Abstract
Donne began composition of La Corona around 1607, four years after the death of Elizabeth I.1 He could now contemplate the ‘faithfull Virgin’ freed from her typological bondage to the queen’s cult of imperial sovereignty. He was, in his mid-thirties, close in age and suffering to the Christ whom he sought to join on the Cross in the fifth sonnet of the Corona sequence, ‘Crucifying’. Like the figure racked on the transverse beams of the Rood, Donne was himself torn by the opposing pull of a lingering mother faith and Anglican ‘fathers’ such as Thomas Morton, Dean of Gloucester, who wished to claim him for their ministry. In the last years of his life he would reiterate the hope of the first Corona sonnet that:
What thy thorny crowne gain’d, that give mee, A crowne of Glory, which doth flower alwayes; The ends crowne our workes, but thou crown’st our ends. (11. 7–9, p. 334)
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Notes
David Novarr, ‘The Dating of Donne’s Corona’, The Disinterred Muse: Donne’s Texts and Contexts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980) pp. 85–93, discounts Grierson’s proposal that La Corona was composed around 1607 and submits that it was probably written after a similar but shorter poem, ‘The Annuntiation and Passion’, late in 1608 or early 1609. Gardner in her ‘Commentary’ to The Divine Poems, pp. 55–6, 151–2, summarises Novarr’s initial conjectures and concludes that La Corona should probably be dated 1608 rather than 1609. Shawcross, The Complete Poetry, p. 413, holds to 1607, giving credence to a dated letter to Magdalene Herbert of the same year and the likelihood that the ‘hymns’ he asked her to harbour were the Corona sonnets.
Walton, Life, p. 259, describes him as preaching ‘like an angel from a cloud’ and Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, p. 197, contrasts La Corona’s crown of praise with the crown of glory the speaker hopes for from God.
Simone de Beauvoir saw the Virgin Mary’s adoration of the Christ Child as a shameful subjugation of woman before masculine triumphalism. But Julia Kristeva’s ‘Stabat Mater’ in Susan Rubin Suleiman (ed.), The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986) pp. 107–8, suggests that de Beauvoir was too quick to condemn the cult of Mary’s motherhood, though her own interest in this cult is psychoanalytic and not devotional. (Further references to this work may be indicated by page number in the text.)
Noted by Josephine Evetts-Secker, ‘Fuga Saeculi or Holy Hatred of the World: John Donne and Henry Hawkins’, Recusant History, vol. XIV (1977) pp. 40–52, and Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of Dr. John Donne, 4th edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973) p. 287.
See Martz, Poetry of Meditation, pp. 105–6, and Herbert Thurston’s history of the Bridgettine rosary, ‘Our Popular Devotions: The So-Called Bridgettine Rosary’, The Month, vol. C (1902) pp. 189–203, especially pp. 196–7.
See Strype, Annals in Caraman (ed.), The Other Face, pp. 25–6. Clarissa W. Atkinson discusses the Bridgettines or Brigittines in Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983) pp. 170–75. After its dissolution, Syon House became home to influential patrons of Donne as well as to an Anglican college. From Bald, A Life, pp. 229, 332, 391, 425, 439, it is evident that Donne continued to have contact with this seat of former holiness. Though ‘mount Sion desolate doth lye’ (l. 382) in ‘The Lamentations of Jeremy’, he would have been comforted to know that the Brigittines eventually returned and are the only pre-Reformation order in existence in England today. See Charles G. Herbermann (ed.), Edward A. Pace, Condé B. Pallen, Thomas J. Shahan and John Wynne, The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton, 1907) vol. II, p. 786.
See Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, p. 70, and A. B. Chambers, ‘The Meaning of The “Temple” in Donne’s La Corona’ in John R. Roberts (ed.), Essential Articles for the Study of John Donne’s Poetry, (Brighton: Harvester, 1975) pp. 349–50.
Flynn, ‘Donne’s Catholicism: I’, p. 15, n. 12, disputes Bald’s claim in A Life, pp. 63–4, that the meeting probably took place at the end of 1591 when Southwell formulated his petition to the queen. He believes, as does Carey, Life, Mind and Art, that 1584 is the more probable date, for then Jasper Heywood was visited by Elizabeth Donne and William Weston.
Thomas Worthington, The Rosarie of our Ladie, Otherwise called our Ladies Psalter (Antwerp, 1600) pp. 4–6. (Further references to this work may be indicated by page number in the text.)
Low remarks on the Jesuits’ private office in Love’s Architecture, p. 12. It is evident from Gerard’s Hunted Priest, p. 117, that the ingenious fabrication of rosaries from materials to hand, such as orange peel in Gerard’s case, was a form of psychological as well as spiritual resistance, sometimes even a form of physical therapy after having lost the use of the hands on the rack or iron gauntlet.
Lucas Pinelli, The Life of the Glorious Virgin Marie (1624), English Recusant Literature, no. 112 (Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar, 1972) p. 84. (Further references to this work may be indicated by page number in the text.)
I am not so certain as Richard Hughes, The Progress of the Soul: The Interior Career of John Donne (London: The Bodley Head, 1968) p. 140, that Donne found the rosary a convenient poetic vehicle but no longer believed in its efficacy.
See Patrick O’Connell, ‘“La Corona”: Donne’s Ars Poetica Sacra’, in Summers and Pebworth (eds), The Eagle and the Dove, pp. 119–30. Caroline Walker Bynum asks ‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’ and comes to some pertinent conclusions in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) pp. 82–107.
Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1950) p. 246.
In his Life of Christ, the Anglican Jeremy Taylor depicted the Virgin of the Annunciation and Nativity as a type of the Christian soul at prayer. See Allchin, ‘Our Lady in Seventeenth-Century Anglican Devotion’, Essays by Anglican Writers, p. 63.
Garnet, The Societie, p. 22, calls her womb ‘the worke-house of the same eternall spirite’ while Stafford would remark in The Femall Glory, p. 58, that the salvation of mankind depended on her fiat.
Commenting on Donne’s generous praise of the Virgin in ‘Good-friday, 1613. Riding Westward’, where Mary is described as ‘God’s partner’ who ‘furnish’d thus / Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom’d us’, Joe Glaser argues that Donne’s soul still bent ‘towards the east of his ardent Catholic childhood’ with its veneration of Mary, even while the course of his mature life bore him steadily more west towards a reformed Protestant position. See Joe Glaser, ‘“Goodfriday, 1613”: A Soul’s Form’, College Literature (Coll L), vol. XIII (1986) pp. 170–73.
See St. Gregory Thaumaturgus’ early homily in Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter: Mulieris Dignitatem on the Occasion of the Marian Year, special issue no. 3 (Theological Centrum, Nov. 1988) p. 12, n. 16.
See Lewis De la Puente, Meditations upon the Mysteries of Our Holie Faith, John Heigham (trans.) (St Omers, 1619) p. 264 (Further references to this work may be indicated by page number in the text); Gaspar Loarte, Instructions and Advertisements. How to Meditate the Misteries of the Rosarie (London, 1600) p. 110; Worthington, The Rosarie, p. 75; and Garnet, The Societie, p. 8.
Marilyn French, Shakespeare’s Division of Experience (New York: Summit, 1981) p. 128.
St Cyril of Alexandria’s address to the Fathers of the Council of Ephesus quoted in Paul Palmer’s Mary in the Documents of the Church (London: Burns & Oates, 1953) p. 50.
I am indebted to M. Thomas Hester’s essay, ‘Donne’s (Re)Annunciation’, on Elegy XIX for Marian suggestions which I have just followed up.
See Littlehales, Prymer, pp. xi–xxxv.
Hughes, The Progress, pp. 139–40, is not alone in this. Itrat-Husain, The Dogmatic and Mystical Theology of John Donne (New York: Macmillan, 1938) p. 67, is certain Donne rejected the Catholic belief that Mary cooperated in the Redemptive plan.
As Martz implied in Poetry of Meditation, p. 108. See Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Commentary on Redemptoris Mater, pp. 172–3, for a discussion of the link between the Mother’s memories and the infancy narratives in the Gospel.
See Milton’s verse on Mary’s reverie of mothering Christ, Paradise Regained 2:66–105, in Merritt Y. Hughes (ed.), John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York: Odyssey, 1957) pp. 495–6.
Patrick O’Connell contends: ‘if he can claim that the Virgin partakes of his woe on the flight into Egypt, his priorities remain confused’, ‘Ars Poetica Sacra’ in Summers and Pebworth (eds), The Eagle and the Dove, p. 125. Obviously, Mary was preoccupied with her child’s safety then. But Donne’s wider and more profound point is that this is the surety of her protective love for all mankind.
‘A Panegyricke dedicated to the eternall Memory, and glorious Fame of the blessed Virgin Mary’ in Stafford, The Femall Glory, p. D111.
Worthington, The Rosarie, pp. 6, 20.
Chambers, The Garden, p. 97.
The remark was Luther’s, cited by H. Edward Symonds, ‘The Blessed Virgin Mary’, Essays by Anglican Writers, p. 2.
Yet as Gardner points out in her ‘Commentary’ to The Divine Poems, p. 84, only three years before this sermon was written, Donne still described Mary as ‘God’s partner’ in ‘Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward’. John Carey, ‘Donne and Coins’, English Renaissance Studies: Presented to Dame Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980) pp. 156–7, reminds us that the question of Mary’s role in salvation continually rankled.
Sinfield, Literature in Protestant England, pp. 8–13, and Halewood, Poetry of Grace, pp. 48–54, sketch the psychological difficulties faced by Protestants in earnest.
Helen Gardner, ‘The Religious Poetry of John Donne’ in Helen Gardner (ed.), John Donne: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962) p. 128.
This is not a chance remark quoted by Caraman in The Other Face, p. 284. Gerard, another experienced English missionary, recounts the advice given to one of his Calvinist lady converts by a Cambridge doctor of divinity: ‘If you wish, you can live in the religion which the Queen and the whole kingdom profess — you will have a good life, you will have none of the vexations which Catholics have to suffer. But don’t die in it. Die in faith and communion with the Catholic Church, that is, if you want to save your soul’, Hunted Priest, p. 19. In Sermons 8:66, Donne would warn those who ‘have made it their last syllable, and their last gaspe, to sweare, they shall die, so they inlarge, and ungirt their wits, in this jesting at Religion, shall passe away at last, in a negligence of all spiritual assistances’.
See Donne’s ‘To Sir H. G.’ (autumn 1608) in Hester (ed.), Letters … of Honour, p. 31 The ‘continuall Cramp that … wrests the sinews [and] withdraws and puls the mouth’ is thought by Bald, A Life, p. 157, to have been prolonged neuritis and by Shawcross, The Complete Poetry, p. xiv, typhoid fever.
Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, p. 306.
Gardner, ‘Commentary’ to The Divine Poems, p. 84.
Mark Frank quoted by Allchin, ‘Our Lady in Seventeenth-Century Anglican devotion’, p. 71.
Stafford, Femall Glory, p. 221.
See Palmer’s discussion, Mary in the Documents, pp. 3–4.
William Crashaw, The Jesuit Gospel (London, 1610) pp. 35, 88 respectively.
Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, p. 251, cites this quotation as evidence that Mary was only meant to be worshipped as Theotokos or God-bearer. But the remark actually belittles her role as Mother of God, reducing Mary to a brood mare.
Mario Praz, The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli and Other Studies of the Relation between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1966) p. 217, first made this connection.
See George A. Maloney, Mary: The Womb of God (Denville, NJ: Dimension, 1976) p. 14.
See Donne’s letter to Sir Henry Goodyer entitled ‘To all my friends’, pp. 46–7. The face of an uncompromising Protestant God seems eternally creased in a frown. Donne shows a genial side to his religious character by further remarking that if Christ is not known to have laughed in Scripture, ‘his continuance is said ever to be smiling’.
See Emile Mâle, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century, Dora Nussey (trans.) (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) p. 237.
Carey, ‘Donne and Coins’, in English Renaissance Strudies, p. 157.
The general impression is that Protestantism had a more positive understanding of sexual experience, especially as it promoted matrimonial reciprocity, repudiated medieval asceticism of the body and attacked monasticism. But both Sinfield, Literature in Protestant England, pp. 49–65, and Charles and Katherine George, The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation 1570–1640 (Princeton University Press, 1961) pp. 110–12, 261–2, 265–9, acknowledge conspicuous contradictions (further references to this work may be indicated by page number in the text). Men of religion were still attacking sex and the women who aroused it in the Reformation. While clerical marriages did take place, Mary Piyor has shown in ‘Reviled and crucified marriages: the position of Tudor bishops’ wives’, Womenin English Society, pp. 134–8, that bishops’ wives were snubbed by Elizabeth as an offence to the clergy. Anglican divines still saw the single life as a superior course for a churchman; and the celibate lives of Christ and Mary were still an exemplar, even for Donne. Helgerson has shown at length the strong streak of misogyny in the humanistic tradition of Latin education. See The English Prodigals, especially pp. 27–37.
As Warner, argues in Alone of All Her Sex, p. 67.
See John Brereley’s Virginalia, or Spirituall Sonnets (1632), English Recusant Literature (Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar, 1969) pp. 45–7.
The celebrated Holy Sonnet ‘Since she whome I lovd’ has been seen by Gardner in her introduction to The Divine Poems, p. xx, and subsequently by other critics as a lament for his dead wife, whetting his yearning for God. See, for instance Douglas L. Peterson, ‘John Donne’s Holy Sonnets and the Anglican Doctrine of Contrition’ and M. E. Grenander, ‘Holy Sonnets VIII and XVII: John Donne’ in Roberts (ed.), Essential Articles, pp. 313–23, 324–32; Sherwood, Fulfilling the Cycle, pp. 143–4; and Thomas O. Sloan, Donne, Milton and the End of Humanist Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) p. 183. However, the initial statement that ‘the admyring her my mind did whett / To seeke thee God’ (ll. 5–6), is in conflict with the later impression of a jealous Deity who demands the speaker’s exclusive devotion, not only in the closing lines of this holy sonnet but several years after, in ‘A Hymne to God the Father’. In freeing his mind of the ‘Love to Saints and Angels’ (l. 12), Donne may have been saying final farewell not only to his wife but the Virgin Mary; for the line is reminiscent of Herbert’s courteous adieu to her in ‘To All Angels and Saints’.
This, at any rate, is the implication of Bald’s testimonial, A Life, p. 326: ‘Ann Donne was thirty-three when she died, and her fate was that of many women of her time — to die worn out by child-bearing while still scarcely past her youth. Twelve times, her epitaph recorded, she had been brought to bed.’ More recently, Bell, ‘Donne’s Love Letters to Ann More’, in Summers and Pebworth (eds), The Eagle and the Dove, p. 33, has suggested that their relationship was much more sex-charged than has usually been presumed.
This tribute from her brother-in-law may actually refer to her state of health before delivering a stillborn child. See Bald, A Life, p. 253.
See Simpson’s edition of Donne’s Essayes in Divinity, ll. 30–31, p. 75. Gardner, introduction to The Divine Poems, p. xx, was the first expressly to read ‘confining my affections’ as a reference to Anne More, though the metaphoric language might also suggest she put him on a marital leash. Carey, Life, Mind and Art, p. 73, is among those who accept Gardner’s assumption. However, the allusion may not refer principally to Anne but to chastity or the curbing of carnal desire which Jeremy Taylor called ‘the circumcision of the heart’. See Ruth Perry, ‘The Veil of Chastity: Mary Astell’s Feminism’, in Paul-Gabriel Boucé (ed.), Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester University Press, 1982) p. 142.
Stanley Stewart, The Enclosed Garden: The Tradition and the Image in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966) pp. 42–3. Stewart suggested this poem was a prayer for the indwelling of the Virgin. But it must be a plea to Christ by a speaker who emulates the Mother of God. For as Leon Joseph Suenens reminds us in Mary: The Mother of God. (London: Burns & Oates, 1963) p. 110, there can be no ‘question of an indwelling of Mary in the human soul: that is reserved to the Trinity and to Christ’. Rather, ‘She forms Christ in us’ (p. 111).
Though Donne’s son assigned these meditations to 1614–1615, Simpson, in her edition of Donne’s Essayes in Divinity, pp. ix–xxii, and Hughes, The Progress, pp. 131–2, both see the verbal links between the Essayes and Anniversaries. Hughes even suggests the Essayes could have been written prior to these poems. If Shawcross, The Complete Poetry, p. 414, and Carey, Life, Mind and Art, pp. 46, 90, are correct in assigning the main Holy Sonnets to the period 1608–1610, the Essayes could be regarded as the seedbed of Donne’s devotional work.
In his biography Thomas More (London: Dent, 1984) Richard Marius suggests that Donne’s great forefather was also troubled by the place of sexuality in God’s saving plan for man. See chapter 3, ‘Priesthood or Marriage?’, pp. 34–43. Donne swore never to marry again after Anne’s death and Anglican ordination. In arresting contrast, More entered into a second marriage with a considerably older and unattractive woman to close the possibility of priesthood but at the same time, to kill his sexual longings.
Carolly Erickson, The First Elizabeth (London: Macmillan, 1983) p. 333.
See John R. Mulder, The Temple of the Mind: Education and Literary Tastes in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Pegasus, 1969) pp. 15–29.
See Evelyn M. Simpson, A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924) pp. 26–7, and Bald, A Life, p. 227, on Donne’s flirtation with the legal profession.
Hester, introduction to Donne’s Letters … of Honour, p. ix.
See Keynes’ discussion of this motto, A Bibliography of Dr. John Donne, p. 260.
See Simpson, Prose Works, p. 212, and her edition of the Essayes, pp. xix, 22, 76; as well as Novarr, The Disinterred Muse, p. 137, for the complex interplay of ‘glorious’, Catholic, Egypt and the world in his writings; and Gardner’s ‘Commentary’ to The Divine Poems, pp. 64–5, on the prolific powers Donne attributed to the Nile.
See Joseph C. Plumpe on the African Fathers’ formulation of the Church’s maternity in Mater Ecclesia: An Inquiry into the Concept of the Church as Mother in Early Christianity (Washington DC: Catholic University Press, 1943) pp. 20–22, 31, 72–5, 124–5.
See E. O. James, The Cult of the Mother-Goddess: An Archaeological and Documentary Study (London: Thames & Hudson, 1959) pp. 192–8, and Yates, Astraea, p. 33.
See The Catholic Encyclopedia, XV, p. 464, and Donne’s musings on Mary’s name in Sermons 6:183.
Hawkins, Partheneia Sacra, p. 15.
See Keynes, A Bibliography of Dr. John Donne, p. 125.
See Donne’s ‘To Sir H. G’. (March 1608), Hester (ed.), Letters … of Honour, p. 72.
Quoted by Ilona Bell from the edict against religious pomp read in Elizabethan Churches, in ‘Revision and Revelation in Herbert’s “Affliction (I)”’, JDJ, vol. III (1984) p. 94, n.21.
Augustine’s phrase from On Christian Doctrine, which suggests the way Christian allegorists appropriated ancient myths seems particularly apropos in the context of Donne’s Essayes. See Grant, The Transformation of Sin, pp. 16–20, though the final point that Grant makes, that ‘Egyptian gold’ is no longer valuable for seventeenth-century writers, is a telling comment on the Anniversaries.
John Selden, The Fabulous Gods Denounced in the Bible, W. A. Hauser (trans.)(Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1880) p. 93. Yates, Astraea, p. 34, believes he is connecting this Virgo Coelestis with the Virgin Mary.
See Donne’s ‘To my very true and very good friend Sir Henry Goodere’ (May–June 1609), Hester (ed.), Letters … of Honour, p. 102.
See his letter to Mr George Gerrard in the wake of the Anniversaries when Lady Bedford was in high dudgeon (4 Aug. 1614), Hester (ed.), Letters … of Honour, p. 260: ‘So you see how much I should wrong her, by making her but equall to others. I would I could be beleeved, when I say that all that is written of them, is but prophecy of her’.
Heather A. R. Asals, ‘Crashaw’s Participles and The “Chiaroscuro” of Ontological Language’, in Robert M. Cooper (ed.), Essays on Richard Crashaw, (Universität Salzburg, 1979) pp. 42–3, observes that the Virgiri’s breasts were sacred by the logic of metonymy which, as John Floyd argued in The Overthrow of the Protestants Pulpit-Babels confuting W. Crashaw’s Sermon at the Crosse (London, 1612) pp. 53–4, makes us ‘needes-behould, and contemplate Christ in her virginall armes’.
Dorothy McLaren, ‘Marital fertility and lactation: 1570–1720’, in Prior (ed.), Women in English Society, p. 27, sees the pressure on upper-class women to deny the breast as a reflection of the denigration of the religious image of the suckling Mother of God.
See Sermons 2:58, where Donne complained: ‘let a man be zealous of the house of God, and say any thing by way of moderation, for the repairing of the ruines of that house … and there flies out an arrow, that gives him the wound of a Papist’. We may note that ‘zealous’ was used in another Catholic context, to express his thanks to the Virgin in ‘A Litanie’.
John Henry Newman expressed his regret for the changes made by the early Church of England to the Catholic Eucharist service in similar terms: ‘It is a misfortune — and I bear it resignedly, as I should the loss of a limb’. He urged Anglicans, none the less, to love their own service ‘as we should be more tender of a persecuted and mutilated brother’. See Rosemary Ashton’s review of Ian Ker’s biography of Newman in The London Review of Books, 16 Feb. 1989, p. 13.
See Donne’s ‘To Sir H.G’. (1609) in Hester (ed.), Letters … of Honour, p. 61.
See the letter of March 1607, ibid., p. 66.
‘To all my friends: Sir H. Goodere’ (Dec. 1611), ibid., p. 43.
Nicolas Sander was commenting in Anglican Schism on the confused communion practices of priest and layman, Catholic and Protestant, in Reformation England, in Caraman (ed.), The Other Face, p. 26. This has obvious bearing on Donne’s compromise position in ‘A Litanie’.
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© 1992 Maureen Sabine
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Sabine, M. (1992). Crowned With Her Flesh. In: Feminine Engendered Faith. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372580_2
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