London: Penguin, 1965) pp. 72–3, offers a solution, but one which does not sit right with many critics, that Elizabeth Drury is the Logos. Even those critics who stoutly maintain that Elizabeth Drury does not lose her particular identity — like O. B. Hardison, The Enduring Monument, p. 185, or P. G. Stanwood, ‘“Essentiall Joye” in Donne’s Anniversaries’ in Roberts (ed.), Essential Articles, p. 388, or less convincingly, Manley, John Donne: The Anniversaries, p. 15 — concede that she is weighed down by a ‘superabundance of vehicles’ (Hardison, p. 170) and by being made a ‘woman on whom literally the entire world depends’ (Manley, p. 15).
To Garrard (14 April 1612), in Hester (ed.), Letters … of Honour, p. 255.
It has become literary lore to propose a definitive hermeneutic reading for the complex metaphorical signification in the Anniversaries and to react competitively to the ingenious explanations of other textual critics. Donne was not alone in pinning his hopes on these poems. O. B. Hardison classified the Anniversaries as epideictic poems in an elegiac mode but insisted that Donne’s foremost concern was to praise a singular girl (The Enduring Monument, pp. 168, 179). Critics such as Williamson, ‘The Design’, p. 184, are not convinced of Donne’s intrinsic respect for his subject. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the effect of the new science upon seventeenth-century poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960) p. 106, argues that Donne ‘combined memories of the pagan Virgo, the Virgin Mary, and the Virgin Queen, all woven into his “Idea of a Woman”’, and that ‘it is “Shee” who merits these encomiums critics have attempted to heap upon a dead young girl’. Manley, John Donne: The Anniversaries, pp. 10–50, suspected that no categorical identification of the feminine symbolism in the poems was possible; but suggested that Elizabeth be read in the light of the complex manifestations of Wisdom as the anima figure, sapientia creata, Venus Coelestis, the Logos, Shekinah, Sophia, and lost Edenic felicity. However, Hughes gathered from all this that ‘whoever she is, she is not Elizabeth Drury; or rather, Elizabeth Drury is involved in her, even as Queen Elizabeth, the Virgin Mary, and all lovely women are involved in her’ (The Progress, p. 208). He concludes that the woman celebrated is St Lucy who died at 15, on 13 December, and that as the patron of illumination, ‘she’ inspired Donne to make his own spiritual rebirth the real concern of the poem (pp. 209–15). Although Lewalski’s sympathies lie with a Protestant movement of spirit diverging from the medieval inheritance examined by most critics, her conclusion in Donne’s Anniversaries, p. 162, is not radically new but correspondent with P. G. Stanwood’s supposition that ‘Elizabeth Drury stands for herself, who is the idealized, the saintly embodiment of God’s free gift of sanctifying grace’ (‘Essentiall Joye’, p. 388). However, John Carey, Life, Mind and Art, p. 103, objects to her view of Elizabeth as a typological symbol of the regenerate Christian bearing the image of God in the soul on the grounds that the image of God is restored in all regenerate souls, whereas Donne treats Elizabeth as unique.
As is evident from lines 3 and 520 of ‘The Second Anniversary’. Bald, A Life, p. 240, and Shawcross, The Complete Poetry, p. 286, differ from Manley, John Donne: The Anniversaries, in the view that ‘A Funerall Elegie’ was written prior to the Anniversaries. In ‘“A Funerall Elegie”: Donne’s Achievement in Traditional Form’, Concerning Poetry (CP), vol. XIX (1986) pp. 65–6, Paul A. Parrish makes sense of the publication of the ‘Elegie’ as a bridge between the two Anniversary poems, while accepting that this shorter and more conventional tribute may well have been written first. While Parrish examines the elegy as a statement of what was and shall be, recalling ‘The First Anniversarie’ and anticipating the motifs of ‘The Second’, I am interested in the literary potentialities that opened up to Donne as he played with his poetic subject in ‘A Funerall Elegie’.
Colie, ‘“All in Peeces”’, Just So Much Honor, p. 211, believes Donne reckons time according to the death of the secular lady who is ostensible subject of the Anniversaries; but as I have shown, behind this figure stands the religious figure of ‘Our Lady’.
J. E. V. Croft’s damning comment was that Donne ‘cannot see her — does not apparently want to see her; for it is not of her that he writes, but of his relation to her, not of love, but of himself loving’. See ‘John Donne: a Reconsideration’ in Gardner (ed.), A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 82. Ilona Bell challenged this reading in ‘The Role of the Lady in Donne’s Songs and Sonets’, SEL, vol. XXIII (1983) pp. 113–29.
O. B. Hardison, The Enduring Monument, p. 115, invokes the classical commandment that ‘immoderate grief is impious’, but here I suspect that elegiac art and the sorrowful facts of life frequently parted company.
See, by way of example, Jacobus, Essays in Feminist Criticism, p. 85, and Mary Eagleton (ed.), Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987) pp. 44–5.
Floyd, The Overthrow of the Protestants Pulpit-Babels, p. 25.
Thomas Carew, ‘An Elegie upon the death of the Deane of Pauls, Dr. John Donne’, 1. 16 in Shawcross (ed.), The Complete Poetry.
Alfonso De Villegas, The Lives of the Saints, Vol. 2, p. 524.
Bald, A Life, pp. 241–4, believes that Donne wrote ‘An Anatomy’ after he had agreed to accompany the Drurys abroad, but before setting out, which would be the late summer or early autumn of 1611. Line 39 of the poem suggests it could even have been earlier.
Zailig Pollock, ‘“The Object and the Wit”: The Smell of Donne’s First Anniversary’, ELR, vol. XIII (1983) pp. 301–18.
See Jacobus (ed.), Essays in Feminist Criticism, pp. 199–217, who asks a question pertinent to the Anniversaries, which is the relation between female and male hysteria in patriarchal discourse; Atkinson on Margery Kempe, Mystic and Pilgrim, especially chapter 7, pp. 195–220; and the helpful male views of the psychiatrist and Christian convert, Karl Stern, The Flight from Woman (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1965), pp. 1–6 (further references to this work may be indicated by page number in the text.), and I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism (Middlesex: Penguin, 1971) pp. 22–32, 179–92.
The years at the Inns of Court, 1591–95; after his marriage, 1601–03; at Mitcham, 1607–10; and before ordination, 1613–14, have been regarded as particularly stressful. But Bald, A Life, pp. 234–5, argues that the period between 1607–10 was ‘probably the most disturbed and anxious’ of his life, when he showed the classic symptoms of the sick soul. I would agree but extend the period through to 1612, because it accounts for Donne’s strange state abroad with the Drurys and the sense of a struggle to master disorder in the Anniversaries.
Marius, Thomas More, p. 265, is not alone in raising this suspicion. Richard Helgerson makes a similar point in sketching the acute crisis conditions in which Renaissance poets lived and worked. See Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) p. 8, and Halewood’s discussion of the Pauline conversion experienced by both Reformation and Counter-Reformation men in The Poetry of Grace, pp. 84–7.
Near completion of this book, I was pleased to see that a critic whose approach is radically ‘other’ than mine, has none the less arrived by a divergent methodology at a similar conclusion: that the Virgin Mary and her Immaculate Conception are the subject of this poem. See Thomas Docherty, John Donne, Undone (London: Methuen, 1986) pp. 2–8, 10, 227, 231.
Hughes, The Progress, p. 139, for example, believes that Donne would have nothing to do with the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Gardner claims that Donne wittily denies this doctrine in his tribute to the innocence of the Virgin in stanza V of ‘A Litanie’. See her note to 1. 40 in the ‘Commentary’ to The Divine Poems, p. 84. But she ignores his assertion in the ‘Annunciation’ sonnet of La Corona (ll. 20–21) that Christ cannot be touched by sin, nor Mary give it to Him, in the womb. Donne’s own theological statement on this subject in Sermons 6:182–3 is not clear.
See Bryson, ‘Lost Portrait’, p. 15.
Quoted by Suenens, Mary, p. 22.
In her essay, ‘Dora and the Pregnant Madonna’ in Essays in Feminist Criticism, Mary Jacobus makes some staggering pronouncements about this dogma. See pp. 138–41.
See chapter 16 on ‘The Immaculate Conception’ in Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, pp. 236–54, especially p. 247.
Donne, ‘To Sir G. F.’ (14 April 1612), Hester (ed.), Letters … of Honour, p. 75.
Even the Virgin’s great advocate, Bernard of Clairvaux, misunderstood when he asked ‘how can there be holiness in conception?’ Palmer, Mary in the Documents, p. 70, notes that the belief sex transmits original sin has ‘long been rejected’. However, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Towards a Feminine Theology (Boston: Beacon, 1983) pp. 150–51, still discusses the Immaculate Conception on the basis that original sin is regarded as the consequence of sexual reproduction. Earlier, she had conceded in Mary – The Feminine Face of the Church (Philadelphia: Westminister, 1977) pp. 66–8, that this doctrine could, none the less, remind Christians of the natural goodness of humanity. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, p. 254, follows suit in her conclusion that it accentuates the ordinary mortal’s sense of sinfulness.
See Pollock’s clever discussion of these lines, ‘“The Object and the Wit”’, pp. 312–13, especially as it connects up with Kahn’s views on King Lear in ‘The Absent Mother Rewriting the Renaissance’.
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, John Osborne (trans.) (London: Verso, 1985) p. 139.
Andrew Marvell, ‘An Horatian Ode’, ll. 34–6, in George de Forest Lord (ed.), Complete Poetry (New York: The Modern Library, 1968) p. 56 and Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s famous theory, The Breaking of the Circle, p. 96.
French psychoanalytic critics like Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva have seen the female and maternal body as crucial to the acquisition of language and subjectivity, and to political subversion of the patriarchal symbolic order. See Weedon’s analysis in Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, pp. 63–73. As Jacobus rightly observed, Essays in Feminist Criticism, p. 168, these are attempts to rehabilitate the discourse of the maternal in a secular era. But I obviously disagree with her conclusion that the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary has no further meaning for a modern or liberal female reader.
Henry Vaughan, ‘The Knot’, ll. 5–16, in French Fogle (ed.), The Complete Poetry (New York: Norton, 1969) p. 302.
This is Ross’ statement, Poetry and Dogma, p. 51, of how Calvin defined the Eucharistic presence of Christ. Hardison, The Enduring Monument, p. 179, makes a similar claim for Elizabeth whom he believes ‘is defined negatively by what is missing’, though he still insists, is treated as an individual.
See Docherty, Donne, Undone, p. 4. The parallel with the theological question of the ‘real presence of Christ’ in the Eucharist is obvious. On p. 26, he states the secular literary credo that ‘the “I”, strictly speaking, cannot ever repeat itself and therefore cannot establish a Self which transcends each individual, historical instance of the “I”’. But I submit that however imperfectly and provisionally, Donne still ascribed to the ancient Christian view in his devotional poetry that man was made in the image of God and the examination of self was a quest for likeness to constant Being.
See Kerrigan’s essay, ‘The Fearful Accommodations’, outlining Donne’s struggle to imagine an anthropomorphic God by means of Christian accommodation; Pollock, ‘“The Object and the Wit”’, pp. 302–11, discussing the discernible fissure between the object and the wit, or God and the divine means of knowing him in the Anniversaries; and Grant’s theory of Donne’s near-impossible exertions to restore correspondence between the world and God in these poems, Literature and the Discovery of Method, p. 79.
Lewalski, Donne’s Anniversaries, p. 259, concedes this point.
Macbeth’s soliloquy on hearing of his queen’s death (V, v, 18–24) expresses kindred feelings of a world in which there is no longer time for, or point in, loving remembrance:
She should have died hereafter: There would have been a time for such a word. To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Obviously I disagree with Thomas Willard’s view in ‘Donne’s Anatomy Lesson: Vesalian or Paracelsian?’, JDJ, vol. III (1984) p. 56, that this ‘ideal is lost in The First Anniversary’ but ‘regained in The Second Anniversary as a personal pattern, the eternal feminine of Goethe and Teilhard de Chardin’.
Bald, A Life, p. 253, argues that ill-health, delirium and anxiety for his wife may have induced such a vision.
See Bald’s discussion of the records related to Donne’s tour, A Life, pp. 241, 252–3.
Flynn, ‘Donne’s Catholicism: I’, pp. 12–13, surmises that Donne may have discussed this avenue with his mentor Egerton who as an ex-Catholic himself would be in a position to offer relevant advice.
Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton: Harvester, 1983) pp. 50–51, and Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford University Press, 1975) pp. 66–88, have helped to qualify the blanket assumption that Protestantism improved women’s religious rights when it instituted a priesthood of all believers. Both point out that in its abolition of convents, female mediation and spiritual role-models and reinforcement of paternalistic authority, the Reformation actually made it more difficult for women to identify with the life, liturgy, symbolism and organisation of the Church. One reviewer of Jardine, however, SCN, vol. XLII (1984) pp. 40–41, sees some inconsistency in these remarks.
See Montrose, ‘Eliza, Queene of shepheards’, p. 73, and other relevant remarks by Kahn, ‘The Absent Mother’, p. 45.
Jacobus, Essays in Feminist Criticism, p. 194, argues that by discounting the mother figure, Freud ‘authors the immaculately self-conceived speculations of theory’, a strategy which I believe has parallels with earlier power-moves by Christian fathers.
Ruether’s discussion of the anti-maternal stance of the male leaders of the Church in Sexism and God-Talk, pp. 142–5, is pertinent to the Anniversaries.
It is the undaunted Margery Kempe speaking, The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 164.
See Stanwood, ‘Essentiall Joye’, in Roberts (ed.), Essential Articles, p. 395, and Lewalski s own elaboration of Stanwood’s suggestion in Donne’s Anniversaries, pp. 111–12.
Villegas, The Lives of the Saints, Vol. 2, p. 524.
Perhaps Donne had in mind the blighted pregnancy of another ‘Mary’, the Tudor and Catholic Queen of England. See Erickson’s poignant account, The First Elizabeth, pp. 142–50.
Montrose notes how the royal image of the Virgin Queen was similarly splintered and so disarmed of its menace in ‘Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture’, Rewriting the Renaissance, pp. 80, 84.
Some of Donne’s friends evidently entertained some anxiety for him, judging from a letter to Garrard of 14 April 1612 in Hester (ed.), Letters … of Honour, pp. 255–6, where he protests there is no ground for the rumour that Sir Robert Drury went to Mass while in France. Obviously, he was keen to quash any assumption that he was in attendance.
Gardner, Appendix C: ‘The Interpretation of Donne’s Sonnet on the Church’, ‘Commentary’ to The Divine Poems, p. 122; Carey, Life, Mind and Art, p. 30.
See M. Thomas Hester’s discussion of Satyres III and IV in Kinde Pitty and Brave Scorn: John Donne’s Satyres (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1982) pp. 54–97.
Such as Novarr, The Disinterred Muse, p. 140. Though it is acknowledged that Donne writes of the Church in the terms appropriate to a whore, critics still maintain that ‘the images of the ascetic Crashaw are far more predominantly sexual than those of Donne’ and do not give offence as Crashaw’s do. See Bennett’s remarks in Five Metaphysical Poets, p. 104, and Williamson, The Donne Tradition, p. 122. Kerrigan, ‘The Fearful Accommodations’, pp. 356–60, concedes that in this sonnet Donne comes close to Crashaw but turns his criticism against the latter rather than the author of the offending poem.
See Angela Carter’s debunking exercise in The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (London: Virago, 1979) pp. 106–11.
See a typical poetic instance of this in ‘A Letter to the Lady Carey, and Mrs. Essex Riche’, especially ll. 52–4, in Shawcross (ed.), The Complete Poetry, p. 238.
Madelon Sprengnether, ‘Annihilating Intimacy in Coriolanus’, in Mary Beth Rose (ed.), Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives (Syracuse University Press, 1986) pp. 89, 92–7.
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© 1992 Maureen Sabine
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Sabine, M. (1992). Refuse the Name of Mother. In: Feminine Engendered Faith. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372580_3
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