In the winter of 1609, stricken with painful and protracted neuropathy, John Donne was forced to endure “imprisonment in bed.” (1) It is unsurprising that Donne, for whom poetry had become a form of prayer, should in such a moment try his hand at a poetic litany. He had pressing reasons to supplicate God: debilitating pain, the possible approach of death, and a years-long struggle to raise a growing family in a state of poverty that hardly merited the qualifier “genteel.”

John Donne's Litany
by
David K. Anderson