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Holy Sonnets

Series of 19 poems by John Donne

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Donne's work, both in love poetry and religious poetry, places him as a central figure among the Metaphysical poets. The nineteen poems that constitute the collection were never published during Donne's lifetime although they did circulate in manuscript. Many of the poems are believed to have been written in 1609 and 1610, during a period of great personal distress and strife for Donne who suffered a combination of physical, emotional and financial hardships during this time. This was also a time of personal religious turmoil as Donne was in the process of conversion from Roman Catholicism to Anglicanism, and would take holy orders in 1615 despite profound reluctance and significant self-doubt about becoming a priest. Sonnet XVII ("Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt") is thought to have been written in 1617 following the death of his wife Anne More. In Holy Sonnets, Donne addresses religious themes of mortality, divine judgment, divine love and humble penance while reflecting deeply personal anxieties.

Composition and publication

Writing

The dating of the poems' composition has been tied to the dating of Donne's conversion to Anglicanism. His first biographer, Izaak Walton, claimed the poems dated from the time of Donne's ministry (he became a priest in 1615); modern scholarship agrees that the poems date from 1609 to 1610, the same period during which he wrote an anti-Catholic polemic, Pseudo-Martyr. "Since she whom I loved, hath paid her last debt," though, is an elegy to Donne's wife, Anne, who died in 1617, and two other poems, "Show me, dear Christ, thy spouse so bright and clear" and "Oh, to vex me, contraries meet as one" are first found in 1620.

Publication history

The Holy Sonnets were not published during Donne's lifetime. It is thought that Donne circulated these poems amongst friends in manuscript form. For instance, the sonnet "Oh my black soul" survives in no fewer than fifteen manuscript copies, including a miscellany compiled for William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The sonnets, and other poems, were first published in 1633—two years after his death.

Among the nineteen poems that are grouped together as the Holy Sonnets, there is variation among manuscripts and early printings of the work. Poems are listed in different order, some poems are omitted. In his Variorum edition of Donne's poetry, Gary A. Stringer proposed that there were three sequences for the sonnets. Only eight of the sonnets appear in all three versions.

  • The first sequence (which Stringer calls the "original sequence") contained twelve poems. This sequence survives in manuscripts only (British Library MS Stowe 961, Harvard University Library MS Eng 966.4 and Henry E. Huntington Library Bridgewater MS).
  • The second sequence (called the "Westmoreland sequence") contained nineteen poems. This sequence was prepared circa 1620 by Rowland Woodward, a friend of Donne who was serving as the secretary to Sir Francis Fane (1580–1629) who in 1624 became the first Earl of Westmorland. The Westmoreland manuscript is in the collection of the New York Public Library in Manhattan.
  • The third sequence (which Stringer calls the "revised sequence") contained twelve poems—eight sonnets from the original sequence (in a different order) and four sonnets from the Westmoreland manuscript. This sequence was the basis for the 1633 print edition of Donne's poems. John T. Shawcross has remarked the importance of establishing the order(s), saying that "[a]nyone who has paid attention to Donne's Holy Sonnets is aware that the order in which the sonnets appear casts 'meanings' upon them." Quoted from "A Text of John Donne's Poems: Unsatisfactory Compromise," John Donne Journal 2 (1983), 11. The editors of the Variorum have remarked Donne's "ordering of the sonnets [as]...a matter of continuing authorial attention," LXI. A first response to the Variorum editors is Roberta J. Albrecht, who establishes the clock motif as ordering principle for the 1633 sequence of twelve sonnets. Albrecht, Using Alchemical Memory Techniques for the Interpretation of Literature: John Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Crashaw, The Edwin Mellen Press Ltd. Lampeter, Caredigion, Wales (2008). See chapter I, pp. 39–96.

The 1635 edition of Donne's poems again included the four sonnets that were present in the original sequence but dropped in the revised one, making it a total of sixteen poems, and this became the standard until the late nineteenth century. Most modern editions of the sonnets adopt the order established in 1912 by Herbert Grierson, who incorporated MS Westmoreland sonnets 17, 18 and 19 into the 1635 sequence and thus produced a list of 19 poems—like the Westmoreland manuscript, but in a different order.

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