Rhetoric and Doctrine in Donne’s Holy Sonnet IV

Abstract

1 he sonnet beginning "At the round earths imagined corners"fourth in Dame Helen Gardner's numbering of Donne's Holy Sonnets, ^seventh in Sir Herbert Grierson'shas had almost as distinguished a career in the lists of commentary as in the civil quiet of anthologies.LA.Richards used it for his Cambridge experiments in Practical Criticism, where it attracted the highest number of non-committal "votes."^Itfigures importantly in Dame Helen's account of the Holy Sonnets as illustrative of Donne's progress in doctrinal matters and of his Ignatian method in composition.It is analysed by Stanley Archer in his questioning of the relevance of that method to an understanding of Dome's poems, and employed by Murray Roston as an instance of Donne 's mannerism.It is, for Wilbur Sanders, "eloquently modulated" and "spine-tingling"(perhaps the Holly woodism is half-way to dispraise), t ut finally not the product of "a genuinely religious encounter."^Moreevidence could be added to quaUfy Richards' observationupon revie\^tng student proto- cols on the sonnetthat "It is in the nature of some performances that they leave the spectator feeling rather helpless."After responding to the contrast between the grand evocation of general Judgement in the octave and the private quiet of the sestet's plea for instruction in repentance, and to the apparent logic that con- nects them, one hesitates over the tone and import of at least three passages.Even if these hesitations can be accommodated reasonably well to some interpretation of the poem, the passages remain a matter j of concern because they seem to point outward to the preoccupations I of Donne's Pseudo-Martyr and of several elegiesall probably written i within a year of the sonnet.It is as though one had seen beneath the surface of a stream not the expected smooth rocks, but the jagged out- fall of a quite different event."Round earths imagin'd corners," "Shall behold God, and never tast \ deaths woe," "for that's as good/ As if thou hadst seal'd my pardon, .with thy blood": these are the occasions of hesitation.First, why the i

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