Abstract
Donne builds his sermon around Lamentations 3.1, quoting the King James version of this verse: “I am the man, that hath seen affliction, by the rod of his wrath.”1 The Geneva version reads, “I am the man, that hathe sene affliction in the rod of his indignation.” Neither version uses “God” or “Lord,” instead Donne prefers “his wrath” or “his indignation.” Yet, the parallel passage from The Lamentations of Jeremy reads, “I am the man which have affliction seen, / Under the rod of God’s wrath having been” (187–88). It is difficult to know why Donne chose to use the word “God” in his poetic rendering of Lamentations 3.1. In the sermon, however, Donne explains why the word “God” is not used in 3.1:
Here, the name of God is onely by implication, by illation, by consequence; All necessary, but yet but illation, but implication, but consequence. For, there is no name of God in this verse: but, because in the last verse of the former chapter, the Lord is expresly named, and the Lords Anger, and then, this which is the first verse of this chapter, and connected to that, refers these afflictions, and rods, and wrath to Him, (The rod of his wrath) it must necessarily bee to him who was last spoken of, The Lord, They are Ejus, His, and therefore heavy. (X.201–202)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
While certain dates continue to elude us, we nonetheless know Donne had formal and informal connections to St. Dunstan’s parish years before he actually received its vicarage. In 1616, after being in the ministry for a full year, Donne was awarded two benefices, the first at Keyston in Huntingdon, the second at Sevenoaks. Christopher Brooke and Walter Bailey signed bonds to guarantee Donne’s payment of the taxes on those benefices (see R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970], 317–18). Bailey was a parishioner of St. Dunstan’s. As Bald suggests, “It is tempting to imagine that he [Bailey] might have been a friend also of Walton, and perhaps a source of information for the Life of Donne“ (n.318). It is also tempting to imagine that Bailey’s friendship with Donne in 1616 might mean Donne had an even stronger tie to St. Dunstan’s. Another of the parishioners at St. Dunstan’s, Richard More published Ignatius his Conclave in 1611 and 1626 (Bald, John Donne, 459). Walton himself was a parishioner at St. Dunstan’s, and though a great admirer of Donne, there is no evidence the two were close acquaintances.
Barbara K. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979), 214–31;
C. A. Patrides, “The Experience of Otherness: Theology as a Means of Life,” in The Age of Milton: Backgrounds to Seventeenth-Century Literature, ed. Patrides and Raymond B. Waddington (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1980), 185–88;
J. W. Blench, Preaching in England in the Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: A Study of English Sermons, 1450–c.1600 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964); and
W. Fraser Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson: A Study of Its Literary Aspects (New York: Russell & Russell Inc., 1962). Mary Morrissey represents a different perspective on the notion that Puritans generally promoted a plain style. She argues against the distinction between the Puritan “plain” style and the Laudian “metaphysical” style in preaching, because such a distinction relies on the assumption that preaching styles themselves were based upon “theories from classical rhetoric” (“Scripture, Style and Persuasion in Seventeenth-Century English Theories of Preaching,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53, no. 4 [October 2002], 686). Rather, Morrissey concludes, “the unique status of preaching in Reformed theology set it apart from other forms of oratory and shaped the theory of preaching accepted within the mainstream of the English Church before the Civil War” (687). Further, the “profound differences” between “Reformed doctrines of Scripture” and “classical theories of persuasion” made “the latter inappropriate as a theoretical basis for homiletics” (689). While oratorical skills could be important to the preacher’s efforts to move his listeners, more important to “English Reformed theory” was the influence of the Holy Spirit on the preacher and on the listeners (689–90). There is an “art” to preaching, but the art “was an act of biblical interpretation whereby the teachings of the Bible were made relevant (or applied) to the circumstances of the sermon and to the hearers’ lives” (693). The plain versus ornate issue may also suggest a larger Puritan-Anglican dichotomy as regards the genre of the sermon in early modern England. Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough promote a “revisionist” approach to sermons, including Donne’s, which dispenses with the traditional assessment of the Puritan Revolution. Indeed, one must abandon the “simplistic” distinctions between “Anglican” and “Puritan” in lieu of a more accurate and contextual understanding of the religious conflict of which the sermon was often a manifestation. A more appropriate way to describe the religious conflict of the 1620s and 1630s, they contend, would be via the distinction between conformity and nonconformity, and in this regard they wish to show “how the sermon text can be animated by better reconstructing its historical context” (The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750 [Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000], 9). Their argument challenges “the notion that puritanism was a force for historical change” (12). But while the “puritan revolution” became less of a focus, “puritanism” nonetheless remained an important shaping force (12).
Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric (1560), ed. Peter E. Medine (University Park: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1994), 120.
Claude J. Summers, “Donne’s 1609 Sequence of Grief and Comfort,” Studies in Philology 89, no. 2 (1992), 211–31. The five poems occasioned by the deaths of Lady Bridget Markham and Cecilia Boulstred were the following: “To the Lady Bedford” (“You that are she and you, that’s double she”); “Elegy on Lady Markham” (“Man is the world, and death the ocean”); “Elegy on Mistress Boulstred” (“Death I recant, and say, unsaid by me”); “An Elegy upon the Death of Mistress Boulstred” (“Language thou art too narrow, and too weak”); and the funeral elegy attributed to Lady Bedford, “Death be not proud, thy hand gave not this blow.”
Copyright information
© 2014 Reuben Sánchez
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sánchez, R. (2014). “First the Burden, and Then the Ease”: Donne and the Art of Convetere in the Sermon on Lamentations 3.1 and in the Letter to His Mother. In: Typology and Iconography in Donne, Herbert, and Milton. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137397805_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137397805_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-48508-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-39780-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)