People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research
Larbi Ben M'Hidi University, Oum El Bouaghi Faculty of Letters and Languages ______Department of English
A Metaphysical Reading of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet:
“Death Be Not Proud” (1634), and The Modern Reception of Death as an
Enigmatic Subject.
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Letters and Languages, Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Anglo-American studies
By AZZOUZ Sabiha
Miss Mordjana HADDAD: Supervisor
Mr. Toufik KOUSSA: Chairman/examiner
2013-2014 Summary
The present work seeks to define the use of the Metaphysical conceit in John Donne’s
“Death Be Not Proud”. Death has always been considered as a dread and mysterious power that probes into our lives and takes away control of it. This study will show how John Donne defies death and reduces its power. It will also show how the poet grapples with the theme of death from different points of views. This study is our reading and response towards the poem and how it tackled such theme and the way it tackled it. In addition, the major point is to clarify the relation between the reader and the Sonnet “Death Be Not Proud”. Which is structured by the way Donne uses the conceit, and the Metaphysical characteristics to manipulate the meaning in the reader’s mind. The research of the memoire is structured according to various relevant literatures that have detailed and centered study and analysis of the subject of death from a Metaphysical point of view. The basic conclusion to be drown from the whole study is that death as a topic is an escapable destiny for all of us, and to define it we cannot confine to one aspect or science, also the discipline of its meaning and reflects requires a joint of interdisciplinary efforts.
Key Words: John Donne- Metaphysical school- Metaphysical conceit- death- reader response- death denial- death aware.
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Résumé
Le présent travail vise à définir l'utilisation de la vanité métaphysique dans la Sonnet de John
Donne "Death Be Not Proud". La mort a toujours été considérée comme une puissance mystérieuse qui sonde dans nos vies et enlève le contrôle. Cette étude montre comment John
Donne défie la mort et réduit son pouvoir. Il montrera également comment le poète aux prises avec le thème de la mort d'autres points de vues différents. Cette étude est notre lecture et réponse vers le poème et la façon dont il a abordé comme un thème. En outre, le point important est de clarifier la relation entre le lecteur et la "Death Be Not Proud" Sonnet. Qui est structuré par la voie Donne utilise la vanité, et les caractéristiques métaphysiques de manipuler le sens dans l'esprit du lecteur. La recherche de la mémoire est structurée selon diverses littératures pertinentes qui ont détaillées et centrées et l'analyse de la question de la mort d'un point de vue métaphysique. La conclusion de base à noyer de toute l'étude est que la mort comme un sujet est un destin inéluctable pour nous tous, et à définir nous ne pouvons pas limiter à un aspect ou une science particulière, aussi la discipline de son sens nécessite un joint de efforts interdisciplinaires.
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مهخص
ٌذي انمذكزج تسعى إنى تُضيخ مُاطه انفكز انميتافيشيقي في شعز جُن دَن َ قصيذتً ديث تي وُخ تزاَد.
نطانما اعتثز انمُخ انقُج انخارقح َ انغامضح انتي تجتاح دياج اإلوسان, َ تسهثً انقُج َ انسيطزج. نذنك, ٌذي انذراسح
انمُضُعيح تتىاَل كيف أن َادذا مه أٌم شعزاء انثُرج األَرَتيح جُن دَن استطاع أن يُاجً ٌذي انقُج َ يقهص مه
قُتٍا َ جثزَتٍا, مُضذح كيف أن انشاعز تىاَل مُضُع انمُخ مه عذج سَايا َ َجٍاخ وضز مختهفح. َ تما أن
انذراسح مزتكشج عهى انىظزيح األدتيح انمٍتمح تزدج فعم انقارئ, فٍي تُضخ انعالقح انُطيذج انتي تزتط انقارئ تانىص
األدتي ’ديث تي وُخ تزاَد’, متىاَنح في سياقٍا انمميشاخ َ انخاصياخ نهمذرسح انميتافيشيقيح َ أٌم مسهماتٍا.
انخالصح مه ٌذي انذراسح انمفصهح ٌي أن انمُخ دتميح كُويح ال يمكىىا انٍزَب مىٍا, َ نكه نهتعزف عهيً كمُضُع َ
مذاَنح فك أنغاسي ال يمكىىا أن وعتمذ عهى مجال َادذ, تانعكس فٍُ يتطهة مجمُعح مه انتعاريف في شتى انمجاالخ.
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Acknowledgement
This work would not have been possible without the help of Allah. I would like to thank first and foremost my supervisor, Miss HADDAD Mordjana, for her patience, valuable instructions and suggestions during the writing of this dissertation. Also, heartfelt thanks go to
Mr. KOUSSA Toufik, for his unforgettable guidance and significant instructions, who helped me to raise a great interest in literature with his knowledge and remarkable methods.
I am deeply indebted to my virtuous parents and beloved sisters for their help.
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Table of contents
SUMMARY…………………………………………………………….i
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………… ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS………………………………………………iii
INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………iv
Chapter 1.Cultural, Historical and Social Context of John Donne’s
Writings…………………………………………………………………..5
Chapter 2. John Donne and the Metaphysical school of Poetry: Donne’s assessment in the conceit…………………………………………………26
Chapter 3. Death: Then and Now. From Donne’s Metaphysical Conceit to its
Contemporary Reception………………………………………………..52
CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………….77
WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………...79
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I. General Introduction
Is the fear of death universal? the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is the mainspring of human activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man. There is much about death to fear: Whether by accident, disease, or intentional infliction by another human, the path to death for all but a few fortunate humans is accompanied by pain. Death can also be a lonely and isolating experience. Humans are social beings, and their interactions with other humans that complete their existence and give their lives meaning. Death, frequently, separates people from everything that give their lives form; it is the loss of everything that we hold dear. The loss of a beloved one to death is often one of the most emotionally painful experiences that a man can have. In addition, it leads him to question life and the reason behind the end of life and afterlife.
Though death seems to be unexplainable, it can be said that it is the only certainty in life. Thus, death is, and has arguably always been, a crucial part of humankind‟s everyday existence, whether we would choose to accept it or not. It is often remarked that death is the great equalizer. Yet our experiences of death are quite different and unique to the historical moment in which we live. In other words, despite the fact that mortality itself is common to all beings, the death that you and I experience will be particularly modern.
The subject of death, before, was merely depiction of the religious and spiritual realm.
Whereas, as time evolved and people attempted to approach it, via opening new and various doors to make a clear comprehension of what it really is. John Donne‟s Holly Sonnets of his later life are the perfect example of what people used to think of death. John Donne is known as the first and the greatest of Metaphysical poets.
The metaphysical poets preferred subjects, as death, because they engendered enigmatic images in reader‟s mind and allowed them to imagine and relate them freely to 2 other subjects or objects. Furthermore, Donne‟s use of this conceit can teach the reader to connect thought and emotions, and form pictures about what is death. Though, the reader response theory was not developed then, but the reader thus always been an important factor in interpreting literature since Plato and Aristotle; certainly, Donne gave that element an important role while writing his poem.
Every individual and every culture for centuries has tried to depict the true meaning and subject of one of the vaguest, ultimate, and enigmatic subjects of humanity that is death. for all of as death may be regarded as the victory of a hidden and almighty power of nature over the abilities of humanity, and it is this theme that is explored in greater depth to discover the actual concept of death. What constitutes it and how it can be defined, even though this very point is far from easy and delicate and without dispute, and it is strongly bound into social and cultural norms and traditions.
This study will deal with our reception and interpretation of the theme of death in John
Donne‟s Holy Sonnet “Death Be Not Proud”. However, to understand this theme, one could return to the poet‟s opinion about death and the Metaphysical subjects. This will largely help us in analyzing the poem. In addition, after reading the poem and explaining its historical and social conditions of production, we shall try to interpret it from a contemporary point of view.
Henceforth, the main aim of this research is to contrast the reception of a poem from two different epochs to see whether the idea of death changed or it is the same since Donne‟s days. As it is known, people of modern time have developed their psychology and this may raise the question about one‟s reaction towards death; and to what extant John Donne‟s
“Death Be Not Proud” succeeds in shaping and influencing it‟s response and whether it fulfilled the purpose of the speaker. In undermining the might dead and shedding, the light on its vagueness and blurriness, hypothetically speaking, people of modern time had developed 3 their psychology towards death. A fact that in a single culture we might face various and maybe contradictory opinions and attitudes such as conceptualizing death, realization or complete denial of it; therefore the Sonnet‟s study is opened to social cultural, religious and historical approach.
The present study is divided into theoretical and practical sections. As for the first chapter: Cultural, Historical and Social Context of John Donne’s Writings. This is gathered purposefully in order to give the reader a close view of the subject in hands, so that he can make a clear understanding of the general overview of the production of the poem and
Donne‟s view, and depicts the development of his perspectives, and the era in which he was living in. The last part of this chapter tends to introduce the reader to literary trend that John
Donne developed and proponed in his days that is the metaphysical school of poetry, who are its prominent and what does this school stands for by clarifying the main characteristics; the
Metaphysical conceit specifically. And this is the subject matter of the next chapter.
The second chapter entitled Donne and the Metaphysical School of Poetry: Donne’s
Assessment of the Conceit. This chapter tends to make a constructed analysis and critic of
John Donne as a poet and proponent of the Metaphysical conceit. Providing different claims by different scholars in the field, also this chapter works as the preliminary illustration and explanation of Donne‟s role in the Metaphysical school of poetry and his unique use of the conceit, via the study of his multiple Holly Sonnets. In addition, the chapter depicts the different relationships of Metaphysics paving the way for the detailed assessment of the relation between God and men. in the next chapter, this relation that derives with it the fear of the death as considered as an enigmatic and vague issue in people‟s lives and struggling throughout their lives to figure its substance in an attempt to triumph it. 4
As for the practical side of the study The Conceit in “Death Be Not Proud” and the
Modern Thought: The Fear of Death. This last chapter is the discussion of the subject of death, conveyed by John Donne precisely in the tenth Holly Sonnet “Death Be Not Proud,” illustrating the theoretical assessments, and especially clarifying homes of the conceit in the poem in showing the enigma of death. In addition, the chapter defines the role played by the metaphysical conceit in the formulation of John Donne‟s vision of death, the conceit, which is regarded as an element of style that probes into the relationship between God and Men. Along with the explanation, the study tends to focus on the modern view of death, and the different interpretations of the Sonnet as well as proving the mastery of our poet in making the connection between emotion and thought.
The memoire ends a conclusion tracing the main findings throughout the analysis of the tenth Sonnet “Death Be Not Proud.”
As for the structure of the body, this work uses the MLA style 2011-2012. And it follows its pattern along with hole chronological study, concerning the in text citations, long quotations and works cited.
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1. Cultural, Historical and Social Context of John Donne’s Writings
In order to depict a certain literary work and its evolution; it is important to create a clear image of its historical events and social development. This chapter works for the clarification and examination of the circumstances, intellectual asserts and influence on the proponent John Donne, and his depiction of death. That is why we need to look back to the religious social and cultural development that Donne was living in and influenced by.
Renaissance is an important era in the history of English literature. It is important to begin withdrawing its several contexts and grounds. as Michael Hathaway states in his book:
A New Companion To English Renaissance: the word Renaissance means rebirth which refers to a cultural vision, that firstly appeared In Italy and was widely used since that time.
Mimitch in his article adds “[…] it was marked by a source of creative energy and the emergence of a world view more modern than medieval” (Mimitch, 21).
English Renaissance is strongly related to the Tudor dynasty and the English
Reformation. The Welch Tudor family took over the throne, and shined its star during the reign of Henry the eighth. who acceded to the throne in 1509, and began an era of significant and enormous changes, he succeeded to achieve major decisions such as encouraging trade and manufacturers besides he increased the wealth of the country also, in his reign, literature put a basis stone for the next generations to share. One major aspect Henry the eighth was marked with is the Religious Reformation. According to Mititelu, Reformation represents the return of pure Christianity and cleaning of their religion from the complex rituals and beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church. The idea first appeared in 1517 with a German Augustinian monk known as Martin Luther who posted his Ninety- five Theses on indulgences on the door of the castle Church at Wittenberg, thereby initiating what history refers to as the Protestant
Reformation. Mary Arshagouni in her book John Donne and the Protestant Reformation states: 6
[…], thereby initiating what history refers to as Protestant Reformation
Luther‟s act would result in the breakup of Catholic Europe into warring
Catholic and Protestant states and its consequences would ripple through
Europe including England, for the next 150 years (Arshagouni, I)
England was the major nation that identified and practiced Protestantism since King Henry the eighth break up with the Roman Catholic Church for personal purposes; historians claim that he was seeking a male heir the reason that he demanded to divorce his first of six wives
Katherine of Aragon. “ when pope Clement refused to grant Henry a divorce from Katherine, the King took matters into his own hands, manipulating parliament into declaring his marriage null and void and thereby challenging the authority of the Catholic church” (Hagar, viii)
After this event, King Henry was declared as the “Supreme head on earth” of the new church of England. Upon his death and his two successors: young Edward and the Catholic
Mary, the throne was passed to the only remaining daughter and the last monarch of Tudors:
Elizabeth the first. During that particular time, England had been through religious controversy (Arshagouni, 03). Since successors contradicted to between the religious branches, Queen Elizabeth the first raised Protestantism. During her reign, England witnessed a general progress. The Reformation of English church and revision of Book of Common
Prayers distinguished mainly speaking the Elizabethan era; by these acts, Queen Elizabeth announces her strong support for the Protestantism. However, she followed a principle that was mainly the reason behind the glorious period of Tudors in the political philosophy known as “moderation and compromise.” this principle is better understood in the way that:
Protestantism or Reformation, the philosophy of moderation and compromise and last
Humanism. a concept will be tackled further in the present thesis, were inter-related in completing each other, the fact that supported and widely opened doors for creativity in many fields as science, art and especially literature. 7
During her reign, as stated by Daniel Darrel Santee, not only did she reformed the
Church of England, but she also manifested in urging England‟s position by the huge achievements in fields such as: political, religious, economic and intellectual changes. for instance she allowed captains like Walter Raleigh to explore the new world and help in flourishing the British economy. In fact these achievements were a continuous path of her father Henry the eighth, and because of her well renaissance education. Queen Elizabeth did not only rise up with the universal position of England; but she manifested and supported cultural education and literary creativity by surrounding her crown by the finest writers and literary figures of her time. This fact explains Mititelu‟s statement, which refers to the sphere of that period much as the Renaissance spirit, which was marked in certain times in history as series of factors causing dramatic shift in human perceptions and beliefs. He proceeds by stating that the Renaissance spirit manifested itself differently from one region to another. as scholars agree on the fact that: the Renaissance is the renewing of the ancient sciences of
Greco- Roman ages, and celebrated those ancient perspectives; as Jennifer Speake asserts that the Renaissance meant the development and rediscovery of the classical sciences “studied without the theological preconceptions for the first time since the dark ages”(Speake, xxi).
What we are trying to say is that: even if the scholars have different definitions of the
English Renaissance; or the Renaissance in general, but the fact that how it affected or shaped
England was generally agreed upon them i.e. maybe Renaissance varied in the description but it is unified in its effects and consequences, especially characteristics and aspects.
The Renaissance describes a subject of much mythology. Jonathan DA Clarke and
Allan J Day contradict the former statement claiming that the rediscovery of the classics was in the twelfth and thirteenth century. Whereas in the sixteenth century the revolution marked the shifting and rejection much of those classical dimensions, and they asserted, “The breaking of the ecclesiastical chains was the reformation, not the scientific revolution” 8
(Clarke and J Day, 6). The myth suggests that it occurred when Europe rediscovered the purity of Greek rationalism and broke off the chains of ecclesiastical thought and perspectives. The rediscovery of the ancients occurred during twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Scholars claim that the scientific0 revolution of the 16th and 17th century was the shifting and rejection of much of the classical sciences and not rediscovering it. They claim that despite their curiosity of discovering the world and trying to explain why it is important that Greeks had many assumptions that the Renaissance spirit strongly rejected for instance Greeks emphasized the reasons and rationalism to explain the world henceforth legitimizing and allowing the speculations about the world. Speculating the world met great problems of acceptance in Christendom. Since, Greeks and mainly speaking Aristotle claimed that Nature was non-created and therefore divine. This theology or as Aristotle named Natural philosophy was banned in various European Renaissance Universities. They proceed that the reason behind this is that Aristotle‟s philosophy stood in sharp contrast to Biblical instructions and teachings. Aristotle claimed the eternity of world also claimed that celestial matter was different from terrestrial matter yet sharing some characteristics. this major claim was completely contrary to the Christian doctrine is that the soul dies along with the body ; however Church had no option but to reject his claims or try to”[…] Christianize Aristotelian philosophy” ( D.A Clark and J Day, 05).
About the same speculations and within the rediscovery as well as rejection of sciences, the natural theology, according to D.A Clark and J Day: the natural theology is the study of what can be deduced about God from the natural world, whereas Revealed theology is the study of what Bible says about God (06). Overall, natural theology can be seen as revealing God‟s impersonal attributes, while revealed theology is about his personal attributes. The relationship between the two is often strained. Natural theology of itself has 9 tendencies to stress sciences, as prove, however revealed theologians have often ignored what is known about the world from science, especially when writing in the areas of creation.
Despite these contradicting arguments, most scholars agree on the fact that
Renaissance is the turning point of Europe in general and England in specific term that represented the crib of what Britain became later; since it witnessed all the major changes and shifts came along with Renaissance thought (Grendler, 48). Generally, scholars tackle the theme of Renaissance manifesting it as the spirit that started in Italy and spread later to reaching England. Since the Renaissance manifested itself differently from one region to another, England, even though started lately, had its part with the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. However, one of the focal aspects that characterized England that contrasted to the medieval England that held the belief that the world is a place where human beings prepared for life after death. The fact that proves the Church was the center of society; adding to this England traced Renaissance spirit not only in the religious domain but also in domains such as science, it marked the end of classical physical science that had dominated thought in physics and astronomy for centuries.
Although this spirit manifested itself differently from region to another, the shared characteristics of the spirit were the attempts toward secularism. as Mititelu claims secularism grew as a tendency of the Renaissance era of sciences and art, since the medieval perspective and belief was based on the idea that the world was a place “where human beings prepared for life after death” (Mititelu, 18) this theology explains or proves that in the pre-Renaissance, the church was the center of the society. However, the Renaissance put new basis that is secularism, which according to Mititelu are the shift of human, thought, and view to be worldlier and earthly since he occupied himself with progress of art, literature, and appreciation of beauty in life. 10
Secularism of the Renaissance has many important and related aspects, and mainly
Renaissance secularism reflected the era in which Catholic Church is no more the center of life and that individuals find more freedom to prove themselves. Another face of secularism,
Michael Hathaway asserts, is the “neutrality of the secular state” (Hathaway 301). That is people and known figures: writers and clergymen tend to prefer some religious conformity and compromise. This idea is strongly supported by figures such as John Donne, who believes that toleration is effective in order to collaborate with individuals to be united institutions under state authority (G Mohamed, Feisal). Feisal G Mohammad is explaining one face or evidence of secularism. That is mainly neglecting all boundaries that were made by church, which affected badly on the production and innovation outside its limits. So secularism was a result and a motivation for the Renaissance spirit what leads us to speak of one other characteristic that will be tackled later which is the religious toleration; yet it cannot be neglected that secularism was the emphasis on individualism (Mititelu, 18) and progressing the individual talents and abilities as well as achievements.
Closely related to Secularism, is the Renaissance emphasis on the individual and developing human potentials or better say the idol “Renaissance Man” (Mitetelu, 18). As
Mitetelu states that, he was a person who cultivated his innate capabilities to the fullest. He was a multi- talented individual who might be an engineer, philosopher and painter or an architect, astronomer and poet. Perceiving himself as the center of his own universe, he synthesized the emotional, rational, social, spiritual forces in his life into a harmonious balance (Mitetelu,19). This concept was held largely by literary figures of that age as
Christopher Marlowe. in his play: The Tragic History of Doctor Faustus Marlowe is portraying a characteristic Renaissance phenomenon the New Man or Self Made Man, in many respects this idea came together , and they do so in the character of Faustus who uses his new found freedom as a man to rise his position by using his education. by the end of the 11 play the audience, realizes that Faustus is a portrait of Marlowe, who wants to describe himself as a renaissance or self- made man; because he chooses his own occupation in contrast to the middle ages when men were told from birth what to make in their lives, and they lacked freedom in drawing their careers.
Many historians considered John Donne to be one of the main proponents of the secular trend. For his tendency towards a secular state and religious toleration, however in most of his writings he was concerned or better say obsessed with life after death trying to show to his readers that he had no personal desires for the worldlier life. Whereas he was largely interested in worldlier matters as class positions and titles, also he showed no relation to toleration towards lower classes for he considered his works supreme and refused to distribute them to ordinary people. About this, Ted Lery Pebworth in his essay: “The texts of
Donne‟s writings” states that the most crucial feature of Donne‟s writings is his preference of restricted manuscript publication, for significant purposes of the study of his texts. He continues:
Moreover, during the early modern period, manuscript publication
was not a peripheral phenomenon or an inferior form of
transmission, but was important in the commerce of disseminating
texts and was considered by many – including John Donne – to be
superior to print. His choice of manuscript publication makes a
crucial difference in the way a reader should view Donne‟s
texts.(23)
“Goodfriday” is a fully persuasive poem, a powerful dramatization of the irresistibility of divine grace operating on the will of the speaker (F. S. Post, Jonathan, 19). It might even be tempting to think of it as a “conversion” poem (19); Donne had a few cards left to play in his quest for secular preferment. (As late as 1614, Donne was seeking the ambassadorship to 12
Venice.)However, “Goodfriday” does suggest, as the sonnets do not, how the turn could be both imagined and enacted, a desire made stronger by the very nature of. Moreover, that dimension of the poem does accord with what we know of Donne‟s career as a divine. Once ordained, he was a fully committed servant of the Church, rising quickly to become Dean of
St. Paul‟s in 1622 and one of England‟s most famous preachers. In other words, through his religious poems, Donne tries to convince the reader that God‟s Grace on him gives him the favor to possess more powerful, secular, positions and here he tends to justify his secular purposes and ambitions. As mentioned before the English Renaissance was widely impacted by the Italians. The Greco- Romans perspectives influenced the Italians themselves. especially by the human oriented point of view (Santee, Daniel, 2010) which later became known as
Humanism; it was a distinguished branch dealt with human‟s interests since it supported up dated philosophical and theological trends of their time as well as being aware of development in the natural philosophy of science.
Humanism as a main characteristic is strongly bound to the idea of typical
Renaissance Man. that is previously explained suggesting, according to Jennifer Speake, that
Humanism was not spontaneously generated but had its roots in a combination of social, political and intellectual impulses. These impulses must have been at work in the collective subconscious of Europe or at least of Italy. it started by the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch
(1304-1374), to whom the term dark ages is coined to, referring to the middle ages; he observed the phenomenon of the Renaissance as complexity that humanism as the culture of antiquity was styled i.e. Petrarch realized that ancient Greek literature would be essential to the rebirth of classical culture. he worked hardly to create his work is summed up in a collection of 200 volumes most of them were ancient work in Latin and writings by the early
Catholic leaders of Roman Church, Petrarch urged that the source of true knowledge or the real knowledge lies in a strong awareness of the self. The individual an idea central to the 13
Renaissance thought. Another key point associated with humanism is that humanistic figures starting from Petrarch centered their interest on seeking practical knowledge to guide human life. What is meant here is that knowledge since the middle ages specifically, speaking philosophy, had changed a great deal over the course of Renaissance. During the middle
Ages, philosophy had strong links to theology that is study of the nature of God and religion.
Although Renaissance philosophers continued to think about the general subjects of God, nature and humanity, they no longer viewed their studies as focusing chiefly on God, with the rise of scholarly movement Humanism, human beings took center stage in philosophy as they did in most areas of culture and thought (Grendler, 162)
Humanism spread north from Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries but did not have wide spread influence in England until 16th century. In some ways Northern European or better say since Italian humanism is often described by Mary Thomas Cane as Pagan i.e. the Italian movement grew in opposition to the logic and practices of the late medieval Church and because it urged a return to classical texts without sharing to the same extant northern concerns to make them suitable with Christianity. In England humanism placed more emphasis on religious issues than Italians humanist biblical scholarship such as new and different translations of the scriptures, encouraged this emphasis that came to be known as
“Christian Humanism” (Grendler, 189). As humanism reached England, its themes and interests were reflected by connections with religious reform movements. Scholars as Lisa
Jordan (1993), Walter Org (1958) and Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979) recently stressed the invention of the printing production of books and writings. they urged that the print, by its wider and more accurate spreading of texts, helped in spreading humanist not only through wider geographical space but also through class lines and distinctions; as printed books made texts available not only to wealthy patrons who could afford manuscripts but increasingly to ordinary people. Apart from scholars such as Karl Demote, who states that English humanism 14 reflected the combination of the new vision of art and science with the growing self- consciousness. This combination ended the middle ages and opened doors for progress and development in human life. Paul F Grandler in his work advocates that English humanism combines religious reforms and speculations, the proponent John Donne, this very point is to be tackled in this present thesis within the first chapter humanism with the human concerns and speculations especially religious doubts and questions that was a strong motivation for the rise of Metaphysics.
As mentioned before, first stirrings of humanism in England appeared in the works of
English poets who began composing verses in Latin poetry. teachers taught their students how to compose Latin poetry as a way to improve their skill in language for instance in 1580‟s both Cambridge and Oxford universities began to print Latin verses of their graduates to reach their goal and progress; however the humanist reliance on print publications in England contrasted sharply with the aristocratic acceptance for the print. Thus, aristocratic and high- class writers favored the circulation of their works in manuscript among very restricted audience. We can say that this practice was quite odd to the humanistic enthusiasm for publication and therefore progress the Renaissance spirit. As a clear example, John Donne who favored the manuscript and restriction of circulation of his religious works tending to introduce Metaphysical dimensions band perspectives as well as his humanistic is being even if his tendencies were quite opposite to the humanistic principles.
Furthermore, it is undeniable how humanism impacted on educational and literary field for the era produced a quite remarkable; schools began to focus more on both language and literature of the ancient world. They also adopted teaching methods based on classical texts with the study of rhetoric, occupying a particularly important place in the classroom. the spread of humanist education helped in promoting a common culture among people of different nations languages and religions. However, this change was limited mostly to the 15 upper classes and the reason is that the Renaissance in England was specified or concerned with upper and aristocratic people; however, lower class people were far from all those concepts and movements for they were interested in daily life problems.
The humanist educational system soon spread beyond Italy. Although it took slightly different forms from one country to another each nation adapted the course of study to fit its cultural and religious needs. Erasmus was a major force in the spread of humanist education to England as well as the religious reform since they are both inter-related, even though
Erasmus was a remarkable member in the Catholic Church, Mary T Cane adds that he held strong reformed religious ideas that were strongly similar or alike of those of Protestant
Reformation (I:95). It is said that by 1516 Erasmus freed his controversial translation of the
New Testament that shared new and reformed ideas. Those ideas urge the back to classical
„original‟ texts and consider them literally. this is how Martin Luther decided to break with the Catholic Church, Erasmus refused to join him as Mary T Cane said “[…], ultimately disagreeing with Luther on his more pessimistic protestant ideas […]” (I:92) for the reason that Luther held pessimistic or negative point of view about the innate human nature.
English Renaissance was at the beginning, closely linked to Italy. English Men travelled all the way to study in Italy, where exchange of ideas was widely taking place, pushing forward progress as well as the Renaissance spirit in England. However, scholars worked on many hypothesize. Mainly that the beginning of humanist influence started weigh back before the accession of Henry the Eighth. Robert Weiss in his Humanism in England during the 15th Century (1957) traces the earliest beginning of humanist influence in England before 1485. Though the humanistic perspective was limited to only existing scholastic methods, i.e. it was not quite a progressive process and study; gradually the transformation of attitudes and approaches took place. In addition, the humanistic idea that we can come out with is that England was kind of background of the Italian humanism or European as a hole. 16
Moreover, the reason that no major claims or proves existed about the fact is that there was no interest in human education and they did not find any adequate libraries or interesting manuscripts until the real humanists as John Donne came in later years with his religious ideas that were influenced by humanistic reforms.
Many humanist figures shined in that era as Thomas More Erasmus and Colet (Cane
T. I: 93), John Donne is considered one of the most known figures who can be described as
Christian humanist because of the strong relationship between him and the Protestant
Reformation; and how this relation affected his life and perspective. The matter that he showed in his literary works; the subjects he tackled were about the spiritual doubts and fears and religious speculations. Starting from the Renaissance era there was no more the Church supremacy on thoughts and perspectives and people started to question everything that has to do with shaping their entourage. The historical circumstances were in no doubt of great impact on tracing and identifying Donne‟s life and career. Every artist is the son and product of his entourage and history, John Donne reflected widely this aspect since his works are the mirror of a dynasty known of its richness and glory especially in the literary field.
Mary Arshagouni in her book: John Donne and the Protestant Reformation states that
John Donne (1572) witnessed London in the period of Religious contradiction and instability.
She separates the period of his life into earlier and young life during Elizabethan age, and his adult life during the reign James the first referred to in English history as the Jacobean period
(Arshagouni, 03). Donne in his early years was raised in a strong Roman Catholic family. this fact marked an undeniable phase of his life, as his modern biographer R.C Blad claims that
John Donne was raised in a Jesuit family and tutored by a Catholic teacher “was a good
Catholic, perhaps even seminary priest” (qtd. in Arshagouni, 03). because Donne was raised in a Catholic atmosphere, one tradition that he followed in his adulthood and pursued loyalties 17 of the Roman Catholic church for a reason that he had the tendency to know about whom defined his family during his early years as well as emphasize to his readers his Jesuit uncles.
About Donne‟s conversion, Mary Arshagouni states that he contrasted the loyalties of his family and converted to Protestantism, which mainly symbolized his work Pseudo-
Martyr: the violent attack on the Roman Catholicism… Donne here probably was stressing his position towards Catholic society a direct result of certain circumstances since he considered it as cruel and not tolerant with him. Despite the uncertainty of scholars of the exact time of his conversion, Donne asserted strongly his opinion in his writing for instance the beginning of his Pseudo- Martyr where he states a polemical attack on the Jesuits specifically and on Roman Catholicism more generally (1611), Donne refers to this conversion as follows:
I had a longer work to doe then many other men; for I was first to blot
out, certaine impressions of the Romane religion, and to wrastle both
against the examples and against the reasons, by which some hold was
taken; and some anticipations early layde vpon my conscience, both by
Persons who by nature had a power and superiority over my will, and
others who by their learning and good life, seem‟d to me iustly to
claime aninterest for the guiding, and rectifying of mine understanding
in these matters. (Qtd. in Arshagouni, 04)
Another important point in the religious context of John Donne‟s writings as well as his time is the establishment of Christianity in England by law. It was almost forbidden for people to think outside Christianity. According to Shall and Hunt, it is not enough to say that Donne‟s entourage was merely Christian, because in that period, as Donne states in one of his letters:
“religion is Christianity” (qtd. in Shall and Hunt, 65) including both branches Catholicism and
Protestantism. However, along with Christianity England knew other different religious 18 members, as Jews whom were back in 1655; and with the growing commercial relations as well as diplomatic especially with Eastern Mediterranean, yet Christianity remained the center of the English thought. As prove for this statement Donne as a main figure of the religious field who contributes rising with a new literary category that has to do with religious meditations and fears namely Metaphysics and the Metaphysical school.
The Metaphysical School of poetry in England can be considered as having been coined by the Jesuit poets Jasper Heywood and Robert Southwell in the late sixteenth century (Guy,
Isabelle, 01). Yet it is only a generation later through the works of Heywood‟s relative, John
Donne that poetry in the Metaphysical style acquired the vitality, soulfulness, and wit that allowed for its triumphant revival in the beginning of the twentieth century (02). Donne‟s appeal as a poet lies mostly in his particular handling of the Metaphysical conceit, an element of style, which has come to be perceived as the hallmark of the Metaphysical tradition
(Abrams, M.H 2000). Speake defines the metaphysical conceit as a term also having the specialized meaning “literary conceit,” essentially an elaborate and striking metaphor, drawing a parallel between two very unlike objects, qualities, or experiences. She asserts that two types are usually distinguished: the Petrarchan conceit, as employed by Petrarch, especially associated with the verse of John Donne and the English Metaphysical poets. Early in the twentieth century, Donne‟s style attracted scholars as T.S. Eliot. For decades after the publication of Eliot‟s influential review of Grierson‟s anthology of Metaphysical poetry in
1921 and the argument it contained, the conceit was perceived as a literary device that joined unrelated elements in a great and detailed comparison for greater imaginative effect. At the same time, it had come to be considered as representing a dissociation of sensibility (Guy,
02). However, since Eliot‟s time, perceptions of the conceit and Donne‟s style have changed and evolved. At the end of the last century and at the beginning of ours, new approaches to the conceit appeared that at least, historically speaking, can be thought of as doing more 19 justice to its complexity and its beauty than the approach gathered unrelated elements that
Eliot‟s criticism employed but this very point to be discussed in the second chapter.
Historically, the conceit owes its origins to Aristotle‟s metaphor of proportion in which of “four things the second is to the first as the fourth is to the third” (Aristotle, 41). As for the term „metaphysics‟, it usually refers to a branch of philosophy concerned with first principles, which explore into the nature of things (Webster, 45). The Metaphysical conceit may therefore be regarded as a literary device that investigates relationships in order to find out what defines their nature. The conjunction of the meaning of these two terms, “conceit” and “metaphysical,” not only describes the functioning of a literary device, but may also serve to define Donne's epistemological or scientific and accurate approach to the created universe.
In fact, in both his verse and in several of his prose texts, Donne's manner of investigating the world seems anxious with the exploration of the ties that bind a human being to other individuals, and to the divine.
In order to make it more understandable and accurate defining the metaphysical conceit is deeply tackled in various works and anthologies as follows: The word conceit can be realized as being an exaggerated idea about oneself. However, from the literary point of view, the word can be realized as “a figure of speech which makes an unusual and sometimes elaborately sustained comparison between two dissimilar things the encyclopedia Americana.
Alternatively, as an elaborate metaphor that offers a surprising or an unexpected comparison between two seemingly highly dissimilar things, this can involve dissimilar images or familiar images used in an unfamiliar way. „Conceit‟ is regarded as a figure of speech that establishes
“a striking parallel between two very dissimilar objects or situations.” The Encyclopedia
Americana International Edition Vol.7 defines conceit as “an elaborate poetic metaphor expressing an analogy or parallel between two things or situations that seem totally unlike
[…] a conceit often forms the basis for an entire poem.” The conceit can be either a simile or 20 a metaphor that create “ingenious or fanciful parallel between apparently dissimilar or incongruous objects or situations” (Encyclopedea Britanica).
The word conceit can be used to refer to the logical senses of Concept. It can mean conception, gasification, meaning, apprehension, understanding, frame of mind, fanciful notion, or witty notion or expression; now applied disparagingly to a far-fetched turn off thought, figure[...]Etc”(Oxford Dictionary, 755). Helen Gardner in her book, The
Metaphysical Poets defines conceit and compares the metaphysical conceit to a spark made by striking two stones together:
The metaphysical conceit can be also defined as „a comparison whose
ingenuity is more striking than its justness, or, at least, is more
immediately striking. All comparisons discover likeness in things unlike; a
comparison becomes a conceit when we are made to concede likeness
while being strongly conscious of unlikeness. A brief comparison can be a
conceit if two things parentally unlike, or which we should never think of
together as shown to be alike in a single point in such a way, or in such a
context, that we feel their incongruity. Here a conceit is like a spark made
by striking two stones Together. (Gardner, xxiiii)
Gardner thinks the thing that differentiates the metaphysical conceits is not the frequent employment of the curious learning in their comparisons. She comments:
What differentiates the conceit of the metaphysical is not the fact that they
very frequently employ the curios learning in their comparisons, many of
the poets whom we call metaphysical, Herbert, for instance, do not. It is
the use, which they make of the conceit and the rigorous nature of their
conceit, springing from the use which they are put, which is more
important than their frequently learned content. (xxv) 21
She further comments:
In a metaphysical poems the conceits are instruments of
definition in an argument or instruments to persuade. The
poem has something to say which the conceit explicates or
something to urge which the conceit helps to forward…the
metaphysical conceit aims at making us concede justness
while admiring ingenuity(xxvi)
In this context Rosemond Modern, criticism shows a growing tendency to forsake Elizabethan for Jacobean poets- precisely on grounds of the greater adequacy of later imagery. [… ]
Certainly a very great deal of the justification of the shift on our taste from Elizabethan to
Jacobean poetry has found its basis in difference seen between the two periods as regards the relation of imagery to reality. (6-7)
Joseph Anthony Mazzeo in his essay on “A Critique of Some Modern Theories of
Metaphysical Poetry”; has discussed some of the modern theories of metaphysical poetry. He says that many modern critics find the most striking characteristics of the metaphysical
Tuve‟s observation are very significant: poet to be his desire to extend the range and variety of metaphysical expression. He thinks that conceit means metaphor: He says: “the word
“conceit” , “concetto”, or “concepto” also meant metaphor as well as conceit in the sense which Dr. Johnson used the word” (Mazzeo,77). The first critic that he discusses in this context is the Italian critic Giordano Bruno, who attempted a conceptual formulation of concettismo as the metaphysical style known in Italy. For Bruno metaphysical poetry was essentially concerned with perceiving and expressing the universal correspondences in his universe. The other critics Baltsar Gracian in Spain and Emmanual Tesauro in Italy have discussed the concettismo in view of the universal correspondences. In this context Mazzeo comments: 22
One of the cardinal tenets of the critics of the conceit is that
the conceit itself is the expression of a correspondence which
actually obtains between objects and that, since the universe
is a network of a universal correspondences or analogies
which unite all the apparently heterogeneous elements of
experience, the most heterogeneous metaphors are justifiable.
Thus the theorist of the conceit justify the predilection of the
„school of wit‟ for recondite and apparently strained analogies
by maintaining that even the violent couplings of dissimilars
were simply expressions of the underlying unity of all
things (qtd. In. Mazzeo,78)
He further observes:
Bruno and the theorists of the conceit should have based their
poetic on the principle of universal analogy meant that they
wished to justify and formulate philosophically the actual
practice of metaphysical poets in making recondite and
heterogenous analogies and in using mundane and "learned"
images (qtd. In Mazzeo, 78)
The most widespread theory of the metaphysical style is the emblem theory. Mario Praz, the foremost representative of this group, bases his analysis on Croce‟s, without either assuming the later‟s negative attitude toward the baroque or the metaphysical styles. Warren‟s version of the emblem theory of metaphysical poetry is based on a general theory of imagery involving the nature of the analogues in a metaphor:
All imagery is double in its reference, a composite of
perception and conception. Of these ingredients, the 23
proposition vary. The metaphorist can collate image with
image, or image with concept, or concept with image, or
concept with concept. (qtd. In Mazzeo, 83)
It is important to mention that these ideas are stated merely for the explanation for the reader so that they will not be confused while reading or attending the dissertation .After discussing the series of combinations according to which the “ingredients" of an image may be arranged, he continues:
Then too, the metaphorists differ widely in the degree of
Visualization for which they project their images. The epic
simile of Homer and of Spenser is fully pictorial; the intent,
relative to the poet‟s architecture, is decorative. On the other
hand, the „sunken‟ and the „radical‟ types of imagery- the
conceits of Donne‟ and the „symbols‟ of Hart Crane- expect
scant visualization by the senses (84)
It is clear from the above mentioned theories that the metaphysical poets and their contemporaries possessed a view of the world founded on universal analogy and derived habits of thought which prepared them for finding and easily accepting the most heterogeneous analogies.
Going back to the previously mentioned idea of the Metaphysical poets, Alan Hager refers to them as term used to describe a group of poets of the 17th century who wrote lyric poetry in which wit, irony, and wordplay are applied to serious and emotionally resonant subjects. John Dryden first used the term, rather derisively, when he wrote of John Donne in
1693:
He affects the Metaphysics [. . .] in his amorous Verses, where nature
only should reign perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice 24
speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts. (qtd.
In Hager, 272)
In Dryden‟s view, Donne‟s approach to love poetry was too artificial and intellectual. Samuel
Johnson took up the term in the Lives of the Poets when he grouped Abraham Cowly with “a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets” (qtd. In Hager 272). Johnson saw the most characteristic feature of these poets‟ work as the use of far-fetched comparisons, a practice he disliked. It was not until the early 20th century, when T. S. Eliot took up their cause in his 1921 essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” that the “metaphysical” came to be appreciated as fully as they were in their own day (272).
Besides Donne and Cowley, the metaphysical poets usually included in the group are Richard Crashow, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Thomas Traherne and Henry
Vaughan. Most of them wrote religious poetry, though, as Dryden noted, Donne wrote love poetry that was as knotty and intellectually demanding as his devotional work (qtd. inHager
272). The scholar Earl Miner, in several studies of 17th-century poetry, distinguished between the private mode of the metaphysical poets and the social mode of Cavalier Poetry . Whether writing about God or a woman, the metaphysical focus is on the poet‟s private relationship, not on its social context. These poets did not write for publication, although they showed their work to friends who would be able to appreciate their sometimes-obscure references; the same case proved with Donne. They reacted against the pretty rhythms and conventional imagery popular in much Elizabeth verse (Hager). Their rhythms are irregular and often reflect those of everyday speech. Their imagery is drawn not from literary tradition but from the current knowledge of the day, as in Donne‟s references to exploration, or from daily life, as in
Herbert‟s references to a broom. In all their work, the intellect and passion are in creative tension these ideas will be explained deeply in the second chapter along with Donne‟s style 25 and aesthetic tendency. As Helen Gardner, one of the most influential scholars to study this movement, said in the 1957 introduction to her anthology The Metaphysical Poets:
Argument and persuasion, and the use of the conceit as their
instrument, are the elements or body of a metaphysical poem. Its
quintessence or soul is the vivid imagining of a moment of experience
or a situation out of which the need to argue, or persuade, or define
arises. (xxiii)
Gardner here is being totally agreed with the metaphysical poets by illustrating their use of the conceit and their highly exercised passion and intellect.
26
2. John Donne and the Metaphysical School of Poetry: Donne’s Assessment of the Conceit
After the detailed definition of the conceit and the Metaphysical poetry as a trend, we come to point that we should clarify Donne‟s assessments in the Metaphysical poetry. Also within the chapter states scholars critics of Donne‟s writing and style, the chapter employs and proves the previously stated ideas about John Donne‟s association to the wide dominating characteristics of the Renaissance and the Jacobean era. As the purpose of the chapter is, to give different critics of Donne‟s works and style the study the critical approach is mainly based on the well-known Holy Sonnet “Death, Be Not Proud”, whereas as the explanation goes further and for the sake of its coherence it is better to associate other Holy
Sonnets. This chapter is also a focus on the subject of death in the Jacobean era, and reading this section the reader can make a division into small or brief parts, and each part has a different purpose of prove. In addition, in this chapter we try to clarify Donne‟s use of the metaphysical conceit to manipulate the readers mind to achieve addressing a particular meaning.
The assessment of Donne‟s knowledge contrasts sharply with the views expressed by several prominent authors of the earlier twentieth century such as Carey, Leishman, and Eliot himself, who have described Donne as being sometimes a self-centered, egoistical man - as an apostate and an abject flatterer who was strongly motivated by his pursuit of advancement
(Guye 25). Nevertheless, recent critical assessment has refused these views. The second part of the twentieth century has been characterized by a shift of interest on the part of Donne scholars from his rhetoric to the fields of knwoledge discourses that have influenced his poetry. This change of focus has led the critical world to the consideration of the poet‟s philosophical conception of man and creation. As a result, critics have defined Donne in terms 27 of his quest for relatedness and his faith in humanity, this point proves that john Donne is considered one of the humanist figures of his time.
Even though the previously mentioned critics have focused on Donne‟s knowledge and epistemology, they did not raise any interest in his use of the Metaphysical conceit as a literary device. However, scholars of the twentieth century have investigated either Donne‟s handling of the conceit or his interest in the ties that unite men to each other and to the divine.
This thesis will explore Donne‟s use of the Metaphysical conceit in his description of three different clearly identifiable types of relationships: between men and women, among human beings in general, but what interests us more is the relationship between man and the Divine.
From the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1960s, numerous theories of
Metaphysical poetry were advanced, yet even after decades of intense analysis; critics still could not seem to agree on a definition of the most striking feature of the style: the
Metaphysical conceit. This chapter presents an overview of the evolution of critical perceptions of the Metaphysical conceit from Eliot‟s influential review of Grierson‟s anthology to van Hook‟s article “Concupiscence of Witt: The Metaphysical Conceit in
Baroque Poetics”, published in 1986.
In his essay “The Metaphysical Poets”, Eliot expresses views on Metaphysical poetry that influenced the way the style was to be perceived for generations (Guye, 31). To him, the
Metaphysical style appeared in order to force unrelated experiences into unity (Eliot, 283). In other words, Eliot explains that through the Metaphysical conceit, English poets of the late
Renaissance could bridge the gap towards the beginning of the modern era between thought and sensibility. Moreover, He explains that the Metaphysical poets‟ “mode of feeling was directly and freshly altered by their reading and thoughts” (Eliot, 286). This what would stand for the “heterogeneity of materials” (Eliot, 283) that characterizes the conceit. In the conceit, 28 through this variety, we can say that it is the result of the poet‟s disparate knowledge of astronomy, alchemy, history, or any other domain of learning, would be used in his description of emotional states. According to Eliot, the connections established between these seemingly unrelated elements in the conceit would be “forced upon it by the poet” (282).
Eliot claims that the union of those “desperate” elements is what characterizes the
Metaphysical poetry and makes it the perfect medium for the description of man‟s chaotic and fragmentary life (287). This means that the first character of the Metaphysical poetry tends to analyze the changes in the reader‟s minds rather than anything else. Consequently, he describes the effect of the Metaphysical conceit as “something permanently valuable, which subsequently disappeared, but ought not to have disappeared” (qtd. In Guye, 16). Thus, to
Eliot, the Metaphysical conceit summarizes the essence of what poetry ought to have been in
1921, and should be today, as it was in Donne‟s day (Guye, 19).
Donne employs another strong image in the Holly Sonnet “Death, Be Not Proud”. in the eleventh line in which he compares death to a poppy, and how they can make us, human, sleep. However, he does not really mean sleeping but dying. The image may serve to illustrate
Eliot‟s idea of dissimilar elements compelled into unity and held together by an incredible show of intelligence on the part of the poet. In addition, Izabelle Guye states that the passage would also represent how the poet‟s learned thoughts, by being applied to the description of an emotional state, would Influence and change his “mode of feeling” (Eliot, 286). That is,
Eliot would have seen in this conceit “a recreation of thought into feeling” an emotion modified by reason (Guye, 21).
Thus, and following Grierson‟s view, Eliot recognizes the variety of materials that characterizes the Metaphysical conceit and at the same time emphasizes the poet‟s successful creation of a sense of unity through his use of the conceit. However, in a later essay published 29 in A Garland for John Donne and entitled “Donne in Our Time,” Eliot altered his approach somewhat. There, for the first time he stressed the “manifest fissure between thought and sensibility” (292) that, according to him, characterize the verse of John Donne, “a chasm which in his poetry he bridged in his own way” (Eliot, 8). Therefore, years later his focus has shifted. That is, while Eliot‟s earlier essay emphasized Donne‟s successful recovery of a sense of unity through his use of the conceit, his later work stresses the poet‟s apparent failure to bring together the parts of his fragmented experience.
As Elazabeth Guye assumes that if Eliot‟s analysis of the Metaphysical conceit may seem just at first sight, it remains historically incomplete. His “misunderstanding” of Donne‟s use of the conceit, historically, we must call it that; is due in great part to his failure to recognize the poet‟s indebtedness to Aristotle‟s “metaphor of proportion.” Although the conceit in “Death, Be Not Proud” may be regarded, on the surface, as a literary device that compares unrelated elements, its functioning reflects that of the metaphor in which the poet shows the similarities between the relationships that unite two sets of things. Thus, Donne employs the relationship that unites a poppy and death to illustrate what can takes a person‟s life. Therefore, this Metaphysical conceit does not merely yoke unrelated things together, but rather seeks to represent the vague ties that, in reality, bind physically distant elements
(Guye,15).
Furthermore, Eliot‟s definition of the conceit fails to account for the fluid rhetoric that characterizes some of Donne‟s religious, poems (Tuve, 279). In fact, the critic in “Donne in
Our Time” even goes to state that in Donne‟s verse, “it is not, as it is with the Elizabethans in their worst excesses, the word, the vocabulary, that is tormented it is the thought itself “
(“Donne in Our Time”, 12). Because of his constant focus on the difference of objects forced together in the conceit, Eliot overlooks Donne‟s capacity at finding, through those apparently forced comparisons, the very essence of the experience he seeks to describe (Guye, 17). The 30 image of the poppy may perhaps seem out of place when applied to the description of the experience of death, but it sums up precisely the way these different elements interact in
Donne‟s mind. Thus, the conceit in “Death, Be Not Proud” does not regularly have to appear as the representation of a tormented thought. It could also be considered as the achievement of a successful experience. In this famous image, Donne skillfully brings the reader to embrace his point of view as each line flows fluidly into the other in other words this is how John
Donne impacts on the reader and makes him embrace his same picture in his mind. If Donne‟s conceit asks for a certain amount of concentration on the part of the reader, its ingenuity lies precisely in the fact that, the poet‟s reasoning seems just and unconstrained and creates unity rather than disunity (Guye, 29). Elizabeth Guye states that Eliot was perhaps unwilling to make the jump that the Metaphysical conceit demands from the reader to inspire truth existing beyond the physical realities related to the words. Today, that we have moved into another critical era than Eliot‟s, we may perhaps feel that a more historically oriented approach could have enabled him to come to a better understanding of Donne‟s thinking.
In Metaphysical and Elizabethan Imagery of 1947, Rosemond Tuve brought new elements to the debate by focusing on the historical facts that may have influenced the
Metaphysical conceit. Unlike Eliot, who twenty-five years earlier measured Metaphysical poetry according to “modern” ideals of the first half of the twentieth century, seeing in it the essence of what poetry have to be (289), Tuve warns against the danger of trying to force seventeenth-century poetry “into the narrow pattern defined by modern criteria” (07). Instead, she supported an approach that takes into account the standards by which poems were measured in the Renaissance (229). Accordingly, she bases her analysis on the dictates of the two disciplines that established the standards in both written and spoken language in the
Renaissance, those of logic and rhetoric, devoting most of her attention to those principles that Aristotle sets in his Metaphysics. 31
In fact, Tuve explains that poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, created the images that decorated their verse (285). To her, then, the Metaphysical conceit is “one of the literary devices that jumped from the poets‟ application of logic to the writing of poetry”
(Tuve, 285) i.e. metaphysical poets such as John Donne blended logic in their poetry through the metaphysical conceit. She thus defines the conceit as “an image based simultaneously on a number of predicaments or commonplaces in logic [...] framed with especial subtlety” and through which the poet pursues the idea of likeness based on “several logical parallels” (Tuve,
294). Following her argument, one may indeed consider that Donne, through his use of the
Metaphysical conceit in his poems, builds parallels between the sets of things he compares.
Following Tuve‟s reasoning, one could consider that the poet bases himself on the
Aristotelian predicament upon the conceit and, from it, builds complex images that enable him to define the type of relationship in which he is involved.
If Tuve‟s assessment seems close to the mark, that if Donne draws parallels between sets of things, it is not the things in themselves that are compared, but the very relationships that unite them (Guye, 28). That is Donne does not merely draw parallels between two elements but he rather attracts the reader‟s attention to the relationships, to the vague ties, that unite these sets of things. While the distinction may seem insignificant, the second option emphasizes the reader‟s focus on the relationship itself instead of on the things being compared (Tuve, 285). Thus, if Tuve‟s criticism points to important elements that have been overlooked by Eliot, such as the role of logic and the influence of the Classics on the
Metaphysical conceit; she fails to identify a very important influence that has contributed to shape the most distinctive feature of poetry in the Metaphysical style. In addition, as a result, her criticism may be seen as constituting a most interesting but yet incomplete analysis of this conceit (Guye, 31). 32
Furthermore, by focusing so much on logic, Tuve fails to portray correctly the
element in Donne‟s unusual use of the conceit, which allows for the creation of the sense of
wonder so characteristic of the Metaphysical style (Tuve, 287). In a comment on the period
that saw the decay of the Metaphysical conceit, she indeed declares that what makes a “real
difference between this „mediocre conceit‟ and a poetically successful conceit of any date is
not the extent of the ingenuity [...] the real difference is, rather, this complete irreverence
with respect to the demands of the subject” (Tuve, 319). By these words, she attributes the
success of a conceit to the poet‟s yoking together of elements that seem odd with regard to
the subject being discussed. Hence, Tuve may be thought of as repeating Eliot‟s approach of
reducing the appeal of the Metaphysical conceit to its treatment of varied materials. Donne‟s
conceit in “Death, Be Not Proud” may speak of poppies and charm, of objects that are not
normally associated with a subject like death. Yet its true power lies in the sense of closeness
that the reader derives from the successful comparison of relationships that unite sets of
things in the impression that through verse, the poet has succeeded in defining then
indefinable, as Guye put it. therefore, the appeal of Donne‟s conceit lies mostly in its
Metaphysical character rather than in the vast difference of the elements, it compares.
Like Tuve, Dame Helen Gardner stresses the strong element of logic that characterizes the conceit. Yet, if Tuve sees the Metaphysical conceit as a literary device based on rhetorical principles, Gardner views it rather as a central element in a rhetorical argument (Gardner, xxvi). This change of focus leads Gardner to describe the conceit as an instrument of definition or of persuasion in a poem that “has something to say which the conceit explicates or something to urge which the conceit helps to forward” (xxvi). Hence, to Gardner, the
Metaphysical conceit plays a major role in the expression of the poet‟s reasoning and may thus be regarded more as a rhetorical than a literary device. 33
Accordingly, the poet through his use of the conceit may be said “to establish a proof by analogy” (Gardner, xxvi), which in fact constitutes the “body of a metaphysical poem”
(xxvi). The aim of the conceit‟s whole argument is therefore to persuade the reader of the justness of its central thesis, the reason of choosing this example even though it may be considered as shifting from the main theme and the study case, is that it works as the clearest case for the argument. Following Gardner‟s reasoning, then, the Metaphysical conceit may be compared to “the beating out by which the metal is shaped to receive its final stamp, which is the point towards which the whole has moved” (xxvi). Thus, in Gardner‟s mind, the conceit‟s aim is to make the reader accept the thesis it defends and ought to be regarded as a tool of persuasion.
Unlike the critics previously mentioned, J.B. Leishman in The Monarch of WU 1951 does not provide his readers with an explicit definition of the Metaphysical conceit. Still, his treatment of the poetry of Donne reveals much on his views regarding this most indefinable literary device. Interestingly, he does not identify much in Donne‟s verse that could be termed
„metaphysical‟. The reason may be that he imposes strict limits on the nature of metaphysics inquiring into the existential nature of things and its possible relationship to poetry. Leishman explains that only those poems in which the poet “has introduced ... something of the rigorously logical and syllogistic method of the academic and theologian disputations, and only in so far as such disputations, because of their philosophical and semi-philosophical subject-matter, might be loosely described as metaphysical” (89). This passage summarizes the main theory of his whole argument on the metaphysical aspect of Donne‟s verse. That is, to Leishman, a Metaphysical poem must treat of a metaphysical subject, a description for which the topics that Donne exploits in his most shameful and light-hearted poems do not qualify. While Leishman remains general regarding his definition of what constitutes a metaphysical topic, he discusses the non-metaphysical in Donne‟s verse in detail. He 34 therefore explains that several of Donne‟s poems in “Elegies” and “Songs and Sonnets” are works in which the poet was merely “displaying his wit, maintaining, with the most sequacious but only half-serious logic ...the most outrageous paradoxes” (148). Consequently, in the hundred pages Leishman devotes to those poems, he never mentions the word metaphysical. On the other hand, he readily acknowledges the presence of metaphysical elements in those poems in which the poet addresses what he regards as some higher, more philosophical topic, such as in “The Sun Rising” (190). Therefore, he draws a line between
Donne‟s argumentative and yet outrageous poems and his “Metaphysical” verse which he generally considers more serious. Leishman thus bases his approach on what makes a poem
Metaphysical on its subject matter. His approach results therefore in great part from his concern with the philosophical ideas possibly contained in the conceit as well as from his disregard for the role played by the image‟s structure.
Let us establish a contrast to Leishman and consider the conceit as a literary device that compares the relationships uniting two pairs of objects using the same pattern as that of the metaphor of proportion. With this approach, our aim is to investigate the nature of relationships, and one may easily come to think of the conceit as a literary device capable of describing a wide variety of relations. Indeed, there is no reason why such a structure for the conceit could not be applied to several types of relationships. Furthermore, a seemingly slight subject treated in a cheerful fashion may reveal, via Donne‟s skilful use of the Metaphysical conceit of “relations”, a truth that transcends its unimportance. Moreover, as Hugh Lawson-
Tancred observes in his introduction to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the contribution upon which metaphysicians usually based their reasoning was simple, even banal, features of our daily dealings in the world”, whereas the output was often “an extraordinary and dramatic reassessment of the fundamental structure of that world” (xiii). It therefore follows that despite the playfulness of some of Donne‟s topics, his handling of the Metaphysical conceit 35 seems consistent with the methods used by metaphysicians in their investigation of the world.
Thus, one cannot restrict Donne‟s use of the Metaphysical conceit only to those poems in which he expresses openly heavy philosophical matters.
In the context of his approach therefore, Leishman does not identify Metaphysical elements in several of Donne‟s poems. Hence, Leishman‟s great emphasis on the philosophical character of Metaphysical poetry might be considered as causing him to misinterpret seriously a poem like “The Flea” in which Donne‟s treatment of a trivial subject reveals a truth that reaches beyond the syllogistic and insignificant. If Leishman‟s approach to the Metaphysical element in Donne‟s verse is due in great part to his view that only philosophical discourse can make “Metaphysical” poetry “metaphysical”, it may also be explained by the subjectivity of the critical thinking of his era. Leishman indeed states that modern readers‟ value poetry only when it is characterized by “self-expression, self- revelation, [and] sincerity” (Leishman, 165). Since Donne wrote at a time when, according to
Leishman, audiences paid little attention “to differences in substance and in seriousness”
(147), he questions the sincerity of several of his poems that he distinguishes from the poet‟s more “serious, more impassioned, more tender, and, one cannot help but feel, more personal”
(179) works. For reasons, which he does not, state, Leishman seems more inclined to attach the term „metaphysical‟ to those poems which measure up to this ideal of authenticity. “The
Sun Rising” is one such serious poem he treats as truly Metaphysical and belongs to love poems or the relation between human rather than human and God. Thus, Leishman can successfully identify a Metaphysical conceit in those poems that he considers serious. Yet, he treats the same literary device in Donne‟s supposedly insincere verse as a mere effect of wit.
Clearly, Leishman‟s outlook on the conceit might be said to speak for his, Leishman‟s, own time. 36
Still early in the twentieth century in The Donne Tradition 1930, George Williamson‟s views on the Metaphysical conceit incorporate elements from the discourses of most critics who preceded him and yet introduce some interesting personal innovations. In the first chapter of his book, he defines the Metaphysical conceit as a literary device that presents a
“rational perception of relations” (31). Williamson explains that through the conceit, Donne
“wove the fabric of his thought, and gave the pattern by which he united his most disparate knowledge into an image witty or imaginative, novel or compelling, but always rising from a tough reasonableness and often attaining startling insight, with moments of breath-taking beauty” (32). Like Gardner and Tuve before him, Williamson highlights the logical and argumentative aspect of the Donnean conceit to translate his thought process through verse.
He also stresses the sense of wonder that the literary device achieves under the influence of
Donne‟s genius by causing readers to reach for a truth that transcends the boundaries of the earthly and physical. Furthermore, unlike most of his predecessors, he explicitly identifies the conceit as a device, which compares relationships in a logical way.
If Williamson recuperates Eliot‟s idea of the unification of disparate materials, he therefore gives it an interesting new dimension. While he acknowledges the heterogeneity of knowledge that characterizes Donne‟s use of the conceit, he brings Eliot‟s reasoning into another area of cultural thinking by identifying the two types of experience the poet joins through verse. Williamson indeed explains that the Metaphysical conceit primarily appears as a device that brings together the spiritual and the secular. saying: “In his [Donne‟s] life, as in his poems; all his moods are implicit in the mood dominant at a given moment, the priest is in the lover, and the lover in the priest; the divine poem is implicit in the love song, and the love song is in the divine poem” (Williamson, 51). Another good explanation of this very point is in the sonnet „Death Be Not Proud‟ where Donne hides the frightened mood in the proud strong one via addressing death as a weak. Donne‟s joining of materials pertaining to the 37 secular and humble in a single image to define relationships touching upon the spiritual and the Divine may be regarded as the union of dissimilar experiences, after the statement we come to the point that Donne in his writings reflected one of the main trends that is
Secularism. Still, through the Metaphysical conceit, the poet shows the physical world as permeated with spirituality and the spiritual world as permeated with sensuousness. In this respect, Williamson considers the conceit as the product of a “unified sensibility” (Eliot, 51), not so much, because of its yoking together of disparate knowledge, but because of the unity of feeling conveyed through the description of seemingly unrelated experiences. That is, to
Williamson, the worshipper and the lover come together through the conceit because the poet lived both experiences in similar ways. In addition, Williamson asserts that through the conceit, the reader gets “the exact curve of Donne‟s mode of thinking and feeling” (84), a mode that “embraced intense passion, intellectual difficulty, and unusual imaginative connections” (84). Therefore, Williamson‟s assessment of the Metaphysical conceit summarizes both its function as a literary device that recreates the poet‟s thoughts and a sense of wonder that encompasses both the secular and the spiritual. Although further inquiry would be required to verify the applicability of Williamson‟s views to the conceits present in
Donne‟s light-hearted poems, he seems to have captured the sense of the indefinable, elusive, and yet breath-taking quality that characterizes the poet‟s use of this literary device.
The critical world shifts away from Donne‟s rhetoric to his epistemological discourses in the later twentieth century resulted in the demotion of the Metaphysical conceit to an inferior position among its concerns. In the years following the publication of Williamson‟s
The Donne Tradition, Donne‟s critics seem to have built largely upon Williamson‟s most comprehensive study, adding little to the debate surrounding the structure of the conceit.
Nonetheless, the few studies that have treated of the conceit at length from the publication of
Williamson‟s work to the end of the 1980s have deferred valuable insight on its aesthetic 38 effect upon the mind of the reader. This is notably the case with Murray Roston‟s The Son of
Wit (1974). In this work, Roston attempts to identify the mechanisms of the Metaphysical conceit that enable Donne to create the sense of wonder that Williamson refers to as the
“Metaphysical shudder” (90). He rejects the idea of a logical basis for the conceit promoted by Tuve and her followers, seeing through its outward appearance of a logical development nothing more than an exercise of evasion inspired by Jesuit poetics (81). Already at the beginning of this chapter, we mentioned the Jesuit poets Jasper Heywood and Robert
Southwell. Indeed, to Roston, Donne‟s poetry originates from the poetics developed by the
Christian writers of the early Counter-Reformation, who used evasion and paradox as weapons “in the struggle to subvert the intimidating authority of Reason” (85). Hence, according to Roston, Donne‟s poetics are a reflection of the concerns of his era a means to challenge precepts that appeared to him as inappropriate to express certain realities. Roston indeed points to Donne‟s dissatisfaction with right reason in matters of faith in his analysis of a passage from Essays in Divinity, in which he highlights the poet‟s “realization that empirical demonstration cannot attain to ultimate truths” (81).
Consequently, Roston identifies the Metaphysical conceit as “a means for gesturing towards a transcendent verity” (76) situated far beyond the reach of right reason. However,
Roston adds another asserts that Donne‟s conceits challenge the rules of logic to a certain degree cannot be denied. Yet all imagery floats slightly beyond the boundaries of strict reality in order to illustrate a mood, a perception, or a feeling. If, to use Roston‟s words, Donne‟s imagery establishes its point by “blurring the line between metaphor and fact” (Roston 74), it does so precisely because the relationships that unite the sets of things being compared are so similar that their reality cannot fail to merge almost perfectly. When Gardner, Tuve, or
Williamson alludes to the logicality of the Metaphysical style, they may in fact be referring more to its argumentative aspect than to strict scholastic logic. Donne‟s poems indeed almost 39 invariably lead the reader through a series of intellectual acrobatics that conclude in the acceptance of its central thesis. Roston‟s over-reading of the conceit‟s logical and discursive elements may perhaps be thought of as having led him to demand of Donne more than can generally be expected from a poet. Nevertheless, one may spontaneously sense Roston to be heading in the right direction when he describes the complex movement of Donne‟s poems, most of the time enacted through the conceit, as creating “a spring-board for the leap into the mysterious or the transcendental” (75). Two lovers‟ feelings for each other, a worshipper‟s faith in his God, or a man‟s sense of belonging to a community, are realities that elude definition. Yet Donne‟s strength lies precisely in his capacity, through his handling of the conceit, to cause his readers‟ to accept the reality of these relationships on a rational basis and, simultaneously, to feel the truth that transcends the boundaries of the written text.
Therefore, in his representation of a reality that sometimes eludes reason, Donne blends the rational and irrational in conceits that gesture towards a verity that descends upon the reader as a revelation.
If the Metaphysical conceit is, according to van Hook, based on a central metaphor, he explains that this literary device differs substantially from the simpler or ordinary metaphor.
The ordinary metaphor, he argues, directs the reader‟s attention to a pretty image, whereas the conceit directs his aesthetic response to the comparison it establishes. The conceit indeed
“records the ingegno‟s experiment with the categories of judgment” (Hook, 34) here ingegno mean‟s the intellect and the process analyzing thoughts. In other words, the conceit differs from a simple metaphor because it does not simply create connections between different objects but represents rather the intellect‟s play with hypothetical associations. The
Metaphysical conceit therefore takes the reader one-step further than the objects of the simple metaphor and enables him to connect with the poet‟s ingegni and to follow the movement of his thought. Hence, in this study, van Hook explicitly identifies the aesthetic effect of the 40
Metaphysical conceit on the reader‟s mind to which Williamson was intuitively pointing in
The Donne Tradition, within the texts of Baroque theorists.
Van Hook then describes the conceit primarily as a literary device that “drive[s] the mind toward a new mode of awareness and vision” (38). For him, it mixes logic, intellect and imagination in a novel and compelling way. Although he does not mention the influence of Aristotle‟s metaphor of proportion on the underlying structure of the Metaphysical image, his assessment of its aesthetic effect enables him to identify the emotion that Williamson tentatively named “the Metaphysical shudder” (90) attached to Donne‟s verse. Moreover, van Hook‟s analysis of the conceit does not rule out its indebtedness to the metaphor of proportion, for his emphasis on the ingegno‟s flight between categories could allude to the comparison of the relationships that unite sets of things. Certainly, his study of the theorists conception of the Metaphysical conceit could have yielded more insight on this much debated literary device had it been extended into a book. Although van Hook could have developed his study of the historical origins of the Metaphysical conceit to a greater degree, his assessment of the way in which the conceit was perceived in Baroque poetics produced novel information on its aesthetic effect.
From Eliot‟s influential review of Grierson‟s anthology to van Hook‟s
“Concupiscence of Wit: the Metaphysical Conceit in Baroque Poetics”, critical views of the
Metaphysical conceit have changed and evolved. While the earliest definitions of the conceit emphasized its immediate material implications, critics have extended their views of the objects in the conceit, devoting attention to both its inner-workings and its philosophical aspect. Finally, more recently, some critics have coupled both dimensions of inner-workings and philosophy to deliver a broader picture of what the Metaphysical conceit means.
Certainly, the critical world has come a long way in its study of the works of the
Metaphysical poets. 41
Going back to the early mentioned idea and as the definition of the Metaphysical conceit, Donne‟s manner of investigating the world seems anxious with the exploration of the ties that bind a human being to his creator. In fact, the relationship between Man and the divine is a main feature and character of what the Metaphysical poetry stands for. The typical relationship between God and man is one of helpless supplication. For example, in George
Herbert‟s “The Altar,” the speaker‟s stance is humbly begging, submitting himself to God at the altar in the hopes “[...] That, if I chance to hold my peace, / These stones to praise thee may not cease” ( Herbert, 13-14). The speaker succumbs entirely to God and offers himself as a servant. John Donne in his Holy Sonnets offers an interesting contrast. In his Holy Sonnets
“Thou hast made me” and “Batter my heart,” although Donne‟s speaker acknowledges being weak and reliant on God to help him refrain from temptation and abstain from sin. The speaker employs a commanding and authoritative tone with God in an attempt to convince
God to assist him, an approach that is seemingly contradictory to the meek and humble image of a child of God. In making his appeal to God, the speaker implements metaphysical conceits in order to describe the relationship between God, man and sin, and to command God to save him from sin, by using force. Both sonnets illustrate the speaker‟s weakness and dependency on God‟s aid in order to resist temptation and to abstain from sinful pleasures, yet Donne‟s speaker immediately uses a commanding tone. The speaker is afraid that sin is consuming him, and he may be fated to suffer the torments of hell. Therefore, he instructs God to assist him and repair his soul; however, what interests as is that Donne attempts to illustrate the relationship of Man with his God that is based on fear of punishment and faith, and more likely death.
Donne‟s religious works differ significantly from his poems of mutuality both in the level of mastery he demonstrates in the treatment of his subject and in the anxiety, they inform on with regard to his relationship with the Divine. The poet‟s mind here investigates 42 the ties that bind a worshipper to his God anxiously, as if unsure of their presence.
Consequently, his handling of the Metaphysical conceit lacks the confidence conveyed in his poems of mutuality. Nevertheless, Donne‟s attempts to attain the Divine through the
Metaphysical conceit bespeak his longing in his relationship with his Maker for the sense of unity that had marked his union with the beloved in his love poems.
Although the critical world has devoted more attention to Donne‟s epistemology than to his rhetoric in the last two decades, some recent studies have stressed the appropriateness of the Metaphysical conceit as an instrument to represent his relationship to the Divine. This is notably the case with Brodsky (1982) and Biester (1997) who, in their respective studies of
Donne„s handling of the conceit, highlight its aptness to the task of “preaching the Word”
(Brodsky, 839) that he undertook in his mature years. As a literary device often characterized by paradox, reverse and hyperbole, the Metaphysical conceit seems to have been the favorite instrument of some Renaissance priests and divine poets for conveying the sense of wonder the believer may derive from his experience of a 0divine mystery. When he finally undertook the writing of his religious verse such as the Holy Sonnets between 1610 and 1620, Donne thus had for long been experimenting with the conceit and “had already exercised the strategies for provoking admiration that he knew was all the more sanctioned in religious verse” (Biester, 148).
Yet, Donne‟s elevated mind in his religious lyrics seems obstructed in its flight to heaven by the weight of both original and personal sin. The poet-speaker‟s relationship with his Maker has indeed suffered a break that must be restored for the salvation of his soul. In order to restore the ties that once united him to the Divine, the repentant-persona of Donne‟s devotional works begs God to invest him with His all-pervasive presence and to purify his flesh and soul from the foul contamination of sin. Donne thus builds intricate conceits through which he exploits the image of man the Lord for the holy peace of mind one derives 43 from being joined intellectually to his Creator. As the tormented priest asks the Lord to ravish his soul and take him to his bosom, his experience of the Divine blends spiritual exaltation with sensuousness. Fourteenth Holy Sonnet is an example: Take me to you, imprison me, for / except you enthral me, never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me (Holly Sonnet 14. 12-14).
Donne in fact uses the Metaphysical conceit in his attempt to reach the Divine, and, although several critics have questioned his degree of success, he nevertheless achieves the creation of an extraordinary sense of intensity and of immediacy in his representation of man‟s relationship with God. The speaker of Donne‟s Holy Sonnets is an excellent example of his attempt to come to terms with God in a practical relationship with Him. The speaker frequently represents himself as a sinner who regrets for his past mistakes and praise the
Lord to afford him His grace and mercy. Donne indeed seems to conceive of sin as having the power of altering man‟s capacity to feel God‟s immanence in Creation and therefore of severing the ties linking him to the Almighty. The notion of purification against the disruptive force of sin is therefore central to the Holy Sonnets, as these primarily dramatize a sinner‟s attempt to restore the bond that united man to his Maker before the fall. In the first
Holy Sonnet, a meditation on man‟s constant need for divine nourishment to escape the pitfalls of sin in a fallen world, Donne represents a worshipper‟s gradual move from despair to certainty. Concerned with both his immediate and ultimate destiny, the speaker begs the
Lord to guard his soul against the threat of spiritual death. At the beginning depicts the poet- speaker‟s unsuccessful struggle to free him from the hold of sin:
Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay
Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste,
I run to death, and death meets me as fast,
And ail my pleasures are like yesterday, 44
I dare not move my dim eyes any way,
Despair behind, and death before doth cast
Such terror, and my feeble flesh doth waste
By sin in it, which towards Hell doth weigh; (Holy Sonnet 1, 1-8)
Although not all the images in this passage, structurally speaking, constitute Metaphysical conceits as we have defined the figure in the present thesis, Donne‟s description of the sinner‟s spiritual unrest serves to illustrate the manner in which he conceived of sin as an obstacle to man‟s relationship with the Divine. The speaker of “Thou hast made me” presents himself as a dying man who is burdened with the fear of the tortures that await him as a penalty for his sins. Donne‟s reference to the experience of the parting of body and soul in the octet is concerned, this time in the reader‟s mind, with the complication rather than the simplicity of the dual nature of the contingent death of his spiritual self by eternal damnation.
The fear and despair of the sinner that inhabit his feeble flesh over the mortality of his body thus confer a feeling of corresponding death-like “cold sensuality” to his soul (Williamson,
50). The sinner, without the intervention of God‟s redeeming agency, is left with no means of effecting his salvation of the other half of him that is his spirit. Sin‟s effect on the spiritual part of man is thus here depicted in terms of Metaphysical imagery that renders it apprehensible to the rational intellect. Human concern is to the death of the body as moral despair is to the dissolution of the soul. Certainly, Donne‟s description of an affection of the soul, that is, the fear of damnation, by means of its corresponding body-passion confers materiality to an otherwise abstract reality.
As a critical approach, In her article “Visages de la souffrance chez John Donne”,
Munoz Teulie states that; the passivity and anxiety expressed by the speaker of Donne‟s religious lyrics, may be explained by the poets shift to Protestantism. in his mature years “to a religion which left a sinner with very little or no certainty with regard to the salvation of his 45 soul” (Teulie, 50-51). In a fallen world left prey to sin and death, man‟s only hope of spiritual purification was believed, Munoz Teulie argues, to reside in God‟s abiding grace, but according to much Protestant theology, this grace was not donated to everyone. According to the Calvinist theology of the elect, God chose, it appeared, to give grace to some and not to others. The attitude of the repentant-persona in Donne‟s devotional or religious poetry may therefore be thought of as reflecting the Protestant belief in the necessity for further divine assistance to overcome a person‟s weaknesses because he fears that grace is not enough. In this poem as in several others, Donne therefore represents the gap that separates a man‟s ambitions from the reality of his condition. To him, the human mind is “a battlefield between the forces of light and the powers of lust and envy” (Edwards, 20) a battle of which the outcome, without divine provisions, will always remain uncertain. Unlike the speaker of
Donne‟s love poems, the tormented worshipper has difficulty to feel God‟s presence.
Although he reaches upwards to his Maker, sin weighs him down and seems to assume that his spiritual death will occur at the same time as his physical end.
In the sonnet of “Thou hast made me”, Donne introduces the solution to the speaker‟s dilemma described in the poem. He adopts the convention of the sonnet to the structure of the conceit and the nature of Metaphysical verse. The speaker‟s move from despair to hope and confidence is achieved through the sonnet‟s gradual pithy, brief progression towards the strong conceit of the final line. There, a sense of unity between the sinner and his Maker is restored in the poem‟s speaker. Whereas the poem ended on a descending note with the terrible sight of the torments of hell, it affords the reader a sight of heaven as the poet-speaker turns his gaze upwards:
Only thou art above, and when towards thee
By thy leave I can look, I rise again;
But our old subtle foe so tempteth me, 46
That not one hour 1 can myself sustain;
Thy Grace may wing me to prevent his art,
And thou like adamant, draw mine iron heart. (“Holy Sonnet 1”, 11. 9-14)
The sonnet here depicts the speaker‟s progression towards his complete surrender to God‟s will. Caught in the deadly captures of sin and paralyzed by fear and despair, the sinner needs the intervention of the Lord‟s grace to gain heaven. In a conceit that pictures divine grace as a power that attracts the hearts of men hardened by sin, he thus signifies his acceptance of the only course of action available to him. The sinner therefore surrenders passively to his Maker as iron offers itself without resistance to adamant is magnetic attraction. We note the pain in
Donne‟s use of iron. The sinner‟s heart has become as unfeelingly hard as iron, but paradoxically it is the very iron hardiness that allows God‟s magnet to work on him.
In order to overcome despair and restore a sense of spiritual union between God and himself, the speaker must, as DiPasquale has pointed out in her study of sacramentality in
Donne‟s verse, “rely upon his own invention, his own concetti, his own skill as a sonneteer”
(DiPasquale, 102). Di Pasquale has argued in fact that this self-reliance is a common need for the speaker throughout the Holy Sonnets: “the poet-speaker is a man alone” (102). In “Thou hast made me”; the hysterical condition of the poet-speaker that DiPasquale describes is particularly common. It is precisely through the conceit representing God‟s grace as attractive power acting on a lonely human that Donne achieves a sense of renewal with the Divine. The conceit indeed describes the effect of God‟s agency upon the speaker in such a way as to make it available to the understanding and shows how sinners in a lonely battle willing to surrender to the Lord‟s grace will be washed from the foul taint of sin that weighs them down.
Because of Donne‟s skilled use of the Metaphysical conceit, the speaker‟s voice, which was wavering with uncertainty at first, ends the poem on a hopeful note. “Thou hast made me” hence progresses from despair to hope and finds its resolution in a conceit of flesh, 47 soul, iron and magnet that, however briefly, succeeds in re-establishing a sense of unity between man and God.
The very complicated notion of the relationship between God and Man obliges us to step to a very important point in this last that is Sacramentality. It is of course not wholly absent from the possibly context of Donne‟s Holy Sonnets. Several critics, such as DiPasquale and Whalen, have indeed highlighted its centrality to the definition of Donne‟s devotional ideal expressed in his divine poetic meditations. For example, fifth Holy Sonnet “I am a little world made cunningly” is in fact built upon a conceit, which blends sacramental as well as metaphysical imagery to represent Donne‟s conception of the experience of purification through divine power that is man is seeking. In the first part of the poem, the repentant persona is represented, mirroring Creation in its element:
I am a little world made cunningly
Of elements, and an angelic sprite,
But black sin hath betrayed to endless night
My world‟s both parts, and, oh, both parts must die.
You which beyond that heaven which was most high
Have found new spheres, and of new lands can write
Pour new seas in mine eyes, that so I might
Drown my world with my weeping earnestly
Or wash it if it must be drowned no more (“Holy Sonnet 5”, 11. 1-9)
In fifth Holy Sonnet “I am a little world”, Donne‟s use of Metaphysical imagery again provides an abstract reality, here the relationship that unites the sensuous and the spiritual in the sinner, available to the understanding.
Thus, the worshipper who, without the intervention of God‟s grace will die spiritually as well as physically by the foul taint of sin. In Holy Sonnet “I am a little world”, it is 48 therefore through a conceit built on such sacramental interference in human salvation by God that the sinner finds his way back to his Maker. The regretful poet-speaker who preying God and send tears of sincere regret for his mistakes and wash away the stain for the sins his soul has committed as well as sins of mankind (11. 5-9). The sacramental dimension of the conceits of “I am a little world” appears exactly described in DiPasquale‟s Literature and
Sacrament. In her discussion of this sonnet, she explains that, an individual cannot receive the sacrament easily, based on protestant beliefs, twice in a lifetime and the poet-speaker‟s tears of regret and sorrow for his sins are deemed insufficient for the salvation of his soul.
Donne in Holy Sonnet 5 thus finds comfort in a conceit, which performs the spiritual purification effected by the sacrament “in the act of receiving, „in eating‟” (DiPasquale, 113).
The speaker therefore ends his holy meditation in the knowledge that through his surrender to
God‟s divine agency, the battle raging within the self may finally end and give way to peace.
Through the conceit of “I am a little world”, Donne hence fuses notions of sacramentality with Metaphysical imagery to convey a sense of hope in the renewal of the ties binding a man to his God through the sacraments.
One cannot escape the fact that John Donne within his Metaphysical stream; is searching for a spiritual significance to human experience. Donne‟s penetrating mind thus flies between the sensuous and the spiritual dominions that constitute a man‟s world. Such an investigation of human condition is representative of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century era in which man was thought to be continually in touch with the spiritual forces that governed the universe (Raspa, 12). According to Raspa, thinkers in
Donne‟s time indeed believed that “man was always conscious of a meaningful universe" and was “bound to recognize its significance” (13). In Devotions upon Emergent Occasions that Donne composed after the Holy Sonnets, his search for the spiritual significance of sensuous human experience hence reflects the Reformation belief in a universe charged 49 with spiritual meaning (13). Certainly, because of this, Donne‟s mature thinking betrays signs of his Catholic background.
Of course, Donne‟s approach to his subject in his devotional writings was not solely influenced by the Reformation world-view. The method of Devotions also relies heavily on that of Protestant premises. The metaphysical approach to the world used by
Protestant thinkers revolved around different religious and enigmatic concepts including the book of scriptures. For its part, was the Bible upon which man could rely to “identify the meaning of history in the present for the benefit of his salvation” (Donne, xxix). The conjunction of Reformation world-view and of Protestant concepts thus defines Donne‟s epistemological approach to man‟s relationship with the Divine. Certainly, his reflection on the spiritual significance of human experience takes him to higher spiritual considerations by way of the sensuous (Raspa, 15).
This movement of Donne‟s thought between the two realms of existence of the universe in Devotions for example in a sense proves the aesthetic effect of the Metaphysical conceit that van Hook describes in his essay “Baroque Poetics”. As was explained in the first chapter of this thesis, van Hook points the aesthetic effect of the Metaphysical conceit to its reproduction of the mind‟s flight from one to the other of the spiritual concepts upon which man relies for his analysis of the world (van Hook, 36). Whereas metaphor relies on creating similarities in its representation of ideas or concepts, the Metaphysical conceit guides the reader‟s mind every step of the way to force it to get “the exact curve of Donne‟s mode of thinking and feeling” (Williamson, 84). Donne‟s words in his religious works hence mirror his thoughts by stressing the progression of his mind from one set of relationships to another. His treatment of the subject of man‟s relationship with God in
Holly Sonnets may thus be said to follow the method of the Metaphysical conceit and reproduce its aesthetic effect by attracting the reader. 50
Throughout his Holy Sonnets, Donne seeks to achieve in his relationship with God the sense of unity that had characterized his union with the beloved in his love lyrics
(Williamson, 120). Despite his sincere desire for the peace of mind, one may derive from being joined with God. In his desire to restore the ties that joined man to the Divine before the fall, the speaker of Donne‟s Holy Sonnets seeks spiritual purification through the intervention of divine grace. In this Endeavour, the repentant-persona uses the Metaphysical conceit to render his experience of the Divine. Donne has complicated conceits, in the sacred verse and the prose in question, blend poetic wit, metaphysical imagery, sacramentality, and spirituality to depict the flight of his mind from the material world to the eternal area of the soul. The
Metaphysical conceit hence acts as a bridge that facilitates the passage of the speaker‟s rational intellect from one realm of existence to the next and allows him to reach new levels of spiritual insight. In the saving knowledge the repentant-persona derives from his investigation of human experience, one may perceive the hand of the Lord extended towards the regretful, in Holy Sonnets, showing him the way back to heaven.
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3. Death, then and now: From John Donne’s Metaphysical Conceit to its
Contemporary Reception
As should be clear by now, there are various associations about theme of death and the development of its reception in the works of literature and arts. Principally, this chapter starts
With the detailed explanation and illustration of the Metaphysical relationship between God and men, and revealing the vague and ultimate fear within this relation that is the fear of death. Then we move to a detailed analysis of the tenth Holy Sonnet “Death Be Not Proud.”
Highlighting the main assessments and claims previously mentioned, such as the imagery of death: how death is seen and dealt with in the time the work was produced, stressing the study on main literary elements that appear in the Sonnet as Apostrophe and Paradox. As well as the major point is to clarify the relation the tenth Holly Sonnet of John Donne with its readers; and how work succeeds in highlighting the enigmatic subject of death. By the end of this chapter, we would have given the reader a clear study of the subject of death using death paradox amongst other literary imageries: personification, apostrophe; and specifically the modern reception of this later, which is mostly based upon the Horizon of Expectation.
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Within the ultimate relationship between God and man, it lays strongly the aspect of death or the fear of death and the afterlife. It is important to state that through his works as a metaphysical poet, Donne stresses the idea that he was an Anglican Christian, because he addresses god only, whereas other catholic metaphysicals addressed Virgin Mary or the trinity. John Donne spent much of his life anticipating his death. Although similar claims could be made for many seventeenth century English men and women, for whom death was a constant presence, Donne had an unusually active relationship to his mortality (Targoff, 236).
As readers of his poems and prose immediately understand, Donne was obsessed by an incredible fear of death, and his writings return repeatedly to plans for defeating this fear.
However, at the same time that Donne feared the moment of death, he also repeatedly seemed to invite it (236). Donne was a deeply theatrical person, and he was perhaps at his most theatrical when he attempted to stage the actual instant when his soul would depart from his body (236). From his Holy Sonnets, which begin with lines like „„this is my plays last scene,‟‟ or „„What if this present were the worlds last night?‟‟. Donne positioned himself repeatedly on the access between this world and the next. What can explain this singular obsession with confronting death? In addition, why was it, as his collected works attest, so powerful an imaginative tool?
There are, needless to say, no simple answers to these questions. However, certain concerns about death and the afterlife appear repeatedly throughout Donne‟s works. among which Ramie Targoff emphasized the following: an urge to battle death directly; a desire to take death into one‟s own hands; a hatred of the separation of body and soul; an overwhelming concern for the material decay of the corpse; an anxiety about the mixing of remains in the grave; a longing above all for resurrection (217). These concerns hardly reflect a constant, position indeed, they often seem contradictory and each represents a different strand of Donne‟s lifelong struggle with mortality. Taken together, however, they make clear 53 what are perhaps most central to understand, and most surprising, about Donne‟s fear of death: it does not primarily reflect an attachment to mortal life.
Before we answer at those questions or moving any further in the illustration, we should first give a hint about the semantics of death. There are two directions in which the language about death can face, in literature; they reflect two philosophical positions toward death (Collmer, 147) one block of attitudes views death as a divisive agent: it dissolves, separates, annuls, and annihilates (147). Erasmus defined four kinds of death, all divisive. He stated that spiritual death is a “seuerance of god, from the mynde”, natural death is a
“seuerance of the soule, from the body”, eternal death is the “deathe of hel”, i.e, the eternal separation of the soul and body from God, and transformatory death, “separation of the fleshe from the spyrite” (qtd. in Collmer, 147), which offers salvation. A second block of attitudes views death as a union or gain. Allen Tate has called this radical shift between death as negation to death as affirmation of association with God “the particular virtue, the Christian entelechy or final cause of mankind” (qtd. In collmer, 148). Using the method of whether the poet handles death as a divisive or unitive agent, we penetrate the heart of the poem “Death
Be Not Proud” to discover if Donne really sees it as a devisive.
The way Donne handles theme of death, establishes a paradigmatic position of him towards death in general and his mortality. In his letter to Goodyer, Donne expresses his attraction to the idea of battling against death. However, more frequently in his works we find expressions of the opposite sentiment: a desire to embrace death actively, to submit voluntarily and willfully to his own termination (Targoff, 219). If one strategy for conquering death is to combat it as an enemy, a second strategy is to determine the time and nature of death oneself. Donne strongly supports his arguments and perceptions by using biblical texts to make his thoughts more valuable, convincing and concrete claiming that because Christ released or gave out his soul “before his Naturall tyme,” (qtd. In Targoff, 219). The 54 theological grounds for this argument are highly complex, and they are not the subject of our interest. Nevertheless, what matters is that Donne admires Christ precisely for achieving what
Donne often wants for himself: a voluntary acceptance of death. The fantasy of willing the release of his soul instead of allowing himself to be conquered by death does not appear regularly in Donne‟s writings, but in “A Hymne to Christ, at the Authors last going into
Germany” he comes close to articulating such a wish. In addition, the very point to be highlighted is the obvious impact of the religious and biblical side on Donne‟s writings. As
John Carey has suitably noted, the gloomy and solitary mood of this poem hardly matches the occasion it describes: a state visit to Germany and Bohemia led by Viscount Doncaster in
1619 for which Donne served as the official chaplain. However, Donne‟s tone is dark and valedictory, and he imagines the journey as a dramatic, and voluntary, farewell to the world
(Targoff, 219).
One of the most remarkable achievements of the Donne in this concern is its total cutting of death as a force of its own “death.” Perhaps this above all is what it means for
Donne to imagine an active mode of dying: he wants to replace Death as an actor in his own drama so that Donne plays the roles of both agent and victim at once. John Donne offered more variations on the theme of death than any other metaphysical poet did. For Donne, death was primarily divisive. On one fact, he is insistent: no death is natural; all death is the result ofan interfering force. The devastation caused by death dominated his thinking. As a result, his pictures of physical dissolution, grave descriptions, and mental suffering are especially forceful.
Though many persons have marveled at Donne‟s wide learning for example, the usual assertion is that he was “another Pico Della Mirandola […] rather born wise than made so by study” (Gosse, 14) [Edmund Gosse. The Life and Letters of John Donne. 1959], nevertheless an analysis of Donne‟s treatment of death leads to the conclusion that his thinking was more 55 of a mind work than logical. Donne handled death as something to play with. There was much of the poseur in him. One suspects that Donne himself must have laughed at people‟s fascination for the “gloomy Dean”. He never presented a coherent, well-developed view of death. As he treated medicine, law, geography, and theology, so also he touched death in a kind of hesitant, lack-of-commitment manner. He picked and chose what he dramatically and poetically wanted, for instance, that the good die easily “A Valediction: forbidding mourning”, Even when he came to prose, he played with faces of death. In Donne‟s works, death is useful as a vehicle of expression and as a topic for meditation; however, almost exclusively it breaks and disrupts an order.
As part of the memoire, it is important to shift with the explanation to the point of death reception in the modern era and since the reader is the cornerstone of this studies it is important to make a detailed study to his reception to such an abstract figure as well as his response towards it. Death in several decades had been identified for the sake to figure it out scientifically spiritually socially and culturally. No doubt, that death as a subject since the beginning of humanity, people tried to understand and disclose its mystery. and departing from Donne‟s tenth Holy Sonnet, we come to the articulation Donne‟s attitude towards death that is considering it not a failure and not feared and considering it a natural act that humanity should have as part of their lives. Therefore, we can say that modern readers are equal or approving Donne‟s view and share the same opinion as him.
Opinions and responses started to take different directions of interpretations and understandings. For all death may be regarded as the ultimate „victory‟ of biology and nature over all the abilities of humanity (Barry, 306), the process of dying and the moment of death are as social as they are natural. What is important here is that defining death is far from easy and without dispute, and is strongly bound into social and cultural norms and traditions. 56
It is important to highlight the fact that modern individual became more aware of their conscious and interested in the changing process within their inner self. Unlike the primal human, the renaissance, this walks through a world that is experienced as completely continuous between inner and outer. On the other hand, as Richard Tarns states in his article
“is the modern psyche undergoing a rite of passage?” that the primal human lives in a world that is radically unsoiled. Whereas the modern “[…] human self is seen as the exclusive repository of conscious intelligence, moral sensibility, and spiritual aspiration in the universe
[…]” (08); it means that all meaning in the world comes from the human subject. The reason we tackle the modern psyche is to give a starting point of how modern people tackle their subjects and issues including or especially death and the way they handle it.
French poststructuralist philosopher Derrida (1993), in his deconstruction of popular and scholarly ideas, has questioned the existence of a tight and clear description and border between life and death. Instead, he draws attention to how changeable and fluid ideas of death are bound into different cultures and are variable and changing across time and history. Death is also, he notes, a state of being that is neither fully social nor biological but exists in the fusion and interrelationship of the two. This highlighting of issues relating to defining and conceptualizing death and dying is highly useful as it guides us to thinking of death not just as a simple state of „non-life‟ or the non-functioning of core bodily processes and no brain activity. Rather as a process which exists in the midst of other processes, bound into culture, society, history and biology?
Modern death was indeed, also in Walter‟s outline, a period in which people distanced themselves from death. However, this was not merely against their wishes; it was the way decent, practical people handled death in those days. Cleanliness became very important in the latter half of the 19th century when medical professionals started to understand how epidemics spread. Emotions were more and more privatized – showing grief openly was also 57 considered as a lower class trait. Walter does not write about post-modern but rather about neo-modern death, which may be more practical considering the present popularity of post- modernity.
The above-mentioned discussion of death is a prominent feature in neo-modern death: awareness of one‟s own death is almost as central a feature as understanding one‟s own emotions and expressing them. In the neo-modern culture of death, people are very active toward death. They want to create their own ideas about it, find rituals to suit their personal emotional needs, and discover their true feelings in order to be able to cope with it (Rotar andTeodorscki, 13). This was not a popular thought in the age of modern death, during which death was mostly handled swiftly and without extensive soul-searching. In traditional societies, so the thought goes, death was confronted together with other people and individual feelings and wishes were not of primary importance.
Eventually, although death puts thought in a difficult position, going as far as denying it, death, in its turn, the extraordinary power unfolding as death anxiety, gets relatives by thought. By thought, we mean all the scientific and sociocultural modes able to shed light on the relationship between human beings and death (Rotar and Teodorscki, 01). That is philosophy as reflection on finiteness or temporality, history as science of the past, literature as a way of investigating the imaginary and symbolic roots of death, religion as a means of generating hope, medicine as an instrument for temporary delaying death, and sociology and psychology with their specific scientific tools. Moreover, death may be a category escaping thought, but it definitely is a defining category of existence, As Nicolas Grimaldi points out, and, consequently, an aspect concerning human culture overall. On the other hand, it is obvious that we can no longer talk today about a death taboo in European societies (Lee
2008). as the significant increase in the interest towards the subject of death - both in what regards science and the mass media proves, the study of death, its status and human attitudes 58 towards it having become first priority for knowledge, an apparent sign of what the British sociologist Tony Walter called the revival of death (Walter, 1994). It is important to say that that along the explanation of the memoire, we are mostly mentioning the European societies in general.
According Barry Yuill since the publication in English of the highly influential and stimulating work of Philippe Aries on death in The Hour of our Death (1982) and Western
Attitudes toward Death: from the Middle Ages to the Present (1974), modern society,
Europeans specifically, has been characterized as being death denying (311). This particular concept means that modern society silences discussion of death, forbids the topic of death and dying in everyday conversation, and excludes and isolates the dead and dying to the physical and symbolic outer limits of society. Aries‟ thesis is based upon his empirical study of cultural, literary and artistic representations of death and dying. According to his viewpoint, he challenges that practices and rituals surrounding death have changed and changed over time according to how society understands and creates death (Aries, 215). He offers a clarification of death in which it moves from being seen as an expected experience towards being an experience that can be controlled, where the dying person can focus on sorting out their affairs with the full involvement of their family and friends to lead to a good death
(Aries, 215). In the eighteenth century, death was romanticized subject as being almost a beautiful experience but one covered in sorrow and ideas of personal tragedy. The one main curve of historical change Aries notes is the move away from public recognition if not very public display of the dead and the dying to a privatized and hidden death, where death becomes dirty, and an event to be shunned and relegated to the margins of conversation.
The reason we mention the historical record here again is to indicate just how much has changed in terms of our relationships with both death and the dead. At other points in history death was all-pervasive, experienced by having dead family members in the 59 household, seeing the dead in the streets and observing the dead represented in art forms
(Rotar and Teodorscu, 05). The Black Death that raged across Europe in the middle 1300‟s was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history. The sheer scale of the disease challenged and reshaped society on a myriad of levels. The power and social role of the
Church for one was questioned, but one of the visual manifestations of death in this period was the frequent use of death images in art. This tradition was most evident in the various
Danse Macabre (Yuill, 312) images of the medieval period, where skeletons and dead people were depicted in wild dances with each other.
As time evolved, scholars had advanced many reasons for why modern societies had moved from an open and accepting culture of death to a total denial can be traced to different social changes in the twentieth century. Death denial a state in which the often-interrelated processes inherent in modernity lead to the depersonalization of death and the repression of emotion and grief. The result of all these processes acting on and shaping societal and individual belief is that death becomes a taboo subject, an off-limits area of conversation, blanked out as an issue in personal reflection on one‟s life and its future (Yuill 314). As a reason for this shift of view, Yuill asserts that like various aspects of modern life, death has entered the process of rationalization, as one reason, where the very intimate and touching moments of death turned to timetables, bureaucracy and categorization (Rotar and Teodorscu,
07). i.e. death as any other aspect of life has been recorded and filed. The end result is that death becomes disconnected from private emotional reference points, grief in particular, and attached to the cold emotionless framework of the public office and public official (Yuill,
314). The death certificate is an example. As a document, the death certificate records very objective information such as date of birth, the cause of death and the name of the recording officer. Subjective and affective information, such as the emotions of the surviving relatives, go unrecorded. This is all very useful for the running of a large bureaucratic state, which 60 requires information on its citizens but is not very effective at dealing with the issues of loss and grieving.
Another reason Yuill asserts is medicalization, which had overwhelmed many areas that were recognized before an outsiders such as death and dying; for death was approached in religious terms (Yuill, 314). Therefore, religion was the only insight of God‟s will that people should die. As medical technology had developed, death became increasingly defined as a medical event. Scholars also claim that the change reached even the location of dying, since most deaths are now more likely to be in hospitals under medical profession than in home supported by friends and family.
As a major reason leading to the death denial: is secularization, which is considered one of the developments within modernity and refers to the decline of sacral or religious belief (Yuill, 313). Modern society has become increasingly secular, which means that people do not interpret their lives within the symbolic framework of religion (313). Previously, images of death resurrection and redemption informed the minds and actions of people.
Without the presence of such imagery, death becomes less a feature of life. Walter Points to the First World War as a turning point in religious belief, where the idea of a loving God became increasingly weak given the mass death and suffering of the conflict. However, other scholars asserts that secularization begins much earlier in the eighteenth century, when the new urbanization brought about by the Industrial Revolution removed ordinary people from the control and teachings of the church (313).
Finally yet importantly one debated trend within contemporary society is the move away from community to a life based more on individualism. Such a trend may sound appealing in that we now possess the potential to make more of our lives as and how we wish
(314), unbidden by pressures from the wider community. Walter notes, however, that one rather demanding cost of being individual is that one lacks the ties to other people who could 61 provide emotional support in times of crisis, such as when facing death. The upshot is that it is better to ignore rather than embrace death since there is no one to be there when time of death comes.
About the aspect of individuality, explanations would take various directions and interpretations. Scholars had taken many attempts such as Foucault who put many studies about death and its effect on individuals, he had many positions and works on power. In particular, a little acknowledged book written by Foucault in 1973 entitled The Birth of the
Clinic. In this book, Foucault makes an argument about the importance of death to our modern sensibilities. In fact, he argues that .from the integration of death into medical thought is born a medicine that is given us a science of the individual (Foucault, 179). However, as have been acknowledged, in his later work Foucault claimed that a power that manages life cannot account for the death of individuals, in this particular work, he claimed that death is embodied in an individual‟s living body (196). According to Foucault, Lindsey Ann Hall claims that medicine established itself as the first science of individuals once it was able to incorporate death into its analysis of bodies (Hall, 37).Thus, Foucault claims in The Birth of the Clinic that the experience of individuality in modern culture is bound up with that of death
(197). However many scholars ignored his work an oversight that does not come as much of a surprise since it is ignored by Foucault as well in his later works.
In a comparison, to the past death was absolutely beyond medicine. It was not at all concerned with the causes of disease or with the localization of disease within the body itself.
This approach to medicine, Foucault maintained, death was merely that absolute beyond which there was neither life nor disease (141). However, for Foucault it was through the incorporation of death into medicine that the individual first assumed the role as an object of positive knowledge and could thus be located in the nexus of knowledge and power that
Foucault has identified in other works (Faucault,196). 62
In modern time, death had taken different definitions and had witnessed new terms and ideologies that made it totally a strange concept to what people used to know about death.
Moreover, since scholars had associated death with new concepts such as death the threat of the individual mower. Foucault added various approaches towards this concept, one of his most important claims about subject of death power and within the newly associated field to the definition, medicine, which set new standards to proclaim someone‟s death I. e. via taking decisions for what is best for a patient. The matter that proves modern societies is total denials of the fact of dying and ignoring its power. However, we cannot say that the old power of death has disappeared, according to Agamben, it has simply taken on a new “new masks”
(122) in modern culture. The reason behind highlighting these facts is to show to how extant modern culture and societies had gone with conceptualizing death i.e. denying it.
This perception of modern society being death denying has been challenged by a number of scholars such as Seale, and the work of Aries and others who have advanced the death denying thesis has been critiqued. One of the main objections to Aries‟ analysis of death, is that Aries presents in effect is an overly romanticized view of death and dying that is nostalgic for a past that never was (Seale, 56). The main claim of the counter argument is that contemporary society is not death denying but is just as death aware as in previous times, only in a way that is more fluid, complex and contradictory. On the one hand, contemporary society denies death; it is a topic put in conversation, and issues of dying, such as the ageing process, have become almost a taboo subject. On the other hand, death is frequently depicted in many mainstream cultural products, where the subject of death and what is it to be dead form the basis of plots in films and television serials. Death and what the dead are like are very distinct and characteristic in such media. In many contemporary films and TV shows, such as the Twilight trilogy or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to be dead is to be reborn in the afterlife as an emotionally complex but still very sexy American teenager. where death is not 63 about bodily decay or the end of self but instead is a continuation of self at the peak of one‟s young powers (Yuill, 315). One could claim, as Gorer (1965) did back in the 1960s, that this form of death awareness is „pornography‟ and does not really deal with death; yet these depictions of the dead and death are often more shadowy and slight than the traditional movies of that period.
Throughout popular culture, there is other sufficient evidence of engagement with death. In addition to the new wave of vampire movies, one could point to the movie Wit, directed by Mike Nickolas starring Emma Thompson, which focuses on a professor of literature, diagnosed with ovarian cancer in the final stages. She is a specialist on the sonnets by John Donne and has professional metaphysical knowledge about death and the various geographic variations of the American crime series CSI, where death and the dead are treated and portrayed in computer-generated high detail. In popular music, there is the subgenre of death metal, where intense bass heavy songs in doom-laden minor keys celebrate motifs of death and dying, and where bands refer to death in their names, such as Korpse, Entombed and (the not so subtle) Death. It is, overall, difficult to sustain a perspective that claims that modern society is exclusively death denying. A quick survey of popular culture, as revealed above, finds plenty of evidence to the contrary. Scholars, though, concern against such a simplistic dichotomy of society being either death denying or death aware; the actuality they argues, is much more complex, but then again so is the phase of modernity. As Kellehear
(2007) maintains, the practices and understandings of death and dying parallel the norms and cultures of a given society; so as society becomes much more complex, an equally complex approach to death and dying develops. Walter (1994) characterizes this complexity towards death and dying as being consistent with postmodern trends in society. As any other trend in postmodern life, there is a rejection of a unified approach. Instead, an acceptance that everyone is free to choose the path of his or her social culture (Seale, 107) so, what we can 64 see today is not one mass society wide approach to death but a countless of individual approaches. However, one must be careful to acknowledge that these choices are not open to all.
One current social trend, however, is the increasing secularization of society that is previously mentioned, principally within the UK and other European states, where belief in organized religion is in significant decline. This development does pose a very important point of how do non-religious societies deal with death. If Durkheim is, correct in claiming that humans require ritual to mark and make sense of important stages in the life course, then we should know what ceremonies do secular societies provide to endure the challenges posed by death. In fact, there has been a proliferation of different forms of funerary practice.
Humanist funerals have become increasingly popular. As a ceremony, they may resemble conventional religious funerals as far as there will be a burial or a cremation, with the ceremony led by a specially designated individual, accompanied by songs and readings There are crucial differences, however.
As long as we tackle the point of religion, it is important to state that the reception of death or perspectives towards death differs depending on the religious waves, but they all share certain basics that characterize death. Dr. Akhter Jamal addressed a seminar organized by Academic Research Center on John Donne‟s “Death Be Not Proud” It was “A Critical
Study from an Islamic Point of View. Dr. Jamal said, “John Donne Seems to be very close to
Islam by writing such a poem.” (2011) He thematically explained the poem from an Islamic point of view. He said, “Before Islam, there was darkness and with the advent of Prophet
Muhammad (PBUH), a renaissance began.” He focused on the Islamic concept of death; that death is a transfer of the soul from the mortal world to the immortal world. He said, “Death is made of fear and unknown things. What will happen hereafter, nobody knows.” Dr. Jamal pointed out the verses of Donne‟s poem, such as, “Rest and sleep are pictures of death”, 65 which realized the Islamic point of view of death. Even though the Sonnet has a few contradictions with Islamic perspectives such as in the Sonnet, Donne illustrates death as merely functionary “a slave of fate, chance, kings and desperate men” (Donne, 3). This argument runs contrast to the Islamic point of view, as Jamal Akthar states that all Muslims are aware and believe that all these things are the creation of God and they are nothing but slaves of him. However, at the end of the sonnet the personification and paradox of death makes a parallel between Islamic instructions and Christian claims in the fact that death, which destroys the body, becomes embodied and meets the same fate it dispenses to others.
Death will unfortunately come to us all; that is an inescapable part of being human.
However, our experiences of dying and our understandings of death will differ greatly by social class, gender, and ethnicity on the one hand, and by wider social, global and historical developments on the other. Therefore, we all may die but that final stage of existence is also cut across by the various inequalities that structured and conditioned the life we had before our death. By also discussing those differences, another point is made about death and dying: as moments in our life, and that death as a topic cannot be confined to one science, the search for its meaning and the deciphering of its effects requires a joint, interdisciplinary effort.
“Death, be not Proud” is one of many religious sonnets by John Donne. The tenth
Holly Sonnet is the most agreed upon by scholars and critiques on its meaning and object, to be the triumph of man over the fear of death also the unknown destiny. The speaker begins the poem with a stream of arguments to undermine man‟s greatest fear and apprehension of death. After all, who has not questioned the nature of his or her existence after dying? People are curious and tend to fear the unknown. Donne ends his admonishment very boldly: “Death thou shalt die.” By introducing the spoken voice, Donne broke new ground in the realm of
English poetry. Here, too, the poet seems to have favored apostrophes, personification as well 66 as paradox that lend closeness and necessity to his rhetoric. In a typical metaphysical approach, Donne criticizes the power and negates the fear of death.
As previously claimed in the second chapter, John Donne struggled throughout his life with the fear of death, and the way the spirit is going to meet its destiny in the afterlife. Via his Holly Sonnets in general and the tenth Sonnet specifically, Donne reveals many of his most fundamental preoccupations and theological assessments that were vastly represented by the use of the Metaphysical conceit. On one hand, the Sonnet includes the challenge of death, which affirms with great boldness the greatest defeat of death through eternal life (Targoff,
106). In this poem, Donne triumphantly declares the sting of death to be only temporary; and on the other, in many of the other Sonnets, Donne shows and expresses the fear and anxieties that “Death Be Not Proud” ignores. The Sonnet begins with the imperative “be not proud” as a foreclosure ravages, a pointer to the uselessness of our excessive fear. In meanwhile, he personifies death he also strips it of its greatness; thus, what Donne focuses on is the use of a metaphysical conceit for the sake of dismissing the fear.
John Donne is known as the first of metaphysical poets, those of a genre in which “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together, nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons and allusions” (qtd. in Targoff, 123), as the critic Samuel Johnson put it. Here Donne has taken a Romantic form and transformed a transcendental struggle of life and death into a quiet ending one in which death “shall be no more Donne‟s style dazzles with soft and calm brilliance, even in the cascade of calumnies against the great Death. “Fate, chance, kings and desperate men” are yoked together, not in bondage, but in freedom, in their power to inflict and manipulate death at will. Here Donne shapes the chaotic and fragmentary relationship that the metaphysical conceit seeks in order to achieve the unity of thought and sensibility. In addition, through the entire analysis, we can see how Donne succeeded in gaping between these two aspects. The continuation of life and legacy has overcome death 67 repeatedly, yet Donne explains the expansive exploitation of death in one verse. It is the will of man that triumphs over the termination of life, the will to believe in what cannot be seen, to dismiss “poor death” as mere “pictures” compared to the substance of life infused with the
Spirit.
In order to make it more convenient to give a detailed study of the Sonnet to make it more understandable and grasped by the reader. “death be not proud, though some have called thee/ Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;” (Donne, 1-2) No bragging rights for Death, according to the poet, who in the first two lines of his sonnet criticizes in apostrophe the end of life, “not proud”, “not so”. “Mighty and dreadful,” two weighty terms, do not belong nor confer any majesty on death. “Thou are not so.” A simple statement, a certain condemnation and the poet has dispensed with Death, who is heavy, no ridiculous for the previous fears His presence has impressed on humankind.
“For, those, whom thou think‟st, thou dost overthrow, / Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill mee.” (Donne, 3-4) In this neat conceit, Death himself is fooled, limited by the surface. “Thou think‟st, thou dost overthrow,” the monarch of destruction is a poor exile, removed forever more from the room of domineering importance. “Poor death” is now the object of pity, the last enemy that will be thrown into the lake of fire. Via the use of this neat conceit Donne attempts „desperately‟ to encode the real substance death and tries to make the reader think about the reason of the enigma of death.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from Thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul‟s delivery. (Donne 5-6-7-8)
The poet compares death neither to a savage violation nor a deadly, final battle, but instead an extension of any easy rest, one from which a man receives “much pleasure”. “Rest and sleep” 68 as “pictures”, the poet derisively remarks, bring death into the secondary status of humiliating dimension. Men‟s bones receive a welcome break and their soul the final delivery from this
Earth. Death has nothing to brag about, for death is put in comparison with rest, with sleep, with regenerative silence. Death does not catch the prey of weak men, but instead sets men free and without fail. So far it is clear somehow Donne‟s use of the metaphysical conceit, which is defined by scholars to be a metaphor; this literary device that differs in stages from the ordinary metaphor because a simple metaphor centers the readers mind to a pretty image, however the conceit directs his aesthetic response to the comparison it establishes. As stated in the second chapter, the conceit is a metaphor that differs from the simple one. because it does more than creating connections between different objects but represents rather the intellect‟s playing with hypothetical associations, so Donne‟s conceit takes the reader, modern and old, further than a simple relation and enables him to connect with his intellect and way of thinking following the movement of his thought.
Apart from this assessment, we come to a very important point of the memoire that is revealing the reception of the Sonnet from a different religious dimension. Donne‟s tenth
Holly Sonnet treats on the subject of death as it pertains to the Christian, coping with his losses, Donne channeled his feelings into verse that robs death of any dignity. In doing so, he tries to control his feelings about the dreadful death.
Compared to the Christian view of this Sonnet we specify the Islamic point of view. it is known that “Death Be Not Proud” is a mere, Christian production since Donne was a very religious man, in his Critical Study (An appraisal from an Islamic Point of View) Dr.
Jamal Akhtar claimed that John Donne seems to be very close to Islam by writing such a poem. He thematically explained the poem from an Islamic point of view. The comparison made between sleep and death echoes the words of the holy Koran:
God receives (men‟s) souls at the time of their 69
death, and that (soul), which dies not (yet) in
its sleep. He keeps that soul for which He has
ordained death and dismisses the rest till an
appointed time. (Az-Zumar, 4)
The Islamic order, also, asserts that becomes clear that during sleep the soul leaves the body and remains in the possession of Allah. The soul returns to the body by Allah‟s bidding, unless Allah has „ordained death‟ for that person the words of the holy Koran substantiates that sleep, indeed, eases stress and strain.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell‟st thou then? (Donne 9-10-11-
12)
Here, death as considered a slave one, which the poet fashions with wit and wisdom. “Fate” is far greater the force than the end of life, which threats many men. “Chance” is a game, a mere little, a toy that men gamble with, whether ending their fortunes or their lives. “Kings” put evil rebels, maniacs and threats to the state, to death. No one escapes the justice, the rule, the righteousness of the king, who even in passing, his dynasty passes on: “The King is dead.
Long live the King!” is proclaimed from death to life, where the children become the rulers of today and the kings of the future. Death, mere witness, guides in the transitions of power.
The tenth holy sonnet, thus, illustrates quite a few mystical and oriental concepts that run parallel to Islamic views. Some of the thoughts, however, related with Christianity are contradictory to Islamic belief. In the opinion of the speaker, death is merely functionary: “a slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men”. Furthermore, the speaker argues that its home is amongst “poison, war and sickness.” Here it could be noted that the arguments mentioned 70 above run contrary to Islamic views. It is relevant to note here that all these things are the creation of God (Akhtar 02). Hence, these things are but slaves of the Maker, Allah. In the holy Koran, it has been said that nothing can harm or kill a man without the order of Allah:
He is the Omnipotent over His slaves. He sends
Guardians over you until, when death comes to
one of you, Our messengers receive him, and they
neglect not. Then they are restored to God, their
Lord, the Just. Surely His is the Judgment. And He
is the most Swift of reckoners. (6, 61- 62)
Furthermore, it is a known fact that death does live in poison, war, and sickness, but it would be wrong to say these things have the power to kill a man by themselves except without
Allah‟s order. Moreover, going back to the Holy Koran, the words of Allah establish the fact that only Allah, the Creator, causes death. Battles and wars can never harm a person unless
Allah decreed it to be so.
Back to the sonnet, as for the company of death, the poet outlines simply “poison,” natural or otherwise, which can kill a man in minutes or in hours. Poisons that have ended kings and queens, eliminates pests and other pestilences, even drugs that prosper and prolong life began as poisons, which in improper doses kill, and quickly. Whether the vain powerful of weak men or glory on the battlefields, “war” covers a range of reigns and rights, possibilities. Death is not even a hunter, but a frustrated element pushed to the limit, expected to do the bidding of the common folk and the ruling elite, the final weapon that man overcomes even in being overcome. In war, where men die for country, they live forever in the memory of their countrymen, mocking Death who has aided their eternity. Sickness” is the necessary pause for men who cannot contain their passions, for the growing race of human beings who run the race with no thought to running out. Sickness is the crucial agent that 71 brings a long and much needed arrest to those who impose harm on their bodies who resist the bounds of natural hunger. Sickness also is the final sign; the moments when a man who departs knows well that his time is short and so at least he get to say “good-bye” by suffering.
“Poppy or charms can make us sleep as well.” “As well” communicates “in comparison” and
“in addition”, gaily sporting with the super bounding grace of nature‟s wonders, which man has artificial to ease his pain and quicken his rest. “Poppy” is a joyful word, a colorful, childlike flower winding away with careless wonder in the wind. “Charms”, whether magical or romantic, are bewitching and mourner, at least for the one who has fallen beneath their spell. Sometimes, the simple charm of a smiling face suffices more, traced with the soft face of a poppy gladly handed to a loved one. Therefore, Death is beaten once again. In this image of the eleventh verse, Donne compare or uses the metaphor to compare death to a sweet rose and charm; and how they have the same ability to make us sleep, here to die. The image may serve to illustrate Eliot‟s idea of dissimilar elements compelled into unity and held together by an incredible show of ingenuity on the part of the poet.
“One short sleep past, we wake eternally, / And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die” (Donne 13-14) “Sleep” appears again, but not in combination with rest; instead, rest leads to life eternal, where man will no longer need to rest, fashioned as he will be in a body that does not age, that will never flag or fail, John Donne decrees. Death is further broke, ruined, and left desolate. Man in eternal life witnesses death succumbing to him.
“Death shall be no more,” the poet proudly yet delicately declares, not even bothering to speak to death. So certain, so final, so enriched with energy, the poet then whispers, yet loudly of the import of the paradox: “Death, thou shalt die.” Death dies, or is Death dying? What a wicked end, the poet has mocked, derided, denounced and diminished death into a cruel joke, a maxim that maximizes the power of the man reborn, trusting in a higher power to infuse him with eternal life, forever inoculating him from the subtleties of war, poison and sickness all. 72
Fate is fated to disappear, chance has become certainty, kings of limited fame are deposed and desperate men now hope. “Death, thou shalt die.” Death is now bereft of pride, like a witless cowboy who has shot himself in the foot, powerless and wounded, and by his own stroke.
John Donne indeed has done and dispensed with Death and mortal man evermore may rejoice.
It would insufficient to seize the explication at this point; precisely the last two verses serve as the basic stone for the best rapprochement of the Sonnet. The poem has multiple faces of interpretations for the literary mastership, Donne‟s skilled use of the metaphysical conceit shows the speaker‟s voice as wavering with uncertainty at first, and the poem on a hopeful note; this very method reflects the way the metaphysical conceit works. Here the speaker begins the poem with doubt and uncertainty hidden under the wavered tone addressing the personified death, along to the end the tone changes to a confident voice addressing death to be terminal and dead. Via the use of the conceit, we can recognize its aesthetic aspect, which gives the exact goal of Donne‟s mind. His words in the religious works mirror his thought by stressing the profession of his mind from one set of relationship to another; his treatment of subject of death follows the method of the metaphysical conceit and reproduces its aesthetic effect by attracting the reader. It is inescapable to note that the tenth Sonnet amongst Donne‟s religious works lacks the confidence that appeared in his poems of mutuality in the sense of applying the metaphysical perspectives.
As previously mentioned in the second chapter, the metaphysical conceit, as complex literary device, is characterized by paradox, apostrophe, hyperbole and personification. In addition, most of these aspects appear vastly in Donne‟s Holly Sonnets especially “Death Be
Not Proud.” As critics argued, Donne‟s speaker is trying to convince himself that death is not to be feared. We can say that Donne‟s poetry is frequently showing as a complete union of thought and feeling. However, what we sense in the tenth Sonnet is the opposite, a sense of conflict or tension between what the heart wants to be true or fears to be true. Here Donne‟s 73 heart wants to believe. that death is not to be feared not that might, vague and blurry path to be taken by human this fear shows in the first lines of the Sonnet: Death be not proud, though some have called thee/ mighty and dreadful, for thou are not soe, (1-2); and what the mind knows or can argue of . Means that Donne‟s says these words even though he is well aware that death is power bigger than any human being is, and he is just trying to convince himself of the opposite.
After the illustration of home of personification and apostrophe, which is applied in the whole poem since it means speaking to a vague subject; we come to the illustration of death paradox. Donne‟s use of paradox in the Sonnet enabled him to reveal great paradoxes both emotional and spiritual, encoded in the passage corresponds to the upward downward movement of ends of scale. His use of paradoxical mode keeps in step with Christian theology that recognizes and shape the paradoxical character of human‟s life. It means that it clarifies how people are living a life that changeable, unstable and most of the time runs in contradiction to his thoughts estimations and precisely death, when it comes to as make as rethink of our life and decisions and it may make as take the complete different ways we were supposed to take. Moreover, Donne‟s use of paradox gives strong and important ideas about the tenth Sonnet that is demonstrating the hidden yet strong connection between man and metaphysics. Conveyed in the tour between the horror of life and fright of death as in the lines where the speaker refers to the horrors of life and how men would be rested and released from them.
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie. (4-5-6-7-8) 74
Also paradox appears in the last line: One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally, / And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die. (13-14) in this line Donne uses what scholars referred to as the death paradox, that the end of death when there wouldn‟t be no more this might and dreadful ghost to threaten our peace, life and especially our individual power. Finally, the purpose of using the paradox is to intensify the impact of meaning on the reader and manipulates his thoughts so that they meet Donne‟s mind and intellect.
A quick shift to the Islamic explanation of this death paradox, since in Islam as well as in Christianity, physical death serves as a portal to eternity. Hence, the Arabic word inteqal does not imply death. It means, in essence, that when a man dies he is transferred from the transient to the eternal world. After that, there is no death. It is important to note that the concluding phrase is of utmost importance from an Islamic point of view: on the day of
Judgment, that is, yaumul qiyama, Allah will judge everyone and decide his fate. A virtuous person will enter heaven and an evil one will be thrown to into hell. After this, as per the bidding of Allah, death shall be brought in the shape of a ram. Allah will then address people heaven as well as dwellers of hell, whether they recognize death and they will answer: “Yes we do.” Finally, as by Allah‟s command, death shall be slaughtered on the borders of heaven and hell. Allah will declare eternity for both evil and virtuous Thus records the Hadith:
Death will be brought in the shape of a ram and made
to stand between heaven and hell. Then, it is said: O people
of paradise, they will crane their necks and look, and then it
is said: O people of hell, they will crane their necks and look,
and feel that relief has come. Then death is sacrificed, and it
is said: immortality no death. (Al- Albani, Sahih Sunah, Al-
Tirmithi419) 75
To conclude the paper I would like draw, here, the parallel between the hadith and the tenth
Holy Sonnet, death that destroys the body becomes embodied and meets the same fate it dispenses to others.
Some uses literature to structure our thought about death, and others uses it to treat death as a literary device as a symbolic representation of a subject wide spread. Death means different things at different times. In addition, for Donne in his “Death Be Not Proud” did not want convey any hidden meaning in contrast he personified death directly revealing his view towards it, also the Sonnet works through the sound of the Christian faith and beliefs that had been previously mentioned above. This poem also works through the force of its sounds – for example, by the way the sounds „p‟, „b‟ and„d‟ are deployed in the opening lines. Here, the effect is of passion and a kind of driven commitment, one might say, reinforced by the tight verse form of the sonnet, which is handled naturally and compacts a great deal of meaning into a short space. The poem works because of technique. What guarantees the value of the writing is not who is writing but what is said and how. It also works because of the shared understanding that most readers will have of the cultural and religious context, even if they do not actually share the belief system. In other words, cultural familiarity is of substantial importance. In the case of John Donne‟s literature, and conveyance of death striving to demonstrate that particular deaths fit into some kind of overall scheme. This may be an eschatological account of the world or merely a matter of taking death seriously, because we in turn hope that our death will be taken seriously.
76
II. General Conclusion
John Donne confronts death courageously death in his tenth Holy Sonnet “Death Be
Not Proud”; it can be said that he defeats that enigmatic concept. Therefore, the reader can learn from Donne‟s poetry and adapt his strong views and attitudes, and here we can talk about Iser Walfgaug‟s anthropology that a literary text can serve as. Throughout the study, we have sought to clarify the role played by the Metaphysical conceit in the formulation of
Donne‟s vision of death and how he inspired us to develop a view about the subject. The conceit as an element of style that investigates the nature of the relationships that man and his creator is central in the approach of the human‟s experience. For Donne, via his use of the conceit, envisions the human individual as caught in an intricate relationship that bonds him to God. In addition, this imposes rather, many concerns, beliefs and fears of death and the afterlife. The focus on the conceit in revealing the different relations of men, especially with his God, throughout the present work reinforces Donne‟s view and perspective; also explains the reason he was so obsessed by the issue of God, destiny and final rest.
After this poem, one can come to the point that Donne as a religious and repentant persona in the Holly Sonnets, or humanist as in his later prose works. He is concerned with the representation and figuring the outside, abnormal reality the human is living in. This dissolution of the abstract reality is precisely discovered via the use of the Metaphysical conceit. As some investigates, the true essence of human‟s life including the various relations that make his life held together, he makes the Metaphysical conceit as a vital and convenient to the formulation of his thought.
Since the conceit in his Holly Sonnets constitutes the background of his argument as seen in the Sonnet “Death Be Not Proud”; for, through his handling of this literary device that 77 relates the emotion, sensuous and spiritual in an image that closes an abstract and vague reality to the comprehension of the human‟s mind.
Another point we come to conclude in this work is Donne‟s use of death paradox. In his Holly Sonnets, which it helped him to strengthen the meaning he wanted to convey; that is the underestimation of death from its image as the biggest threat. Donne uses the paradox to explore the dominating contradictions, which might seem somehow incomprehensible by simple readers who are not able to understand the meanings of the poem. By using the paradox in his works, Donne does not only help to have a better grasp of the meaning, in particular death, but also helping them extracts pleasure from the same. The study of this memoire has tended to demonstrate the way John Donne challenges the reader‟s general understanding, giving an end to the conflicts in the mind of the reader.
Last but not least, the very important claim we come to realize is that, human beings have always sought to deal and cope with death and dying. Considering it as dread and might subject that threatens his individual power and sovereignty, however, death is not necessarily an ambiguous state, and what counts as being dead changes across time cultures, and religions, i.e. the view towards death differs according to each religion and they might have several points and views in common. As time evolved, cultures and communities started to take different attitudes towards death, some as denials and others are considered highly aware of it as part of life.
78
An Assim, Haffs. Ed. Holy Coran. Transl. djamel Akhtar. Quiro: Dar Bnou L‟haytham, 2011.
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