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History of English Literature

Notes of Donne’s public stature—after all, King James named him Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the
largest church in the kingdom, in 1621, and he was in line for a bishopric when he died. (His name
is on the list of deans in Wren’s St. Paul’s, but at his own request his grave in the churchyard was
not marked.)
Donne’s 17th century biographer Isaak Walton gives the circumstances in which various Donne
poems were composed. More modern biographers have often proved Walton wrong, but the
feeling still persists that Donne wrote in reaction to various occasions.

Did u know? “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness” was written after his recovery from
the same especially severe illness of 1623 that produced the Devotions on
Emergent Occasions.
The first stanza sees himself, the sick man, as in a rehearsal room, waiting to go on the celestial
stage to sing with the Eternal Choir. Hence, he must look over his part and tune his instrument,
i.e., prepare spiritually for death. In the next stanza, he introduces the controlling metaphor for the
poem—the human body as a map. In this ingenious figure, his physicians (“by their love,” he adds
tongue-in-cheek) have become map-readers, studying him to discover the cause of impending
death, just as cosmographers of the Age of Discovery studied the charts to find a passage through
the American Continent to the Indies. (He puns on the word straits, meaning a water-passage as
well as an unfavorable situation. Donne finds comfort that whatever “southwest discovery” might
be (and he cites the names of all the famous straits), all such straits take him into the Western Sea
(the sea of eternal peacefulness), just as all modes of death lead to the next life. “What shall my west
hurt me?/ As west and east In all flat maps (and I am one) are one,/ So death doth touch the
Resurrection.” The poem concludes with a reference to an old Catholic tradition that the Cross was
made from wood that grew from the Edenic Tree of the Knowledge of Good and evil. The dying
man becomes a meeting-place for both the First and Last Adam: his fevered grow shows the curse
of Adam, while his soul is embraced by Christ. In his sickbed suffering, Donne sees his imitatio
Christi and he calls for the crown other than the crown of suffering, i.e., the crown of eternal life.
“A Hymn to God the Father” is a death-bed confessional, written, Walton claims, right before
Donne’s passing. The poetic voice lists all the sins that he has—original sin, sins of commission,
omission, and collusion. Readers will hear echoes of the penitent voice of Jack Donne the Elizabethan
rake in the stanza. “Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won/ Others to sin, and made my sin
their door?/ Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun/ A year or two, but wallowed in a score?”
In each instance, he concludes his catalogue of sins with “When thou hast done, thou hast not
done,” punning on the word done meaning completed and as a homonym for his name. In the last
stanza, this consummate Renaissance man, poet and prelate, who had reason to be proud, confronts
in himself the sin of pride. He fears that his ultimate sin will be to doubt the efficacy of Grace of
God through Christ to save such a titanic sinner as himself, and that he will “perish on the shore.”
He asks for a reaffirmation of the Covenant (punning on “sun”/”Son”) by which he is saved
through the light of Christ. Only then, in what a later 17th century preacher would call Grace
Abounding, can he die secure: “And having done that, thou hast done./ I fear no more.”

12.7 Summary

Clara Reeve, best known for her work The Old English Baron (1778), set out to take Walpole’s
plot and adapt it to the demands of the time by balancing fantastic elements with 18th
century realism.
As David De Vore states, “The Gothic hero becomes a sort of archetype as we find that there
is a pattern to their characterization.
Mrs. Radcliffe was an imitator of Walpole yet her attempts at the Gothic romance were
much more successful and artistic than Walpole’s.
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