That's How The Light Gets In: A Formal Imitation of John Donne’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”

[This piece, like Donne's actual 15th Century sermons, may be difficult to understand. For clarification, please refer to the methodological commentary following the creative work.]

PROFESSOR FEEDBACK:
“This is an exquisite imitation. You have a superb ear, and the analytical ability to parse for sound (a much more analytical operation than most people think) as well as to intellectually craft multi-part conceits. I remember this strong ability to capture voice from that excellent imitation you did of that puerile little book about the wallflower; here you have something vastly more demanding and deserving of imitation. Hence the result is even better.”

SERMON TEXT:

HABEMUS AUTEM THESAURUM ISTUM IN VASIS

FICTILIBUS UT SUBLIMITAS SIT VIRTUTIS DEI ET NON EX NOBIS.

We hold this treasure in earthen vessels,
that its power may be of God, and not of us.

A man of Faith may in his moments of iniquity imagine it punishment that he was made so broken, and so given to melancholy; and that those around him were made so broken, and so given to decay; and being so troubled on every side, a man may begrudge God that He made him to feel pain, and thus recoil from it. The Body is of many elements, humours, its health derived from equal composition therein; in excess one brings aggression, one brings apathy, one brings melancholy; but I who have worn that last as a fashion know that pain of melancholy comes from that dust of ground whence man was first formed. The Body is a vessel of Earth, and thereby manifests Earth in memory of man’s shared pain. For we are all shaped by that highest Potter, and all built of that lowest clay; and all clay when collected is not kneaded of its impurities, nor beaten of its airs, but shaped soft into little spheres, for God so loves us and is loath to break us; but he must break us, for to be complete all men must be fired below the firmament in that earthly kiln. If a child be born unto the world he may bear upon his breast the stamps and textures of God’s hand and be so defined by them; but those same textures which define a man in life may in heat destroy him. Though no higher action is without higher purpose; For who when destroyed doth not cry out His name? for who in degradation doth not beg His mercy? For who in iniquity should not rend himself to humility? and if man is a vessel, should he not then be filled? God breaks us to pour unto us His Spirit: through the cracks we may receive it, contain it, ferment it, and so mature ourselves for heaven by it. And therefore never begrudge God that he made us broken, for that same desperation which carries a thief to the cross may carry him to paradise beyond it. We cannot call this a surrender of self, for if in such a moment I rebuke God and take to the walls of my vessel with plaster, I remain empty; I surrender nothing except my salvation. Within all of us there is space for a sea to happen; an intimation of water to come in; and if a man pushes against the waves to retain his buoyancy atop them, he shall forever see in the face of the waters his own face as in a glass: he shall never know the world beyond. 

METHODOLOGICAL COMMENTARY:

In “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” Donne drops all pretense of distance between author and narrator to address his reader directly. His writing is devotional, but still personal rather than doctrinal. I chose to imitate this work because I wanted to write a reflection on personal struggle – using metaphysical imagery, as Donne does – to imbue that struggle with practical meaning.

I arrived on the main idea for my piece by lifting a line from the end of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” where Donne suggests pain is not a thing to be avoided, saying: “No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction” (Longman Anthology 1609). While he’s speaking about illness as it reminds us of our own mortality, his specific use of “affliction” suggests suffering in the general sense – suffering without cause, from within. It’s a quintessential Donne sentiment: despite being Protestant, he still obsesses over the value of his own pain in transaction with God. I saw this idea as a perfect fit for my imitation, as he returns to it again and again, and I wanted to adopt not just his voice, but his persona.

Donne’s ideas on affliction also appealed to me as they lined up thematically with a biblical character I’d been itching to write about from his perspective: The Good Thief. Christ is said to be crucified alongside two others; one doubts he is truly the messiah, while The Good Thief rebukes his counterpart, and in desperation asks Jesus to remember him (King James Bible, Luke 23.39–43). He has no reason to believe Jesus is the Son of God, but at the end of his life – driven into a position of utter despair at his own hand – he has no choice but to believe. As Donne says, his affliction is what makes him fit for heaven. My imitation is primarily concerned with interrogating the problem posed by this story: why would a good and decent God, in making a person to be a certain way, predestine his suffering?

Donne begins his meditation with a Latin epigraph to frame the piece and introduce its central image. After quickly failing to translate English phrases into Latin online, I was forced to turn to biblical verse – which is appropriate considering Donne often began his sermons with biblical epigrams (The Works of John Donne 572) – and I eventually settled on a passage which reads: “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us” (King James Bible, 2 Corinthians 4:7). This idea of an “earthen vessel” gave me a central object I could use to tie my piece together and metaphorically articulate my theme, as Donne does with his tolling bell. However, the bell is unrelated to the metaphors he uses to interrogate its implications; while his personification of the church, conceit of God as author, and conceit of man as an island all effectively communicate his theme of unity in mankind, the images themselves are dissimilar in subject, and the fact that he immediately discards them once he has made his point calls attention to them as poetic devices. This is not a fault, but I saw the idea of an earthen vessel as an opportunity to have my metaphors build upon one another, and not just in theme. I express the vessel through four aspects: man as an earthen vessel (being originally made of Earth); man as an earthen vessel (a clay ceramic made by God the potter); man as brewing vessel (made to contain and ferment God’s Spirit); and man as seafaring vessel (able to displace and push away God’s Spirit). While each image is independently obscure (in Donne’s usual fashion), when put together they form a greater congruous whole.

In terms of the first aspect, I draw on Donne’s personification of “The Church” as an independent actor – a “body” of which he is apart – by adapting it into an image of the literal human body (Longman Anthology 1608). However, I also incorporate several ideas informed by Donne’s other writings, life, and the time in which he lived. My line, “The Body is of many elements, humours, its health derived from equal composition therein,” draws on another line from Meditation XVII, where Donne says that “[the] just and equal composition of the elements in the body … produces all those faculties which we ascribe to the soul,” while in Meditation XIII, he discuses misery and happiness as opposing elements in the body, suggesting misery is more potent (Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions). In online research, I found that Donne embodied “fashionable melancholy,” a image adopted by some writers of the time (Parfitt 26); and that the melancholic disposition of the four Humorist temperaments was supposedly caused by an excess of black bile, associated with Earth, thereby tying into my central idea of an earthen vessel (“The World of Shakespeare’s Humours”). I bring all these ideas together to create the admittedly dense line, “I who have worn [double meaning as both verb and adjective] it [melancholy] as a fashion know that pain of melancholy comes from that dust of ground whence man [Adam] was first formed,” suggesting that the suffering we experience is derived from our Earthly origin, our birth – for that was when God made us and predestined everything come. I thereby foreground my core metaphysical conceit, man as an earthen vessel, within the physical and religious reality of the world – at least as Donne and his contemporaries understood it.

In my second aspect, I conceptualize God as a Potter to mirror Donne’s metaphysical conceit of him as Author, as both illuminate our shared heritage as creations of God by using unconventional imagery. However, my image of human beings as clay pots builds on the preceding suggestion that we are all made of Earth; the transition between the two ideas is not as abrupt, and thus does not call attention to itself as a new poetic device. This section is also significant as I appropriate Donne’s conception of a loving and benevolent God with a line from his sermons: “God … showed himself so loath to lose thee” (The Works of John Donne 581). This lends legitimacy to my conceit and its suggestion that we are all flawed because God cannot bear to beat out our “impurities" (similar to air-bubbles in clay) and only breaks us in life to purify our bodies for heaven (similar to a clay pot bursting when fired inside a kiln); two acts I imagine Donne would view as acts of love.

In my third aspect of the vessel, I appropriate Donne’s suggestion in “For Whom the Bell Tolls” that affliction “ripens” and “matures” us – which evokes an image of ripening grapes and aging wine – by suggesting that we are made to “ferment” God’s Spirit as in a brewing vessel or barrel of wine (Longman Anthology 1609). Donne occasionally uses biblical allusion to enhance the meaning of his works through intertextuality (Longman Anthology). I thus incorporate God’s biblical assertion that he will “pour out of [his] Spirit upon all flesh” (King James Bible, Acts 2:17). I invoke the novelty of the verb “pour,” as it suggests an active, tangible God entering human flesh as though it were a glass to be filled – a perfect complement to God as conceptualized by Donne and to my conceit of the vessel as a container.

In my last metaphor, I answer Donne’s geographical references to an island and a clod at sea by depicting a vessel at sea. However, I suggest that by clinging to one’s ship – the vehicle of Donne’s time necessary to reach a New World – one actually blinds themselves to the Next World through God. I reinforce this idea by writing, “as in a glass,” another biblical reference (King James Bible, I Corinthians 13:12). The verse suggests that knowing what a transcendent life in heaven might be like is impossible, as least on Earth – like trying to make out one’s reflection in a dark mirror, or see past it entirely. Likewise, if my vessel refuses to let in the waters in order to sink below them, they will never truly be able to glimpse the infinity beneath them. Therefore, both the biblical glass and the surface of the water act as impassible reflective barriers representing an inability to know the divine. The two metaphors support one another. This final image of the subject looking face to face into the water is also representative of Donne’s style, as he uses the same image in “The Good-Morrow” with the line, “My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears” (Longman Anthology, 1588).

I adopted Donne’s voice by examining his prose line-by-line to pick out reoccurring structures and trends. His writing is almost paradoxical in that he constantly employs the passive voice, for example, “there was a contention” (Longman Anthology, 1608), which I adopt with lines like “should he not then be filled?” This would normally suggest a sense of distance (as though Donne is trying to remove himself emotionally from his subject), but the flow between sentences happens at a breakneck pace; he uses excessive semi-colons while also opening successive clauses with “and” or “but” (1608). I employ all these techniques in the first three lines of my creative piece, saying: “A man of Faith may … imagine it punishment that he was made so broken, and so given to melancholy; and that those around him were made so broken, and so given to decay; and being so troubled on every side … thus recoil from it.” Given the fact that Donne does not separate his piece by paragraphs, the use of semi-colons and conjunctions as shown here creates momentum leading into each sentence, structuring them as a pseudo-paragraph in punctuation as well as subject in order to separate them from the following unrelated thoughts. The lines also serve an argumentative purpose; like Donne, I open with a hypothetical expressed in language of uncertainty, as we both visualize a man who “may” think something (an idea I continue by repeatedly using “If…” statements, as he does) in order to establish a premise to interrogate (1608). Also notable in this example is my use of repetitious language and parallel sentence construction, both of which Donne employs to emphasise specific ideas and enhance the rhetorical impact of his speech. For example, when speaking of the Church, he says: “All that she does, belongs to all … she baptises a child … she buries a man” (1608). In a similar fashion, I say: “For we are all shaped by that highest Potter, and all built of that lowest clay.” The repetition of “all” in both cases foregrounds the subject with every successive verb enacted by it or upon them: The Church baptises and the Church buries, while human beings are all shaped and all built. This idea continues throughout my entire piece: like Donne, I use the same words over and over to cement them in the mind of the reader (e.g. “no higher action is without higher purpose,” or “one brings aggression, one brings apathy, one brings melancholy”); and like Donne I use parallel structure in successive questions (i.e. “For who when destroyed doth not … for who in degradation doth not … For who in iniquity should not …?”) in order to reinforce their rhetorical force (1608).

Ultimately, I feel like I wrote a compelling argument in the mode of Donne. I only worry that I made my argument too dense and difficult to follow (i.e. it took me more than five pages to explain a 450-word paragraph). While it makes perfect sense to me, at a certain point you lose objectivity; if I had to do it again, I would make sure to get earlier feedback from peers online. Assuming a believable voice was also an issue. I tried to avoid cliché or obvious inelegant language, but I still found difficulty in matching the intricacies of Donne’s language – despite spending hours categorising the technical features discussed above. Even if I had the opportunity to rewrite my imitation entirely, I am not sure I would be able to do it.

Works Cited

Damrosch, David, and Kevin J. H. Dettmar. The Longman Anthology of British Literature. 4^th

ed., vol. 1B, Longman, 2010.

Donne, John. Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. www.gutenberg.org/files/23772/23772

h/23772-h.htm.

Donne, John. The Works of John Donne. Edited by Henry Alford, vol. 4, West Strand, 1839,

books.google.ca/books?id=7ypXAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_s

mmary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false.

Parfitt, George. English Poetry of the Seventeenth Century. Routledge, 2014,

books.google.ca/books?id=KWKPBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA26&lpg=PA26&dq=donne

fashionablemelancholy&source=bl&ots=WX0U_DF8RG&sig=2_8Eqsg9J5XQLthaVd

ztjZgyI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiS0pbspIvaAhUS9mMKHfYABHEQ6AEIYzA

#v=onepage&q=donne fashionable melancholy&f=false.

“The World of Shakespeare's Humors.” U.S. National Library of Medicine,

www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/shakespeare/fourhumors.html.