A Primer: Donne's Holy Sonnet XV

Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.
– Collect for Advent

John Donne (born 1572 – died 1631) was the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral London, from 1621 to 1631. As such he knew the Prayer Book collect for Advent I well. Holy Sonnet XV reflects his engagement with it, as well as the proper epistle and gospel readings for that Sunday.

The collect encapsulates the foci of Advent. This first season of the church’s year begins on the Sunday nearest November 30 and roughly coincides therefore with the month of December (up to December 25). The name is an Anglicization of the Latin word for ‘arrival’ or ‘coming’. The season, as also the collect, has in view two arrivals of Christ: first, when he ‘came to visit us in great humility’ and second ‘when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead’, which is the telos, the end or purpose of his first coming. It may surprise many, who think of Advent only as a preparation for Christmas or perhaps even an extended Christmastide, that an at least equal emphasis is placed on the end of all things, the second Advent, to that on the Nativity in this opening season of the church’s year. As T. S. Eliot said, ‘In my beginning is my end’..¹Four Quartets, II. ‘East Coker’, ln. 1

Having gotten Advent well into focus, let us also briefly bring poetry into focus. What is poetry? How ought one to go about reading a poem? Is it just like reading any other sort of writing? Some will find these questions hopelessly elementary, but I find it useful to return from time to time to elementary questions and grapplewith answering them anew. Thomas Carlyle called poetry ‘musical thought’, which I think points in just the right direction.²Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (University of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. 84. Poetry and music share a common origin – the mythic father of both is Orpheus, who through his song and playing on the lyre, was able to win entrance into hell to rescue his dead wife Eurydice. This myth is frequently used to sum up the power of both music and of poetry. As music is sound compressed into patterns to move hearers, so poetry compresses language into patterns to move them. It is the audible patterns that allow us to distinguish music from mere noise. And so it is audible patterns that allow us to distinguish poetry from mere speech.

In English, the most immediately recognizable of these patterns or correspondences are rhythm and rhyme – both of which derive from the Greek ῥυθμός, rhythmos, a word with a wide range of meanings including measured flow, organized movement, proportion, symmetry, and arrangement. In the seventeenth century, the two words diverged – rhythm referring to a pattern of stresses or beats, rhyme to similar sounding word endings. But poetry can draws too on correspondences other than these. In Anglo-Saxon poetry, the defining correspondence is alliteration, words that begin with the same sound. In ancient Hebrew poetry, the defining correspondence is at the level of meaning, a technique called parallelism, in which an idea is expressed and then reiterated in a different way. Metaphor, the correspondence of two otherwise unlike things, is also of course pervasive in poetry of every kind and culture. For whatever reasons correspondences and patterns attract our attention and stimulate our minds – poetry channels that basic human characteristic. The correspondences of sound delight the ear and the correspondences of meaning delight the mind. Because sound and sense are so interconnected in poetry, as Cleanth Brooks (a founding member of the Prayer Book Society) argued, poetry resists paraphrase.³Cleanth Brooks, ‘The Heresy of Paraphrase’, The Well Wrought Urn (Harcourt Brace, 1947) pp. 192-214. While a poem, just like a piece of music, can be summarized, we must not think that we have somehow got what matters when we have summarized the poem, and can then dispense with the form. Form – the organization of words and sounds – is an irreducible component of the poem. This is why T. S. Eliot (writing about Dante) said: ‘genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’.⁴T. S. Eliot, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: Literature, Politics, Belief, 1927-1929, edited by Frances Dickey, Jennifer Formichelli, and Ronald Schuchard (John Hopkins University Press, 2015), p. 701. In other words, we can be caught in the spell a poem casts before we perceive how or why we had the response that we had.

Now, this all might sound impossibly theoretical and self-indulgent, but it leads to practical advice about reading poems. I recommend beginning reading poetry using a four-step process. (This process is especially tailored to lyric poetry, rather than narrative or dramatic poetry, which more easily lend themselves to a somewhat different sort of engagement.) As one gets more accustomed to reading poetry, these steps will begin to blur together and will feel less and less like a stepwise process.

The first step is to read the poem aloud without working to ‘make sense’ of it. Simply allow yourself to hear the words and experience without evaluation whatever associations, meanings, or feelings emerge. When reading the poem aloud, do not assume that the end of a line requires a stop. Instead, let the punctuation guide your pauses. If there is a full stop at the end of the line, then observe it. If there isn’t one, keep reading through to the next line without a break. Give a slightly shorter pause at commas. Give semicolons, colons, and question marks essentially the same time you do a full stop. Do not over-exaggerate the vocal inflection of question marks and exclamation marks. At this point, if you encounter a word you do not know, just keep going. The point here is to hear the full poem like one would hear a piece of music. Do not treat it as a puzzle to be solved, but as music to be enjoyed. If you never move beyond this first step, that’s entirely alright. You are allowed to enjoy a poem at the level of sound without digging deeper. But, if you do wish to dig deeper, you can often discover more to appreciate and enjoy.

This first step is ‘reading with the grain’. If you can imagine your hand passing over a piece of wood – going in one direction results in a free-flowing, smooth experience, as the direction in which your hand moves matches the direction of the grain in the wood. Reversing direction, going against the grain, produces a rough sensation, maybe even a splinter. After reading a poem with the grain, then read it again against the grain. By that I mean, ask questions as reading. Note points of interest and alarm. Mark confusing bits and unfamiliar vocabulary. Do not bother looking anything up just yet. Read through the full poem again to come to terms with it, negotiating possible aims, meanings, and messages. It helps at this point to have a paper copy of the text and a pencil in hand to mark it up. Although it might be anathema to some, I urge you to write in your books. If nothing else your marginalia will prove of great interest to future scholars!

The first reading is for hearing; the second reading is for questioning; the third is for analyzing. Analysis is the process of taking something apart to see how it works. Dissect the poem on your laboratory table and label all of its internal organs. I recommend starting with form and working your way down into the metaphors and symbolism and buried treasures. In other words, start with the more obvious and measurable and progress to the less obvious and less measurable. Identify whether the poem follows a fixed form like a sonnet. If it does, you will have some clues as to how poems of that kind usually operate and sometimes even what kind of content they usually concern. Identify the rhythmic patterns. Is it metrical or free – in other words, does it have regularly repeating stresses, or are the stresses less predictable? Does it rhyme? If so, what is the rhyme scheme? Look for alliteration in the lines. Note where these sonic features show up and see if you spot any correspondence to what is said in those spots.

To analyze content, start by trying to work out who is speaking, what that speaker seems to be doing, and to whom he or she might be speaking. If possible, identify who you think the speaking voice of the poem is or if, indeed, there is more than one. Describe what the speaker of the poem is doing in the poem. Is she pleading with someone? Is he describing, commanding, exhorting, or some combination of these? See if you can guess what the speaker of the poem thinks the reader will know, believe, think, desire, or accept. At this point, widen your scope beyond looking up unfamiliar words and references. Look for what you can learn about the time in which the poem was written and the writer’s life. Consider if any of this contextual detail informs how you understand parts of the poem.

Finally, after questioning and analyzing the poem, read it yet a fourth time, aloud, and straight through without stopping or questioning. When taking something apart in order to try to figure out how it works, one should then put the parts back together again. The goal is not to destroy but to understand more deeply. All of the questioning and analyzing you have done should allow you to hear the poem anew. Perhaps it will sound different. Perhaps the correspondence of sound and sense will be clearer.

Four steps: hearing, questioning, analyzing, and hearing again. Try out this method on the flour lyric poems discussed below. In what follows I will share some of the fruits of my own engagement with these poems all of which have to do, in different ways, with the present season, Advent. I turn now to the fifteenth ‘Holy Sonnet’ by John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s during the time of King James.

Wilt thou love God as he thee? then digest,
My soul, this wholesome meditation,
How God the Spirit, by angels waited on
In heaven, doth make His temple in thy breast
The Father having begot a Son most blest,
And still begetting – for he ne’er begun –
Hath deign’d to choose thee by adoption,
Co-heir to His glory, and Sabbath’s endless rest
And as a robb’d man, which by search doth find
His stolen stuff sold, must lose or buy it again,
The Son of glory came down, and was slain,
Us whom He had made, and Satan stole, to unbind.
’Twas much, that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.

We knew before we read it that this poem is a sonnet – the title told us so. A sonnet is a fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter, that usually breaks into two parts: an octet (set of eight lines) and a sextet (set of six lines). There is usually a contrast of some kind between octet and sextet, a discernible shift. When the last two lines form a rhyming couplet it is often intended as an epigram, a complete statement that could stand alone expressed so as to pack a punch. That is certainly the case here: ‘’Twas much, that man was made like God before, / But, that God should be made like man, much more.’

The speaker of the poem is someone in a position of giving advice of a spiritual kind, what the Prayer Book calls ‘ghostly counsel’. And so, we might venture to guess that the speaker is a persona of Dean Donne himself, perhaps as pastor in the pulpit. But who is the intended audience? The poem answers that for us quite clearly; the speaker addresses ‘my soul’. This sonnet, then, is a personal meditation. The pastor preaches to his own soul. The opening question ‘Wilt thou love God as he thee’ implicitly acknowledges that this Christian soul, which the spirit of God ought to fill as a temple, does not love God as he ought. For the rest of the poem, then, the speaker advises his soul on how to learn to love God as God loves him, by meditation on the preeminent proof of divine love – the incarnation of the eternally begotten son. Meditation on the love of God exhibited in the first Advent and all that entailed – ‘The Son of glory came down, and was slain’ – brings about an advent of God within the soul. That is, it stirs up love for God within the soul.

The first proper epistle in Advent, Romans 13: 8–14, focuses on the theme of love. It begins, ‘Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law’. Reaching a crescendo, St Paul proclaims, ‘love is the fulfilling of the law’. The collect’s reference to the temple echoes the proper gospel for Advent I, Matthew 21: 1–13, ending with the cleansing of the temple: ‘And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple; and overthrew the tables of the money-changers, and the seats of them that sold doves; and said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.’

The ‘den of thieves’ analogy in the gospel may have suggested to Donne the metaphor of the robber in the sonnet’s sextet. That word, ‘robber’, alliterates with the ‘rest’ at the end of the immediately preceding line. These words not only correspond at the sonic level but also at the level of meaning. They sound similar but their meanings form a contrast. The robber disturbs rest. The robber of the poem is, of course, Satan, who has, as it were, stolen us from our maker, keeping us from the end for which we were made – namely to love him (which is, as the epistle tells us, the fulfilling of the law), turning us to what the epistle calls ‘works of darkness’. We who have been stolen away from our maker by the robber become ourselves agents of the father of theft; we who make of God’s temples – understood as churches and as the hearts of Christians – dens of thieves – where corruption and mendacity, hypocrisy and greed thrive – have become robbers ourselves. The remedy is found in love of God – both the love that came down to rescue us from the robber and the love that continues to come down into our hearts to turn them into temples fit for God. The poem speaks of the maker needing to buy back what was stolen and unbind it – picking up on a key idea from the gospel for Advent II, ‘your redemption draweth nigh’. To redeem means to buy back something or someone that has been lost, stolen, or sold.

Paradoxically, the advent yet to come is also described in the scriptures as a kind of robbery. The Second coming, ‘The day of the Lord,’ as 2 Peter 3:10 puts it, ‘will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.’ Therefore, the Lord says in Revelation 16:15, ‘Behold I come as a thief.’ In a subtler way, the Gospel of John identifies Jesus as a robber in his first advent. When Barabbas was released in place of Jesus, the evangelist makes an observation that is anything but an incidental aside. ‘Now Barabbas was a robber’ (John 18:40), the evangelist says. Jesus takes the place of the robber. This identification of Jesus with the sinner is not incidental; that’s how our redemption worked – ‘bare our sins in his own body on the tree’ (1 Peter 2:24). The robbed became the robber to buy back what was stolen.

St. Paul bids us ‘cast off the works of darkness’; Jesus comes to the temple to ‘cast out’ the robbers. These are one and the same and they are each followed with similarly complementary ideas. St Paul’s exhortation to cast off darkness is accompanied by ‘put on the armour of light… put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ’, which is echoed in the collect repeated throughout the season of Advent. When Jesus cleaned the temple pointed to the sort of commerce with which the temple ought to be filled: ‘My house shall be called the house of prayer’. The first line of Dr. Donne’s sonnet describes something quite similar. Using a vivid metaphor he counsels himself, ‘digest… this wholesome meditation’. And, that of course, is what we are doing too, ruminating on this sonnet. The metaphor was not selected at random. It alludes to the collect for the second Sunday in Advent:

Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience, and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ.

That blessed hope of everlasting life, the mystery that this poem’s speaker bids us inwardly to digest, is that God became man to redeem – to buy back with his own suffering – what was stolen.

With these rich intertextual connections in mind, the closing epigram can have its full force. Aware that we do not love God as he loves us, that our love is weak, and that we allow other things to steal from him the attention, devotion, obedience, and love he is due, Donne bids us to meditate on all that God did for us in his incarnation.

’Twas much, that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.