I woke up this morning thinking of Holy Sonnet XIV. The line in my head was “knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend.” That “seek” caught my attention in a way it hasn’t before. The idea that God might “seek” anything uncouples him from his omniscience and omnipotence. A God who seeks is a God who has not yet found – and the speaker’s direction in the next lines -- “o'erthrow me, and bend / Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new” indicates that he, and not his Lord, knows the direction in which his salvation is to be found. Of course, that’s part of the point of the poem – his very confidence in his own usurpation by evil is part of the problem. It is the speaker who “seeks to mend” his own heart, and it is God whom he beseeches to aid him.
But that “seek” still struck a chord with me. It gets at that Christian idea of a God made weak and defenceless, a God who might, in his last hours, cry out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It’s a lonely God but an approachable one who seeks – and who ultimately also knows the end of his seeking, but who cannot yet approach it.
I thought about Donne, I think, and his seeking God, because I was thinking that Donne, too, was a failure. At least, for an important portion of his young life, he seems to have seen himself – and to have been seen – that way. His marriage to Anne More, however he thought it was going to turn out when he made it, effectively ended his chances at the life he seems to have thought he was going to have. Neither his father-in-law nor the political allies he hoped to cultivate forgave him (at least not for several years) for “marrying up” and violating the unspoken but powerful terms of his employment by making off with the boss’s niece, and he lost both power, money, and the cosmopolitan lifestyle to which he had been accustomed.
When he eventually did regain influence, it was by acceding to conversion to Anglicanism and taking holy orders, something he resisted for many years, and which, if we are to take his writing at face value (and I don’t really see why we shouldn’t) occasioned him a considerable amount of religious doubt and distress. The Bright Young Thing who was rising so quickly in court society, in spite of his Catholic background eventually ended up a respected – even revered – cleric and a powerful man of learning, but the road between the two seems to have felt dark and rocky to him. Even if you don’t take Biathanatos – Donne’s meditation on suicide – as a sign of his personal emotional state (and given the text’s dispassionate, studious approach to Biblical suicide and martyrdom, I admit it doesn’t feel personal), it’s clear that regretted his political downfall, if not his marriage.
A few years ago I wrote an essay claiming that Donne was, even before his marriage, obsessed with the idea of lyric return – this his poetry frequently sets up a dynamic of push and pull that leads to his poems swaying between East and West, near and far, past and present. Like the image of the compass in “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” his poems frequently have feet in two places at once, joined by lyric and thus always in a kind of dynamic stasis.
I was struck at the time by a particular figure Donne uses in a famous letter to a friend, Henry Goodyer. He writes to Goodyer, he says,
It was that “contracted and inverted into myself” that caught my attention – why does travelling make Donne contract and invert? Why, when he is in transit, in motion from one place to another, does he also get small, less moveable, more inverted? I argued that Donne experiences travel – and to an extent writing – as contradictory movement to and from, inward and outward; by travelling you both expand and contract, and by writing you both move forwards and backwards, until you are constantly moving, but yet going nowhere.
But this time around, it’s the more famous part of this passage that I’m thinking about – “her whom, because I have transplanted into a wretched fortune, I must labour to disguise that from her by all such honest devices as giving her my company and discourse.” Donne perceives his failure as having “transplanted” his wife, and is company and discourse – by all accounts lively and enjoyable, at least when he wasn’t meditating on his own death – as “devices” to stave off despair. It’s not, of course, an entirely downhearted picture – his children are “gamesome,” his fireside seems warm, bright, noisy, and companionable, and there’s certainly a degree of playful self-disparagement here. But the idea that this bright, brilliant man – surely destined for greatness – felt to some degree that he had failed, and that all he had left were the pretty devices – the emblems, the metaphors – of love and home strikes a chord with me.
Donne, of course, succeeded in the end, even if he didn’t do it in the way he thought he would. But I wonder if his weak God, his God who “As yet but…seek[s] to mend” him can give me comfort as, one hopes, it gave him. Despite the virile images of the blacksmith and the besieger (or ravisher) in Holy Sonnet XIV, it’s weakness that stands out in the poem. It’s that Petrarchan weakness – the lover overpowered by his love – but it’s also the weakness and the vulnerability of someone who is lost, who seeks. It’s someone who has forsaken himself and his path, who travels, but seems to get nowhere. Maybe the sonnet, then, reifies, even deifies failure – holy failure. To be broken down is also to be enthralled; to be knotted is also to be free.
But that “seek” still struck a chord with me. It gets at that Christian idea of a God made weak and defenceless, a God who might, in his last hours, cry out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It’s a lonely God but an approachable one who seeks – and who ultimately also knows the end of his seeking, but who cannot yet approach it.
I thought about Donne, I think, and his seeking God, because I was thinking that Donne, too, was a failure. At least, for an important portion of his young life, he seems to have seen himself – and to have been seen – that way. His marriage to Anne More, however he thought it was going to turn out when he made it, effectively ended his chances at the life he seems to have thought he was going to have. Neither his father-in-law nor the political allies he hoped to cultivate forgave him (at least not for several years) for “marrying up” and violating the unspoken but powerful terms of his employment by making off with the boss’s niece, and he lost both power, money, and the cosmopolitan lifestyle to which he had been accustomed.
When he eventually did regain influence, it was by acceding to conversion to Anglicanism and taking holy orders, something he resisted for many years, and which, if we are to take his writing at face value (and I don’t really see why we shouldn’t) occasioned him a considerable amount of religious doubt and distress. The Bright Young Thing who was rising so quickly in court society, in spite of his Catholic background eventually ended up a respected – even revered – cleric and a powerful man of learning, but the road between the two seems to have felt dark and rocky to him. Even if you don’t take Biathanatos – Donne’s meditation on suicide – as a sign of his personal emotional state (and given the text’s dispassionate, studious approach to Biblical suicide and martyrdom, I admit it doesn’t feel personal), it’s clear that regretted his political downfall, if not his marriage.
A few years ago I wrote an essay claiming that Donne was, even before his marriage, obsessed with the idea of lyric return – this his poetry frequently sets up a dynamic of push and pull that leads to his poems swaying between East and West, near and far, past and present. Like the image of the compass in “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” his poems frequently have feet in two places at once, joined by lyric and thus always in a kind of dynamic stasis.
I was struck at the time by a particular figure Donne uses in a famous letter to a friend, Henry Goodyer. He writes to Goodyer, he says,
not… out of my poor library, where to cast mine eye upon good authors kindles or refreshes sometimes meditations…nor from the highway, where I am contracted and inverted into myself, which are my two ordinary forges of letters to you, but I write from the fireside in my parlour and in the noise of three gamesome children and by the side of her whom, because I have transplanted into a wretched fortune, I must labour to disguise that from her by all such honest devices as giving her my company and discourse.
It was that “contracted and inverted into myself” that caught my attention – why does travelling make Donne contract and invert? Why, when he is in transit, in motion from one place to another, does he also get small, less moveable, more inverted? I argued that Donne experiences travel – and to an extent writing – as contradictory movement to and from, inward and outward; by travelling you both expand and contract, and by writing you both move forwards and backwards, until you are constantly moving, but yet going nowhere.
But this time around, it’s the more famous part of this passage that I’m thinking about – “her whom, because I have transplanted into a wretched fortune, I must labour to disguise that from her by all such honest devices as giving her my company and discourse.” Donne perceives his failure as having “transplanted” his wife, and is company and discourse – by all accounts lively and enjoyable, at least when he wasn’t meditating on his own death – as “devices” to stave off despair. It’s not, of course, an entirely downhearted picture – his children are “gamesome,” his fireside seems warm, bright, noisy, and companionable, and there’s certainly a degree of playful self-disparagement here. But the idea that this bright, brilliant man – surely destined for greatness – felt to some degree that he had failed, and that all he had left were the pretty devices – the emblems, the metaphors – of love and home strikes a chord with me.
Donne, of course, succeeded in the end, even if he didn’t do it in the way he thought he would. But I wonder if his weak God, his God who “As yet but…seek[s] to mend” him can give me comfort as, one hopes, it gave him. Despite the virile images of the blacksmith and the besieger (or ravisher) in Holy Sonnet XIV, it’s weakness that stands out in the poem. It’s that Petrarchan weakness – the lover overpowered by his love – but it’s also the weakness and the vulnerability of someone who is lost, who seeks. It’s someone who has forsaken himself and his path, who travels, but seems to get nowhere. Maybe the sonnet, then, reifies, even deifies failure – holy failure. To be broken down is also to be enthralled; to be knotted is also to be free.
Labels: failure, langage, poetics, spirituality
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