Comparative Essays on the Poetry and Prose of John Donne and George Herbert: Combined Lights

By Russell M. Hillier, Kirsten Stirling, Angela Balla and 7 more

This book brings together ten essays on John Donne and George Herbert composed by an international group of scholars. The volume represents the first collection of its kind to draw close connections between these two distinguished early modern thinkers and poets who are justly coupled because of their personal and artistic association. The contributors' distinctive new approaches and insights illuminate a variety of topics and fields while suggesting new directions that future study of Donne and Herbert might take. Some chapters explore concrete instances of collaboration or communication between Donne and Herbert, and others find fresh ways to contextualize the Donnean and Herbertian lyric, carefully setting the poetry alongside discourses of apophatic theology or early modern political theory, while still others link Herbert's verse to Donne's devotional prose. Several chapters establish specific theological and aesthetic grounds for comparison, considering Donne and Herbert's respective positions on religious assurance, comic sensibility, and virtuosity with poetic endings. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781644532287

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

RUSSELL M. HILLIER AND ROBERT W. REEDER

Oh that I knew how all thy lights combine

—George Herbert, The H. Scriptures II

The original impulse that gave rise to the following volume was, quite simply, our sense of the need for more scholarship that considers John Donne and George Herbert, two of the most carefully studied writers of the British Renaissance, conjointly and comparatively. Indeed, there has been—so far as we are aware—no attempt to bring together a collection of essays dedicated exclusively to this pair of poet-priests. This gap by no means reflects, however, a waning of interest in Donne and Herbert. They continue to attract international attention in the two societies and journals that bear their names, and scholarship on them proceeds apace both in individual articles and book-length scholarly monographs in which, in whole or in part, the two figures are treated.

Innovative inquiries into early modern literature that incorporate or are singly focused on Donne and Herbert individually continue to flourish. However, although there have been essay collections on seventeenth-century metaphysical or devotional poetry more generally, we still have not seen a volume of essays focused entirely on Donne and Herbert. There are relatively few books of any kind to marry the two, and none that offer the sustained but varied attention that an essay collection can afford.¹ This lacuna is all the more striking given the degree of association between Donne and Herbert, both personally and artistically. We may reject the credibility of Izaak Walton’s perhaps rather saccharine statement in the 1658 edition of his Life of John Donne, published separately to Donne’s LXXX Sermons, that "betwixt [George Herbert] and Dr. Donne there was a long and dear friendship, made up by such a Sympathy of inclinations, that they coveted and joyed to be in each others Company."² And yet, even if we mistrust Walton’s account, there is sufficient historical and material evidence of concord existing between these two men.

First of all, we know that Donne was close to members of Herbert’s family. He enjoyed a friendly bond with George’s accomplished elder brother Edward. Donne’s long-standing admiration for Magdalen Herbert, George’s mother, is apparent in the epistolary exchange between them and in the poetry he addressed to her, or that is associated with her—the sonnet "To the Lady Magdalen Herbert, of St. Mary Magdalen, the verse epistle To M.M.H., The Primrose, debatably The Autumnal, and perhaps even The Relic. Moreover, Donne bore further witness to the high regard in which he held Magdalen Herbert in his Sermon of Commemoration of the Lady Danvers," which he delivered in Chelsea on July 1, 1627.³ Secondly, for an extended period, Donne and George Herbert stayed with Magdalen and her second husband, Sir John Danvers, at Chelsea House when they sought refuge from the plague of 1625. Also, we have Donne’s intriguing verse epistle to the younger poet, stamped with Donne’s seal of the anchor and the cross, and Herbert’s returned poetic reflections on that seal.⁴ Lara M. Crowley has recently made the case that a verse translation of Psalm 137, which shares a line with Herbert’s Deniall, is attributable to Donne rather than to the more commonly preferred candidate Francis Davison. As Crowley observes, Herbert knew Donne, read Donne’s poems in manuscript, exchanged verses with Donne, and (in an unusual move for Herbert) echoed Donne’s poetry in his own.⁵ There clearly was a relationship between these two major figures, and its precise contours warrant further study. The present volume represents a step in that direction.

A representative sample of recent monographs in the field can usefully illustrate the enduring vitality of Donne and Herbert studies. Brian Cummings’s The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace explores, among much else, the ways in which the cultural change brought about by Reformed thought influenced humanist literary practices in Tudor and early Stuart England so that the new literature of religion identified new differences, new contradictions, and new limits.⁶ Cummings includes rewarding readings of the religious discourse of Donne and Herbert’s writings, which abound in theological tensions and paradoxes, so that Donne’s Holy Sonnets try out faith and faithlessness by turns, while the voices of Herbert’s lyrics in The Temple resist any ethic of the certainty of salvation and give expression to the strangeness of the gift of grace.⁷

A second, equally ambitious study, Paul Cefalu’s The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Literature and Theology, ranges over a broad spectrum of early modern poets, including Robert Southwell, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Traherne, John Milton, and, of course, Donne and Herbert. Cefalu makes a case for the shaping influence of the Johannine texts (the Fourth Gospel, or the Gospel of John, and the First Epistle of Saint John the Evangelist) upon early modern literature. Fundamentally, Cefalu maintains that, within this period, these texts enjoyed pride of place as leading apostolic texts on matters Christological, sacramental, pneumatological, and political.⁸ In particular, Cefalu shows how the Gospel of John’s privileging of the Holy Spirit as Paraclete or comforter informs Donne’s definition of the Trinity in the sermons and the Holy Sonnets. Similarly, Cefalu demonstrates how Herbert’s theology and poetics are subtended by Johannine sacramentalism and an idea of love that has much in common with the same gospel’s ontological-metaphysical conception of agape or love. Finally, Cefalu also reveals how one of Herbert’s major literary strategies, in which a stable irony undergirds a speaker’s misunderstanding, draws inspiration from the techniques of the Fourth Gospel.

Two other major books published in recent years and already prominent in the field, by David Marno and Gary Kuchar, are wholly dedicated to Donne and Herbert, respectively. In Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention, Marno proposes that understanding the tradition of holy attention, the cultivation of a prayerful, intransitive attitude toward God, is the key to interpreting the Holy Sonnets. According to this account, Donne’s poems comprise poetic meditations in preparation for prayer by which the speakers of the Holy Sonnets disburden themselves of distraction, even as they also cultivate it, in order to attend to God in pure prayer.⁹ The scope of Marno’s study has alerted scholars to a wide array of potential influences upon Donne’s devotional poetry. In a similar vein, Kuchar’s George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word: Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth-Century England demonstrates the value of new critical approaches to Herbert’s verse. Kuchar charts an increasing insistence within post-Reformation thought, arising in part both from Martin Luther’s doctrine of sola scriptura, according to which the Bible is the sole authority for determining religious doctrine, and an attendant rationalism, that the verities of Scripture are available to the instrument of reason. Herbert responds to this new stress on attaining certitude and assurance, what Kuchar styles a post-Elizabethan eclipsing of mystery, by valorizing mystery and celebrating nondogmatism in his lyrics.¹⁰ One implication of Kuchar’s monograph is an understanding that the efflorescence of the devotional lyric in early seventeenth-century England might have owed something to this critique of hairsplitting logic and rationalism, to the softening of reformed theology, the embrace of mystery, and the spiritually productive role of error and discovery endorsed by Herbert, and others similarly minded, in this age.¹¹

To be sure, the present collection of essays does not mark the first occasion of any kind in which Donne and Herbert have been considered together. As we have already noted, the pair has inspired monographs—although, we again submit, not nearly as many as one might expect—as well as articles and, perhaps most richly, classroom discussions.¹² Linked together in the list of metaphysical poets, they have also served as foils for one another in temperament and sensibility. Louis L. Martz, favoring Donne, states the traditional contrast memorably: if Herbert’s poems dance and pirouette gracefully above a contentious climate, Donne’s poetry conquers by … violent grasping of the terrible problems of the age and the self.¹³ Martz’s distinctions depend upon obvious biographical differences: Donne produced a wide-ranging corpus of secular writing, while Herbert’s verse is almost exclusively religious; Donne traveled a thorny path from his Roman Catholic rearing to his position as priest and preacher in the English Church, while Herbert, to paraphrase Augustine, drank in the Church of England with his mother’s milk.¹⁴ According to this line of thinking, Donne had a history of being enthralled—to the brave loves of a ceremonial Roman Church, like Myrius, in contrast to the sullen, puritanical Crantz in Satyre 3, and to mistresses going to bed—that complicated and enriched his devotional verse.¹⁵ Herbert, on the contrary, was crosse-bias[ed]: dedicated almost from the outset to poetic piety.¹⁶ Those who prefer Herbert express the same contrast differently, setting Donne’s anxious sensationalism against Herbert’s subtlety, understated virtuosity, and earned serenity. Herbert’s most recent biographer, John Drury, after remarking how much Herbert learned from Donne, suggests that within the compass of the devotional mode, Herbert’s oeuvre expresses an even greater variety of moods and forms than that of the poet who was more promiscuous and wide-ranging in subject matter.¹⁷

Many of the essays in this volume similarly juxtapose Donne and Herbert, even if the lines of comparison and contrast are less starkly drawn. At the same time, this collection also reflects the fact that, as Frances Cruickshank observes, the poets are now more often treated together as representatives of an unsettled and imaginatively fruitful religious moment than as representing opposite ends of a devotional or aesthetic spectrum.¹⁸ These essays tend to take Donne and Herbert as equally, albeit differently, unsettled and imaginative voices in an unsettled and imaginative age. Both are enthralled, captivated by earthly and heavenly beauty, and both are cross-biased, simultaneously compelled and confounded by religious faith.¹⁹

The essays that comprise this collection offer current, even cutting-edge approaches to interpreting Donne and Herbert and, in addition, propose possible new directions that future inquiries into these two major Renaissance figures might take. For instance, one chapter boldly substantiates Donne’s commitment in his devotional verse to a Lutheran species of negative, or apophatic, theology. Another chapter offers a reinvigorated understanding of Donne and Herbert’s poetic strategies to claim agency in the face of Protestant formulations of fallen subjectivity. One author undertakes compelling new readings of the two poets’ sophisticated neo-Latin verse in the context of symbolic theory, while another provides an enlightening, tactful reading of Donne and Herbert’s personal exchange of Latin verse epistles on the seal of the cross-anchor, not to mention a fresh translation of these epistles, in addition to alternative interpretations of related pairs of poems such as Donne and Herbert’s calendar poems. Two other contributors furnish the reader with novel surveys of Donne’s sacred and profane verse as well as Herbert’s devotional poetry, one exploring the richly expressive capacity of Donne’s erotic comedy and Herbert’s comedy of forgiveness, the other analyzing and celebrating a near-exhaustive taxonomy of the variety of means by which the two poets close their lyrics.

Some chapters break new ground through the choice of texts that they bring into conversation. One scholar demonstrates that the individual stations of Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions merit critical scrutiny in their own right, while simultaneously showing how Donne’s devotional prose can legitimately be brought into relation with Herbert’s devotional poetry in The Temple. Another scholar proves, by a similar methodology but to different effect, that Donne and Herbert’s formulations of prose prayer and verse complaint in the Devotions and The Temple, respectively, when solidly contextualized within the tradition of prayer manuals, are mutually enriching. Still a third scholar illustrates how as apparently recalcitrant and uninviting a treatise as Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr can yield a complex and provocative political theory that, assuming clearer contours when compared with ideas of sovereignty and natural law in the works of Jean Bodin and Richard Hooker, complicates and deepens our appreciation of Donne’s Holy Sonnet Since she whom I loved and Herbert’s To all Angels and Saints. Last but by no means least, another chapter presents an original reading of the small commemorative volume consisting of Donne’s memorial sermon for Magdalen Herbert and George Herbert’s Memoriae Matris Sacrum, a series of nineteen Latin and Greek elegies composed in memory of his mother. According to this interpretation, Donne and Herbert’s dual-authored volume, evaluated as a consistent whole, displays through poetic and homiletic means a common ecclesiology and, through the Church of England’s Marian tradition and Lutheran thought, an intriguing gendering of sanctity.

While there are certain points of commonality and convergence in these essays—among them, an interest in Donne and Herbert’s neo-Latin verse; a sense that Luther may represent a more congenial Reformer for Donne than Calvin; attention to the theological question of assurance (a tendency that has also been brought to the forefront in the previously mentioned work of Cummings, Kuchar, and Cefalu)—what unites the essays above all is the desire to find fresh angles of vision on these four-hundred-year-old poet-priests.²⁰

Our arrangement of the volume’s ten chapters into four logical sections accentuates the various approaches—contextual, biographical, comparative—enabled by a collaborative volume such as this, although there are also thematic clusters within sections and thematic threads that stretch across the entire book. Part 1, Negative Theology, Political Theory, and the Lyric, pairs Kirsten Stirling’s work with that of Angela Balla, since both offer newly contextualized close readings of Donne and Herbert’s verse. Both Stirling and Balla ask us to consider Donne and Herbert’s poetry anew by aligning the two poets with significant theological and political traditions.

The first chapter, Donne’s Negative Theology of the Cross, is the only essay in the collection that does not address both Donne and Herbert. Stirling nevertheless sets the tone for the volume in several significant ways. Anticipating Danielle St. Hilaire’s contribution in chapter 8, she explores the nature of revelation and the search for God. She also draws a parallel between Donne and Luther, a correlation Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise makes in her contribution in chapter 3, and examines the relationship between sacramental and spiritual understandings of the cross, a major issue in subsequent chapters by Kimberly Johnson and Greg Miller.²¹ Indeed, Stirling initiates the volume’s persistent engagement with the Donne poem The Crosse. At a pivotal moment halfway through the lyric, she observes, Donne makes use of a key metaphor also deployed by Pseudo-Dionysius in The Mystical Theology, in which the sculptor’s subtractive process illustrates the via negativa, or the attempt to understand God by recognizing what God is not. As Stirling shows, Donne boldly adapts the metaphor to a different purpose, focusing on the negating work performed by crosses, or afflictions that conform a person to Christ. Stirling then turns to Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward, arguing that here, too, Donne applies an apophatic motif to the cross. This time, Donne provides a Christological understanding of the Deus absconditus, or hidden God, of the thirty-third chapter of the Book of Exodus, in which Moses is only granted a vision of God’s back parts. In both of Donne’s poems, Stirling argues, an internalized crucifix replaces the material devotional image and burns off the deformities obscuring the imago Dei within humans.

With chapter 2, Angela Balla’s Prayer as Political Theory: Conscience, Sovereignty, and Natural Law in Donne and Herbert, we turn from negative theology to political theory. Balla argues that, while critics have long recognized Herbert’s indebtedness to Donne’s verse, they have not adequately appreciated Herbert’s awareness of how Donne’s polemical prose shaped his religious poetry. According to Balla’s innovative reading, Herbert followed Donne’s lead in crafting religious poetry as a meditation on monarchical authority bounded by natural law. Balla first examines Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr, that daunting and little-read work, and interprets it, in agreement with Tom Cain, as Donne’s most overt expression of political theory.²² In Balla’s account, Donne espoused a situational absolutism, a label that appears less oxymoronic when one sets Donne’s position alongside the theories of sovereignty offered in the thought of Bodin and Hooker. If Donne was a situational absolutist, however, Balla observes that he was one who sometimes masqueraded as an absolutist proper for strategic reasons. In the latter part of her essay, Balla addresses the verse of Donne and Herbert, first exploring the sonnet speaker’s conscientious objections to the abuses of his divine sovereign in Donne’s Holy Sonnet Since She whom I loved. This poem both stages the speaker’s protest and enables us to consider a perspective in which the absolute authority acts within the bounds of natural law. Finally, Balla juxtaposes this sonnet with Herbert’s To all Angels and Saints, which responds provocatively to the tensions between sovereignty and conscience that Donne dramatized. Indeed, Herbert here builds on and surpasses Donne’s example of suavely coopting poetic prayer as nascent political theory.

The essays in part 2, Encounters: Exchange and Collaboration, examine actual points of contact between the historical figures of Donne and Herbert—or, perhaps more accurately, the literary output resulting from such contact. This section offers refreshing perspectives on Donne and Herbert’s poetry because it also places special weight on the poets’ neo-Latin verse. Indeed, we might speculate that some of the most evident traffic between the writers remains underexplored because it is, at least in part, conducted in Latin.

In ‘Resplendence of women, men’s means to zeal’: Fashioning Female Sanctity in Donne and Herbert’s Commemoration of Lady Danvers, Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise argues that the critical tradition has, in effect, overlooked an important collaboration between the two figures. In 1627, one month after the death of Magdalen Herbert, Herbert’s series of nineteen Latin and Greek elegies, known as Memoriae Matris Sacrum, was published together with Donne’s aforementioned commemorative sermon. While this volume superficially resembles a typical memorial collection, Miller-Blaise makes a compelling case that it can be received as a coherent entity and an expression of dual authorship. Such collections rarely involved immediate family members of the deceased and seldom featured only two contributors. It is striking that Donne and Herbert joined forces for the volume, to the exclusion of other potential authors, including Edward Herbert, who was himself a poet, philosopher, and theologian as well as an old friend of Donne’s. Besides the anomalous nature of this two-author memorial collection, the other evidence for collaboration between Donne and Herbert is internal, lying in the complementarity of the collection’s homiletic and poetic components. What brought the two men together on this occasion, Miller-Blaise proposes, was a common vocational commitment to the English Church, even as both were experiencing complications and uncertainty within their vocation. They offer a vision for their Church as embodied by Magdalen Herbert herself, who is presented in a manner that both recalls Luther’s understanding of the Virgin Mary and is in keeping with the English Church’s development of an increasingly robust Marian tradition of its own. Donne’s sermon embodies sanctity through Magdalen’s personal example such that, whether its excellence relates to women or men, sanctity is defined as a feminine quality. In turn, Herbert’s elegiac sequence complements and enhances Donne’s celebration of Lady Danvers as a Marian figure by presenting her as a model of faith worthy of active imitation. In Miller-Blaise’s essay, the memorial volume appears in a startling and renewed light: both priests and writers, mourning the loss of a beloved woman, are understood to be striving together for a Church not yet lost to division and discord.

In the following two chapters in this section, the collection turns to fresh readings of the fascinating and yet slightly perplexing interchange of Latin verse epistles between Donne and Herbert. We should note that, in the appendix to this volume, Greg Miller and the classics scholar Catherine Freis, regular collaborators on editions of Herbert’s neo-Latin verse, provide translations of these two poems.²³ The verse epistles address, as their main subject, the seal Donne adopted for himself, which depicts Christ crucified on an anchor. This focus on the seal offers a clue to the circumstances of the dialogue, but questions persist.²⁴ Donne’s verse epistle implies a date close to his ordination in 1615, and indeed the first prose letter we possess that bears the seal was sent to Edward Herbert on the very day Donne was ordained. The anchor is an apt symbol for ordination, since the Bible’s most famous anchor passage describes hope as priestly in its access to God: Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil; whither the forerunner is for us entered, even Jesus, made an high priest forever after the order of Melchisidec (Heb. 6:19–20).²⁵ On the other hand, Walton, in the 1658 Life of John Donne, claims that Donne sent signet rings bearing this seal to George Herbert and others nearer to the end of Donne’s life in 1631—and, indeed, some of Herbert’s verses in response to Donne arguably imply that his friend has died. Are the poems that we have the product of two widely separated occasions?²⁶ A related complexity involves the seal: Did Donne only send Herbert the letter sealed by the signet ring or did he actually send a ring? We recall that the speaker of Herbert’s witty lyric Hope receives an anchor from his friend, Hope itself—an allusion to the same passage from Hebrews. In this poem, Herbert’s speaker eventually proves to be disappointed because he did expect a ring (8). Despite these uncertainties, the verse epistles remain significant, since they constitute a material, artistic, and spiritual exchange between Donne and Herbert.

In chapter 4, Crossings: Sacramental Signs across the Verse of Donne and Herbert, Kimberly Johnson brings to these epistles the inventive approach she developed in Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England (2014). Johnson observes in the poems a materialist semiotics of the sacred that Donne elsewhere espouses and that the younger poet shared to a surprising degree. Donne’s verse epistle calls the seal of the cross-anchor a sigillum, a Latin word that invokes a crucial term from Calvin’s sacramentology; contra Calvin, however, this nomination suggests that sealing efficacy inheres in the sign itself rather than in the faith of the recipient. In his response, Herbert confirms that the seal of the cross-anchor can indeed fix Christ in place. The seal does not merely point to the historical Cross; it also more successfully keeps Christ present for the touch of the worshipper. Johnson’s argument does not necessarily align these poets with one precise confessional party. In fact, both Donne and Herbert present the material sign as the site of an irresistible encounter with God, thereby blending a high sacramentalism with a Reformed conception of how grace operates.

Greg Miller, who is, like Johnson, an accomplished critic, poet, and translator, argues in chapter 5, Crucifying Craft: A Donne-Herbert Dialogue, that the English versions of these Latin verse epistles that were published in the seventeenth century do not fully and adequately convey the deep ways in which these two poems are in conversation. Donne connects the cross-anchor to his couplet form, while Herbert’s Latin meter mimes the movement of waves, even as the poem assumes the shape of an anchor. According to Miller, however, Donne ultimately cautions against treating the seal and the poem itself as magical objects of devotion. Herbert even more clearly checks this impulse, gently correcting any effort on his friend’s part to fix Christ within his verse. Miller’s interpretation of these epistles thus differs radically from that of Johnson. Indeed, since both critics widen their scope to consider other relevant lyrics, Miller and Johnson provocatively offer opposing accounts of the project common to Donne and Herbert. For Johnson, these poets lovingly refuse to heed Christ’s noli me tangere (Touch me not, John 20:17);²⁷ for Miller, they direct their spiritual gaze to the Cross, on which they have crucified their own worldly interests, and even their own literary art.

Part 3, Sin, Salvation, and Assurance, contains theologically oriented comparisons between Donne and Herbert. In chapter 6, " ‘Extreme Audacity of Penitential Humility’: Devotions 10 and the Donne-Herbert Dichotomy," Robert W. Reeder concentrates on a single passage from Donne’s prose masterpiece, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), arguing that this passage offers a prime opportunity to reflect on the Donne-Herbert dichotomy. Here, Donne exhibits what Helen Wilcox has elsewhere called his extreme audacity of penitential humility, the precise quality that in the critical tradition tends to distinguish him from Herbert, whose humility often seems more truly unassuming.²⁸ A close reading of this moment thus affords insight into the motives for and merits of this characteristically Donnean stance, his self-presentation as chief sinner. The passage proves open to another reading, however, one in which Donne displays a quality frequently associated with Herbert: namely, a keen awareness of the sinful impulses hidden within such dramatic displays of penitence. Taken together, these readings suggest a double bind in our reception of Donne and Herbert, whose devotional writing simultaneously invites and frustrates contrastive analysis.

Reeder’s essay also demonstrates the subtlety of Donne’s religious prose, which stands up against, and bears comparison to, Herbert’s lyric art in The Temple, as well as does Donne’s own divine poetry. Fittingly, in the next chapter, "Imagining Prayer in Donne’s Devotions and Herbert’s Poems of Complaint," Kate Narveson focuses her comparison of the prayerful imagination in Donne and Herbert on the Devotions and the lyrics in the central section of The Temple entitled The Church. Narveson engages Marno’s work only briefly, but her argument raises the question of whether his influential account of Donne’s poetics in the Holy Sonnets—in which, through a complex blend of attention and distraction, the speaker pursues the event of prayer, the experience of specific Christian doctrines as his own thoughts—applies more readily to the prose exercises of the Devotions.²⁹ More specifically, Narveson considers a pressing concern in post-Reformation England: the question of how to pray, and how to teach others to pray, with understanding. Rather than treating the Donne and Herbert pair in isolation, Narveson sets their approaches to this question against those models of prayer represented in the period’s prayer manuals, and even in manuscript notebooks, to revealing effect. Narveson’s study thus embraces figures ranging from clergymen Samuel Hieron, John Downame, and Robert Hill to laypersons such as Anne Twysden and Nehemiah Wallington. Donne and Herbert shared with these fellow believers the effort to pray aright, but Donne in his Devotions more openly foregrounds the interpretive and imaginative work involved in prayer, while Herbert’s lyrics of complaint dramatize the ideal process by which the expostulating speaker comes to understand his situation and breaks through to regenerate, properly ordered petition. In this context, then, Narveson ultimately distinguishes Donne’s assured but provisional prayers from Herbert’s representations of reliable spiritual discovery.

Narveson’s study of prayer thus also squarely addresses the theological question of assurance, picking up from Miller-Blaise’s discussion of Donne’s soteriological vision of modest infallibility in chapter 3. The issue of assurance carries over into the volume’s eighth chapter, Recuperating the Incapacities of the Fallen Self in Donne and Herbert: Possibility and Promise, in which Danielle St. Hilaire develops an ingenious contrast between the possibility of salvation in Donne’s Holy Sonnet As due by many titles and the promise of salvation in Herbert’s lyric The Search. According to St. Hilaire, Herbert’s poem relies on temporal narrative and finds assurance in the future; the speaker’s failed search for God leads, by a kind of via negativa, to the promise that God will do what the speaker could not. Donne’s Holy Sonnet, by contrast, exploits atemporal paradox and finds assurance in the ability to forestall whatever the future may bring. The speaker of As due by many titles resigns himself to God, an act that is possibly a sinful display of agency and possibly a gesture of submission, but never resolves into either one of these states. St. Hilaire perhaps uncovers a motive for Donne’s audacious humility. In her analysis, Donne proves a Schrödinger’s sinner, deliberately suspending himself between salvation and reprobation in order to keep his final destiny at arm’s length. Working within a theological milieu that places an emphasis upon the incapacity of the self, both Donne and Herbert, according to St. Hilaire, manipulate poetic form and grammar in order to discover surprising forms of