Figures of space and labyrinths of language : a study of John Donne's Anniversairie poems
Date
1982
Authors
Fowler, Claire Marie
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Abstract
Donne's deployment of figures of space in Anniversaires is influenced by the sophisticated mathematical methods developed during the Renaissance to explore the trackless expanses of Copernican space. Although not especially sympathetic to the new science, Donne draws upon it to present the highly diagrammatic conceptual view of the world which we find in Anniversaires. Donne, however, also adapts his figures of space in a particular manner to draw out the religious mystery which the death of Elizabeth Drury represents.
Chapter I deal with the experience of disorientation which was a pervasive consequence of the New Philosophy, and of which Anniversaires give a strong sense. Although disorienting, the Copernican universe was also challenging, and scientists were encouraged to develop more efficient systems of organising data based on spatial models, such as we find in Ramist dialectic. Efficiency in spatial organisation, however, was bought at the price of separation between reason and faith; divine truths are revealed and remain inscrutable to scientific enquiry. Donne's recognition of this aspect of the New Philosophy leads to a painful self-reflexiveness in the Anniversaires where he seeks to describe the significance of a symbol of spiritual perfection, Elizabeth Drury. Donne draws the reader into his own perplexity as he explores the inexorably paradoxical relationship between the language of discursive reason and the truths of faith. And in the curious perspectives produced by Donne's dramatisation of divine mystery through metaphors of space lies the peculiar distinction of the Anniversaire poem.
The purpose of Chapter II is to explore Donne's deployment of positive and negative spatial symbols as he sets up an antithesis between the perfection of the circle, suggestive of the imagined completeness of the glorified soul, and the imperfect spiral pattern, suggestive of man's perpetual doubts and uncertainties as he searches out of the mysteries of religion along the various perplexed ways of natural reason. Chapter III continues this line of enquiry by suggesting that the uncertainties implicit in the spatial metaphor of the spiral are reflected in the complex argument of the poetry which follows a deliberately convoluted and tortuous course. Donne invites us to explore the curious perspectives and paradoxical structures produced by the labyrinth of language so that we might come to a better understanding of the relationship between human reason and divine mystery.
The concluding chapter deals with Donne's use of figures of space in the secular and devotional poems in an attempt to place the Anniversaires within the context of Donne's canon, and to show more clearly the function and development of his metaphors of framing.