1. “Contraryes meete in one”
Lyric Conciliations in John Donne’s Holy Sonnets
Justin Ismael V. Lutian
Honors Thesis
2015
Tutor: Elizabeth H. Sagaser
Second Reader: Laurie E. Osborne

2. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Debts of gratitude I owe to Elizabeth Sagaser and Laurie Osborne for urging me to read more
meticulously, to write more clearly, and to feel more intensely the power of Donne’s poetry. I
thank them too for that many times they pulled me back, in a proverbial sense, to the realm of
mortals. Thank you also to Jillian Riendeau ’15 and Laura Rosenthal ’15, who both critiqued
versions of this honors project but above all have been my formidable colleagues through the
joys and challenges of thesis writing.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel.
Despite those who question the gravitas of his character, Polonius is right.

3. TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Confronting Death Through Poetry (A Case Study in Yeats)…………….………………1
A Biographical Sketch…………………………………………………………………….5
Dating the Holy Sonnets…………………….……………………………………………10
The Power of the Sonnet Form…………………………………………………………..16
The Power of the Lyric Genre…………………………………………………………...20
Donne’s Holy Sonnets as Lyric…………………………………………………………..29
Commentaries
“Oh, to vex me”……………………………………………………………………..…...36
“As due by many titles”………………………………………………………...………..44
“Thou hast made me”……………………………………………………………….……54
“At the round earths imagin’d corners”…………………………………………..……...63
“Oh my blacke soule”…………………………………………………………………....71
“Death be not proud”…………………………………………………………………….79
Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………..88

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INTRODUCTION
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate
intensity” (Yeats): Confronting Death through Poetry
Turning and Turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand:
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; bot now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Opening with the image of a falcon ominously circling in a “widening
gyre,” the speaker in Yeats’s “The Second Coming” imagines the chaos of the
apocalypse. Through a seemingly unstoppable cascade of events, the physical
world disintegrates; “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Entropy
accelerates, and the invisible mechanisms holding earthly life together are
“loosed.” The “widening gyre” becomes too wide to bear its own distension. As
communication between the falcon and the falconer breaks down, “Mere anarchy”
ensues, and the “ blood-dimmed tide” physicalizes the “anarchy[‘s]” inundating

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effect. “The ceremony of innocence” which has propagated delusions of human
righteousness that undergird everyday life “is drowned” and gives way to a new
ceremony—one less dainty but ultimately more truthful than the previous one.
By conjuring this upheaval, Yeats’s speaker assumes the role of God
segregating “the best” of mankind from “the worst.” Those who have least sin
“lack all conviction, while” the most sinful put on shows of “passionate
intensity.” These two sets of individuals embody two ways by which humans
confront death and the question of salvation. “The best” appear uneasy about their
spiritual redemption. However, with such unassuming façades, they display
humility and endear themselves even more to God. They trust that He will fill the
voids in their beings but know that such action ultimately hinges on divine
prerogative. “The worst,” either unfettered by faith or now suddenly consumed by
it, perform the proverbial wailing and grinding of teeth, rivaling the
pandemonium around them. Having done little to merit God’s mercy, they now
attempt to catch His attention with the hope that doing so will incite His pity.
At the start of the second stanza, the speaker synthesizes a possible
explanation unifying all his fantastic observations in the first: “Surely are
revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” Although the
speaker is the sole agent in the poem, the parallel clause structure of the ninth and
tenth lines betrays a certain disbelief in his voice. With the repeated construction
“Surely [something] is at hand,” he seems to need assurance that his conclusion
has validity. However, before regaining full confidence in his voice, “a vast image
out of Spiritus Mundi / Troubles [his] sight.” The catastrophic “blood-dimmed

6. Lutian 3
tide” has turned into “sands of the desert” from which materializes a sphinx,
covered in shadows but with “a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.” At the sight of
this chimera, the speaker discovers the circularity of history, presaged by falcon’s
movement around “the widening gyre,” as Christ is reborn to exact judgment
upon all.
The speaker’s diagnosis of his frightening imaginative journey concludes
with more unrest. Ending the poem with a question, he suspends the completion
of the cycle of history but in the process establishes the intellectual connection
between the “vast image out of Spiritus Mundi” and “Bethlehem.” Despite this
unsettled denouement—which is not really a denouement given the implied
circularity of experience—the speaker emerges purged of “innocence.” He is now
more knowledgeable of the supernatural forces that governs his existence and will
continue to do so for the rest of time. His imagination has brought him to this
poetic apocalyptic space, where he finds enlightenment in the darkness of sight.
What does it feel to come face-to-face with death? Or more specifically,
what does it feel to come face-to-face with the possibility of eternal life? The
horrors of mortality and the frightening enigma of the apocalypse are evidently
not alien to Yeats. Written after the First World War, “The Second Coming”
encapsulates the terrors of militaristic conflict. The poem, with “the falcon [that]
cannot hear the falconer” figuring failed communication, explores the disjunction
between human progress and the alienation that people in the modern era
experienced. Yet, in spite of the cataclysm her conjures, the speaker appears calm
and resilient. The intrusion of the apocalyptic monster in his imagination

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paradoxically allays some of the emotional intensity that he displays at the
beginning of the second stanza. In describing the creature’s lethargic movement,
he slows down and luxuriates, over a span of four lines, in the speech-act of
description. His protracted portrayal of the slow-moving sphinx in the second
stanza contrasts with the rapid motion of earthly rupture in the shorter first stanza.
Eventually, “the darkness drops again,” and with a strong medial caesura, the
speaker enunciates the truth of the apocalypse: his poetic journey, his entire life,
and history itself “had been vexed to nightmare,” and he fears that he might have
to relive it all.
Yeats’s “The Second Coming” follows a longstanding tradition of
exploring themes of time, death, and salvation in lyric poetry. The question of
human salvation was particularly vexed in the Renaissance when the severe
antagonism between the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-
Reformation destabilized the theological underpinnings of dogma about life,
death, and life everlasting. Many throughout Europe found themselves torn
between Protestantism and Catholicism, or perhaps more specifically between the
promised rewards of faith and the immediate social ramifications of conversion
from one Christian group to another.
Among these persons is the seventeenth-century English poet John Donne,
whom Yeats admired for the mix of intellect and passion that emanated from his
work (Smith 13). Donne was a man “full of passionate intensity,” one who would
not have hesitated, based on the sentiments that he has expressed in his prose and
poetry, to have been among “the worst.” This project examines his Holy Sonnets,

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which among his devotional verse, wrestle most spectacularly and individually
with conflicts of religious, political, and artistic devotions that beset his milieu.
“No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a
part of the maine" (Donne): A Biographical Sketch
In the introduction to his biography of Donne, John Stubbs contends that,
“Despite [Donne’s] great idiosyncrasy as a writer and a man, he had no desire to
dwell in the shadows. It was crucial to Donne to remain involved in society and
accept the obligations it conferred to all” (xviii). Like Yeats, Donne was not a
recluse. He displayed great interest in public issues, earlier in his life as a
secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal and later as a man of the cloth. But
his quest for success in the public eye was stymied numerous times throughout his
life, not least by the history of his family.
Donne was born in 1572 to a middle class ironmonger John Donne and his
wife Elizabeth. His namesake father purported to have been descended from a
Welsh line of nobility, the Dwns of Kidwelly (Post 1). That claim awarded the
family a respectable reputation that complemented their fairly substantial income.
However, as in the most engrossing narratives, tragedy strikes early: the elder
John died when his son was merely four years old, encouraging Elizabeth to
quickly re-marry rather than suffer financial burden of being a widowed mother.
Elizabeth Heywood’s family background influenced much of the younger
John’s life. Her ancestral lineage was filled with staunch adherents to
Catholicism, whose teachings the mother ardently practiced and instilled in her
children. Perhaps the most famous member of her family was Sir Thomas More,

9. Lutian 6
Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII and a fierce protector of the Roman Church’s
power in early Tudor England. In 1527, frustrated (among other reasons) that his
wife had not produced a male heir to the throne, the King sought permission from
the Pope in Rome to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. When the Pope
refused, Henry VIII broke from the Catholic Church thus bringing the Protestant
Reformation, which had been circulating throughout northern Europe, to England.
Firm in his faith, More resisted his sovereign’s decision and issued his
resignation, which the King at first refused to accept. More also disapproved of
the Act of Supremacy that not only ascribed Henry VIII absolute power over
political matters but also positioned him as the spiritual head of the Church of
England (Post 2). In one fell swoop, both More’s once orthodox political and
religious allegiances were suddenly contradictory to the ones professed by his
king and country. Henry VIII, affronted by his intransigent subject, considered
More’s dissension a treasonous act, imprisoned, and executed him in 1534.
More’s martyrdom portended the persecution that the rest of Elizabeth
Heywood’s family would suffer. Her brother, Jasper Heywood, was a Jesuit priest
who was exiled for his refusal to convert to Anglicanism. Her son, Henry, was
jailed and tortured for harboring a priest and later died in prison. The young
John’s aspirations to climb the social ladder were also hampered by his family’s
Catholic history and recusant behavior. He had to remain secretive about his
religious affiliation, which he started to question more vehemently upon his
brother’s death. John never completed his studies in either Oxford or Cambridge
because he refused to take the Oath of Allegiance, whereby he would have

10. Lutian 7
effectively renounced his Catholic upbringing. As Elizabeth I issued more
punitive laws for recusants and alleged papists, Donne’s world became even more
constrained and his opportunities for advancement increasingly limited.
In 1592, Donne returned to London and entered Lincoln’s Inn with the
hope of acquiring a career in law. The move to the city was incredibly freeing for
the young man: by day, he studied law and made important social connections in
the day but then enjoyed bacchanalian revelry in places of ill repute across the
Thames by night. At this time, he also composed many of his amatory poems
influenced both by his experiences of sexuality as well as the imperialist ideas
that circulated in his milieu. In “The Sun Rising” for instance, he appropriates the
diction of political conquest to register a corresponding sexual one: “She’s all
states, and all princes I;” his speaker holds, “Nothing else is” (ll. 21-22). Donne
later participated in military expeditions when he sailed to and fought in Cadiz
and the Azores under the leadership of the Earl of Essex. While in service, he met
the son of Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Seal, for whom Donne would
work as a private secretary upon his return to England.
Because of his rhetorical skill and general amicability, Donne became a
valued addition to the Lord Keeper’s staff. The young man, fresh from serving his
country in war, finally discovered a road to social preferment, one he could not
have imagined taking as a Catholic boy. He soon however deviated from that road
and became ostracized by many who had supported him in his success. Ironically,
despite the religious tensions that defined his childhood and youth, what brought
about his fall from grace was not a religious issue per se although Elizabethan

11. Lutian 8
mores were certainly at play. While working for the Lord Keeper, Donne met
Egerton’s niece Anne More, who was thirteen years his junior. The two fell in
love, began a clandestine affair, and eloped in 1601. The consequences of their
unauthorized union in conjunction with their difference in social class—Anne was
an aristocrat—put the pair and their children in dire financial and social straits for
the rest of their lives.
After his removal from the Lord Keeper’s staff, Donne provided for his
family by writing verse for patrons, most notably Lucy, Countess of Bedford. He
also asked many of his friends who had influence in the Elizabethan and later
Jacobean court to intervene with the monarch on his behalf. Though Egerton and
Anne’s father, Sir Henry More, eventually forgave them and sent Anne’s long-
withheld dowry, the scandal of the Donnes’ marriage still prevented the husband
from ascending any courtly position of note. With a growing number of mouths to
feed but still no steady source of income, the family moved to a cottage in
Mitcham, a suburb of London. This difficult time in Donne’s life was a prolific
one for his writing, a period when he composed several prose polemics including
Pseudo-Martyr and Biathanatos, and his Holy Sonnets.
With persistence, financial salvation for the Donnes came through the
patronage of Sir Robert Drury whose support allowed the family to move back to
London. Despite this surge in his luck, Donne never held political office again.
Remembering the now middle-aged Donne’s disreputable elopement, King James
I ended the still aspiring courtier’s hopes of political ascendancy but offered him a
path to redemption through ministerial service. In 1615, after much hesitation,

12. Lutian 9
Donne was ordained into the Church of England. He was immediately appointed
royal Chaplain and soon after became a Reader of Divinity at Lincoln’s Inn (Post
15). Under the King’s prodding, he also received a Doctorate of Divinity from
Cambridge, the very institution that years ago refused to give him a degree
because of his Catholicism. Donne eventually became Dean of St. Paul’s, the post
he kept until his death in 1631.
What then do we make of Donne’s religious affiliation? Could we
construe his participation in the Elizabethan conquest of Catholic Spain as the
young man’s rejection of his connections with the Roman Church? What about
his ordination and eventual election as Dean of St. Paul’s? Must they indicate a
shift in his religious thinking and therefore his religious allegiance? “Satire 3,”
which scholars have dated to Donne’s time at Lincoln’s Inn, charts the speaker’s
search for true religion. At its close, the poem warns about the perils of blind
adherence to any religious institution, especially if devotional fervor draws
attention away from God: “So perish souls, which more choose men’s unjust /
Power, from God claim’d, than God himself to trust” (ll. 109-10). The poem’s
conclusion demonstrates the speaker’s ambivalence towards institutionalized
religion that we could perhaps map on to the author’s mind as well. We can only
surmise that for Donne personal communion with God, admittedly broached in an
Anglican manner, was more important than any avowed religious affiliation.
While his brother’s death could have pushed Donne to one side of the
religious debate, it is difficult to pinpoint when in is his life Donne converted to
Anglicanism, much less when his intrinsic beliefs actually changed. For the

13. Lutian 10
purposes of this project, shedding light upon these mysteries is relatively
unimportant. Ramie Targoff argues that because of the critical focus placed on the
poet’s religious crisis, “it is difficult to find critics or readers who consider
Donne’s career without impugning his motives and accusing him of bad faith”
(John Donne, Body and Soul 4-5). As I concentrate on the literary aspects of the
Holy Sonnets, I refrain from making any judgments about Donne’s religious life. I
consider the tendencies of Catholicism and Anglicanism as a seeming
contradiction that he attempts to resolve in his divine poetry. In other words, what
Donne takes from the theological tensions that have pervaded his life and applies
in his Holy Sonnets are the experience of liminality itself—of feeling stuck in
between—and the great effort needed to disentangle oneself from the mess.
“But reduce no Human Spirit / To Disgrace of Price—” (Dickinson): Dating
the Holy Sonnets
Placing the Holy Sonnets in context of the rest of Donne’s oeuvre has been
a critical puzzle since 1633, when some of his poems were first published
posthumously. The question of context goes beyond their date of composition and
also includes their proper sequence and the search for a master manuscript that
would most closely resemble the finished products. Donne published few poems
during his lifetime. Most of his works circulated in manuscript within a coterie
group including his patrons and friends from Lincoln’s Inn. Because no autograph
manuscripts are known to still exist, miscellanies in the hands of his readers and
editions published posthumously form the basis of his corpus that we study today.
Unfortunately, these extant texts show signs of authorial revision as well as errors

14. Lutian 11
made in copying from one miscellany to another. In fact, some poems differ so
greatly among manuscripts and printed editions that the question of who made the
textual changes remains fraught. Efforts to date poems have therefore focused on
gleaning autobiographical hints from the poems and categorizing them according
to apparent thematic concerns.
Donne’s famed biographer Izaak Walton suggests that the poet wrote the
Holy Sonnets and other devotional verse, including La Corona and the hymns,
sometime after his ordination in 1615:
It is a truth, that in his penitential years, viewing some of those
pieces that had been loosely—God knows, too loosely—scattered
in his youth, he wished they had been abortive, or so short-lived
that his own eyes had witnessed their funerals: but, though he was
no friend to them, he was not so fallen out with heavenly poetry as
to forsake that; no, not in his declining age; witnessed then by
many divine sonnets, and other high, holy, and harmonious
composures (italics mine).
Specifically, Walton dates the sonnets near the end of Donne’s life, when the
Dean of St. Paul’s would have been close to death while still retaining the
capacity to write poetry about it. As Helen Gardner observes, “Walton sees Donne
as a second St. Augustine [with] the idea that Jack Donne wrote secular poetry,
but Dr. Donne wrote ‘divine sonnets’ and Hymns” (xxxviii). Much akin to
Augustine, the mature Donne purportedly looked disapprovingly towards his
depraved past and regretted producing the sexually charged poetry of his youth.
For Walton, the power of Donne’s conversion, coupled with the trauma of his
impending mortality, explains the pained yet powerful poetic voice that appears in
the Holy Sonnets.

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A later Donne critic, Herbert J.C. Grierson, argues for another date for the
Holy Sonnets. Grierson bases his assertion on the 1620 Westmoreland manuscript,
re-discovered by Edmund Gosse in 1892 (Gardner lxxviii). Until then, only
sixteen of the extant sonnets, gathered in several manuscripts, were available for
reading and study. The Westmoreland manuscript contained three new sonnets,
completing the set of nineteen we now call Donne’s Holy Sonnets. Among the
three is the poem “Since she whome I lovd, hath payd her last debt,” ostensibly
written as an elegy at the death of Anne Donne. With the assumed subject of this
poem, Grierson suggests that Donne composed the Holy Sonnets close after his
wife’s death in 1617, earlier than Walton suggests. Moreover, for Grierson,
Donne’s “harsh and rugged verse” (xxii) has more to do with his passionate
artistry only amplified by the provocative subject matter he handles: “Whether
verse or prose be his medium, Donne is always a poet, a creature of feeling and
imagination, seeking expression in vivid phrase and complex harmonies, whose
acute and subtle intellect was the servant, if sometimes the unruly servant, of
passion and imagination” (xxviii). Death and salvation, it so happens, suit the
poet’s intensity well.
Helen Gardner interrogates both Walton’s and Grierson’s assertions and
provides an even earlier date for the Holy Sonnets. She observes the difference
between Donne’s love poetry and divine poetry, indicating specifically the lack of
rapturous feeling in the latter: “There is an ecstasy of joy and an ecstasy of grief
in his love poetry; in his divine poetry we are conscious almost always of an
effort of will” (xxxv). That “effort of will” stems from the melancholy the poet

16. Lutian 13
supposedly experienced while writing his religious verse. The intricate verbal
turnings that arise from his almost manic linguistic play emanate from the
profound dilemma that anyone attempting to write divine poems encounters: How
do I position myself vis-à-vis God, the occult all-powerful entity, while still
retaining my integrity and agency as a poet? As Gardner argues, there is an
aspirational quality to the divine poet’s voice as he “is to some degree committed
to showing himself as he would be rather than as he is” (xvii). Writing religious
verse demands increased fictiveness as the poet must forego his sinful self and
feign piety to prove his worth to his divine audience. He must attempt to appear,
if we import Yeats’s terms, like “the best [who] lack all conviction”, as opposed
to “the worst [who] / Are full of passionate intensity.” With these in mind,
Gardner holds that Donne wrote the Holy Sonnets in 1609, in conjunction with
Pseudo-Martyr, a prose work that discusses the idea of purgatory and final
judgment at the moment of death as opposed to during the Second Coming—a
running motif in the Holy Sonnets (xlvii).
Gardner also proposes that the Holy Sonnets can be divided according to
the main themes of each poem and the order they appear in the 1633, 1635, and
Westmoreland editions (xlii). The first six sonnets in the 1633 edition—“As due
by many titles,” “Oh my blacke soule,” “This is my playes last scene,” “At the
round earths imagin’d corners,” “If poysonous mineralls,” and “Death be not
proud”—all deal with the Last Things: death and the final judgment. The next six
that complete the series in the 1633 edition—“Spit in my face yee Jewes,” “Why
are wee by all creatures waited on,” “What if this present were the worlds last

17. Lutian 14
night,” “Batter my heart, three person’d God,” “Wilt thou love God, as he thee,”
and “Father, part of his double interest”—ponder on the wonders of God’s love,
focusing especially on Christ’s bloody sacrifice on the cross. The four sonnets
present in the 1635 edition, but not the 1633—“Thou hast made me,” “I am a little
world made cunningly,” “O might those sighes and teares returne againe,” and “If
faithfull soules be alike glorifi’d”—are contemplations on sin with tears as a
recurring motif. Finally, the three sonnets found only in the Westmoreland
manuscript—“Since she whome I lovd, hath payd her last debt,” “Showe me
deare Christ, thy spouse, so bright and cleare,” and “Oh, to vex me, contraryes
meet in one”—are “separate ejaculations,” which, though transmitted with the
other sixteen in one document, depart from the aforementioned thematic
categories (xli-xlii). With these classifications, Gardner subverts Grierson’s then-
canonical ordering of the poems according to the 1635 edition. She instead
proposes that a sequence following the 1633 printing is more appropriate given
the thematic unities within the Holy Sonnets that emerge given the grouping in the
earlier edition.
Gardner further demonstrates that taken together, the Holy Sonnets follows
a structure of meditation outlined in St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises
(l). Ignatius’s meditative scheme has four parts: a preparatory prayer, a first
prelude known as compositio loci where the speaker imagines the setting of his
prayer, a second prelude containing petitions pertinent to the subject matter, and a
colloquy with its outpour of devotion. Gardner maps these four parts onto
groupings of the sonnets as they occur in her proposed order of the Holy Sonnets.

18. Lutian 15
She notes how “As due by many titles” acts as a preparatory prayer for the sonnet
sequence, while “Oh my blacke soule,” “This is my playes last scene,” and “At
the round earths imagin’d corners” all possess aspects of the two preludes.
Meanwhile, the six sonnets that deal with God’s saving love follow the structure
of colloquy that concludes Ignatian meditation. Louis L. Martz likewise locates
this scheme of Jesuit meditation in the Holy Sonnets but within individual poems.
Martz cites, for instance, the triptych structure of “Why are wee by all creatures
waited on” with the first quatrain naming the problem by way of a compositio
loci, the next six lines elaborating on the issue, and the final four lines following
as a “colloquy of mercy” where the speaker remembers Christ’s bloody sacrifice
for the salvation of sins (44).
While I do not further assess the meditative scheme that Gardner and
Martz find severally in the Holy Sonnets, it gives me pause to think how both
critics detect a plausible organizing principle for the sonnet sequence originating
from the Catholic tradition, let alone a seminal text of the Counter-Reformation.
Martz’s and Gardner’s respective discoveries of this correlation implies that
remnants of the Catholic past that Donne had ostensibly abandoned lingered in his
consciousness and poetic imagination. Moreover, yoking Donne with St. Ignatius
problematizes the notion of conversion, as one may of course purport to believe in
something while actually believing in something else. Nevertheless, I mention this
link only because the meditative structure that Martz and Gardner observe in the
Holy Sonnets coincides well with the argumentative structure of the sonnet form.
Far more important than feeding further speculation about Donne’s religious

19. Lutian 16
adherence, Ignatian meditation offers a logical means of establishing a problem
and rhetorically trying out solutions for it, much like sonnets have been used since
their invention in Italy. Even with the critical interventions into the Holy Sonnets,
contradictions, which are the primary concerns of this project, abound.
“In truth the prison, into which we doom / Ourselves, no prison is”
(Wordsworth): The Power of the Sonnet Form
The sonnet was first popularized in the thirteenth century by Giacomo da
Lentini in the Sicilian court of Emperor Frederick II (Cousins and Howarth 1).
Giacomo and his colleagues used the poetic form to express desire for their
female beloved others. Borrowing from the structure of the strambotto, the early
sonneteers divided their poems in two parts: an octave and a sestet separated by a
turn or volta (Burt and Mikics 7). Even as they tackle erudite subjects that could
easily fill pages upon pages with writing, sonneteers must circumscribe their
speaker’s flights of fancy within a mere fourteen lines. The sonnet’s asymmetric
structure allowed those Sicilian poets, as it does now, to succinctly present
complex arguments and hierarchize ideas while minimizing redundancy.
Although the sonnet’s concision prevents extended description and elaboration,
the volta permits the speaker to change his mind or modify ideas presented in the
octave. Indeed, the speaker, Michael R.G. Spiller asserts, “almost has ‘to make a
point’, to go beyond merely declaring a feeling” (4). Driven by this impulse and
despite its brevity, the sonnet can include twists that grip on the reader.
After its invention in Sicily, the sonnet thrived at the hands of Italian
masters Dante and Petrarch. The former positioned the sonnet as a prime locus for

20. Lutian 17
self-assessment through works such as Vita nuova and Rime petrose. The latter,
considered by many to be the most important sonneteer of all time, established in
his Rime sparse tropes of love sonnets which many later poets have adapted.
Petrarch also instituted the canonical rhyme scheme of the Italian sonnet,
beginning with two closed quatrains, abbaabba, and the sestet, usually in cdecde,
cdcdcd, or cdedce (Burt and Mikics 8). The popularity of the sonnet as a poetic
form spread through continental Europe and eventually reached England through
the works of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. What began in
miscellanies soon became a massive obsession in early modern English letters
with all major poets of the time, including Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare,
writing sonnets and sonnet sequences.
Wyatt translated many Italian sonnets while taking care to adhere to their
specific rhyme scheme. Surrey, on the other hand, developed the specific English
form of the sonnet we know today (“sonnet”). Because of the difficulty of
rhyming in their vernacular, English poets took some liberty to modify the
Petrarchan structure. They changed the interlocked octave of the Italian sonnet
and took four lines of the sestet to create three open quatrains, abab cdcd efef, and
ended the poem with a pithy rhyming couplet, gg. The modified structure did not
necessarily diminish the argumentative power of the sonnet, although the pressure
of the internal rhyme between the two closed quatrains and the drama of the volta
were somewhat lost. To circumvent this issue, other English poets took further
liberty with the sonnet structure and married both Petrarchan and Shakespearean
forms. Among these poets is Donne.

21. Lutian 18
By and large, the Holy Sonnets feature Petrarchan octaves and
Shakespearean sestets. They combine the sonic cohesion of the rhyme between
the fourth and fifth lines and the potential for psychological movement in the
volta with the epigraphic closure of the final rhyming couplet. Within his sonnet
sequence, Donne deploys both the focus that the Italian octave/sestet division
affords and the increased psychological play in the more fragmented
quatrains/couplet division of the English. For example, the fourth line in Donne’s
“I am a little world made cunningly” ends the sentence of the first quatrain, and
the speaker turns his address to some unnamed “You.” However, the change in
address is surprisingly subtle; ultimately, the two quatrains both attend to the
death of the speaker’s “worlds both parts” and in concert as an octave prepares for
the changing meanings of “fire” within the sestet. By amalgamating the two
traditions of sonneteering, Donne maintains the fluidity of the form while
optimizing his ability to explore various issues requiring nuanced modes of
exposition.
The sonnet therefore is a literary arena to test hypotheses and bring
contradicting elements together. Poets have found great freedom of exploration
and the space for intellectual play within sonnets, complemented by the ease of
dissemination afforded by their size. Indeed, while Donne writes in a variety of
poetic styles over his career, for the project of communicating with the divine, he
chooses a poetic form subject to seemingly strict rules of rhyme and meter. To be
sure, there is biblical precedent for speaking to God in verse—see for instance the
Psalms of David. But keeping in mind Spiller’s argument, although a sonnet

22. Lutian 19
consists of only fourteen lines, some form of resolution among its various
dimensions must be attained over the poem’s short span. “With its built-in
mechanisms for posing and answering its own questions,” Ramie Targoff holds,
“the sonnet allows Donne to unleash and then rein in his imaginative reach” (John
Donne, Body and Soul 107). The sonnet’s requirement of foreclosure forces the
poet to make more deliberate linguistic choices to succinctly articulate his
thoughts on abstract concepts while grounding his speaker and his discourse in the
realm of the living.
While the Holy Sonnets, by and large, leave their reader in suspense about
the outcome of the speech acts, their conclusions are never fruitless. Always, the
poems end with the feeling that the speaker has alleviated some of the strains he
experiences at the beginning, using the fourteen lines as a platform for glorified
venting. Admittedly, some conclusions feel resigned to the insolubility of the
problem at hand; the end of “As due by many titles” exemplifies that emotional
depression. In a way, however, that sort of ending, while potentially
unsatisfactory for some readers, does ease the tension built through the speaker’s
juggling of the contradictions within his fictive existence. His resignation
signifies his finally coming to terms, albeit somewhat less gratifyingly than
desired, with the problems undergirding the poem. At the end of each sonnet,
there is release, and we realize that that sonnet, as Wordsworth says, “no prison
is.”
In his pivotal study of Donne’s works, John Carey proposes that, “Donne
likes imagining opposites which combined while remaining opposites. He

23. Lutian 20
cultivated disjunction and junction equally and at the same time” (262). By
having a speaker traverse the narrow boundaries between life, death, and life
everlasting in order to divine the operations of God within that space, Donne
performs the ultimate concatenation of opposites that anyone might execute. Body
and soul. Sin and grace. Freedom and bondage. Eternity and nothingness. These
are the ideas that Donne’s speaker grapples with in the Holy Sonnets, and one
may rightly say that these too are concerns of lyric poetry in general.
“Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not”
(Whitman): The Power of the Lyric Genre
The fundamental unit of lyric is the word. When arranged in certain
orders, these units of sound and letter modify one another and engender new
levels of meaning. For instance, starting with the words “dog,” “chase,” and “cat,”
I can create a sentence conjuring a large four legged-beast running after a smaller
four-legged beast: “The dog is chasing the cat.” While day-to-day speech requires
little more than this level of complexity, poets superimpose a second organizing
principle over the words, wresting them from sentence-level logic and organizing
them visually on the page. “The dog is chasing the cat” can become “The dog is
chasing / The cat,” leaving the reader in suspense about the object of the hound’s
pursuit and making the eventual revelation a tad more satisfying. There is
therefore inherent tension between the grammatical sense that sentences generate
and the visual sense that comes with lineation, between the abstract form of the
poem, experienced visually and aurally, and the semantic unfolding of the
discourse.

24. Lutian 21
By their interaction with clauses and sentences, lines confer the poem with
increased fictiveness and elevate words to the literary, thereby making poetry
poetry. In other words, a poem exists qua poem because of this tension between
sentence and line. However, the relationship between the two organizing
principles need not be antagonistic: the abstract pattern can either follow and
underscore the grammatical or interrupt it as in the dog example above.
Combining these two senses in lyric “produce[s] the material object of the poem,
for an emotional, intellectual, and activist effect on the reader” (Cheney 8). A
poem’s value rests in its words and the patterns they construct on the page and in
speech.
Facilitated by this interplay of sentence and line, lyric conveys mental
motion. As Helen Vendler argues, lyric is “the genre that directs its mimesis
toward the performance of the mind in solitary speech” (1-2). A poem maps shifts
in the arrangement of words onto changes in the speaker’s psychic trajectory.
Moreover, mental motion, akin to physical motion, is relative; it requires a
perceived stationary referent, “the same situation” as Vendler calls it, unveiled
through “successive entrances of new sets of words, or new stylistic devices
(grammatic, syntactical, phonetic)” (3). Caesurae, for example, represent pauses
in the speaker’s rumination on a topic, anticipating a shift in perspective or simply
providing some time for silent thought. Meanwhile, grammatical suspensions in
enjambments linguistically transmit the inner life’s push against the structural
limits of a poem. Indeed, a poet working within established rules of form, such as
a sonneteer, is effectively attempting to impose order upon the disorder of

25. Lutian 22
thought. His success is gauged by how seamlessly he reconciles the idiosyncrasies
of mental activity with the boundaries set by poetic convention. Here again, we
find tension in the self-contained space of the lyric: poetic form delineates an
imaginative territory for unbridled mental motion. Evidently, the fundamental unit
of lyric may be the word, but its fundamental functions are dialectic and synthesis
from the patterns formed by those words.
This discussion of the definition of lyric begs the question: whose thought
process does a lyric poem portray? To be sure, the poet invests his own
knowledge and feelings into his work, and the routine appending of the author’s
name to his literary creation forges a public bond between maker and product.
Likewise, by reading or reciting the poem, the reader participates in performing
the poem’s trajectory of thought. However, the lyric genre possesses a degree of
artifice engendered through its fiction of mind and its physical presence as text on
paper or on screen that necessitates the existence of a poetic voice displaced from
the biographical poet. This voice belongs to the lyric speaker who exists only
within the space of the poem. The speaker is necessary because metaphor and
materiality, aspects crucial to the existence of lyric poetry, obstruct the
conjunction of the poet’s mental life with the reader’s; there needs to be a
mediating entity. For his work to have any social and ethical value, the poet
creates a fictional character who can navigate the liminal space between poet and
reader and moderate a symbiotic relationship between them while preserving their
autonomy and individuality.

26. Lutian 23
The lyric speaker owes its existence some extent to the grammatical,
visual, and sonic structures generated by the poet. But words in a poem remain
dormant until a reader enunciates them. In reciting a poem, the reader reanimates
the speaker and his world; he psychologically aligns his extra-textual
circumstances with the speaker’s imagined existence demarcated by the tangible
limits of the poem. The speaker is therefore a unique microcosmic entity which
assimilates aspects of the poet and the reader but melds them into something
completely new. Some literary critics function akin to psychiatrists who examine
the fictive speaker’s manifest operations and the arrangement of words in the
poem as windows into the speaker’s latent psychic dynamics and as projections of
his thinking. With this triangulation of the poetic speaker’s identity that implicates
both poet and reader, this present study of lyric poetry considers the interplay of
language and individual identity.
The intensity of the speaker’s experiences and emotions materialize so
clearly and immediately in part because the lyric poem is uncluttered by multiple
voices. Even if various entities, including the poet and the reader, contribute to the
poetic genesis of the speaker’s performance of thought, none of them receive the
platform to actually speak. The meta-poetic traffic among these entities is just
that—meta-poetic, outside the space of the poem. Although lyric becomes fully
alive when the triangulation of poet, speaker, and reader is activated through the
act of reading, poetry still exists apart from these relationships. Remember: the
fundamental unit of lyric is the word, in its sensory (i.e. visual and auditory) and
semantic guises. From arrangements of words arises the poem’s singular voice:

27. Lutian 24
that of the speaker, though the thoughts he conveys could refer to things outside
the literary space. “Lyric,” Helen Vendler writes, “can present no ‘other’ as alive
and listening or responding in the same room as the solitary speaker” (19).
Whatever intimated audience—be it some beloved other, a patron, or the
speaker’s own soul—is situated at a distance from the poem’s world, leaving the
speaker in solitude and often in contemplation of that distance. The addressee’s
silence underscores the speaker’s solitary state and often provides the impetus for
the poem to progress. Indeed, the speaker does not expect any audience to be
actively listening, but always he has profound hope that someone will do so
eventually.
Despite the clear differences between poet and speaker, Richard Strier
insists that poetry critics cannot generally identify the poet separately from the
speaker. Objecting to one of the basic tenets of the New Criticism, Strier
maintains that assuming that the voice in a poem is always different from the
poet’s is “a dubious piece of dogma that praises art by trivializing it” (358). Some
poems, he claims, suggest that the speaker is a wholly separate persona from the
poet, while in others, poets intend their speakers to be projections of themselves.
In Strier’s camp is Herbert F. Tucker who argues that the tradition of privileging
the speaker over the poet is a product of human (specifically, academic) torpor:
Life (and courses) being short, art being long, and history being
longer still, the fiction of the speaker at least brackets the larger
problem of context so as to define a manageable classroom task
for literary studies…The fiction of speaker, if it removes from the
study of poetry the burden, and the dignity, of establishing contact
with history, puts us in compensatory contact with the myth of
unconditioned subjectivity (152).

28. Lutian 25
Liberally using the term “speaker” apparently eschews the need to arduously
research a poet’s history and try to get every name, place, and date right, in favor
of the supposedly easier work of sitting with a short poem printed in full and
‘analyzing’ it without these contexts. I argue, however, that nuances between the
poet’s and speaker’s identities exist in all poems are not trivial, and the practice of
differentiating speaker from poet is correct. Though I agree that a poet can project
aspects of himself onto his speaker, the two cannot be equated. The poet’s
projection of self through an artistic medium constitutes an artificial identity that
cannot be ontologically identical to the original. As a product of imagination, the
speaker possesses freedoms of movement, thought, and speech which the poet is
not privy to in his physical milieu, and vice-versa. In other words, rejecting the
distinction between poet and speaker undermines the multiplicity of separate
selves at play in the phenomenology of reading and writing lyric. And reading a
poem—truly reading and experiencing it—even Strier and Tucker must admit is
difficult work.
Equating the speaker with the poet also denies the value of the
psychological interchange that happen when a reader reads a poem. Such an
academic choice, regardless of the autobiographical hints in the poem, arrests the
mental turnings of the poetic persona in the past, thus contradicting the
fundamental immediacy of poetic encounters. It also denies the value of reading
and reciting poetry in non-academic contexts where resources to quickly learn
about a poet’s biography might be unavailable. While knowledge of the poet’s life

29. Lutian 26
could certainly enrich a reader’s experience with the poem, the reader does not
need that knowledge to be swept by the incantation of lyric. New Critics Cleanth
Brooks and Robert Penn Warren celebrate the ineffability of this poetic quality: a
poem, they say, is “a piece of writing which gives us a certain effect in which, we
discover, the ‘poetry’ inheres” (188). That mysterious encounter with a certain je
ne sais quoi is part and parcel of the fun—and power—of reading lyric poetry.
For example, Donne might have once shared the amazement of his speaker
who says, “But wonder at a greater wonder, for to us / Created nature doth these
things subdue” (“Why are wee by all creatures waited on?”, ll. 11-12). However,
the now-dead poet obviously cannot experience that wonder, whereas the speaker
continues to do so every time the poem is read. For lyric to have any emotional
effect, it must deploy emotive states that have analogues in the reader’s own
experiences. The feelings depicted in a poem—fear, joy, loneliness, lust—are not
unique to the biographical poet’s experiences nor to the speaker’s for that matter.
Variation in poetry occurs neither due to the nature of the imagined situations nor
to the emotions they elicit but to the different verbal mechanisms employed by
different speakers as they confront similar situations. Hence, differentiating
between “the speaker” and “the poet” is consequential in critical work, as the
practice ascribes a level of specificity to the analysis that places poetic intents,
actions, and agency on the appropriate individual.
By separating the poet from the speaker, I recognize once again the
primacy of language in engendering poetic experience. In his imagination, the
poet carries worlds and fictions, which he collects through his lived experiences

30. Lutian 27
and his encounters with literature. From these imagined realms, he chooses one or
combines aspects of several to make one for his speaker to inhabit. Upon placing
the speaker in some literary domain, the underlying laws of linguistic play, though
at times at odds with those of the poet’s physical world, take over and motivate
the composition. Yet, far from being restrictive, these rules scripted by
imaginative language give the speaker creative license to explore scenarios
impossible in earthly life; hence why a speaker can ventriloquize non-existent
beings, incorporate magic in his narratives, and in the case of Donne’s speaker,
stand on the brink of death. The ineffable operations of the divine govern the
sphere of the Holy Sonnets, and there, Donne is at equal pains with his speaker to
interpret the mind of God.
Arguably, the poet still retains limited prerogative to manipulate that
fictional world and revise his work after initial iterations. In revision, however, he
must adhere to the boundaries set by already established language (i.e. previous
lines) or change the language that underpins that fictional world. The latter
maneuver automatically revises the logic to which he must subscribe while
crafting the speaker. Thus, the verbal precision of lyric poetry is a direct result of
poetic revision more than a poet’s inherent control over language and the
speaker’s mental states. By this meta-poetic traffic, the poet can manufacture and
control even such feelings of urgency and confusion, as we see Donne do with his
Holy Sonnets.
So why then did I bother to briefly sketch Donne’s biography and the
history of his milieu? If the fundamental unit of lyric is the word and only a

31. Lutian 28
fictive speaker’s voice emerges from the poem, then outlining the poet’s life
history was a waste of space and energy. I do not mean by my impassioned
defense of the difference between speaker and poet to suggest that the latter takes
no part at all in generating his art. Obviously, the poet creates poetry. Yet, in the
realm of lyric, the authority of language subsumes that of the poet. This superior
power of literature qua literature reduces the poet’s agency but opens the door to
manifold possibilities that would and/or could not exist in his earthly reality. The
speaker is a product of the poet’s imagination, but even the poet cannot control all
the cogs of his fiction. Lyric—indeed, language itself—is far too capacious and
dynamic for any single human mind to completely manipulate.
Though lyric brevity limits the poet’s freedom to analyze mental
experiences of the highest intensity, lyric poems can still be effective beyond the
place and era poets made them. A poem’s emotional charge can strike so violently
in some distant location and epoch that the speaker and his thoughts seem vividly
present in whatever reader’s immediate surroundings. The act of reading collapses
spatial and temporal schisms and forges a co-extensive space shared by the
speaker and his contemporaneous reader. No small wonder why many speakers
use the present tense to describe their worlds; the experience they portray in the
poetry is happening here and now and can be recapitulated in later moments of
reading. Because of its characteristic smallness, the sonnet, specifically, evokes a
greater sense of immediacy than perhaps any other poetic form (Dubrow 37). Its
rush to foreclosure within fourteen lines discourages any extensive foray to other
temporal realms apart from the immediate present. Yet, by the conflation of time

32. Lutian 29
that all lyrics participate in, sonneteers can still allude to past experience as well
as envisage future ones.
The work of lyric thus bridges the metaphysical space between the
speaker’s poetic present and the reader’s earthly one, in part by the universality of
the circumstances and emotions that poems explore. For Donne, such conflation
of time is made easier by the fact that his speaker tackles such prevalent subjects
as death and human redemption. In many of the Holy Sonnets, the speaker has
reached the ultimate impasse and places himself in the liminal space between life
and death. Despite the many adjectives that one can use to describe Donne’s
speaker, patient is not one of them. His spectacles of intense emotion deflect the
reader’s attention from the ravenous passage of time, which regulates the
speaker’s solitary existence and is one of the causes of his despair. Though death
is still in the speaker’s future, it is encroaching upon him rapidly, and this
inevitability generates a new understanding of “here” and “now” that blurs the
distinction between the immediate present and the expansive future. Thus, the
Holy Sonnets, through their simultaneous treatment of memory and prophecy,
traverse different levels of “here-ness,” cover temporally transcendent concepts,
and in so doing, infiltrate the reader’s extra-textual present (Dubrow 38).
“Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it”
(Heaney): Donne’s Holy Sonnets as Lyric
In his Holy Sonnets, Donne employs perhaps the most inaccessible
audience of all: God. In line with the monologic mode of lyric, the speaker
interacts not with God Himself, but with his idea of who God is and how God

33. Lutian 30
works. The truth of the divine appears in the abstract not because the speaker
wishes to hide it from the reader but because he himself does know what it is.
Compelled by a personal crisis of salvation springing from the impenetrability of
God’s mind, the speaker brings forward his idealized projections of divine truth.
The Holy Sonnets, Helen Wilcox remarks, “are shot through with the desire for
debate, however futile such argument may ultimately be” (152). Because of the
mystery shrouding the operations of the divine, the speaker uses the sonnet as a
space to test his assumptions regarding God’s ethereal reality with the hope of
eventually chancing upon the truth. His is a game of trial-and-error in extremis.
Still, sonnet after sonnet, the speaker realizes that God’s truths are far too
complex for humans to perfectly grapple. Indeed, the speaker’s persistent ideation
of the divine epitomizes the imaginative pursuit for metaphysical understanding
that poets and readers endeavor. “The desire for debate” regarding the big
questions about human existence, despite its absurdity in the face of God’s
profound detachment from our imperfect realm, is one many share.
The futility of speech in lyric begs important questions: if lyric bars any
true dialogue directed towards some meaningful end from ensuing, why do poets
continue to create? Why do speakers continue to speak? Answer: because they
feel compelled to do so. Northrop Frye, in an essay about lyric poetry and the
New Criticism, writes, “The private poem often takes off from something that
blocks normal activity, something a poet has to write about instead of carrying on
with ordinary experience” (32). In Frye’s view, poetry arises from existential
urgency. He identifies the block that compels the poet to write as “the verbal

34. Lutian 31
essence of life” that the reader re-animates at the moment of reading. The poet’s
ordinary experience is laden with paradox which cannot be undertaken outside the
realm of poetry. Lyric poetry is tensional poetry: it is a vehicle not only for
expressing strong emotions but also more crucially for making sense of the
disruptive contradictions that engender those emotions.
When circumstances demand resolution but overwhelm the reserves of
prosaic language, the poet reaches for the poetic. Desperate for clarity, he must
transplant himself to the imaginative space afforded by poetry, where these
oppositional tendencies can be set free to openly challenge one another. In a way,
the poet relegates the responsibility of resolving the oppositions in his life to his
speaker—the poet’s avatar, so to speak—whose imagined world has more
capacity to reconcile these conflicts and renovate a unified self.
For the speaker in the Holy Sonnets, the oppositions that define his
existence are “the verbal essence[s] of life,” which lends the poems their palpable
urgency. The confusion wrought by yoking antithetical ideas, such as life and
death, body and soul, and being and nothingness, has left the speaker with no
recourse but to rave in his poetic world. Above all, the speaker constantly tries to
reconcile the uncertainty of God’s judgment after death with his trust in his
human capacity to rationalize all things. Speaking—fervidly, plangently—as he
attempts to make sense of paradoxes is his form of release. HE attempt a
“nonsimplifying structural balancing of alternatives” without negating their
coherence in “the contradictory nature of existence” (Halewood 8). He must, in

35. Lutian 32
other words, learn to live while acknowledging contradictions rather than
endeavor to eradicate them from his life.
According to Ronald W. Hepburn, this process of poetic resolution can
follow different routes: either “by correction, or access of new information;” “by
seeing steadily” or cutting through the veneers of jaundiced reasoning; “by value
assertion;” “or by appeal to an extrapoetic model” (Halewood 9-10). In the Holy
Sonnets, the speaker resorts to the fourth scheme that Hepburn propounds.
Because of the inherent futility of his enterprise, the speaker realizes that to settle
the uneasy equilibrium of the oppositions that govern his existence, he must
obtain the grace of the omnipotent divine. But without direct access to ‘God’s
mind,’ the speaker can only imagine what it might contain. This performance of
imagination, with a view towards recuperating some precarious stability from the
sludge of “the contradictory nature of existence,” is his main poetic action.
My aim is to characterize this poetic act, to discover how the speaker uses
the lyric genre, particularly the sonnet, to introduce order on the different
oppositions that pervade his existence. I find a human speaker trapped in eternal
liminality, not just between life and death or salvation and damnation, but more
crucially within the metaphysical space of the poem. Donne’s speaker in the Holy
Sonnets exhibits more urgency than many others in the English canon. With
moments of spiritual transcendence juxtaposed with lines of raw eroticism and
biting wit, these poems appropriate longstanding conventions in order to
naturalistically present a man dealing with human anxieties of mortality, sin, and
salvation. Because he cannot escape mortality, he insists upon knowing more

36. Lutian 33
about its operations: “If one strategy for conquering death is to combat it as an
enemy,” Ramie Targoff observes, “a second strategy is to determine the time and
nature of death itself” (“Facing death” 219). The speaker insists too that God
promise to intervene when the time of his death comes. In a way, the epithet
“metaphysical poet” that modern critics have assigned to Donne speaks less about
the lack of decorum that Samuel Johnson locates in the poet’s conceits and more
about the “de-idealizing, sceptical, urbane, witty, and often hard-edged” voice that
speaks in the Holy Sonnets (Cheney 284). The speaker speaks as if he has
everything to lose and always with the vain hope that he will be saved.
In confronting death, at once a fearful event but also, he believes, a source
of eternal rest, the speaker uses various strategies that show the range of his
discursive aptitude. He attacks the problem of death and the divine from political,
theological, and scientific angles. He addresses God, Death itself, and in a move
further edifying the introspective dimension of sonneteering, his own soul.
Ironically, by employing such breadth of rhetorical tactics, the speaker uncovers
further dualisms in his identity: audacious yet afraid, headstrong yet ultimately
self-deprecating. Despite his forceful verbal mechanisms for persuasion, the
speaker still looks somewhat desperate and pathetic given the obstinate resolution
in his voice. Moreover, all his accusations, commands, suggestions, and laments
are suspended in limbo, with no argumentative scheme ever seeming to come to
fruition. Yet, it is precisely his linguistic diversity in addressing different entities
and drawing from different extra-poetic discourses, such as law and science, that
show his earnestness to make sense of his surroundings by whatever means

37. Lutian 34
necessary. In witnessing the same speaker plead for his salvation in myriad ways
throughout these poems, I have been entranced and disturbed, amazed and
disconcerted. His thoughts emerge from the page with arresting spontaneity:
Renaissance sprezzatura at its finest.
I have tried to choose poems that place the speaker in different specific
situations. I arrange my commentaries thematically, taking into account the types
of poetic address and the dialogue that I see ensue among different poems: hence
why I put “As due by many titles” and “Thou hast made me,” the first sonnets in
their respective editions and both with the speaker addressing God directly, next
to each other. Furthermore, I adopt the texts prepared by Gardner, who
modernizes the lettering but keeps the idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation of
the poems in their respective first published editions.
The sonnets I have chosen inevitably have intersecting concerns, and I
have found myself at times making similar comments about the denouements of
and the language in each. Indeed, some commentaries refer to ideas and lines
from other Holy Sonnets, including ones that do not receive my extended
treatment. Still, I have tried to comment on the unique eschatological thinking
experiences that each sonnet offers. As a poem that looks most like a monologue,
“Oh, to vex me” addresses the idea of contradiction directly and was the litmus
test for my lyric theory. With “As due by many titles,” I investigate what
constitutes an active pursuit of salvation; in this poem, the speaker uses the space
of the sonnet to give arguments for why God should save him, but these
arguments inevitably undermine his agency. With the speaker’s diminished power

38. Lutian 35
in mind, I witness in “Thou hast made me” a specific encounter with the limits of
human language to articulate mental experience, let alone the mental experience
of confronting death. In “At the round earths imagin’d corners,” the speaker tries
to regain this power only to once again unearth the vexed question of his
salvation. Similar to “As due by many titles,” “Oh my blacke soule” undertakes
the question of how to attain grace, but here, the speaker makes poetic
performance by inhabiting the mind of a sick man. Finally, in “Death be not
proud,” I watch the speaker arrogantly address and personify Death (capitalized
for reasons that I hope will become apparent in the commentary) but in ways that
again betray his profound helplessness. The beauty of the Holy Sonnets lies in the
surprising linguistic mechanisms that the speaker uses to chart his experiences
and strive to resolve the numerous contradictions that permeate his mental life.
For him, as for many others, the work of lyric is inescapable. The speaker is
“locked within…obsessive meditations from which [he] cannot escape,” and must
continue his poetic rampage (Dubrow 35). And what an enchantingly tempestuous
rampage it is.

39. Lutian 36
COMMENTARIES
“Oh, to vex me”
Oh, to vex me, contraryes meete in one:
Inconstancy unnaturally hath begot
A constant habit; that when I would not
I change in vowes, and in devotione.
As humorous is my contritione
As my prophane love, and as soone forgott:
As ridlingly distempered, cold and hott,
As praying, as mute; as infinite, as none.
I durst not view heaven yesterday; and to day
In prayers, and flattering speaches I court God:
To morrow’I quake with true feare of his rod.
So my devout fits come and go away
Like a fantastique Ague: save that here
Those are my best dayes, when I shake with feare.
More than any of the other poems I consider for this project, “Oh, to vex
me” best fits my conception of lyric. This poem proves that while language
undergirds the workings of the poetic space, the fictive speaker engages with that
space in his own unique way. Any influence that another entity, including the
poet, Death, or God Himself, appears in the speaker’s poetic territory only insofar
as he ruminates on them and expresses his connections to them in his own voice.
The publishers of the Westmoreland manuscript placed “Oh, to vex me,”
one of three devotional sonnets discovered only in this edition of Donne’s poetry,
as the last of the Holy Sonnets. This choice in 1620, emulated later by the likes of
Herbert J.C. Grierson, Helen Gardner, and Donald R. Dickson, speaks to this
sonnet’s importance as it encapsulates the speaker’s unique performance of mind
in the Holy Sonnets. Throughout the sonnet sequence, the speaker grapples with
questions of mortality and salvation, and in the process, he must come to terms

40. Lutian 37
with paradoxes that govern his existence. In this poem, he literally parses those
“vex[ing]” binaries which beget the myriad personas he projects in the sequence.
As this poem illustrates, he can be simultaneously haughty and pleading,
thoughtful and commanding, supercilious and contrite. Such dualisms in the
poetic voice doe not disturb the coherence of the Holy Sonnets; on the contrary,
they animate the poems and unveil a truthfully complex portrait of a human being.
The speaker in “Oh, to vex me” candidly interrogates the multiplicities
within his solitary self. Throughout the sonnet, he uses the present tense in
conjunction with numerous adjectives to register the immediate relevance of the
descriptions at hand. He begins with an ejaculatory “Oh” followed by “to vex
me,” cryptic syllables that suggest the presence of a malicious agent troubling—
“vex[ing]”—the speaker. Implicit in this first line are questions about the
speaker’s character and his poetic situation: Who vexed him? Why was he vexed?
He follows this enigmatic opening phrase with the frank declarative “contraryes
meete in one.” With it, the speaker steps back from the verge of unrestrained
gushing suggested with “Oh, to vex me” and delivers an innocuous sounding
statement that bears its own questions: How can “contraryes meete?” Where do
they meet? This change in register in the second half of the first line betrays the
speaker’s confusion that manifests in the expression’s almost inaccessible
abstraction. The dual register in the first line is itself indicative of the contending
forces influencing the speaker’s speech act: on one hand, he would like to rant
with abandon, but he recognizes that his exposition calls for more systematic

41. Lutian 38
meditation. He knows that if he is to come to terms with any part of his
contradictory nature, he must maintain an air of objectivity.
Still, despite the speaker’s efforts, the pervasive contradictions in his
identity overwhelm him. The explanation he provides in the second and third lines
for how “contraryes meete in one” is even more convoluted than the confusing
opening statement: “Inconstancy,” he says, “unnaturally hath begot / A constant
habit.” The adjacent multisyllabic words “Inconstancy” and “unnaturally,” the
first an abstract nominalization and the other an adverb replete with negation and
suffixed elements, disrupt the iambic pentameter. The close proximity of these
words to one another also makes reading—let alone understanding—the supposed
clarification a tedious task. Moreover, with the verb phrase “hath begot,” the
speaker anthropomorphizes “Inconstancy” by ascribing it the capacity to
procreate. Its child is “A constant habit,” a redundant phrase whose repetition
amplifies the irony of the situation. Nevertheless, although straightforward syntax
of this clause balks at the distended diction—witness the medial caesura that
comes right after the paradox—it does hint at the identity of the forces that “vex”
the speaker. The adverb “unnaturally” suggests that the “vex[ing]” action violates
the governing principles of nature. In the speaker’s Christian milieu, God controls
the forces of nature and is therefore a suitable candidate for the mysterious entity.
Bringing some clarity to the confusion of the first two and a half lines, the
speaker finally uses the first person after the medial caesura in the third line. Also,
by re-employing monosyllables, he recaptures the emotional lyricism of the
opening “Oh, to vex me” and relieves the pressure formed by the series of

42. Lutian 39
multisyllabic abstractions at the beginning of the first quatrain. In so doing, he
provides a relatively accessible explanation for the connection between these
personified abstract concepts: inconstancy begetting a constant habit apparently
means “that when I would not / I change in vowes, and in devotione.” The
speaker presents “change,” a synonym for “Inconstancy,” as inevitable even when
will, uttered in its past tense verb form “would,” fervidly fights against it. Yet, in
differentiating between “vowes” and “devotione,” he reveals another dualism in
his identity. “Vowes” externalizes conviction of fidelity, while “devotione” refers
more to the intrinsic conviction itself. As such, the speaker implies that though he
projects a certain persona through his poetry, he also has an internalized self that
he might choose to hide. These aspects of his identity mutually influence one
another, and the tension that evolves between them is one of the significant
“contraryes” that the speaker attempts to reconcile in this poem.
In the second quatrain, the speaker uses comparison to further
contextualize the disjunctions in his identity. Employing the diction of
physicality, he demonstrates how his feeble moral resolve engenders the
contradictory nature of his existence. He deploys an early modern medical belief
in the humors to register this volatility of character: “As humorous is my
contritione,” he professes, “As my phophane love, and as soone forgott.” The
main objects of the comparison are aspects of his moral character: “contritione”
and “love.” Yet, although the grammar in the fifth and sixth lines implies likeness
between them, the adjectives used to describe “contritione” and “love” do not
jibe: “humorous” suggests that the speaker’s ability to manage his “contritione”

43. Lutian 40
fluctuates against his will, whereas “prophane” implies that the speaker makes an
active choice to desecrate his “love.” Why does he make this flawed comparison?
I argue that the significance of the rhetorical strategies that emerge from this
juxtaposition far outweigh the lopsidedness of the claim. First, the words
“contritione” and “prophane” inject more religious connotations into the sonnet,
thus making it clearer that the object of the “vowes, and…devotione” is (the yet-
unmentioned) God. The comparison also introduces the anaphora that runs
through the second quatrain. These parallel structures impose order on the
“Inconstancy” by sonically cohering the contradictions with a constant rhythm.
Departing from the convoluted abstractness of the first quatrain, the speaker
deploys a new poetic device so as to better frame and elucidate his exposition.
With the humoral conceit, the speaker reiterates the changeability of his
“contritione” by calling it “As ridlingly distempered, cold and hott.” By this point,
the speaker has learned to balance intricate diction with simple monosyllabic
words. Although “ridlingly distempered” recalls the verbal tedium of
“Inconstancy unnaturally”—note how these phrases even occupy the same
relative location in their respective quatrains—“cold and hott," underscored by a
powerful medial caesura, compellingly figures the feeling of being torn between
different “vowes” and “devotione[s].” The refreshing frankness of this dualism at
the end of the seventh line leads well to the perfectly executed anaphora of the
eighth: “As praying, as mute; as infinite, as none.” The inclusion of “praying” as a
foil to “mute” echoes the religious sentiment that other words in the sonnet—
“unnaturally,” “vowes,” “devotione”—have also suggested. Furthermore, the

44. Lutian 41
visual symmetry of the end of the octave, reminiscent of the parallel simplicity of
the end of the first quatrain, counteracts the profound imbalance in the speaker’s
life projected onto the poem by the words “humorous” and “distempered.”
Ironically, instead of releasing even more abstractions into the poetic
space, by parsing out the humoral motif that he introduces at the beginning of the
quatrain, the speaker creates harmonious symmetry in the eighth line. The pairs
across the caesura can be construed as separate iterations of “contraryes meet[ing]
in one:” “praying” is opposite of “mute; “infinite” of “none.” But the parallel
locations and relative phonetic complexities of “praying” and “infinite” also
associate them as a pair in contrast with “mute” and “none.” The din of pious
speech imagined by the combination of “praying” and “infinite” and the silence
suggested by the combination of “mute” and “none” represent the two extreme
devotional speech acts that the speaker can perform: on one hand, he can be
infinitely prayerful; on the other, he can be mute and none. There seems to be no
room for moderation.
The speaker’s subsequent portrayal of his relationship with God registers a
similar severity of choice. At the volta, the speaker finally invokes God, thus
solving the mystery of the source of “contraryes” and “inconstancy.” He returns
to using the first-person “I” and further undermines the more abstract and
metaphoric description of his internal life in the octave. He characterizes his
relationship with the divine according to a three-day scheme: “I durst not view
heaven yesterday; and to day / In prayers, and flattering speaches I court God: /
To morrow’I quake with true feare of his rod.” Yet, instead of oscillating from

45. Lutian 42
one extreme to another, as the parallelisms he deploys throughout the sonnet
suggest, the trajectory of his encounter with God seems unidirectional. He moves
from shame to flattery to fear, without any indication of the process circling back
on itself. Arguably, since the speaker is in the eternal present, he exists only “to
day / [where] In prayers and flattering speaches [he courts] God.” As such, he
characterizes his present speech act as mere pandering to God.
The close visual proximity of “yesterday” to “To day” in the ninth line
suggests a conflation of time that makes the move from ignoring God to praising
and flattering Him an easier leap than foregoing the flattery in order to manifest
reverential fear of divine punishment. Likewise, the juxtaposition of “prayers”
with “flattering speaches” debases the quality of the former, as the speaker
implies that they can easily turn to sycophancy. Finally, though the rhyme
between “God” and “rod” exhibits a metonymic relationship between the two, the
speaker notes that the “rod” is what elicits fear and not God. The inverted
hierarchy of the metonym relegates God to an inferior place below the “rod,”
which is supposedly a mere symbolic instrument of His power. It ultimately
suggests that the speaker’s moral conversion is due less to faith than to fear. Thus,
the “quak[ing]” that he experiences is a symptom of his hypocrisy, a moral illness
that he has diagnosed in himself.
The speaker confirms this diagnosis in the next two lines where he
characterizes his “devout fits” that “come and go away / Like a fantastique Ague.”
“Fits” and “Ague” reiterate the motif of physical health that the speaker has been
using to concretize his ailing moral well-being. The phrase “devout fits” also

46. Lutian 43
harks to his constant inconstancy with the play on syntax and the fluid
connotations of “devout” exacerbating the speaker’s bathos: instead of fits of
devotion, he has “devout fitts.” Yet, with a deictic at the end of the thirteenth line,
he insinuates that he can move past his fulsome behavior. Within his imagined
world, he can, in fact, reach “Tomorrow,” which are his “best days,” when the
fear of God’s retribution “shake[s]” him.
By the end of the sonnet, he completely does away with the convoluted
jargon and straightforwardly expresses the paradox of enjoying fear using only
monosyllabic words. He disentangles himself from the confusion of the octave by
embracing his lowly status at the eternal mercy of divine whim. The fear of the
“rod,” it seems, is the key to rehabilitate this wavering speaker’s moral life.
Indeed, fear is the only word that he uses to signify emotion, and it is the only one
he admits to feeling. Through his expository declamation about his multifaceted
identity, the speaker has learned that in order to attain closure with the “contraryes
[that] meete” in him, he must unwaveringly confront them, as he does throughout
the Holy Sonnets.

47. Lutian 44
“As due by many titles”
As due by many titles I resigne
My selfe to thee, O God, first I was made
By thee, and for thee, and when I was decay’d
Thy blood bought that, the which before was thine,
I am thy sonne, made with thy selfe to shine,
Thy servant, whose paines thou hast still repaid,
Thy sheepe, thine Image, and till I betray’d
My selfe, a temple of thy Spirit divine;
Why doth the devill then usurpe in mee?
Why doth he steale, nay ravish that’s thy right?
Except thou rise and for thine owne worke fight,
Oh I shall soone despaire, when I doe see
That thou lov’st mankind well, yet wilt not chuse me,
And Satan hates mee, yet is loth to lose mee.
“As due by many titles” begins with an apology. Ostensibly in accordance
with the Christian teaching of placing one’s absolute trust in the divine, the
speaker “resigne[s] / [His] selfe to…God.” Yet, with the conditions set by the
opening phrase, the speaker frames his “resign[ation]” of self as one motivated
less by unsullied faith than by the “many titles” that apparently require such an
action. Further lending irony to the situation, by this move—the speaker’s only
active operation in the poetic present—he abdicates his own agency, marked later
by the profusion of passive voice. With a medial caesura after his invocation to
God in the second line, the speaker moves from present tense to past tense and
starts listing the “many titles” that have accrued since his birth.
As hinted by the word “titles,” the speaker communicates with the Father
using the language of civil society. He deploys both legal and mercenary jargon to
bring the discourse of salvation to the realm of the living. Specifically, he
attributes his powerlessness to quasi-legal terms—“titles”—that implicate both
him and the divine. The list of “titles” in the octave is in fact a catalogue of

48. Lutian 45
hierarchical connections that the speaker occupies in relation to God. These
relationships mirror modes of exchange found in the spheres of law and market,
including two instances of the speaker being “made.” Likewise, the speaker
recalls that God had “bought” and had “repaid” him, while the devil “usurpe[s]”
him from his rightful owner. The speaker thus rewrites religious devotion as an
economic bond where both divine and human parties have assets, liabilities, and
obligations. The speaker’s push for this paradigm symptomatizes the wide
ontological gulf between him and his ethereal audience: he can only linguistically
approximate God’s operations, which are, by definition, inaccessible. Hence, he
uses the pragmatic language of the law and mercantilism, which though
seemingly incongruent with God’s omniscient reason, is the only means for the
speaker to remind the Father of His investment in creating and sustaining man.
The speaker’s insistence on legal and commercial diction stems both from his
human status and his need for a firm logic of fair interchange that these social
spheres can purportedly model.
The list of “titles” in the octave is more symbiotic than antagonistic, as the
speaker wants to paint a picture of a positive relationship between him and the
Father. He remembers God’s past kindnesses to him but articulates them in proto-
capitalist terms. In so doing, his self-characterization devolves from surrender of
self to utter helplessness, which urges the Father to continue this generosity
towards His subject now in agony. The list also provides the rhetorical scaffolding
for the main questions of the poem revealed at the volta: “Why doth the devill
then usurpe in mee? / Why doth he steale, nay ravishe that’s thy right? ” After his

49. Lutian 46
resignation of self in the first line, the speaker introduces his primary link to the
divine: “first I was made / By thee.” This creator/created relationship harks to the
central Christian dogma of God as the progenitor of the universe. Yet, for the
speaker’s purposes, this relationship registers his total reliance on the Father, so
inextricable that his continued existence in the poetic present depends on divine
intervention. The relationship also implies the fundamental sanctimony of
humanity, which, the speaker suggests, is God’s responsibility to preserve. The
speaker makes his demand especially convincing with the passive voice in the
clause through which he insinuates that he has taken no part in his own generation
and, re-iterating the message of the opening line, is devoid of agency over himself
and his future.
The implications of this first self-characterization encapsulate the
speaker’s counterintuitive approach to self-empowerment. With his humbled
diction, he constantly underscores his feebleness and generates a desperate sense
of his lowliness. In particular, he underlines his passivity in his interactions with
the divine: he “was made” by God; he “was decay’d” by a yet-unmentioned force;
and he “shall soone despaire” instead of fight for himself. By characterizing his
operations almost exclusively through passive voice, the speaker positions God as
the entity solely responsible for his continual existence and eventual destiny. He
even configures himself as a dehumanized commodity, “that, the which before
was thine,” with the Father as his owner. All these the speaker does to capture the
Father’s attention and induce some divine course of action to assure his salvation.

50. Lutian 47
Extending his assertion for divine responsibility over human salvation, the
speaker indicates that he was made not only “by” the Father but also “for” Him.
He thus recasts Creation as a function of virtuosic vanity, an ego-driven creative
action that God performs “for” Himself. The speaker suggests that the Creation of
Man served the Father some personal purpose that necessarily places the onus of
human upkeep on Him. Given God’s initial self-serving investment in His
creative work, He also has a vested interest in ascertaining the human speaker’s
salvation. By drawing this mutualistic relationship between him and the Father,
the speaker rationalizes his petition for extraordinary divine aid as he continues to
face the Satan’s temptation in his life. Despite his sins, he remains confident that
he inherently deserves God’s pardon and ultimate salvation.
Further establishing his dependence on God, the speaker invokes the
sanguinary sacrifice that Christ undertakes that has made salvation available to
imperfect man. By recalling Christ’s Passion in the fourth line, he harks to part of
the dogma of the Holy Trinity. He conflates the Father, for whom the speaker
“before was [His],” with the Son whose divine “blood bought” the speaker from
his state of “decay.” Locating these characteristics in a singular all-powerful
entity, the speaker combines Christ’s radical altruism in the New Testament with
the Father’s phenomenal yet wrathful clout manifest in the Old Testament. The
invocation also reminds the Father that the Son’s Passion and subsequent
Resurrection has already secured the promise of salvation for mankind. Now, He
must fulfill this promise in spite of continued human depravity.

51. Lutian 48
The speaker restates the creator/created dynamic in more familial terms at
the start of the second quatrain: “I am thy sonne, made with thy selfe to shine.”
The multiple puns on “sonne” elevate the speaker’s status on one hand, to the
level of the “sun,” the source of light on earth; and on the other, to Jesus Christ
the “Son,” the source of human spiritual enlightenment. The motif of light
culminates in “shine,” a word that supports the speaker’s suggestion that Creation
serves the Father’s ego. As Adam’s successor, the human speaker is a signifier of
God’s empyrean supremacy on earth. For God’s “self to shine,” He must assure
the survival of the speaker whom he owns—in the poem, “Thine”—and who is an
extension of His being. By aligning himself with an important celestial body and
the Son of God, the speaker somewhat aggrandizes himself but still indicates that
this rise could only occur in concert with the Father. In short, his human glory
transitively is God’s as well.
Continuing his egoistic self-deprecation, the speaker stylizes himself in the
sixth line as a “servant” to a divine master. Here, the speaker renders himself
deserving of divine protection by virtue of the service and reverence he has
supposedly devoted to God, who in turn “hast still repaid” his “paines.” Yet, an
earlier figuration of the master/servant relationship between the speaker and the
Father undermines the positive valence of this metaphor. In the first quatrain, God
“bought” the speaker in his “decay’d” state, but the sinful man ungratefully
recommends no form of recompense for the Father’s kindness. Analogously, the
“paines” in the sixth line refer to the speaker’s past encounters with sin and
temptation. Through these experiences, God had constantly provided him divine

52. Lutian 49
aid regardless of the insincerity of his faith practice. Thus, the payments that the
speaker-servant received are not necessarily commensurate to the fervor of his
devotion as much as they demonstrate God’s benevolence. The servant metaphor
works more to paint God as a compassionate entity than the speaker as an
obedient man deserving salvation. Yet, with the double entendre of the sixth line,
the speaker hopes that divine pity overrides his unworthiness.
The final three metaphors used to characterize the lyric self in the octave
soften the legal motif that has been the undercurrent of the octave. In the seventh
line, the speaker turns to tamer biblical invocations of the relationship between
God and man: from “sonne” and “servant,” the speaker becomes the “sheepe” of
God the shepherd, the “Image” of His perfection, and “a temple to [His] Spirit
divine.” In particular, the metaphor of the temple echoes the connotations of God
purchasing the “decay’d” speaker in the third and fourth lines. However, instead
of passive denigration, the speaker admits that from being “ a temple of [the]
Spirit divine,” he has since “betray’d / [Him] selfe.” Expanding on hints of servile
activity that he introduces in the sixth line, the speaker confesses culpability in
succumbing to temptation and actively enacting his downfall—“treason” abroad
as his metaphoric pilgrim does in “Oh my blacke Soule.” Yet, still clinging to his
argument for the Father’s responsibility to assure his salvation, he concedes to
have betrayed only himself and not the Father. The self-centered speaker remains
concerned only with threats to his own self-preservation and shows no distress
over the ramifications of his actions—his decay and betrayal—to his creator,

53. Lutian 50
father, master, and shepherd. The speaker’s frank demeanor even here at the end
of the octave undermines any contrition that he may have been tying to exhibit.
As he positions himself in different ways vis-à-vis God in the octave, the
speaker inevitably invokes different theologically loaded senses of the divine.
Because he has no clear, singular picture of God that captures all His abiding
characteristics, the speaker must cannily employ various modes of appeal and
argumentation to different dimensions of the divine self with the hope that one
would prove successful. Thus, while he establishes a familial connection to a
divine father figure, he also reminds the divine master of His duties to His servant
and the divine shepherd of His to the sheep. Likewise, he recalls the innate
divinity of humans who are images and temples of God. By articulating his
relationship to God from different points-of-view, the speaker comes at his main
argument—that the responsibility of reformation is on God and not on himself—
from various angles, thereby strengthening his claim.
The speaker’s desperate egotism becomes greatly apparent at the volta. At
this juncture, he reveals that the first two quatrains are merely protracted
subordinate clauses supporting the rhetorical question in the ninth line, “Why doth
the devill then usurpe in mee?” Cohering the argument of the octave, the rhyming
of the first or nearly first words of the eight lines—“As due, by many titles;” “My
selfe to thee;” “By thee;” “Thy blood bought;” “I am thy sonne;” “Thy servant;”
“Thy sheepe;” “My selfe”— carry through in the subsequent “Why…Why” in the
ninth and tenth lines. Instead of embedding these rhymes in assonances in the
middle of the lines in the octave, the speaker places these echoing words for the

54. Lutian 51
most part at the beginning of each line. That these monosyllabic words are
possessive adjectives re-iterate the legal and mercantile motifs of the poem. This
repeated diction of ownership anticipates the speaker’s final self-commodification
to a temple in the eighth line and sonically progresses his helpless plea for divine
intervention. Ironically, the two mentions of literal self-ownership in the poem,
“My selfe,” succeed enjambments in the first and seventh lines, which suspend
instances of abdication and self-betrayal. These enjambments display the
speaker’s momentary reluctances to quit himself to God and to admit that he has
sinned and is therefore culpable for his faults. In these cases, the speaker betrays
how his conviction of worthiness collides with but eventually subjugates his
pangs of conscience.
In the sestet, the speaker trades the winding, evanescent loquaciousness of
the octave for terser but more expressive verse. He follows the rhetorical question
of the volta with another: “Why doth he steale, nay ravish that’s thy right?” The
tenth line, more than any other in the poem, reflects the psychological turning of
the speaker’s mind: at a medial caesura, he changes the main verb in the sentence
from “steale” to “ravish” and completes the iambic pentameter with an emphatic
negation, “nay.” While “steale” jibes with the ongoing legal and mercantile motifs
of the sonnet, “ravish” introduces a visceral, sexual component to the speaker’s
agony, which he re-visits in “Batter my heart.” Nevertheless, he poignantly
returns to his original legal logic when he invokes God’s “right” to the
preservation of His creation after the caesura. With lyric agony reminiscent of the
opening line of “Oh, to vex me”, the image that the speaker creates with the

55. Lutian 52
second rhetorical question of “As due by many titles” invites greater sympathy for
his plight.
The last four lines witness the emergence of the speaker’s more
emotional, desperate register—the result of the poem’s argumentative trajectory.
Instead of answering the questions that he poses in the ninth and tenth lines, the
speaker signals a new turn in the sonnet, with the negating conjunction “except.”
With this turn, he gives the Father an ultimatum—“Except thou rise and for thine
owne worke fight”—which re-iterates God’s great investment in His “worke”
from which an equal investment in the sustenance of man must apparently follow.
Subsequently, the speaker foretells the “despaire” that he will experience if God
opts to forsake him. Here, as when he “was [first] decay’d” and when he
“betray’d / [Him] selfe,” he gives no indication of contrition nor proposes any
penance for his sins. The speaker does so because he pessimistically assumes that
the Father will eventually abandon His “sonne,” “servant,” “sheepe,” and
“Image.” He locates himself as a victim of God’s prerogative and the devil’s
wiles, and therefore annuls any human agency and culpability that he might have
yet to eviscerate in earlier parts of the poem.
The final couplet consists of two clauses of parallel structure that depict
opposite entities. In these two lines, the speaker reverts back to present tense and
posits a future scenario where both God and Satan act against their conventionally
viewed tendencies and in the process relegate his human fate in limbo. In the
thirteenth line, the speaker scornfully declares that God can “lov’st mankind well”
but still “not choose” to save him—a glaring moral contradiction. The next line

56. Lutian 53
illustrates a similar binary in Satan who though he “hates” the speaker is evidently
“loth to lose” him. The latter description displays the devil’s greed and lack of
self-control; what then of the description of God’s irrationality? By showing the
absurdity in God choosing not to save him, the speaker makes a final desperate
appeal to the divine by reverse psychology. He goads the Father to “fight” for His
“owne worke,” then shows how He acts like the devil if he does not save the
speaker. The move verges on the sacrilegious but the speaker seems to have no
other choice, as he pleads for his salvation to a mute and physically distant entity.
The speaker ends the poem wallowing in his “despaire,” uncertain of how the
competition between empyrean powers to either “ravish” or salvage him will
conclude.
As in many of the Holy Sonnets, the reader is left with no certainty
regarding the success of the speaker’s petition. The eternal communion with the
divine that he envisions in the first two lines is wholly contingent upon God’s
acceptance of such resignation. Yet, in accordance with the inherent solitude if the
lyric speaker, God’s silence remains eerily conspicuous in the face of His
subject’s magnificent expostulations. The sonnet, with its freedom of poetic
language, provides the only interface between Heaven and the speaker’s temporal
world, but even its imaginative capaciousness cannot ensure salvation. For all his
cunning self-deprecation and sycophancy, the fate of the speaker still hangs in the
balance.

57. Lutian 54
“Thou hast made me”
Thou hast made me, And shall thy worke decay?
Repaire me now, for now mine end doth haste,
I runne to death, and death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday,
I dare not move my dimme eyes any way,
Despaire behind, and death before doth cast
Such terrour, and my feebled flesh doth waste
By sinne in it, which it t’wards hell doth weigh;
Onely thou art above, and when towards thee
By thy leave I can looke, I rise againe;
But our old subtle foe so tempeth me,
That not one houre I can myself sustaine;
Thy Grace may wing me to prevent his art
And thou like Adamant draw mine iron heart.
The nature of the liminal space between life and death has long been
shrouded in mystery. All human beings will pass through it at the end of their
lives, but the traffic is unidirectional; after death, one cannot return to the realm of
the living to report what he has experienced post-death. For the speaker in “Thou
hast made me,” this liminal space is located much closer to humans than
previously imagined. For him, it is the mental “space” that one occupies as he
confronts death. Hence, poetry, whose province is the mimesis and transmission
of mental experience through language accessible by human beings, is a suitable
medium to explore this realm. However, its internality relative to the individual
experiencing it does not make it any less enigmatic. The liminal space between
life and death is so inaccessible not necessarily because one cannot come back
from the dead, but because few persons have the capacity to fully access and
comprehend their own mental experiences where this space is located.
The sonnet opens with the speaker audaciously asking, “Thou hast made
me, And shall thy worke decay?” While he does not explicitly name his

58. Lutian 55
addressee, his intimation of creation clearly indicates God as the distant audience,
whom he entreats to help ensure his safe departure from his terrifying encounter
death that he details over the rest of the poem. Exacerbating the trauma wrought
by his poetic self-relocation, the speaker knows that the fires of hell are still more
horrific than the mental confrontation of his imminent mortality. This realization
prompts him to brazenly ask the opening question. As in several other Holy
Sonnets, the pronoun “Thou” registers a certain level of familiarity between the
speaker and his divine addressee, which coincides with the audacity of his tone.
As the speaker foregoes the usual courtesy and veneration used in addressing the
divine, his self-presentation recalls that of a child quarreling with his parents.
Likewise, akin to a parent dumbfounded by his offspring’s audacity, God here has
no voice—no choice but to listen.
The conjunction “And” in the first line registers the causal relationship
between the primary statement and the corollary question: because God “hast
made” the speaker, He has the responsibility to prevent His creation’s “decay.”
The question, “And shall thy worke decay?” has an ejaculatory quality, implying
that the speaker’s long-bottled anxieties about death have only now found verbal
release. Yet, despite his boldness, the speaker also commodifies himself in the
first line. The word “decay” refers both to the post-mortem degradation of the
body and to the eternal damnation of the sinner’s soul. By using the term, the
speaker recasts his creation as an artificial manufacturing process where the
product can easily “decay.” Thus, the sonnet’s first line introduces the tension
between the speaker’s projected pride and his deep-seated insecurity that propels