Shair: Ho Naseeb Nazar-e-Karam Unko

Nadamat kya chez hai, aati tak nahi sharam unko,
Baat ka apni kisi zamane main tha bharam unko,
Ujar ker bhi tere darbaar main yehi dua kerta hon,
Ilahi teri mehfil se ho naseeb nazar-e-karam unko,

What of regret? They feel not even shame on their doing,
They who once long ago used to value their word,
But even after ruin only this prayer escapes my lips,
My Lord may they only be destined with your grace,

- Hassan Bin Fahim

An Introduction to Shara McCallum's Madwoman

    Madwoman by Shara McCallum

     Alice James Books, 2017

    ISBN: 978-1-938584-28-2

Shara McCallum

Let me confess: I had never heard of Shara McCallum. At AWP Conference 2017, mid Friday morning, I listened, rapt, in a session called, �Written on a Woman�s Body: A cross-genre reading of bold writings about women and their bodies.� The presenters were prepared and impressive. The last presenter on the panel was Shara McCallum. A tough spot to be in, last. She opened, not with her own work, as the other four presenters had, but by reading Lucille Clifton�s �leda 1,� �leda 2,� and �leda 3.� McCallum�s commanding voice pulled off this reading and, in the process, put her own work in a vulnerable position. Then the strength of her own words followed�outstanding. She read from her newest publication, Madwoman, the following poems: �Madwoman a Rasta Medusa,� �Oh Abuse,� �Insomnia,� �Grief,� �To Red,� and �The Parable of Shit and Flowers,� in that order. Wow. The book was available at the Alice James booth in the book fair; I read it as I flew home from D.C. And this served as my introduction to Shara McCallum.  �Melva Sue Priddy

Shara McCallum was born in Jamaica to an African Jamaican father and a Venezuelan mother and moved to the United States with her family when she was nine. She earned a BA from the University of Miami, an MFA from the University of Maryland, and a PhD from Binghamton University. McCallum is the author of four previously published poetry books: The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems (Peepal Tree Press, UK, 2011); This Strange Land (Alice James Books, US, 2011), a finalist for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature; Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh Press, US, 2003); and The Water Between Us (University of Pittsburgh Press, US, 1999), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry.

 Recognition for her poetry includes a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, a Cave Canem Fellowship, inclusion in the Best American Poetry series, and other awards. Her poems and personal essays have been published in literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks in the US, the UK, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Israel and have been translated into Spanish, French, and Romanian.

McCallum�s dramatic reading drew me in. But the strength of her own words are admirable, at times lapsing into her Jamaican patois. As if this weren�t magical enough, her poems slip in and out of time, yet remain timeless. She includes the mystical and commonplace. She writes of all life�s maddening contradictions matter-of-factly, without explanations, reflecting real life. Madwoman does not step neatly from one age or stage to the next; her contradictions and paradoxes are often stirred in with rewritten myths, life challenges demanding one�s need to adapt and push through living, doing what has to be done, especially for a woman of color.  

One can, of course, make a search of all the wonderful reviews and interviews available on the internet (Consider reviews listed at the bottom of http://www.peepaltreepress.com/books/madwoman .) and so I intend only to introduce McCallum to readers unfamiliar with her work.  

The persona, Madwoman, marginalized, sane, insane, and, more likely, multiple beings at once, reoccurs, scattered throughout the book, and remains an engaging thread that confounds with her many anomalies. At one point, she is �the madwoman now being all women� (27). She is addressed by various voices from multiple intersections: �Madwoman as Salome�(8), �Madwoman in Middle Age� (24), �Why Madwomen Shouldn�t Read the News� (41), �Lot�s Wife to Madwoman� (51). 

One theme that binds this book concerns the various stages of womanhood. In response to a question about those stages and whether madness was an inevitable trait, McCallum states: 

I suspect some forms of �madness� are an inevitable byproduct of aging. As we go along in life, if we are fortunate to live long enough, we will all accumulate losses�of people we love to death or to the changing nature of relationships over time, or of parts of ourselves as we are forced to confront the fact that versions of who we thought we might be or a life we imagined we would live will simply not [be] coming into being. The poems in the collection address various feelings of �madness� roiling below the surface�among others, rage and sadness and dislocation of the self but also defiance, a wanting to say or actually saying �fuck you� to societal norms and expectations. The vantage points through which I look closely at or dwell in these poems in anger, despair, fear, moments of coming unhinged, etc. are those of womanhood and girlhood and the stages in-between, as you note. But I am sure the gamut of emotions the Madwoman confronts exists in men and women alike, in anyone who has eyes to see and does not close them. (�Introduction to the Madwoman: An Interview with Shara McCallum�, interview by Alice James Books)

A recurring motif is memory; what gets remembered, by whom, and why. In fact, McCallum�s prologue poem, �Little Soul� after Hadrian, opens the possibilities of memory�s role in, or lack of, influence. 

Little soul�kind, wandering�
body�s host and guest,

look how you�ve lowered yourself,
moving in a word of ice,

washed of color.  My girl, 
what compelled you once

is no more. 

Such a small, unassuming poem, and yet there it is: How are our lives shaped by memory, �what compelled you once�? Which begs of Madwoman, what role has memory played in your development? These questions will not be answered in this book. No neat little strings. McCallum doesn�t try to tell us what the meaning of her life is, what the meaning of our lives are, woman or man, madwoman or sane. And she reinforces this in the book�s second poem,�Memory� (quoted in full): 

I bruise the way the most secreted,most tender part of a thigh exposedpurples then blues.  No spit-shine shoes,I�m dirt you can�t wash from your feet.Wherever you go, know I�m the windaccosting the trees, the howling nightof your sea.  Try to leave me, I�ll pin you between a rock and a hard place; will hunt you,even as you erase your trackswith the tail ends of your skirt.  You thinkI�m gristle, begging to be chewed?No, my love: I�m bone.  Rather: the sound
bone makes when it snaps.  That ditty
lingering in you, like ruin. (5)

Nothing sentimental here, no, rather bruises, dirt, howling, bone and ruin that linger. At best, the truth will confront: �Friends,/do you remember when we were young?/Life plump with promise and dreams?/Me neither� (41). Memories can �become unbearable� (12). But answer our life�s questions?  One voice asks midway through �Madwoman Apocrypha,� �Shouldn�t the death of ten thousand matter/more to you than that of just one person?� and another answers, �Yes. But I�m afraid grief isn�t math� (75). �Insomnia� speaks: �Dear one, why do you assume/there are lessons?� (64).

Yet even in the grittiness of life, McCallum gives us some beauty and innocence, but not much. �How else chart/a course than the way a child//plucks flowers from a field�/the eye compelling the hand to reach� (11). Even �Death� waxes poetic, if absolute: ��for I am in you/as the river is inside the stone�(56). 

In McCallum�s last poem, and the longest covering nine pages, �Madwoman Apocrypha,� several voices are speaking at once. Interlaced are those who will question and those who will tell Madwoman something, each with his/her own agenda. �Apocrypha� is a biblical term referring to texts of largely unknown authorship. When asked how this word defines the poem, McCallum responds: 

It speaks to it very well. But there�s another part of the definition of the word that is important to me to add to the mix. Apocryphal texts are those omitted from the �canon� and are therefore not accepted as doctrine. Aspersions are often cast upon apocryphal narratives�due to their supposed lack of authenticity or truthfulness or sufficient evidence to back them up�in order to qualify and rationalize their exclusion. (�Introduction to the Madwoman: An Interview with Shara McCallum�, interview by Alice James Books)

An excerpt from this poem is difficult to layout, the page is broader than the regular page, but let me try, in order to show these voices intertwining.   

          Q: Why do you make the past a fiction?
          A: Everything is a wager.

                                                                                              Duppy know who to frighten. 
                                                               I heard this as admonishment 
                                                                           when a child.  But now
I think she is, I will be,
                                                                                        we have always been
                                                                                                             the duppy we fear.

          Q: What do you mean �a wager�?
          A: I needed to enact a search, but something happened
          I didn�t mean to have happen. I�ve become
          a sifter and a counter of grains.  


                                                                                     When as a child I couldn't sleep,
                                                                                                  stroking my arm,
                                                            she would sit with me, repeating,  �

                                                            nursery rhymes, song, nothing making sense
                                                            �

  but her voice and the dark.

          A: I don�t know where she ends and I begin. (77)

This last answer, above, has no question before it. The poem attempts to imitate the many voices each of us may have to confront within ourselves, even when there are no easy reassurances. 

Madwoman may be semi-autobiographical (most poems are), but, certainly, it reflects those voices living on the margins of society, voices full of authenticity, truth and lived experience but which are often unheard. Shara McCallum reminds us they are worth hearing by bringing us into their complex world. Find her work and read. And so I give McCallum the last word.

Q: Why do you keep referring to this woman

in third person? She is you after all, isn�t she

A: I�ve come to believe all stories

are self referential. Or else none of them are. 

When comes the night of your unmaking? (78)

Melva Sue Priddy lives near Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband. In addition to reading and writing, she enjoys gardening, sewing, and grandmaw-ing. She holds an MFA from Spalding University and has published work recently with Still: the Journal, Friends Journal, Poet Lore, and LexPoMo.. 

The Use of Names in Ben Jonson's Plays

The astute choice of a character’s name is something we, as readers, cherish in literature. We only have to recall Dickens’s villains to see how important a name can be in the depiction of a certain personality – the name Ebenezer Scrooge (A Christmas Carol), for example, with its harsh consonants, immediately hints at unkindness and cruelty, whilst the name Verneering (Our Mutual Friend) at once reveals a sense of superficiality and an obsession with ostentation. When dwelling on the importance of names in literature, we may also recall Virginia Woolf’s feminist novel A Room of One’s Own, the heroine of which is never fully identified apart from as ‘Mary’. Given that this name was, at the time, the most common female name, this naming sets her forth as a universal figure of feminine life. This tradition of the precise selecting of names partly stems back to Medieval morality plays, in which the characters each represent a particular virtue or vice and are named accordingly: in the anonymously-written, archetypal morality play, Everyman, the protagonist is surrounded by characters like ‘Good-Deeds’, ‘Beauty’, ‘Knowledge’ and ‘Strength’. Arguably, it was this tradition that Ben Jonson drew on in the skilled naming of his characters: though their names can be easily overlooked, his specific choices often emphasise particular aspects of his satirical writing. In his three most famous comedies, Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, Jonson uses names to exemplify the idiosyncrasies of his characters before we have even met them, and it is often the naming of his characters that drives his satire or elucidates his plots.

The naming of characters in Volpone is the simplest manifestation of this phenomenon. In the play, Jonson draws directly on the medieval fabliaux tradition and, as Michael Jamieson points out, ‘The people of the play are, through their names, invested with animal symbolism…’ The play is set in Venice, a city which was, to the Elizabethans, seen as a hub of corruption – many audience members would recall the usury of Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. The name Volpone, in Italian, literally means ‘sly fox’, and thus the protagonist comes to represent this corruption – his manipulative scheming (evident in his comic asides), like that of Subtle, Face, and Doll in The Alchemist, comes straight out of the cony-catching pamphlets of the Early Modern period. The other characters are likewise elucidated by their names: Corbaccio (‘the raven’), Voltore (‘the vulture’) and Corvino (‘the crow’) are all carrion-eating fowl, hungry not for flesh but for the wealth of the play’s protagonist. This animalism is so extreme that Corvino, for instance, commits to disinheriting his son and prostituting his wife. But this is Jonson’s name choosing at its most simple. More interesting are characters like Sir Politic Would-Be, whose name gives away his role as the ridiculous Englishman abroad, vainly attempting to be politic and sensible, an endeavour in which he fails miserably. Indeed, he is so absurd that he notes in his diary every single action he performs (including urination) during each day, and he characteristically ends the play hiding in a tortoise shell, the victim of one of Peregrine’s clever pranks. Thus, we can see how his name goes towards a satire of the ignorant English traveller, his mind filled with extravagant and bizarre business ideas with which he bores characters and audience alike. Likewise, the name ‘Littlewit’ is ironically telling, making the opening scene of Bartholomew Fair all the more humorous. This garrulous amateur dramatist is infatuated with his own negligible intelligence, constantly endeavouring to present himself as a witty and clever orator. For example, when Winwife employs some relatively clichéd metaphors (‘strawberry-breath, cherry-lips, apricot-cheeks, and a soft velvet head’), Littlewit ironically cannot restrain his admiration: ‘that I had not that before him, that I should not light on’t as well as he! Velvet head!’ Justice Overdo’s name is similarly revealing of his character, predicting the exaggeration and self-satisfied nature of his speeches: ‘Now to my enormities: look upon me, O London! and see me, O Smithfield! The example of justice, and mirror of magistrates, the true top of formality, and scourge of enormity. Hearken unto my labours…!’ He, along with the Puritan Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, is just one of the many bourgeois characters of this carnivalesque play whose pretensions to honour, authority and religiosity are mocked by Jonson (who, of course, loathed the Puritans for their critique of the theatre), and it is the naming of these characters that contributes to Jonson’s mockery.

Similar naming techniques are used in one of Jonson’s other satirical comedies, The Alchemist. Sir Epicure Mammon is one of the ‘gulls’ hoping to get rich from Subtle’s feigned magical skill. The name Epicure refers to the Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, famed for an emphasis on sensual pleasure (though this depiction of his philosophy is somewhat inaccurate and exaggerated). The name Mammon is also suggestive, meaning ‘wealth regarded as an evil influence or false object of worship or devotion’. To an extent, then, the name Epicure Mammon is oxymoronic – though his forename implies an emphasis on material and physical existence, his surname seems to refute that, again showing how Jonson uses names to mock certain characters. So it’s no wonder that a character with such a name is so obsessed with the wealth and material riches that he hopes to acquire, which he boasts about to Doll: he shall have ‘glasses / Cut in more subtle angles, to disperse / And multiply the figures, as I walk / Naked between my succubæ.’

Even more witty a choice of name is the name adopted by Jeremy the Butler, who refers to himself as Captain Face whilst he is operating as a member of London’s criminal underworld. The name alone suggests the adoption of a mask, though we don’t find out until Act V that his real name is Jeremy. As Jonathan Haynes points out, ‘All traces of origin are effaced’ by Face’s ‘constant and impeccable role-playing.’ Thus, Face is an ‘impostor’, one of many corrupt characters lurking in London’s underworld: as the Prologue explains, ‘No clime breeds better matter, for your whore, / Bawd, squire, impostor, many persons more.’ (lines 7-8) At the end of the play, though, Face is unmasked. And yet, he is, to some extent, the victor of the play. He is so manipulative and skilful that Lovewit’s neighbours think ‘Jeremie / Is a very honest fellow…’ Moreover, as the name Lovewit would imply, Face’s master appreciates his wit and scheming intellect, and thus Face can use his wit to gain his master’s pardon:

‘Give me but leave to make the best of my fortune,

And only pardon me thi' abuse of your house:

It's all I beg. I'll help you to a widow,

In recompense, that you shall give me thanks for…’

Hence, at the end of the play, Lovewit pays tribute to his servant’s ingenuity: he is ‘very grateful’ to have ‘received such happiness by a servant.’ It’s no surprise that a character called Lovewit would feel obliged to be ‘A little indulgent to that servant’s wit,’ and thus again we can see how Jonson’s use of naming helps not only to illustrate his characters, but to develop and almost foreshadow the plot. And though Lovewit is the eventual winner of the play (gaining a wife and augmented wealth), Face certainly ends up better off than his two scheming companions Subtle and Doll, who are forced to flee once the master of the house arrives unexpectedly. Face is what was known in the Renaissance period as a ‘taker-up’:

‘The taker-up seemeth a skilful man in all things, who hath by long travail learned without book a thousand policies to insinuate himself into a man’s acquaintance. Talk of matters in law, he hath plenty of cases at his fingers’ ends, and he hath seen, and tried, and ruled in the King’s courts. Speak of grazing and husbandry, no more knowether more shires than he, nor better way to raise a gainful commodity, and how the abuses and overture of prices might be redressed.’ – Greene, Notable Discovery

Face can use his wit to adopt multiple different personalities (hence the name ‘Face’, establishing his use of masks) – as Haynes explains, ‘Everyone is spoken to in his own language.’ He can talk to Drugger about tobacco, he can talk to Dapper about his milieu, all the while ready to transform back into Jeremy the Butler. Thus, the barrier between the criminal underworld and straight society becomes permeable for him, whilst it is not for Subtle and Doll. In this sense, Face can be seen as a warning to Elizabethan theatre-goers, his character demonstrating the Trump-like deceptions and manipulations not only of the criminal underworld, but of society in general.

We must remember, though, how aware Jonson was of the dangers of satire – he was, after all, arrested and imprisoned more than once for his satirical work. One of his most interesting satirical works, Poetaster, works completely differently in terms of naming. Jonson’s play sets out, amongst other things, to revenge the criticism he had received from Marston, Dekker and others during the so-called ‘War of the Theatres’ or Poetomachia. But, as he explains in his Apologetical Dialogue, he aims to ‘spare the persons and to speak the vices’. By setting his play in Augustan Rome rather than in London, Jonson champions his own style of Horatian satire (or, at least, the style of poetry to which he aspires), while criticising the Juvenalian satire of Marston and Dekker (though, in bitterly attacking these two playwrights as ‘vile ibids’ in the Apologetical Dialogue, Jonson was hypocritically sinking to the Juvenalian level) – thus, the play can be seen as a general satire of the poetaster figure whilst also criticising Jonson’s rivals. The loathsome Crispinus is often read as a representation of Marston – towards the end of the play, Crispinus vomits up what Tom Cain refers to as a series of ‘Marstonisms’, a pretentious and bombastic lexical flood including words like ‘retrograde’, ‘incubus’, ‘glibbery’, ‘magnificate’ and more. Moreover, the two poems that Crispinus and Demetrius read are undeniable parodies of Marston and Dekker’s work. But still, by choosing not to name Marston in the play, Jonson arguably escapes accusations of Juvenalian, bitter satire.

By (uncharacteristically) avoiding the use of illuminating names, Jonson is also able to compare himself to the great Augustan poet Horace, ‘a self-projection of Jonson’ according to Tom Cain. After all, the two poets were indeed very similar – Horace was often taunted because his father was a freed slave, and Jonson was acutely self-conscious of his step-father’s profession as a brick-layer; Horace had fought in Philippi, Jonson fought in the Low Countries. To an extent, then, Jonson seems to be modelling himself on Horace: in fact, in his Discoveries Jonson advocated exactly that: the ability ‘to bee able to convert the substance, or Riches of an other Poet, to his owne use.’ Thomas Smith even praised Jonson as ‘the elaborate English Horace,’ and like Horace, Jonson often chose to write in a realist style, ‘out of use and experience’ (Discoveries). Thus, Jonson could implicitly compare himself to the great Augustan satirist in an attempt to elevate his style.

There are other comparisons in Poetaster that also ought not to be ignored. The play opens with Ovid composing a poem which turns out to be one of Marlowe’s own translations of Ovid, lines from a banned edition published with Sir John Davies’s epigrams. Marlowe was one of the most loved poets of the day, and Jonson clearly respected him, though Marlowe does not completely escape criticism – compared to the virtues of Virgil and Horace, Ovid is seen as sensuous and arguably blasphemous in his organisation of the Divine Banquet (this, again, would link the Ovid character to Marlowe, who was often accused of blasphemy and atheism, and whose play Dr Faustus presents us with a similarly blasphemous banquet scene in Rome). So by presenting Ovid in such a way that we can’t help thinking of Marlowe, Jonson was able to express his opinions without fear of danger – Thomas More arguably used a similar technique in Utopia, hiding his own beliefs from the reader. Thus, the banishment of Ovid could be compared to the death of Marlowe, and as Tom Cain writes, ‘The Ovid being rejected is as much the Ovid of the 1590s in England [i.e. Marlowe and poets who wrote in a similar vein] as the historical Ovid of Augustan Rome.’ Finally, by setting the play in Rome, Jonson could make a subtle contrast and criticism between the high regard poets were held in under Augustus’s rule, and their relatively harsh treatment in Elizabethan England. It is poets that guide the Emperor Augustus in Jonson’s play, whilst it was libel and informers (like Tucca) that drove the Essex Rebellion of 1601, the year Jonson’s play was first performed.

So it’s clear that names played a huge role in Ben Jonson’s dramatic work. In his later comedies, he used names to elucidate and expound the personalities of certain characters whilst also satirising or ironizing them, whilst in the earlier Poetaster he deliberately avoids the direct naming of his subjects (if we can go so far as to say for sure that Jonson was attempting to satirise Marston and Dekker, amongst others). It is Histrio’s plays that directly mock and bitterly attack individuals: Ben Jonson, posing as the virtuous Horace, suggests he will not wrong ‘men’s fames’ (Trebatius’s words) in his verse. The implication is that Jonson (as Horace), along with Virgil (whom some critics have claimed resembles Chapman), is aloof from that, though it is doubtful whether he really is. Whatever the answer, it’s clear that Jonson thought very carefully about the choice of names in his plays, and through those names he makes his comedies and satires all the more powerful. As Haynes argues, Jonson used his art ‘in society as a weapon, or tool, or organ.’ Whether it was mocking the folly of naïve bourgeois figures like Cokes or Littlewit; whether it was revealing and revelling in the dark scheming of the criminal underworld; whether it was critiquing Early Modern nascent capitalism; or whether it was responding to the attacks of other poets, Jonson made the naming of characters an expressive tool in his work, carrying on and expanding earlier traditions, and influencing the work of writers who came after him.

Masks and Poses in Donne's Holy Sonnets

In his poem ‘Jordan’, George Herbert criticises the convoluted nature of Renaissance poetry and urges poets towards straightforward expressions of emotion, particularly religious emotion. He questions ‘Is there in truth no beauty?’ and opens the poem’s third stanza with the memorable line: ‘Shepherds are honest people; let them sing…’ With the pastoral reference and the use of the word ‘honest’, Herbert also seems to be condemning the insincerity of 17^th Century courtly life contrasted with a sense of rustic innocence. John Donne himself was acutely aware of this artificiality, evident in his sonnet ‘Oh, to vex me…’ (often printed as the last sonnet in the sequence) in which he reveals the variety of masks he adopts in his poetry. He questions whether he can really demonstrate the real truth of his soul ‘By circumstances, and by signes that be / Apparent in us…’ He looks back at his past and sees only a succession of skilfully-adopted poses: ‘to day / In prayers, and flattering speaches I court God: / To morrow I quake with true feare of his rod.’ He showed a similar awareness in his sermons, as when he discussed the dangers of rhetoric and the power of words ‘to shape that beliefe’ and ‘to powre it into new molds… to stamp and imprint new formes, new images, new opinions in it.’ In his Holy Sonnets, Donne does exactly that: he uses his poetic skill to shape various different identities for himself.

Indeed, Donne’s whole life seems to have been divided into a dual identity. A clear split has been forged between the young and lustful Donne of the Songs and Sonnets and the old and devout Donne of the Divine Poems. This division was partly driven by the mature Donne’s desire to distance himself from the sensuousness of his early poetry, a distance reinforced by Izaak Walton’s biography of Donne, in which he compared the poet to a latter-day Augustine, the saint whose conversion at the hands of St. Ambrose became an influential Christian paradigm. But this division is unhelpful in a number of ways, not least because it is based on the false assumption that the religious poems were written much later than the Songs and Sonnets, an assumption with very little evidence to support it. Moreover, the poems themselves undermine the so-called ‘myth of two Donnes’ in that, throughout the Holy Sonnets, we see the same wit and performance for which the Songs and Sonnets are renowned. As P.M. Oliver points out, ‘Donne’s religious writing… demonstrates a striking continuity with the amatory and satirical verse he had already written.’ True, the matter of the religious poems may be different, but their manner and style are very similar. Like the love poems, the divine poems are often ‘witty, individualistic performances.’ This does, however, leave us with some problems: the idiosyncratic wit and rhetorical skill of the poet often undermines the masks he is attempting to adopt, and to that extent the authenticity of emotion in the Holy Sonnets must be called into question.

Donne adopts two major poses in theHoly Sonnets: the first is that of the submissive and despairing sinner, terrified that his transgressions will lead to his damnation. The second mask he adopts is that of a man assured of his own election, unafraid and almost swaggering. The first mask, that of fear, despair, and melancholy, is typical of devotional verse: Gerard Manley Hopkins adopted a similar personality in his ‘Terrible Sonnets’. The melancholy pose was also typical of the Renaissance man, hence the abundance of young men painted as forlorn youths tortured by unrequited love. Donne himself had one of these portraits commissioned in which he is depicted in darkness with his arms folded – a standard symbol of melancholy – and a large-brimmed hat shading his face. Just as he adopted this pose as a pitiful lover, so in the Holy Sonnets he adopts the pose of pitiful sinner. For example, the fourth sonnet opens with the impassioned exclamation: ‘Oh my black Soule!’ and ends with the embracing of a mournful pose: ‘Oh make thy selfe with holy mourning blacke, / And red with blushing, as thou art with sinne…’ His repentance, then, seems to be a mask in itself, and thus we can infer that the poem’s opening exclamation is no more than an artificiality. Indeed, a number of the poems seem to come across as theatrical and dramatic representations rather than sincere expressions of despair. In her introduction to the divine poems, Helen Gardner notes this ‘almost histrionic note’ and attributes it to ‘the meditation’s deliberate stimulation of emotion.’ The emotions of the poems seem almost fabricated at points, as is suggested by the repetition of ‘oh’ and ‘alas’ in the sequence. These exclamations seem particularly out of context when they follow relatively collected and rational meditations, as in ‘Father, part of his double interest…’ After meditating on the doctrine of the Bible and the various commandments God has given, Donne exclaims: ‘thy last command / Is all but love; Oh let this last Will stand!’ The ‘oh’ makes it seem like the speaker is emotionally involved, but as Oliver points out, ‘the level rationality of the preceding lines’ makes it hard to see the speaker as ‘desperate or hysterical.’

There are similarly histrionic notes in the Songs and Sonnets, again showing why the amatory-religious divide is unhelpful. For example, in ‘The Flea’, when his mistress has crushed the flea with her nail, Donne melodramatically exclaims: ‘Cruel and sudden, hast thou since / Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?’ Here, Donne is adopting a tone of sadness in order to inspire the pity of his mistress. Arguably, the Holy Sonnets use a similar tactic, attempting to inspire the pity of God through a pose of despair which often comes across as melodramatic. ‘This is my play’s last scene’ opens very sensationally, with the word ‘last’ repeated four times in the first four lines alone. It’s no wonder, then, that Gardner pointed out the ‘note of exaggeration’ which, ‘in stimulating feeling… may falsify it, and overdramatize the spiritual life.’ But this melodrama is not the only aspect of the Songs and Sonnets which has crept into the religious verse. Throughout the divine poems there are idiosyncratic paradoxes, conceits and puns which, though typical of Donne, seem somewhat out of place in devout religious poetry. For example, in ‘A Hymne to God the Father’, Donne mourns his sinfulness with an authentic voice of fear and despair: ‘Wilt thou forgive that sinne where I begunne, / Which was my sin, though it were done before?’ And yet, the first two stanzas end with a paradoxical pun on his name, jarring with the serious tone of the previous lines: ‘When thou hast done, thou hast not done, / For, I have more.’ This mixture of wit and gloom is something that Wilbur Sanders criticised in the Holy Sonnets as a flaw, though perhaps it shows the tension in Donne between a yearning towards seriousness and an inability to completely escape his jocular self. Hence, in the words of Sanders, ‘the personality becomes the prey of inner division.’

This seems to be the underlying flaw of many of the sonnets: though at times they present us with an apparently sincere sense of grief, fear and despair, this is often counteracted by a strange frivolity, as when he plays verbal games with colours at the end of ‘Oh my black Soule!’ Their other major drawback is that they are often dominated by what Sanders calls ‘blatant theological sophistry.’ This is no more evident than in ‘What if this present were the world’s last night?’ In the octet, the speaker focuses on the picture of Christ crucified and wonders whether Christ will ‘adjudge thee unto hell’ even though he ‘pray’d forgivenesse for his foes’. The sestet opens with a direct response: ‘No, no…’ This audacity in itself is odd, and somewhat hard to believe: perhaps Donne used his poetry as a method of self-assurance. He then argues that the beauty of Christ’s image on the cross ‘assumes a pitious mind.’ But Donne, as a Calvinist, knew that this could not be true, since Christ could not be merciful to everybody: the elect would receive God’s pity, whilst the non-elect would feel his wrath and eventually be damned. Indeed, Universalism (the theory that everybody could be saved) was condemned as a heresy in Constantinople in 553 and again at the Protestant Augsburg Confession of 1530, and so it’s incredibly unlikely that Donne could have believed this sophistic argument. Thus, Christ’s image cannot assure pity for everybody. Moreover, Donne’s reference to his idolatrous past is telling since, as Stanley Fish points out, ‘The assertion that he is not now in his idolatry is undermined by the fact that he here says the same things he used to say when he was.’ So it’s clear, then, that as Sanders says, ‘the consolation does not console’ – Donne’s verbal ability to assure himself of his safety seems to undermine itself, revealing his manifest casuistry. Fish goes on: ‘as the poem concludes, he is no more assured of what he assumes than anyone else, neither of the ‘piteous minde’ of his saviour, nor of the spiritual stability he looks to infer from the saviour’s picture.’

The same can be said for Donne’s famous sonnet ‘Death be not proud’. Throughout his life, Donne was obsessed with the idea of death: as a young Catholic in Protestant England, he was taken to see Catholics martyred, an experience that stayed with him into his elderly years. He also wrote tracts on the morality of suicide, and, most famously, is said by Walton to have ‘preached his own Funeral Sermon’ known as ‘Death’s Duel’, a sermon he gave in the final days of his life. He was terrified by the idea that death takes away our individual essence as humans:

‘[T]hat private and retired man, that thought himself his own for ever, and never came forth, must in his dust of the grave be published, and (such are the revolutions of the grave) be mingled with the dust of every highway and of every dunghill, and swallowed in every puddle and pond. This is the most inglorious and contemptible vilification, the most deadly and peremptory nullification of man, that we can consider.’ (‘Death’s Duel’)

In the sermon, he defeats this fear by concluding that every man must ‘lie down in peace in his grave, till he vouchsafe you a resurrection…’ The sonnet ‘Death be not proud…’ follows a similar line, though it is much more bravado in its argument. He addresses personified mortality as ‘poore death’ and bravely says: ‘nor yet canst thou kill mee…’ Death, he says, is ‘slave to Fate’ and asks ‘why swell’st thou then?’ This question in itself, though, supposes that death still assumes a large portion of Donne’s thought, swelling beyond reason into an irrational fear. The poem ends with a theatrical and yet hollow flourish: ‘death shall be no more, death, thou shalt die’. Despite the bravado of this statement, Donne’s declaration is vacuous – as John Stachniewski argues, the fact that it ends with the word ‘die’ ironically demonstrates that death still has power in the poem. Similarly, when Donne says ‘valiantly I hels wide mouth o’rstride’ we see him adopting a peculiarly audacious stance resonating with the precarious assertiveness of ‘Death be not proud’. Thus, whilst these sophistic arguments may have worked in seducing mistresses with wit and humour, they seem incredibly out of place in an eschatological context of salvation or damnation. They may show Donne’s poetic and rhetorical skill, but as Fish notes, ‘The effort of self-persuasion… fails in exactly the measure that his rhetorical effort succeeds.’

In his poem ‘Metempsychosis’ Donne reflects upon the stretching of ‘reasons… to so nice a thinness through a quill / That they themselves break, do themselves spill…’ This stretching of reason is frequently dramatized in the Holy Sonnets, the strength of the sophistic arguments often driven to a ludicrous extent, revealing their weakness. But this is not to say that the poems themselves are weak: this may have been part of Donne’s intention. Perhaps the meaning of the poems is to be found in their note of feigned assurance. As Stachniewski suggests, ‘the argument of Donne’s poems is often so strained that it alerts us to its opposite, the emotion or mental state in defiance of which the argumentative process was set to work. The poem’s meaning lives in the tension between the argument and the emotion.’ Perhaps in ‘This is my playes last scene’ we are not meant to believe with such assurance that Donne’s sins will fall away to Hell whilst he goes up to Heaven. We are, perhaps, urged to question this argument. And so, this self-conscious casuistry is a subtle and effective way of establishing the poetry’s dominant emotions, doubt and fear.

It’s clear, then, that Donne’s poetic style largely stayed with him throughout his career. The same use of wit and paradox can be seen in the Holy Sonnets as was seen in the Songs and Sonnets. It’s also clear that Donne’s poetry is largely a succession of poses, and this is something he himself seems to have been aware of. The sonnets often begin with a pose of despair and then move onto a pose of self-assured certainty. It’s no wonder, really, that the pose of despairing sinner seems, as Gardner says, ‘exaggerated’ to the modern reader given that we no longer live in a country dominated by Calvinism and the fear of God’s wrath – perhaps, then, we can look past this histrionic note as understandable. Moreover, perhaps this tone of feigned emotion simply demonstrates the impossibility of expressing such strong feeling in words. It’s somewhat harder to excuse the strange use of wit and paradox, which seems to undermine Donne’s apparent despair, revealing it to be just a pose (though that’s not to say he never felt despair, just to say that the despair expressed in the sonnets comes across as somewhat feigned). Similarly, the paradoxical sophistry destabilises any sense of self-assurance and comfort, revealing the mask of boldness adopted by the poet. But, as I argued earlier, perhaps this sense of failed assurance was intentional. Though Donne forces his fierce emotions into the restricted sonnet form, and though he apparently attempts to mitigate his despair with theological sophistry which he surely cannot fail to doubt, other emotions inevitably seep out. Just as the highly-wrought passions of ‘Batter my heart…’ seem almost to break free from the strict rhyme scheme and metre (the initial trochee ‘Batter’ being an obvious example), so the despair of the other Holy Sonnets is never really soothed. Perhaps Donne was partly right when he said: ‘Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce, / For, he tames it, who fetters it in verse.’ But, as we read the sonnets, we get the sense that Donne never truly succeeded in ‘taming’ his grief and his fear completely. Each line is bursting with tension, uncertainty, and doubt, and it is this that gives the sonnets their excitement.