The Enfranchisement of the “In-mate Soule”: Self-Knowledge and Death in Donne’s Anniversaries Poore soule in this thy flesh, what do’st thou know. Thou know’st thy selfe so little, as thou know’st not, How thou did’st die, nor how thou wast begot. --The Second Anniversarie, ll.254-2561 Throughout John Donne’s work we find moments of intense skepticism about the soul’s capacity to know itself coupled with implicit invitations to acquire self-knowledge. The paradoxical nature of his treatment of self-knowledge is nowhere more apparent than in two of his most important long poems, which are known as the Anniversaries. These memorial poems (published in 1611 and 1612) were written in praise of Elizabeth Drury, the deceased fifteen-year-old daughter of Donne’s then future patron, Sir Robert Drury. Donne uses the occasions to inquire into the broader questions of what constitutes a praiseworthy life, and a proper cognitive and affective stance towards death.2 Within this inquiry, Donne gives us two sharply conflicting accounts of self- knowledge: one in which the whole project is dismissed as being quite useless (because hopeless), and another in which it is promised as a virtue essential to “what thou shalt bee” in heaven (SA l.322). The Second Anniversarie – the subtitle of which is Of the Progresse of the Soule. Wherein, by occasion of the Religious death of Mistris Elizabeth Drury, the incommodities of the Soule in this life, and her exaltation in the next, are contemplated -- posits a distinction between the attempt to acquire self-knowledge while still in this life (which is apparently in vain) and the prospective achievement of near instantaneous access to such knowledge in the next. Death marks the dividing line between a “Tombe” in which one is “oppress’d with ignorance”(ll.252-253) and an “expansion” in which one is liberated from the oppression of ignorance: “…thinke that 2 Death has now enfranchis’d thee, / Thou hast thy’expansion now and libertee” (ll.179- 180). Yet even as the poem posits an ostensibly bright line between oppression before death and freedom after death, it also indicates that a provisional enfranchisement is available to the soul while it is still “in this thy flesh” (l.254) through the very process of thinking about death and life after it. The poem instructs the soul to think of itself delighting in the lasting joy of its heavenly home (ll. 487-490), and to think of the body it inhabits on earth as a “poore Inne” (l.175). Not surprisingly, then, the poem has traditionally been read as charting the passage from earthly habitations that are as transitory as they are confining to the expansive freedom of the everlasting dwelling that is heaven.3 Accounts vary as to the significance of the figure of Elizabeth Drury in this context. For Barbara Lewalski, she represents the “regenerate soul,” and the speaker of the poem is understood to be centrally concerned with “the ‘world’ of the regenerate.”4 Elizabeth is “the manifestation of the height of perfection possible in the order of grace upon earth,” and her exemplary progress is a passage “from earthly encumbrances to perfection in the order of grace,” which leads, via death, “to heavenly glory.”5 Recent scholarship, however, has sought to complicate and, in one instance, to unsettle this narrative.6 For Ramie Targoff, The Second Anniversarie, “In striking contrast to a traditional Protestant narrative that celebrates the soul’s ‘liberation’ at the moment of death… describes an entirely unhappy parting between soul and body.”7 In reading the poem as “something other than a traditional celebration of the soul’s passage to heaven,” Targoff argues that the poem depicts death as the unnatural and “reluctant parting of two lovers.”8 According to Sarah Powrie, however, the poem “reconfigures ‘death’ as an ‘enfranchisement,’ arguing that 3 death liberates the soul from the body.”9 She contends that the poem “is framed as a narrative progress through the heavenly spheres to represent a journey through knowledge and self-understanding.”10 Is there some way in which we might accommodate each of these arguments? One might begin by observing that the generally accepted view that the poem contains Donne’s “hortatory…. admonition”11 to his own soul implies an acknowledgment that the soul, as depicted in the poem, stands in need of such an address.12 A soul already uninterested in worldly things, ardently desirous of their heavenly counterparts, and accepting of the view of death as a happy liberation (in accordance with the stance recommended by Donne’s church)13 would presumably not require the added impetus of hortatory admonition. The Second Anniversarie mingles the language of exhortation and congratulation, suggesting an understanding of the regenerate soul as still in need of exhortation to overcome its aversion to death, but capable of celebrating the benefits conferred by death as well (l. 448; ll. 65-66). Existing criticism has not fully taken note of the resistance to celebration within the poem, which is why Targoff’s insistence upon it is so valuable.14 While I do not think that her argument puts into question the view that the poem celebrates the progress of the soul from the “encumbrances” associated with inhabiting a body to “freedom from them after death”15 (even while making it clear that such freedom entails the reunion of the body and soul) it invites us to pay more attention to fact that hortatory admonition implies resistance in the addressee. Here, I argue that the poem may be read as both a portrait of resistance to the parting of body and soul in death, as well as an account of the soul’s enfranchisement and growth in self-knowledge through the same event. The progress of the regenerate soul 4 towards heaven is represented as being at once reluctant and willing, and thus “long” as well as “short,” or, as Donne would have it, “long-short” (SA l.219). I pursue my claim through a discussion of his two-fold account of self-knowledge: that which consists of knowledge of oneself in one’s this-worldly incarnation, and that which entails knowledge of the self at the moment of death as well as of “thy self, beyond thy self… what thou shalt be in the next world.”16 I suggest that Donne does not reject the project of acquiring self-knowledge in “this rotten world” (SA l.49) altogether, but rather fashions a model of transitional self-knowledge between the ignorance suffered by the “oppress’d” (l. 253) denizen of earth and the knowledge afforded the enfranchised citizen of heaven.17 Donne’s use of the topos of the transient “In-mate soule” (FA l.6) is of central importance in this context. His use of this topos (which varies sharply between the two poems) pertains to the longstanding theological debate concerning the tension between what Calvin called “our natural aversion to leaving this life”18 and the normative Christian desire for heaven.19 First, I introduce the notion of self-knowledge beyond the self, before turning to a very short comparative discussion of Donne and Joseph Hall. I then briefly discuss the depiction of the “In-mate soule” in The First Anniversarie before proceeding to a longer account of The Second Anniversarie. ‘Thyself Beyond Thyself’ On April 26, 1625, shortly after the death of King James, Donne preached a sermon at Denmark House before the king’s body was removed for burial. He instructs the auditory to forego the attempt to know themselves through a consideration of honors, 5 offices, pedigree, posterity, and alliances: “Get beyond thine own circle; consider thy selfe at thine end, thy own death, and then Egredare, Goe further than that, Go forth and see what thou shalt be after thy death.”20 Seeing the self as it exists only in the context of the world, Donne suggests, is not really self-knowledge at all. It is only by looking at ourselves as we will be in heaven that we can know ourselves: “Still that which we are to look upon, is especially our selves, but it is our selves, enlarg’d and extended into the next world; for till we see, what we shall be then, we are but short-sighted.”21 He does not propose the abandonment of the project of acquiring self-knowledge, but rather, proposes a more expansive understanding of its object. A sermon by Joseph Hall from Good Friday, April 14, 1609, offers an instructive point of comparison with and contrast to Donne’s approach. Hall observes that “It is a shame to tell: many of vs Christians dote vpon life, and tremble at death…”22 Citing a phrase from John 19:30 (“He gaue up the ghost”), Hall notes that “Wee must doe as he did… This inmate that we haue in our bosome, is sent to lodge here for a time… we haue a liuing ghost to informe vs, which yet is not ours, (and alas, what is ours if our soules be not?).”23 Both Donne and Hall draws from the Pauline understanding of residence in the body as a matter of inhabiting a temporary lodging (see II Corinthians 5:1-9). Both take as their object the Augustinian figure of the soul that is decidedly less than cheerful about the prospect of death24 and needs to be shamed by an appeal to the example of others not similarly afflicted with a want of cheerfulness, tempted with descriptions of how easeful death will be, or otherwise persuaded to convert its tendency to tremble at the thought of leaving its short-term lodging into a cheerful anticipation of entering into its heavenly home.