The Executioner’s Song

Donne’s genius thrived on contradiction; “Devotions” is one of his most paradoxical works. It concentrates on death while celebrating life; it is somber but not sad; it is egotistical but alarmed by isolation. “Death’s Duel,” its independent pendant, is similarly cross-hatched. It finds its energy in exhaustion and its spiritual hope in bodily defeat.

“Death’s Duel” was the last sermon preached by Donne--on Friday, Feb. 25, 1631, a little less than 10 years after he had been installed as the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and a little more than a month before he died at 59. According to his biographer, Isaac Walton, it was an extraordinary performance, even by Donne’s standards: “to the amazement of some beholders he presented himself not to preach mortification by a living voice: but, mortality by a decayed body and a dying face.”

Evidently Donne’s congregation was transfixed by his farewell. But his air of finality--even, in a sense, his presentation--were not without precedent. In 1623, eight years before he ascended his pulpit for the last time, Donne had already appeared in his “Devotions” as a man waiting at death’s door. Not slumped before it, spent and frightened, but rapping on the timber with his remaining strength.

Here is what happened. The early part of 1623 had been crammed--as had every year since Donne’s election as dean--with cathedral business, associated legal business and family business: Donne’s wife Ann had died giving birth to a stillborn child in 1617; he had been left to supervise the upbringing of their six surviving children. On Oct. 21, 1623, he arranged a dinner for Edward Alleyn, at which Alleyn agreed to marry Donne’s daughter Constance, then aged 21. (Alleyn, 1566-1626, was an interesting catch. He had begun working as an actor with the Lord Admiral’s men during the 1590s and took the leading role in several new plays by Marlowe and Shakespeare. In 1613 he had moved to Dulwich, where he built the College of God’s Gift.) Donne was in good health when the wedding plans were made. At the end of the following month, however, he was struck down by the “relapsing fever” then sweeping through London. He immediately brought forward the date of the wedding, which took place on Dec. 3.

“Relapsing fever” was so called because even when the initial danger was passed--the first week was critical--there was a strong likelihood of the patient succumbing suddenly during convalescence. Donne seems to have been over the worst of the early stages by Dec. 6 but was still feeble two months later. As late as February 1624, he described himself as being “barred of my ordinarie diet, which is Reading.”

The fact that Donne managed to plan, write and publish his Devotion during this extremely difficult time is remarkable. Or rather it shows--and not for the only time in his life--that when he felt most gravely threatened, he also felt compelled to produce his most defiantly lively writing. He began taking notes for the book as soon as the first wave of his illness had broken, organized its intricate structure at a feverish pace and completed it during his recovery (which fortunately did not include any “relapses”). He described the process in a letter to his friend Sir Robert Ker:

Though I have left my bed, I have not left my bed-side; I sit there still, and as a Prisoner discharged, sits at the Prison doore, to beg Fees, so I sit here, to gather crummes. I have used this leisure, to put the meditations had in my sicknesse, into some such order, as may minister some holy delight. They arise to so many sheetes (perchance 20.) as that without staying for that furniture of an Epistle, That my Friends importun’d me to Print them, I importune my Friends to receive them Printed.

These friends, and the official licencer, had first seen the completed “Devotions” at the very beginning of 1624, before the manuscript was entered in the Stationers Register on Jan. 9. They had “received [it] printed” by Feb. 1. In other words, the book was not only written very quickly, but it was also brought into the world very quickly, which suggests that it was intended to strike readers as being immediate, close up and intimate.

The reality is more complicated. In certain respects Donne is indeed concerned to create a palpable here and now. He describes the course of his illness in some detail, shows himself disordered and distressed during the first few days of his suffering, reflects on the treatment he received from his doctors (among them Simeon Fox, the youngest son of John Fox, author of the “Book of Martyrs,” who would also treat him at the end of his life) and provides enough anecdotal detail to prove his serious and particular case. Moreover, his language is always frankly intense: “Whether it be thy will to continue me long thus,” he says at one point, with a typically warm sense of actuality, “or to dismiss me by death, be pleased to afford me the helps fit for both conditions, either for my weak stay here, or my final transmigration from hence.”

In other respects, the “Devotions” stand at a distance from their audience. This has less to do with period features of the writing, which can seem remote from modern usage, than with the very ingenuities that make the writing so compelling. We feel, as we often feel reading Donne’s poems, that the emotional weight matters less than intellectual fireworks. Critics who feel there is something inherently disparaging about this separation often seek to heal it by saying, with T.S. Eliot, that thought was an experience for Donne. His brain waves were in their way as charged and self-defining as the heartbeats of the Romantics. But this argument, while properly characterising much of what is vital in his work, risks misrepresenting our experience as readers. The “Devotions,” like all his greatest writing, are a performance, and because they are a performance we feel held at arm’s length. To put it another way: Donne’s sickbed is a stage, and we admire the patient as if we were looking at him across footlights.

The structure of the book makes this certain. The 23 sections that follow the “Stations of the Sickness” are each divided into three parts: “Meditations upon our Human Condition,” “Expostulations and Debatements with God,” and “Prayers upon several occasions to him.” Although these sections are respectful toward their narrative of crisis and recovery, they read more like a set of daring intellectual adventures than a series of meditations on steady subjects. Their tight recurring patterns, their relentless enquiry, and their discursive dazzle combine to generate a sense of detachment in their speaker.

Within the tight world of each little trinity, Donne makes raids on ideas of the Holy Trinity--wondering why an all-powerful God permits disease in the first place, pointing out how disease anticipates death (“the sickbed is a grave”), calculating how we gauge and celebrate the “blessed dependency” between God and ourselves, reminding us how this “spotted” life is a preparation for its immaculate sequel. The great achievement of the structure is to allow these thoughts their element of linear progress while creating the impression of a mind rattling round in a wheel. A point in his illness begets a certain idea; this certain idea begets other ideas; these are differently examined in the three different approaches that constitute each section; then the process starts all over again. No permanent resting-places. But always the surrounding certainty of God’s love and of death. “I need go no further than myself: for a long time I was not able to rise; at last I must be raised by others; and now I am up, I am ready to sink lower than before.”

There is another constant, besides love and death. Sin. Human wickedness in general and his own sin in particular. Although Donne never makes a detailed reference to his life as a young man--his life as a love-poet and raffish European--he glances at it frequently and always in dismay. “If I confess to the sins of my youth,” he says in the 10th Prayer, “wilt thou ask me if I know what these sins were? I know them not so well as to name them all, nor am I sure to live hours enough to name them all.” Elsewhere he refers to his “sinful memory” with the same feeling of disgust--with so much disgust, in fact, that he appears positively enthralled by his own corruption. Why? Because although Donne’s sins are burdensome to him, they are enabling. They are the means by which he defines his humanity and are therefore also the proof of his need for God.

In this sense, Donne interprets his illness as a mixed blessing. On one hand it is a massive, consuming emblem of his fallen state. On the other it represents a step along the road to salvation, which can only be fully achieved by death. More than 10 years before he produced the “Devotions” in “Biathanatos” (first published in 1646), Donne had written a notorious defense of suicide. Now in his new book he is excited by the thought that self-murder might not be necessary. (“I do nothing upon myself, and yet am mine own executioner.”) The very first Prayer in “Devotions” moderately asks God to “enable me by thy grace to look forward to mine end”; later he reassures us, “I fear not the hastening of my death”; later again his voice melts:

Death is in an old man’s door, he appears and tells him so,

and death is at a young man’s back, and says nothing;

age is a sickness, and youth is an ambush; and we need

so many physicians as may make up a watch, and

spy every inconvenience. There is scarce any thing that

hath not killed somebody; a hair, a feather both done it;

nay, that which is our best antidote against it both done it;

the best cordial hath been a deadly poison.

The note of acceptance here is unignorable. But if we tried to persuade ourselves that its calm music swells slowly and surely through “Devotions,” we would imply that the book’s contradictory elements were eventually resolved. They are not. However profoundly Donne accepts that “the whole course of life is but an active death” and however eagerly he anticipates the prospect of his release, he is always buffeted by opposites. The self which longs to be transfigured is also the self which feels insulted by extinction and which clings to a dramatic identity in spite of itself. The sickroom might be a physical prison, but even here the mind is exhilaratingly nimble, adventurous and free. It is, he says, an “Inexplicable mystery”: “my thoughts reach all, comprehend all. . . . I their creator am in a close prison, in a sickbed, any where, and any one of my creatures, my thoughts, is with the sun, and beyond the sun, overtakes the sun, and overgoes the sun in one pace, one step, everywhere.”

Donne knows that his mind delighting supports his spiritual effort; it prevents his faith from becoming complacent or merely passive. In some respects, though, it creates problems. The worst of them has to do with the question of how his self connects with the world around him, as we can see by noticing how deeply the “Devotions” are preoccupied by solitude. Not the bliss of solitude, but the threat of solitude. As a young poet, as a priest and as a preacher, Donne spent his life producing words which--in the ways discussed above--keep their distance but which are nevertheless determined to reflect and engage with society at large. Illness threatens this relationship. “Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself,” he says, and again: “how little and how impotent a piece of the world is any man alone.” Eventually Donne consoles himself by declaring that individuals are never truly isolated:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,

as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a

manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were:

any man’s death diminishes me, because I am

involved in mankind, and therefore never send to

know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

“Because I am involved in mankind.” The brilliantly evocative imagery of this famous passage dramatizes what is at stake. So do the other language patterns which bind together the “Devotions.” At regular intervals, for instance, the alarming disorder of illness is rendered as a conflict between rival kingdoms. So many glimpses of insurrection and war are flashed before us, our sense of the individual gradually expands to fill the space normally reserved for a country. Like the scene in which Donne’s mind escapes his sickbed to overtake the sun, these moments powerfully insist on the potency of the self. That is to say: The self is not a timorous and quailing thing, trembling before its creator and insisting on its own littleness. It is a dynamic and heroic thing--as intrepid in its way as its alter ego the explorer-lover--and always looking for new ways to increase its reach.

And, of course, always finding new definitions of its limits--as we can see by registering another significant language pattern. Donne’s poems are fascinated by things being stretched or extended (compasses; “gold to airy thinness beat”); his “Devotions” are strewn with images of impermanence. In both cases, the effect is to convey a simultaneous sense of mobility and volatility--of a speaker who is at once freed and troubled by living between worlds. Wax (“These heats, O Lord, which thou best brought upon this body, are but thy chafing of the wax, that thou mightst seal me to thee”); a river (which in its course describes “the precipitation of man’s body to dissolution”): These and other images in the “Devotions” ensure that our pleasure in the artfulness of Donne’s mind is always accompanied by sympathy for his plight. It means that as we relish the text he produces, we realize that he is himself a body turning into a text. Illness writes on his body (“I have cut up mine own anatomy, dissected myself, and they are gone to read upon me”) but also makes him legible as God’s creation: “[T]hese spots are but the letters in which thou hast written thine own name and conveyed thyself to me.”

It is the persistence and complexity of these paradoxes that make the “Devotions” such a consoling work. The same thing applies to “Death’s Duel,” though the mood here is more uniformly dark--it is a black mind-labyrinth lit by lightning flashes, echoing with the clatter of mental sword-play. Coincidentally, Donne’s daughter Constance was once again a part of the background story. In the summer of 1630, Donne went to stay with Constance and her second husband at Aldeborough Hatch in Essex, and while he was there he fell ill, probably with gastric cancer. On Dec. 13 he made his will, and when he returned to London in late January 1631, his friends were shocked to see how wasted he had become. Not that this prevented him from preparing “Death’s Duel” minutely--writing it out in full before committing it to memory, perhaps because he knew it would be printed after his death.

Like “Devotions,” “Death’s Duel” has a tightly organised, well-founded structure (Donne actually begins the sermon by saying “Buildings stand by the benefit of their foundations that sustain and support them”). Taking as his epigraph “And unto God the Lord belong the issues of death [i.e. from death],” he wrings three meanings from the phrase “deliverance from death,” “the disposition and manner of our death” and “a deliverance by death.”

The first third of the sermon is the longest, showing once again that Donne’s mind was most urgently stimulated by the struggle between opposites. As he reminds his congregation that the fact of their mortality has been evident since birth, that their bodies have only one destination and that their sinfulness accelerates the journey toward it, he adopts the same tactics as he did in the “Devotions.” He tries to meet death on equal terms by matching its force with his own eloquence. Making his last hours his finest hours, he both prepares himself for God and reminds himself of what he is about to lose.

In the briefer second and third sections, Donne shifts his attention from ideas of deliverance to thoughts of judgment and finally to the example of Christ’s death: “There now hangs that sacred body upon the cross, rebaptised in his own tears, and sweat, and embalmed in his own blood alive. Then are those bowels of compassion which are so conspicuous, so manifested, as that you may see them through his wounds. Then those glorious eyes grew faint in their sight, so the sun, ashamed to survive them, departed with his light too.” These almost-final words are among Donne’s boldest: his congregation, staring at his hollowed face, hearing the rasp of his exhausted voice, realised--as Walton realized--that he was invoking the “blessed dependency” not merely between his listeners and their God but between himself and his suffering Christ. The sensational egotism of the comparison is also the triumph of his compassion.

And also of his theatricality. In “Death’s Duel” as in the “Devotions,” we are engrossed by the evidence of an exceptional mind engaged in the act of thinking for himself, his sentences changing direction to accommodate ideas as they rush toward him, his lexicon riffling and even expanding (he coins “contignation” in the first paragraph) as he tries to find words for everything that is in his mind. At the same time, he validates his thinking for others. Donne had been conspicuously slow to give up a secular existence and turn to the church, and his decision was more obviously swayed by the King’s intervention than by his own faith. But once he had embraced his new life, he retained and adapted the authorizing intelligence he had developed in his old one: An intelligence which dreads isolation, regrets corruption and acknowledges mortality. Which delights in audacious argument, in proud wit, in outrageous flights of fancy. Which knows that these things brand him as fallible but also understands that they show honor to common humanity.