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