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John Donne and Scholarly Melancholy.(Critical Essay)
Donne is in a sense a psychologist.
-T. S. Eliot
Throughout his life, John Donne's prose and poetry are filled with references to, as well as accounts of, his self-understanding as a melancholic. [1] If we take his self-professed depressive tendencies as seriously as his devotional meditations, we find that the two are interlinked: Donne often describes ecstatic religious experience with the same metaphors of earthly instability and material metamorphoses he uses to catalogue his melancholic, self-destructive inclinations. Like Soren Kierkegaard, who will praise Christian belief in part because it entails great suffering, Donne is inclined to equate unhappiness with spiritual redemption.
Modern thinkers interested in depression have often commented on the circular nature of religious despair. According to Julia Kristeva, "the implicitness of love and consequently of reconciliation and forgiveness completely transforms the scope of Christian initiation by giving it an aura of glory and unwavering hope for those who believe. Christian faith appears then as an antidote to hiatus and depression, along with hiatus and depression and starting from them." [2] Donne uncovers a similar pattern in Holy Sonnet III("O might those sighes and teares returne againe"):
To (poore) me is allow'd
- Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV. (John Donne)
- The Explicator Payne, Craig June 22, 1996 700+ words
...Even so, John Donne's image of the Divine Rape in the "Holy Sonnet XIV," by which the victim becomes, or remains, chaste...of the shocking character of the poem's imagery, the "Holy Sonnet XIV" seems coherent, its language apt; it is metrically...
- 'Let them sleepe': Donne's personal allusion in 'Holy Sonnet IV.' (John Donne)
- Magazine article from: Papers on Language & Literature Hester, M. Thomas June 22, 1993 700+ words
...have remarked on the biblical authority for the curious, "vivid" composition of place which opens John Donne's fourth Holy Sonnet (fourth in the 1633 first printed edition and in the early Westmoreland manuscript).(1) The poetic mediator's figuration...
- ALLUSIVE SONNET (III).(Poem)
- Magazine article from: Chicago Review GUTOROW, JACEK June 22, 2000 700+ words
for J. P. The man standing before an enlarger. The man opening an account. This bouquet of flowers, that bicycle, these lines on his face. The man, his forehead pressed against the glass, absorbed in the chalky, violet sky. The horizon: distant, uneasy. At last a woman, canon of afternoons piling
- Donne's 'Holy Sonnet 18.'.(John Donne's poem)
- The Explicator Rovang, Paul R. September 22, 1998 700+ words
Show me, dear Christ, thy spouse so bright and clear. What! is it she which on the other shore Goes richly painted? or which, robbed and tore, Laments and mourns in Germany and here? Sleeps she a thousand, then peeps up one year? Is she self-truth, and errs? now new, now outwore? Doth she, and did
- Poems of John Donne: Divine Poems
- Reference information from: Monarch Notes Donne, John January 1, 1963 700+ words
...a keen sense of emotional urgency. Holy Sonnet I: The speaker asks God, Who has made...like Adamant draw mine iron heart. Holy Sonnet V: This begins with the famous lines...zeal, "which doth in eating heale." Holy Sonnet VII: The octave of the sonnet is a...
- "Lines which circles do contain": circles, the cross, and Donne's dialectic...
- Magazine article from: Papers on Language & Literature Fischler, Alan March 22, 1994 700+ words
...counterclockwise rotation of their circle. For Donne, the order of Nature, in which humanity lives, is a morally neutral one; in Holy Sonnet 9, he recognizes that "poisonous minerals, and ... that tree, / Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us...
- John Donne's Professional Lives.(Book Review)
- Magazine article from: The Modern Language Review Davis, Alex January 1, 2005 700+ words
...volume is dedicated--provides an exemplary instance of analysis in this vein, demonstrating the dependence of the twelfth Holy Sonnet upon the language and structure of a legal plea More generally, however, this volume explores the various senses in which...
- The saving rape: Flannery O'Connor and patriarchal religion.
- Magazine article from: The Mississippi Quarterly Havird, David December 22, 1993 700+ words
"Batter my heart, three-personed God" - so begins Donne's Holy Sonnet 14, the best-known literary text in English that figures spiritual redemption as a purifying sexual assault: Take me to you...
