John Donne established what has become known as the Metaphysical style of poetry and

foremost of the English metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, wrote some of the most
famous religious poetry in the English language. To say that Donnes religious world was,
overwhelmingly, a Christian world may seem to be stating the obvious. The recent work of Helen
Gardner with the tradition of religious meditation is an important contribution to literary history
and thus to criticism1. It has provided us with valuable insights into the ways that Donne adapted
traditional meditative disciplines to the writing of devotional verse.

The Holy Sonnets are a series of nineteen religious poems by John Donne. According to
scholar A. J. Smith, the Holy Sonnets "make a universal drama of religious life, in which every
moment may confront us with the final annulment of time."2. Throughout his poetry, Donne
imagines religious enlightenment as a form of sexual ecstasy. He parallels the sense of
fulfillment to be derived from religious worship to the pleasure derived from sexual activitya
shocking, revolutionary comparison, for his time. In Holy Sonnet 14, for example, the speaker
asks God to rape him, thereby freeing the speaker from worldly concerns. Through the act of
rape, paradoxically, the speaker will be rendered chaste. In Holy Sonnet 18 (1899), the speaker
draws an analogy between entering the one true church and entering a woman during intercourse.
Here, the speaker explains that Christ will be pleased if the speaker sleeps with Christs wife,
who is embraced and open to most men (14). Although these poems seem profane, their
religious fervor saves them from sacrilege or scandal. Filled with religious passion, people have
the potential to be as pleasurably sated as they are after sexual activity.

As for the strength of the religious poets, Helen Gardner stated that they bring to their
praise and prayer and meditation so much experience that is not in itself religious. The different
poems in Holy Sonnets are excellent examples to justify this statement. According to Gardner,
the fifth sonnet (first group), If poisonous minerals, and if that tree, is a sonnet on death, while
the ninth sonnet (second group), What if this present were the worlds last night? is a sonnet on
Gods Love; nevertheless, are not both themes equally present in each sonnet- or rather, is not
each sonnet concerned with the twofold theme of the love which alone can save us from eternal
death.
Caroline F. E. argues that in Donne's treatment of love, his mystical attitude is most
obviously presented. "He holds the Platonic conception, that love concerns the soul only, and is
independent of the body, or bodily presence; and he is the poet, who, at his best, expresses this
idea in a most dignified and refined way".4
Mario Praz, compares Donne's religious verse to that of Michelangelo and comments on
several similarities, yet concludes, "Donne, of course, could not know Michelangelo's sonnets
which were posthumously published in 1623. But for his peculiar mixture of realism and
platonism, for the dramatic tum of his genius as well as for his laborious yearnings for beauty
and religion, for that double character of half-baffled, half-triumphant struggle, for his power of
depicting the horrors of sin and death, and the terrible effects of the wrath of God, Donne is
perhaps nearer to Michelangelo than to anyone else".

To John Donne, devotion and writing were inseparable. His belief in God was so
profoundly word-centered that, in both his theology and his experience, the practice of religious
contemplation and spiritual communion with God always and inevitably involved language. The
devotional poet knows that God, who is the eternal Word, is more complex than even the most
beautiful and profound, yet finite and fallen, human words can express. In some sense, then,
Donnes religious sonnets may be seen as love poems to God: as he writes in Batter my heart,
dearely I love you, and would be loved faine, / But am betrothd unto your enemie (910).
The sonnets struggle to contain the contraries of desire and despair, passion and preoccupation,
trials and triumphs: loving God, Donnes devotional writing suggests, can be as troubled and
varied an experience as that depicted in his secular love poetry.6

Marius Bewley surveys Donne's religious cynicism. Reviews Donne's Catholic

connections and concludes, "One is tempted to say that Donne used much more energy getting
out of the Roman Church than he used getting into the Anglican one" (p. 646). Suggests that the
"Songs and Sonnets, in their inculcation of an outrageous cynicism, in their abuse of religious
imagery, in their distortion of scholastic philosophical concepts, in their cavalier employment of
logic, represent many years in Donne's private guerilla warfare against the dispositions of faith.7

The aim of this study is "to modify the view of literary history which sees a 'Donne
tradition' in English religious poetry. It suggests instead a 'meditative tradition' which found its
first notable example not in Donne but in Robert Southwell". Sees Donne's originality, "not as a
meteoric burst, but part of a normal, central tendency of religious life in his time". Suggests that

the metaphysical poets, though widel' different, are "drawn together by resemblances that result,
basically, from the common practice of certain methods of religious meditation".8

Coming back to Helen Gardners statement, after some of these discussions above, it is quite
clear that Gardner is not actually wrong. Though different critics has interpreted the religious
poets from different perspectives, the strength was almost always their praise and prayer and
meditation they did for God, and they did it very extremely & explicitly. The experiences and
images built by their words are mostly the deep exaggerations of feelings, toward God;
represented as religious but sometimes secular by itself.

References
1. Helen Gardner, John Donne: The Devine Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1952)
2. Frederick J., Entangled Voices: Genre and the Religious Construction of the Self
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)
3. RES, New Series, V (January 1954).
4. SPURCEON, CAROLINE F. E. "Philosophical Mystics," in Mysticism in English
5.
6.
7.
8.

Literature, Cambridge.
Helen Gardner, John Donne: A Collection of Critical Essays
Achsah Guibbory, The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, Cambridge Companions.
BEWLEY, MARIUS, "Religious Cynicism in Donne's Poetry"
MARTZ, LOUIS L., The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature
of the Seventeenth Century