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Death Be Not Proud
The Art of Holy Attention
By David Marno The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-41602-1
CHAPTER 1
The Pistis of the Poem
THE PROBLEM THAT I AM GOING to address in this chapter is that poems sometimes end by reiterating a religious doctrine. It may not be immediately obvious why this is a problem at all, and much of what follows is an articulation of the problem itself. For now, let me offer this preliminary formulation: a poem ending with a religious doctrine constitutes a problem because the domain of poetry is invention, while the domain of religion is the given. The problem emerges from the intuition that these two domains may not be compatible with each other. The final rhyming couplet of "Death be not proud" offers the example I focus on in the chapter:
One short sleepe past, we live eternally And Death shalbe no more, Death thou shallt dy.
What makes the speaker of the poem certain that what he is saying is true? The last line's "Death thou shallt dy" proclaims a coming final victory over death. It announces a future event, an event that is expected to happen. To expect, ex-spectare, is to look beyond the spectacle of the present, beyond what merely is. Yet if it is to be uttered with any measure of confidence, expectation must also rely on something that is already present, either by virtue of having happened in the past and continuing into the present or by happening right now, in this instant. It needs proof in the rhetorical sense of the term: ground for believing in the truth of what it states. It needs a proof to rely on in order to be able to both look at the spectacle of the present and yet not be distracted by it but look also beyond it, into the future. But what is the proof for the proclamation that "Death thou shallt dy"? On what grounds would, and indeed on what grounds could, anyone believe in the coming death of Death?
This question might appear naïve because there are two answers readily available to it, answers that have been repeated time and again over the last two millennia of Western literature. The first is the answer formalist poetics offers, and it is dismissive: it suggests that any question concerning proofs in poetry is mistaken and based on a fundamentally flawed view of what poetry is and does. This answer, which can be traced back to Aristotle's Poetics but which has flourished particularly since the Renaissance rediscovery of Aristotle's text, claims that poetic works cannot be held responsible for their statements in the way everyday language can, because poems refer to invented worlds, and not to the world as we know it. The realm of poetry is imagination, and the mode proper to poetic statements is the hypothetical. As one of Aristotle's early modern readers, Philip Sidney, asserts, the poet "nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth," because he invents his own world, instead of relying on what is already given.
But any reader familiar with the history and literature of Christianity will offer a different answer. Not only does Donne's speaker rely on a proof in proclaiming the death of Death — the proclamation is a reiteration of this very proof. The poem's penultimate line, "One short sleepe past, we live eternally," is a paraphrase of the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. "Death shalbe no more" is a concise expression of the same doctrine; and when the speaker turns to a personalized Death to say, face to face, "Death, thou shallt dy," he can do so because he relies on the authority of Christian doctrine. In fact, if we take into account that Donne thought the doctrine of resurrection encapsulated all other doctrines of Christianity, it may be more accurate to say that at the end of the poem the speaker doesn't simply invoke a particular Christian doctrine, but rather Christianity as such. What it means to invoke Christianity in this undefined but essential sense is a question I will return to later in this chapter; what matters for now is that a Christian reading of the poem would recognize the grounds for the poem's last taunting of Death in the doctrine of the resurrection as a doctrine central to Christianity.
No proof on the one hand, and Christianity itself as a proof on the other: on purely a priori grounds these two approaches seem mutually exclusive. The Aristotelian tradition of poetics suggests that the only proof on which a poetic speaker can rely is a proof located within the poem's invented world; ultimately, the poem is the only "proof" of itself. And if the poem is a self-referential invention that requires no proof other than the poem itself, the last proclamation of the end of death appears to be a mere fiction. A Christian perspective suggests, in contrast, that the poem relies on the evidence of Christianity. Poetic invention may contribute to the form of the speaker's final proclamation; it may change the words, shape their prosody, form them into figures, but the substance of "Death thou shallt dy" remains the doctrine that is already given in Christianity independent of any poetic invention on Donne's part. A Christian reading departs radically from the Aristotelian approach and reclaims truth value for the poem: it suggests that the speaker's final utterance, far from being a mere fiction, is a truth supported by the testimony of Christianity. We might be inclined to prioritize either of these two approaches, according to our own literary or religious preferences. But doing so would mean ignoring the very poem we want to decipher: it is Donne's "Death be not proud" that demands to be read as both poetic and religious. It is the poem that invites us to see it as an invention of the given.
In the first section of this chapter, I briefly discuss how literary history has dealt with the problem of devotional poetry and explain why I am interested in a different, conceptual approach. In the second section, I compare two antique conceptions of proofs, Aristotle's in the Rhetoric and Paul's in the letter to the Corinthians (which is Donne's main source in "Death be not proud"). The third section concludes the chapter's argument by returning to "Death be not proud" and by showing how the poem may be seen as an attempt to invent the doctrine not as proof but as faith.
The One versus the Many: The Question of Historicism
The promise of reading Donne's poem in the double bind of the religious given and poetic invention is that it allows us to reopen the conceptual question of devotional poetry. In the first half of the twentieth century the standard solution for the problems I stressed above would have been that Donne's poem is poetic fiction and therefore shouldn't be held responsible for its content the way propositional statements are. In contrast, the past half-century has been dominated by historicist approaches that suggest that we read early modern devotional poems from the perspective of their own authors and readers and therefore from the perspective of the ostensible beliefs that they may have had. Conceptual problems such as the apparent incompatibility between invention and givenness tend to disappear when they are placed in a historical perspective; after all, the poem exists, so speaking of its conceptual impossibility seems moot. So why return to questions that seem to belong to a previous era?
Since Herbert Grierson in 1921 defined the field's central explanandum by insisting that "in no poetry more than the religious did the English genius in the seventeenth century declare its strong individuality," the most influential attempt to offer a historical account for the flourishing of religious lyric in early seventeenth-century England has been Barbara Lewalski's Protestant Poetics. In the Introduction I showed how Lewalski's book ignited a debate about early modern devotional poets' confessional identity. The relevance of Lewalski's book for my purposes here is that in characterizing seventeenth-century English devotional poetry as "biblical poetry," Lewalski's argument offered a clear and unanimous answer to the questions I posed above about the role of religion and invention in the devotional poem. In Lewalski's view, the majority of seventeenth-century religious lyrics in England fall into the specific category "Protestant poetics," meaning that these poems do not seek to conform to the Aristotelian principle of invention as the essence of poesis but deliberately release their claims to poetic autonomy and submit themselves to the authority of the Christian Bible and its Protestant interpretations. Lewalski quotes Herbert's "Jordan" to this effect: "Who sayes that fictions onely and false hair / Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?" Truth is of course biblical truth here; Lewalski reads "Jordan" as a manifesto of what she calls biblical poetics. "The poetics of much seventeenth-century religious lyrics," she asserts, "derives primarily from Protestant assumptions about the poetry of the Bible."
The enormous achievement of Lewalski's account is that it casts light on the aspirations of Protestant devotional poetry. The downside of her argument is that it overshadows the difficulties that these aspirations face. Herbert may ask rhetorically "Who says that fictions only and false hair / Become a verse," but the answer is not only that Aristotle does, but that Herbert's intimation is hardly satisfying because the original question isn't whether truth and beauty are incompatible, but whether religious doctrine and poetic fiction are. While early modern statements about religious poetry often support Lewalski's account of biblical poetry, instead of taking these statements at their face value we need to ask whether they talk about the aspirations of Protestant poets or about actual poetic practice. A look at Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy will be helpful here. Although Sidney develops a category of "religious poetry" that would seem to support Lewalski's notion of Protestant poetics, when we trace the ways he manipulates this concept to make it fit to the local needs of his argument, we recognize how acutely aware Sidney remains of the concept's inherent logical difficulties.
The first time Sidney makes a reference to Christian religious poetry in Defence of Poesy is in the introductory narration. Rather than making any particular argument, Sidney here simply lists instances of poetry whose authority cannot be called into question, and which therefore provide him with a springboard to get to the more difficult problems that arise from the definition of poetry, which he offers only after these introductory comments. This is what Sidney has to say about Christian poetry in this preliminary context:
And may not I presume a little farther, to show the reasonableness of this word Vates, and say that the holy David's Psalms are a divine poem? If I do, I shall not do it without the testimony of great learned men, both ancient and modern. But even the name of Psalms will speak for me, which, being interpreted, is nothing but Songs; then, that it is fully written in meter, as all learned Hebricians agree, although the rules be not yet fully found; lastly and principally, his handling his prophecy, which is merely poetical. For what else is the awakening of his musical instruments, the often and free changing of persons, his notable prosopopeias, when he maketh you, as it were, to see God coming in his majesty, his telling of the beasts' joyfulness and hills' leaping, but a heavenly poesy, wherein almost he showeth himself a passionate lover of that unspeakable and everlasting beauty to be seen by the eyes of the mind, only cleared by faith?
Note the degree of specificity with which Sidney operates in this passage: "poetical" refers not to a text's ontological status but to its use of particular poetic devices, from prosody to personae and prosopopeias. Since biblical texts, first and foremost the Psalms, seem to use such devices, they qualify, for now at least, as poetry, and thus help Sidney make a preliminary defense of poetry on the basis of the Bible's authority. The Psalms are "divine poems" and thus offer a first proof in poetry's defense.
But shortly after this passage, Sidney introduces his ontological definition of poetry: poetry is invention ("the poet ... lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect another Nature"), and more specifically it is mimesis, that is, it is invention that imitates ("Poesy, therefore, is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth"). Once his subject is defined, Sidney returns to the Psalms and to the matter of divine poetry one more time: "The chief [poems], both in antiquity and excellency, were they that did imitate the unconceivable excellencies of God. Such were David in his Psalms; Solomon in his Songs of Songs, in his Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs; Moses and Deborah in their Hymns; and the writer of Job; which, beside other, the learned Emanuel Tremellius and F[ranciscus] Junius do entitle the poetical part of the Scripture. Against these none will speak that hath the Holy Ghost in due holy reverence." The last sentence is telling. If it is indeed the case that Sidney's argument is a response to Puritan accusations that there is no difference between poetic invention and mere lies, it makes sense that Sidney repeatedly uses the Psalms and other biblical texts to show that poetry has biblical authority. It also makes sense that he should not delve into the details of just how these biblical poems might be seen as inventive. Rather, he goes on to define two further types of mimetic poetry: the generic category of all poetry that imitates facts of history or knowledge (that is, historical and philosophical poetry) and the poetry that departs from the historical-philosophical poet in taking "the free course" of its "own invention." Sidney's preference for this third kind of poetry is evident throughout: those who write this third type of poetry are the "right poets," so much so that he wryly notes about the philosophical and historical poets, "whether they properly be poets or no let grammarians dispute." What distinguishes the third kind of poetry from both religious and historical-philosophical poems is that in its essence it is not concerned with the given but invents its own subject. It imitates "nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be"; instead, it may only "range ... into the divine consideration of what may be, and should be." Sidney leaves the relationship between the divine poetry of the scriptures and this third, "right" kind of poetry unspecified, though if we follow the line of his argumentation, we must conclude that the Psalms are poetry only in the sense historical or philosophical poems are "poems": their status is a debate for the grammarians.
It seems fair to conclude that within this essay Sidney's interest is in an Aristotelian, secular concept of poetry as pure invention. His purpose is to defend this secular poetry from religious-cultural criticism by establishing it as an ethically committed mode. Within this argument, the category of "divine poetry" is a sleight of hand, a trick that is useful insofar as it serves Sidney's purpose of defending "poetry" and that proves useless and problematic as soon as he defines poetry as invention. For the rest of the Defence of Poesy, divine poetry becomes something of a specter of the "right" kind of poetry. Even though "poems" like David's Psalms use certain poetic devices like prosopopeia or meter, they can no longer be seen as poetry in the full sense of the term. Since they do not freely invent their subjects but instead imitate "divine excellencies," they are poetry only in a limited sense of the term, however sublime they might be as another kind of discourse. Sidney's Defence of Poesy thus bears witness to how "religious poetry," far from a clear explanatory category, is in fact merely another name for what remains a problem, the problem of how poetic invention and the religious given could possibly coexist. And while it is understandable why Sidney would rely on this argument in defending poetry, it remains surprising that a significant trend in modern literary criticism after Lewalski's Protestant Poetics would essentially accept Sidney's or Herbert's accounts as objective descriptions of religious poetry's stakes and challenges in the period.
Kimberly Coles has argued against Lewalski's thesis on the grounds that it prevents us from seeing how difficult it was for Protestant poets to begin writing authorial religious poetry, that is, poetry that reclaims poetic invention and acknowledges poetic authority. When placed in the longer context of post-Reformation English literary history, early seventeenth-century devotional poetry appears as a novelty because it follows in the footsteps of sixteenth-century Protestant poets from Wyatt to Sidney who tended to shy away from writing authorial religious lyrics and concentrated their efforts on translating and paraphrasing biblical texts instead. It took English Protestant poets almost a century to begin to write religious verse that went beyond mere translation of divine revelation — and even then, as the poetry of Herbert in particular demonstrates, the problem of how to negotiate the competing claims of divine and human authorship remains central to the actual poems. In other words, the fundamental problem with Lewalski's account is that it considers Protestantism as the primary enabler of seventeenth-century religious lyric, when the evidence suggests that on the contrary, Protestantism was one of the reasons it was so challenging for these poets to write religious verse.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Death Be Not Proud by David Marno. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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