John Donne 'Songs and Sonnets' - Secular or Sacred?

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                Alison Richards

Word Count: 2,574

Essay 2: Seventeenth Century 

John Donne

‘Songs and Sonnets’ - Secular or Sacred?

John Carey states in his book, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art, that:

“The first thing to remember about Donne is that he was a Catholic; the second, that he betrayed his Faith”.

Carey’s argument continues with heavy emphasis on Donne’s religious tendencies and implies that the perpetual worry about fidelity, falseness and the permanence of human relationships contained in the ‘Songs and Sonnets’ is a transference of Donne’s apostatical guilt to women. However, Barbara Hardy in her essay ‘Thinking and Feeling in the Songs and Sonnets’ contradicts Carey’s emphasis on the spiritual and religious, stating that:

 “Physicality…is the rule in Donne”

These two critical views oppose each other and take extreme standpoints on the meaning and content of Donne’s poetry. However, the common theme in Donne criticism is that there is a strong element of paradox and an overriding impression of ambiguity in his poems, and I believe that this prevents a definitive conclusion that the ‘Songs and Sonnets’ are, in a mutually exclusive sense, either secular or sacred.

Donne’s ‘Songs and Sonnets’ are complex. His use of philosophical, theological and scientific illustrations and analogies, captured in a colloquial language “such as men do use” make it extremely difficult to tease out the hidden depths of the poems, and can confuse the issue of whether they are secular or scared in nature. Some critics, however, have attempted to categorise the ‘Songs and Sonnets’, and Herbert Grierson, in his commentary on Donne’s poetical works, claims that there are two major groups to be identified. The first are those poems which are “frankly ‘evaporations’ of more or less cynical wit, the poems in which he parades his own inconstancy or enlarges on the weaknesses of women; and the second, where “the wit in Donne, whether gaily or passionately cynical, is subordinate to the lover, pure and simple, singing, at times with amazing simplicity and intensity of feeling, the joys of love and the sorrow of parting”.

The tendency to divide Donne’s work into two categories - one pertaining to the younger, “cynical libertinism”, days of ‘Jack Donne’ and the other to the later, more spiritually and religiously infused days of ‘Dr. Donne’ is common throughout critical theory and Grierson in his categorisation is no exception. However, although Donne’s life was certainly affected by events both of a religious and personal nature - such as his apostasy and his marriage to Ann More - he uses religious terms to sanctify love in the ‘Songs and Sonnets’. It this blend of secular and sacred, this conflict and unresolvable paradox which binds his poetry together, and spans the divide between Jack and Dr. Donne, the sexual and the religious.

All of the poems contained in the collection ‘Songs and Sonnets’ contain some kind of conflict between secular and sacred, but I believe that the most illustrative of these are ‘The Sunne Rising’, ‘Womans Constancy’ and ‘The Canonization’.

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‘The Sunne Rising’ is classified by Grierson as being in the second category, that of the more spiritual, serious, religious pieces. It focuses on the recurring theme in Donne’s poetry of the encompassing self-sufficiency of two lovers and the recurring image that together they form one world. He writes of the mutual love between a man and a woman as something complete and all consuming, something that needs nothing else:

“She’is all States, and all Princes, I,

Nothing else is.”                                (lns 21-22)

When taken out of the context of the poem, the above quotation appears to be a magnificently profound ...

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