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Unit 12: The Age of Johnson-The Decline of Neoclassicism (Gothic Novel)

in one of his amorous poems, “The Canonization.” He likens the phenomenon of sexual climax Notes
followed by renewal of ardor to the mystery of the Resurrection of the Body (a metaphor that
works for the poet because in Renaissance parlance, “die” was a commonplace for orgasm). “We
die and rise the same, and prove/ Mysterious by this love.” No poem of John Donne’s is more
widely read or more directly associated with Donne than the tenth of the Holy Sonnets, Death, be
not proud.” (Donne’s reputation as a moribund preacher was well-known. had a portrait of himself
made while posed in a winding-sheet so that he could contemplate a personalized memento
mori.) Donne draws upon a popular subject in medieval and Renaissance art, Le roi mort or King
Death. With an impudence that is characteristically Donne’s, he deflates Death in the opening
salvo. He discounts the power of death as a mere fiction: “Death, be not proud, though some have
called thee/ Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so./ For those whom thou think’st thou dost
overthrow/ Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.”
The rhetorical theme of the poem goes back and forth between the two perceptions of death
inherent in the Judeo-Christian belief-system. The first is the perception of death as a natural and
desirable end to life and its vicissitudes, and adding to that the Christian idea that death is the
avenue to eternal salvation. In the second quatrain, Donne says that if fatigue-induced sleep, one
of life’s greatest boons, is the very picture of death, then how much more pleasure will come from
death itself? Even the virtuous must go with Death, to the “Rest of our bones, and soul’s delivery.”
The second perception about death comes in the third quatrain—the image of death as vile
accompaniment to evil forces in life: “Thou’rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,/
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell.” The poet even notes that narcotics or witchcraft
(“poppies or charms”) can outdo death in making people sleep, since drug-induced or hex-generated
trances are not as permanent as death. The superiority of these human-based modes of death takes
away the last shred of dignity for death: “Why swell’st thou then?” His confident reliance is on the
victory of Christ over Death through the Resurrection: “One Short sleep past, we wake eternally,/
And death shalt be no more. Death, thou shalt die.” The verbal gymnastics that Donne performs in
this sonnet cannot disguise the fact that as a Christian he must entertain these two ideas of death:
death as rescuer, death as punisher of even the most noble. In the end, all that he can do in order to
deal with the enormity of death is to turn the sting of death against death itself.

The Anglican Reformation brought about a need for hymns in English to replace the Latin canticles.
Donne wrote many religious poems and hymns, although none have taken a place in the standard
repertory of English hymnody.

Notes “A Hymn to God the Father,” can be found in the 1982 Hymnal from which
Episcopalians m America sing.
Dr. Donne’s religious hymns show a breadth of knowledge which we associate with the cliché
Renaissance man, which indeed he was. Canon law, Scripture, and Church history were areas that
he had complete intellectual mastery over, but his academic province stretched far beyond that.
Interestingly enough, despite the fact that he did have university experience, his verse is relatively
free of Greco-Roman allusion, the mainstay of Renaissance verse for the poetic mainstream of
Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton. This anti-Olympianism, as it were, is a characteristic not only of
Donne’s verse but the Metaphysicals in general. Both his secular and religious verses show him to
have more than a layman’s knowledge of the sciences, a branch of human intellectual endeavor
that has seldom been congenial with theological studies. Of the sciences, he was most fascinated
with the physical ones mathematics, geometry, chemistry, astronomy, and geography. His
fascination with the shape of the physical planet, not just as the home of souls, and the nature of the
physical heavens as other than the abode of the Divine place him as very decidedly in the Renaissance
Zeitgeist which prized exploration.
But Donne’s religious poems and hymns show not just a quick, fertile intellect at work. They reveal
a personal intimacy and confessional disposition that one would not expect from a clergyman
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