Rhetoric and Doctrine in Donne’s Holy Sonnet IV
1969; Iter Press; Volume: 15; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.33137/rr.v15i1.12845
ISSN2293-7374
Autores Tópico(s)Medieval Literature and History
Resumosonnet beginning "At the round earths imagined corners"fourth in Dame Helen Gardner's numbering of Donne's Holy Sonnets, ^seventh in Sir Herbert Grierson'shas had almost as distinguished a career in the lists of commentary as in the civil quiet of anthologies.LA.Richards used it for his Cambridge experiments in Practical Criticism, where it attracted the highest number of non-committal "votes."^Itfigures importantly in Dame Helen's account of the Holy Sonnets as illustrative of Donne's progress in doctrinal matters and of his Ignatian method in composition.It is analysed by Stanley Archer in his questioning of the relevance of that method to an understanding of Dome's poems, and employed by Murray Roston as an instance of Donne 's mannerism.It is, for Wilbur Sanders, "eloquently modulated" and "spine-tingling" (perhaps the Holly woodism is half-way to dispraise), t ut finally not the product of "a genuinely religious encounter."^Moreevidence could be added to quaUfy Richards' observationupon revie\^tng student proto- cols on the sonnetthat "It is in the nature of some performances that they leave the spectator feeling rather helpless."After responding to the contrast between the grand evocation of general Judgement in the octave and the private quiet of the sestet's plea for instruction in repentance, and to the apparent logic that con- nects them, one hesitates over the tone and import of at least three passages.Even if these hesitations can be accommodated reasonably well to some interpretation of the poem, the passages remain a matter j of concern because they seem to point outward to the preoccupations I of Donne's Pseudo-Martyr and of several elegiesall probably written i within a year of the sonnet.It is as though one had seen beneath the surface of a stream not the expected smooth rocks, but the jagged out- fall of a quite different event."Round earths imagin'd corners," "Shall behold God, and never tast \ deaths woe," "for that's as good/ As if thou hadst seal'd my pardon, .with thy blood": these are the occasions of hesitation.First, why the i Renaissance et Réforme / 67 playing off of "round earth" against "imagin'd comers"?If one thinks of this as a stylistic tic, a merely characteristic turn of Donne's wit, one may conclude with Sanders that it is "chirpy"an inopportune levity made possible -as he goes on to conjecturebecause "Religion, in Donne's sonnet, feels like something made" as distinct from a "religious- ness that grows spontaneously out of the natural man."This suggestion raises issues to which one wants to return.But it prompts first another look at the tone of the line.The common gloss is Revelation 7.1 : "And after these things I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth. . .."The "things" are earth- quake, falling stars and other signs that "the great day of his wrath is come."Donne seems to have been fond of the passage, which he employs in three sermons."*That the corners are imagined should suggest caution in taking up Shawcross's idea^that the conventional iconographie con- trast between roundness (perfection) and angularity (imperfection) applies here.Donne of course knows the iconographie usage and employs it in "Upon the translation of the Psalms," the elegies on the death of Prince Henry and Lady Bedford, "The Legacie," and elsewhere.But when he writes of the roundness of the earth, as in "A Valediction of Weeping," "The Comparison," "To Sir Edward Herbert at Julyers," and in "The First Anniversary" (in which he also employs the circle iconographically: 11.268,275), his use is literal, and probably for the
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