Donne's Devotional Writings

Okay, here’s another chapter from The Cambridge Companion to John Donne. This chapter is called “Devotional writing” and is by Helen Wilcox. I was really excited by this at first, because pretty early on, she starts talking about the role of the paradox in Donne’s devotional writing, so I thought that the chapter would help me to understand what the paradox is doing in Donne’s work: What is it accomplishing? Why does he employ it so often? How does it relate to his identity?

Unfortunately for me, Wilcox appears not to have had my research needs in mind when she wrote this chapter, because instead she focuses in on giving a close reading of several of Donne’s devotional writings, but not offering much of a framework as to how we are to think of these writings as a whole, at least, not that I could particularly discern. This chapter was helpful in that it offered a brief close reading of a number of Donne’s devotional writings (including “Hymn to God my God in my Sickness”, which I plan to examine in my paper), but was less helpful in offering an understanding of what is being accomplished in Donne’s career as a whole.

Something that I did find really interesting in this chapter concerned Donne’s view of words themselves. According to Wilcox, Donne saw an inseparable connection between his faith and his writing. He wrote, “God made us with his word, and with our words we make God” (149). For Donne, using language to express the divine was something that he must do, but at the same time it is something that he saw as impossible for him to do fully. What Wilcox said about Donne’s view of language’s inability to communicate divine things reminded me of Herbert’s poem “The Windows”, because the doubts that Herbert expresses seem very similar. (On a wholly tangential side note, it also reminds me of Karl Barth, who wrote similar things about language being fundamentally unable to express the things of God, but that was much later.) Perhaps there is something worth exploring in that Donne is writing in this tension of feeling that he must write, but also that no matter how well he writes, it will never fully articulate what he wants it to.

Guibbory, Achsah. The Cambridge Companion to John Donne. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Print.