Holy Sonnets

The Holy Sonnets, also called the Divine Meditations and the Divine Sonnets, are a series of nineteen poems by the English poet John Donne. Never published during his lifetime but widely circulated in manuscript, they have become some of Donne's most popular poems and are widely anthologized.

Contents

Dating

They were composed in 1609 and 1610, in a period of great personal distress for Donne, with physical, emotional, and financial hardship, as well as religious turmoil: originally a Roman Catholic, Donne did not officially join the Anglican Church until 1615. The Holy Sonnets reflect these anxieties.[1]

Manuscript and publication history

The dating of the poems' composition has been tied to the dating of Donne's conversion to Anglicanism. His first biographer, Izaak Walton, claimed the poems dated from the time of Donne's ministry (he became a priest in 1615); modern scholarship agrees that the poems date from 1609–1610, the same period during which he wrote an anti-Catholic polemic, Pseudo-Martyr.[2] "Since she whom I loved, hath paid her last debt," though, is an elegy to Donne's wife, Anne, who died in 1617,[3] and two other poems, "Show me, dear Christ, thy spouse so bright and clear" and "Oh, to vex me, contraries meet as one" are first found in 1620.[4]

The Variorum Edition of John Donne's work proposes three sequences for the total of nineteen sonnets. The first, the "original sequence", contains twelve sonnets; the second, the "Westmoreland sequence", contains nineteen; and the third, the "revised sequence", contains the twelve sonnets of the original sequence in a different order.[5] The relationship between these sequences is explained by Cummings, in his Seventeenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology: two sequences of twelve poems, having eight poems in common, with the addition of three later poems, make up the nineteen. [6]

Many of the poems circulated in manuscript: "Oh my black soul", for instance, survives in no fewer than fifteen manuscript copies, including a miscellany compiled for William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The twelve sonnets of the original sequence were published two years after Donne's death, in the 1633 collection Songs and Sonnets,[7] probably from manuscripts overseen by Donne himself.[8] From an earlier manuscript comes the 1635 collection called Divine Meditations, containing the revised sequence. The total of nineteen sonnets is found in the 1620 Westmoreland manuscript (now in the New York Public Library), prepared by Rowland Woodward, a friend of Donne; this manuscript contains the sixteen different sonnets of the Holy Sonnets (1633) and the Divine Meditations (1635), plus the three later poems.

List of first lines

Original sequence

  1. Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay
  2. As due by many titles I resign
  3. O might those sighs and tears return again
  4. Father, part of his double interest
  5. O, my black soul, now thou art summoned
  6. This is my play's last scene, here heavens appoint
  7. I am a little world made cunningly
  8. At the round earth's imagined corners, blow
  9. If poisonous minerals, and if that tree
  10. If faithful souls be alike glorified
  11. Death be not proud, though some have called thee
  12. Wilt thou love God, as he thee! then digest

Westmoreland sequence

  1. Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay
  2. As due by many titles I resign
  3. O might those sighs and tears return again
  4. O my black soul! now thou art summoned
  5. I am a little world made cunningly
  6. This is my play's last scene, here heavens appoint
  7. At the round earth's imagined corners, blow
  8. If faithful souls be alike glorified
  9. If poisonous minerals, and if that tree
  10. Death be not proud, though some have called thee
  11. Spit in my face you Jews, and pierce my side
  12. Why are we by all creatures waited on?
  13. What if this present were the world's last night?
  14. Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you
  15. Wilt thou love God, as he thee! then digest
  16. Father, part of his double interest
  17. Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt
  18. Show me, dear Christ, thy spouse so bright and clear
  19. O, to vex me, contraries meet in one

Revised sequence

  1. As due by many titles I resign
  2. O my black soul! now thou art summoned
  3. This is my play's last scene, here heavens appoint
  4. At the round earth's imagined corners, blow
  5. If poisonous minerals, and if that tree
  6. Death be not proud, though some have called thee
  7. Spit in soned God; for you
  8. Wilt thou love God, as he thee! then digest
  9. Father, part of his double interest

Spelling and punctuation as found in Cummings, Seventeenth-Century Poetry.

Quotations and adaptations

Notes

References

External links