Abstract
Most critics have read this poem as assured and irenic. Studying its deictics, however, reveals significant though often subterranean unease about salvation. In registering that response, the poem also encourages further explorations of how deixis, generally discussed only in terms of secular texts, distinctively inflects devotional poetry.
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Notes
See the valuable summary of these issues in Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 135.
Donne’s relationship to Calvinism has of course been extensively discussed. For one of the best overviews, see Achsah Guibbory, “Donne’s Religion: Montagu, Arminianism and Donne’s Sermons, 1624–1630,” ELR, 31 (2001), 412–439.
See especially Strier, Love Known, 105–113 and “John Donne Awry and Squint: The ‘Holy Sonnets,’ 1608–1610,” MP, 86 (1989), 357–384; Shami, “The Sermon,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, ed. Shami, Dennis Flynn, M. Thomas Hester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), esp. 334–335.
Ryan Netzley, Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011).
For that contrast, see, e.g., A. B. Chambers, Transfigured Rites in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 197–198.
See, e.g., Anon, History of Cartography Project No 13 Hymn… Commentary; Noam Flinker, “John Donne and the ‘Anthropomorphic Map’ Tradition,” Applied Semiotics/Sémiotique appliquée, 3 (1999) 207–215.
See, e.g., Walter Cohen, “The Literature of Empire in the Renaissance,” MP, 102 (2004), 1–34.
Private correspondence with Gary A. Stringer. Among the most striking developments in contemporary criticism is basing interpretation on neither the putative intentions nor even the realized effects of an author’s work but, rather, on the interaction among the original author, copyists and revisers, publishers, printers, and readers. See, e.g., Chris Stamatakis, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting: “Turning the Word” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
On these and other characteristics of hymns, see Diane McColley, “The Poem as Hierophon: Musical Configurations in George Herbert’s ‘The Church,’” in A Fine Tuning: Studies of the Religious Poetry of Herbert and Milton, ed. Mary A. Maleski (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989), 126; Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 38–39.
On the dissolution of the flesh, see, e.g., Ramie Targoff, “Facing Death,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, and her book John Donne: Body and Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), esp. 117–119, 167–174.
I had drafted my analysis of the interplay of genres before the publication of Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); the argument in her second chapter about how apparently unified forms can create discord through their interrelationship valuably supports my emphasis on subtle discord in Donne’s poem.
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© 2015 Heather Dubrow
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Dubrow, H. (2015). John Donne’s “Hymne to God my God, in my Sicknesse” and Prevenient Proximity. In: Deixis in the Early Modern English Lyric: Unsettling Spatial Anchors Like “Here,” “This,” “Come”. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137411310_6
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