How Anne More Became a Devil

Donald Guss in John Donne, Petrarchistdemonstrates that Donne in many of the Songs and Sonetsproduced his own version of the Petrarchan tradition; and in fact, "Donne's religious poetry is often like Petrarch's."(1) Guss's generalizations are undoubtedly true; and this makes the contrast between Donne's Holy Sonnet XVII, "Since she whome I lovd, hath payd her last debt," and the ninety poems that Petrarch wrote after the death of Laura, all the more startling. Petrarch is more in love with his mistress in heaven than he was when she was on earth; Donne is relieved that the troublesome wench is out of the way.

For a brief moment at the outset Petrarch contrasts earthly with heavenly love,and treats Laura's death as an occasion for seeking the latter. He exhorts his soul to forget her:"Follow no more those thoughts that lead astray, /Take the sure road; our only heed shall be/Heaven."(2)But that moment once past,Laura becomes his guide on the road to heaven, if not the road itself. In death she continues to dominate Petrarch:"From heaven she rules supreme my willing mind"(Sonnet X,p. 268:"...al ciel salita: indi mi signoreggia, indi mi sforza.")Laura "bore my thoughts to yonder skies"(XXIII).In heaven "the immortal wreaths her temples bind"(XXVII).Laura's eyes were the twin stars that lighted his way through life(XXII). Petrarch envies the saints who summoned Laura among them(XXXII). In a dream, Petrarch meets Laura in heaven (XXXIV). There, still living and to live forever, her beauty enamors him (LI).When Petrarch dies, she will receive him there (LX).Visiting him in a dream, she says she wishes he were enjoying immortality as she does (LXIX).When she returns to heaven, it is as one familiar with the way(LXX).When Laura arrived in heaven the saints and angels crowded around her, exclaiming that it was unheard-of for this late age to produce so great a saint. She mingles with the most perfect (piu perfetti)of saints. Petrarch strains toward heaven because he hears her beckoning him (LXVII).He calls her Madonna (LXXXV). He fancies he goes to heaven and is led by Laura to her Lord(suo Signor)who assures him he will soon be with her(LXXXVII).

In short, in Petrarch there is little, if any,hint of a conflict between earthly and heavenly love.To love Laura in heaven is all one with loving a saint or God Himself.Petrarch's contemporaries were so impressed with his idealization of Laura that they refused to believe she had been a flesh-and-blood woman and speculated that he had written an allegory of Religion, or Virtue, or the Blessed Virgin Mary.(3)

Here, in glaring contrast, is Donne's response to the death of Anne Donne:

Since she whome I lovd, hath payd her last debt

To Nature, and to hers, and my good is dead,

And her Soule early into heaven ravished,

Wholy in heavenly things my mind is sett.

Here the admyring her my mind did whett

To seeke thee God; so streames do show the head,

But though I have found thee, and thou my thirst hast fed,

A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yett.

But why should I begg more Love, when as thou

Dost woe my soule for hers; offring all thine:

And dost not only feare least I allow

My love to saints and angels, things divine,

But in thy tender jealosy dost doubt

Least the World, fleshe, yea Devill put thee out.

The only positive note in this depressing performance is the mention of heaven in line three, and even there,with the words "early" and "ravished," the poet manages to imply that because Anne was young (33), she had to be dragged to the next world--a conceit similar to his plea to God to "ravish" him, overcoming his helpless worldliness, inHoly Sonnet XIV, "Batter My Heart," Line 14. Apart from Line 3, "Since she whome I lovd" bids fair to be unique among funeral poems in not mourning the dead, but saying good riddance to her.

But if "into heaven ravished" means that Anne enjoys the beatific vision eternally, this is inconsistent with the rest of the poem. Protestant theology states that God loves all of the elect equally, but line 9 of this sonnet says that God loves Donne's soul more than (or instead of) Anne's. This implies that Anne is reprobate. It is useful at this point to remember that Christian theology, both Catholic and Protestant, posits two judgments of God:the particular judgment and the general judgment. The general judgment is a huge public ceremony taking place at the end of the world, but the particular judgment concerns an individual and takes place at his death. The soul travels at great speed (like a bullet out of a gun, says The Second Anniversary, line 182)to heaven and is welcomed there or despatched to hell.Line 14 leaves little doubt that Anne is despatched. "Ravished" would mean, then, that Anne went both in haste and reluctantly.

What could make a man hate his wife so?In this realm all is pure speculation; but one remembers what Arabella Donn did to Jude Fawley.

The negative note sounds in the first five words, with the past tense:"Since she whome I lovd," not "whome I love." Their love is a thing of the past. Her death is "To Nature," like Banquo's (Macbeth,III, iv, 28),that is, a termination in this world and not a transition to another. The customary phrase was "Thou owest God [not Nature] a death," as Prince Hal says to Falstaff,or "Ay owe Got a death" as Jamy says to Fluellen ( I Henry IV, V.i.116;Henry V,III.iii.55). To substitute Nature with her "foul deformities" (Milton,Nativity Ode,l.44) for the reverend name of God in this context is like burying Ophelia with "maimed rites" (Hamlet,V.i.214).

Anne is dead to her own good and Donne's; that is, she is not in heaven and he will never meet her there (line 2). With her out of the way he can concentrate on his duties (line 4). The comparison of Anne to a stream with God as the headwaters (line 6) is not as favorable as it seems. The reference is to the Platonic procedure set forth in the Symposium and Bembo's speech in The Courtier , according to which a lover starts with love of another's physical beauty, continues with love of his or her moral excellence, and after other adventures ends with ecstatic love of God. Early in this procedure, one goes beyond love of the other person and discards it. Donne implies that he stopped loving Anne some time ago; it may be before Anne's death that their love ceased. God loves John more than He does Anne (line 9).First He caused Donne to leave the Church of Rome, because He resented its devotions to saints and angels (line 12), and then He abolished Anne, because her influence on Donne was tantamount to everything evil in the world, even the devil himself (line 14). Milton's sonnet "Methought I saw my late espoused saint" is more becoming, the Puritan's feelings being, this time, more humane than the Anglican's.

Many reasons might be put forward for this contrast between the tributes offered to Laura and Anne. One reason, however, claims our attention right off: Petrarch never married Laura, but Donne married Anne. In so doing, he violated a fundamental rule of courtly love, and a basic requirement of the priestly vocation he eventually pursued. In this particular, the priest of the secular religion of love and the priest in Christ's church ("Apollo's first, at last, the true God's priest")had the same obligation; they must be celibate.

To understand Donne's resentment of Anne, and his belief that she hindered his religious vocation, we must consider the following:(1) his former deification of her;(2)his poverty, and the damage it did to his self-respect; (3)his conception of the church, and the importance of clerical celibacy.

1. Donne, aged 27, was at York House,the secretary of Sir Thomas Egerton, when he and Anne More, aged 14,fell in love with each other.(4) Notwithstanding the girl's years the passion was completely reciprocal;in The Dreame Donne describes Anne coming to his bed before he has awakened in the morning to rouse him with caresses before starting the day, a circumstance reminiscent of Wyatt ("They...did me seek With naked foot stalking in my chamber") as well as of the Enchanted Hunters Hotel scene in Lolita.In his transports Donne proclaimed that the love he shared with Anne was of the celestial spheres while other people's love was sublunary ("A Valediction Forbidding Mourning"); that the bedroom he shared with her was "an every where," that the pupils of their eyes were hemispheres better than those of the earth ("The Good-Morrow"); that the Sun was their lackey and that their love, like God himself, subsisted in a nunc-stans, above time ("The Sunne Rising"); that after death they would be canonized in a new religion of love , and invoked by lovers forced to be contented with a love that "now is rage" because of John's and Anne's departure ("The Canonization"); that the abstraction, Love, was incarnated in Anne ("Aire and Angels");that their letters, collected in a book, would form the Koran of a new religion and that moreover it would contain all civilization so that as long as it was safe no one need fear barbarian conquests("Valediction of the Booke");and so forth. No wonder God resents Anne; her praises have surpassed his without her being capable of any subsequent commitment to serve him as a priest.

I have drawn a large inference, which some will challenge, by supposing that the most exalted of the Songs and Sonetswere written to or about Anne, while the angry, cynical, or depressed poems were written to or about other women. My reasoning is simple: Anne was the only woman Donne ever cared about enough to marry her. Some may ask why I insist on connecting these poems with real persons and real events anyway. My reasoning on that topic is that Donne said "I did best when I had least truth for my subjects"(5) which presupposes that he had at least some truth. The sentence also may reflect disillusionment with Anne after her life was over (1625--eight years after her death).

All Christian pastoral theology, Protestant and Catholic, forbids such worship of a being less than God; no doubt the sensation of defying God added to the thrill of self-abandonment in being so desperately in love. At any rate, Donne in his repentant period, in the Holy Sonnets, repeatedly calls his period of courtly love his "idolatry,"(Sonnet III,"O might those sighes and teares,"line 5, and Sonnet XIII,"What if this present were the worlds last night?,"line 9)or in the third person, "Idolatrous lovers weep and mourne"(Sonnet VIII, "If faithfull soules be alike glorifi'd," line 8.)"Since she whome I lovd..." also obliquely mentions the guilt of idolatry connected with Donne's love for Anne. God is said, with an oxymoron, to act out of "tender jealosy" (line 13) when He eliminates Anne, with an allusion to the First Commandment, Exodus 20:3-5: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,...Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them; for I the lord thy God am a jealous God."This jealousy is "tender" because it is compassionate of God to destroy our idols before they destroy us. Donne in his repentant poems liked to dwell on this idea, for example:

Nor thou nor thy religion dost controule,

The amorousnesse of an harmonious Soule,

But thou would'st have that love thy selfe: As thou

Art jealous, Lord, so I am jealous now,

Thou lov'st not, till from loving more, thou free

My soule: Who ever gives, takes libertie:

O, if thou car'st not whom I love alas, thou lov'st not mee.(6)

2. A clandestine marriage was followed by imprisonment and fourteen years of unemployment and desperate place-hunting, living with Anne's relations or in a cottage at Mitcham, while fertile Anne produced twelve children, five of whom died before reaching their majority. At one point so many of the Donne children were sick that Donne dated a letter "From my hospital at Mitcham." At another, he called the Mitcham cottage a "dungeon."(7)His biographer explains that it was because he was going through the worst year of the Mitcham period that he wrote Biathanatos, his strange defense of suicide.(8)In this book Donne confesses that he has suffered from suicidal feelings all his life; in every perplexity or grief "no remedy presents itself so soone to my heart as mine own sword."(9)With 176 grave authorities (listed after the title page), with wonderful catholicity (among the authorities is the Koran), with impressive logic, the author tries to bring you into his frame of mind, so that a calm and casual suicide of a morning will seem no more than part of the day's work. The blandness of the style harmonizes poorly with the shock of the content. Among motives for suicide Donne instances this: since the Church of England lacks the sacrament of penance, and the individual must compensate this lack himself, what prevents me from deeming some act of mine worthy of death, and committing suicide both for that reason and to escape future temptation?(10) For an instant one is bemused; then he realizes that Judas Iscariot followed that advice to the letter, and the advice, moreover, duplicates Redcross's temptation in the Cave of Despair, FQI.ix.43.Donne is recommending the sin of despair.

His poverty became so extreme that on one occasion he wrote "if God should ease us with burials, I know not how to perform even that."(11) This compassionate God! Donne's hope that He might terminate a few of his children bedazzles him so that he forgets how much more convenient it would be if He had arranged a higher income for the Mitcham household or simply refrained from creating the children in the first place. Yes, the children may die; but if they do, the cost of pompes funebres will exceed the short-term savings in food, clothing and medical supplies. Such was genteel poverty in the reign of King James. For such cold and terrible calculations, in the sanity of near-death(Vladimir Nabokov, PninNew York: Random House,1955,p.134)in these times one would have to search the annals of commando raids, disasters at sea, and concentration camps.

In their best days, the room that contained John and Anne had been an "every where"; now it was a "dungeon."It must have been bitter to remember his manic illusions about their shared divinity.

In the meantime a misogyny which had long been apparent in the cynical part of the Songs and Sonets doubtless helped extinguish Donne's passion for Anne. "Hope not for minde in women,"he wrote in Loves Alchymie. Inviting the Earl of Somerset to stand godfather to one of his children, he wrote, "I must beg of you to christen a child, which is but a daughter"(Gosse, II,75;emphasis added.)

.

He grovelled to his superiors. "My fortune," he wrote, "hath made me such as I am, rather a sickness and disease of the world than any part of it."(12) This grovelling continued after his ordination ended the poverty. Of a diplomatic mission that he accompanied in 1619 he wrote, "It is such a general business that even so low and poor a man as I have a part in it."(13) Becoming an idolater a second time, he asked the Marquess of Buckingham for a job in these terms:"I lie in a corner, as a clod of clay, attending what kind of vessel it shall please you to make of your lordship's humblest...servant, J. Donne."(14) This alludes to Romans 9:21, "Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?" The symbolism follows: potter=God, lump=mankind, honor=salvation, dishonor=damnation. So Buckingham is God, employment is heaven, unemployment is hell, and Donne lies in a corner, passively awaiting Buckingham's decision. Next on the list of aristocrats who might patronize Donne was Lady Magdalen Herbert. She is worth more than the whole Virginia colony (Gosse, I, 168);she is beyond instruction and so can receive nothing but praise (ibid.); even when she is absent from her London town-house, he reverences it as a courtier reverences the state-cloth when the king is away (ibid.)

When Donne was Dean of Paul's, he made an ill-timed sermon advocating liberty of conscience, and exhorting his congregation to have the courage of their convictions, just when Charles I was launching a campaign of enforced conformity. It seems that Donne didn't hear of the campaign till after the sermon. He wrote his patron, Somerset:

I was this morning at your door, somewhat early;and I am put into such a distaste of my last sermon, as that I dare not practice any part of it and therefore, though I said then we are bound to speak aloud, though we awaken men, and make them froward, yet after two or three modest knocks at the door, I went away.(15)

Even to his ultimate superior,God, Donne grovelled, implicitly confessing his dislike for Him, as he informs us in the Holy Sonnets:

...to day

In prayers, and flattering speeches I court God:

To morrow I quake with true fear of his rod.

(XIX,"Oh, to vex me, contraryes meete in one.")

This antithesis, built up from the words flattering and true,expresses the fact that when Donne praises God, it is mere flattery; when he quakes with fear of punishment, that emotion is true.

This is a tragic decline for a man who, when young, had wielded the physical and moral courage to survive the hell of the Cadiz Action and the Islands Voyage and to turn them into poetry--and, may I add, to be the first poet in history to write verse in praise of cunnilingus(see "Oral Sex: A Theme in Donne..." in this website). Much of the blame seems to lie on James I. He responded to Donne's frequent requests for employment by saying that for Donne it was "the church or nothing." James, in common with many leaders, disliked talented followers and enjoyed placing them where they would be ineffectual, at least according to his son Prince Henry,who said of James's arbitrary imprisonment of Sir Walter Ralegh, "Only my father would keep such a bird in a cage." (16)We may surmise that James set out to break this brilliant womanizing papist, and he broke him.

To the point is the story of James's condescending manner of giving Donne the deanship of Saint Paul's. The monarch required the poet to "attend him at dinner," that is, stand by like a waiter and watch him eat, as courtiers did. James said:"Dr. Donne, I have invited you to dinner, and though you sit not down with me, yet I will carve to you of a dish which I know you love well; for...I do...make you dean of Paul's; and when I have dined, then do you take your beloved dish home to your study, say grace there to yourself, and much good may it do you."(17) The exquisite rudeness of not letting him sit down, and of congratulating him on his dish of words,alluding in this manner to the fourteen years he had spent hungry both for food and for employment, is crowned by the king's stress on Donne's eating his deanship alone, Anne having died four years before. Her death had smoothed Donne's path to advancement, as the next section will explain.

3. Henry VIII lived and died a Catholic, both erudite and deeply convinced; the only quarrel he had with Rome concerned the Pope's claimed jurisdiction over England. As the young Henry wrote The Defense of the Seven Sacraments, so the dying Henry implored "the blessed Virgin Mary [God's] mother,with all the holy company of heaven,continually to pray for us and with us while we live in this world and in the time of passing out of the same." (18) Nevertheless, after Henry broke with the Pope, conditions af anomie or anarchy allowed Protestant beliefs and practices to spread through the clergy; Henry attempted to suppress these with an Act of Parliament, the Statute of the Six Articles, 1540.Because many English priests had imitated Luther by marrying,

Priestly marriages were declared void, and a priest persisting in living with his wife was to be executed as a felon. Concubinage was punishable with deprivation of benefice and property, and imprisonment, for a first offence; a second was visited with a felon's death, while in all cases the wife or concubine shared the fate of her partner in guilt.(19)

However, married priests who wished to conform to the Six Articles were granted divorces, a circumstance worth noting.The men were not thrown out of their benefices, but the women were thrown out of their marriages;it seems that when ordination collided with matrimony, ordination prevailed and matrimony failed.

The severity shocked continental Protestants. Philip Melancthon sent Henry

a remonstrance expressing his horror of the cruelty which could condemn to the scaffold a man whose sole guilt consisted in not abandoning the wife to whom he had promised fidelity through good and evil, before God and man--a cruelty which could find no precedent in any code that man had previously dared to frame.(20)

Yet a folk-catholicism persisted among the English populace that made many of them back the prohibition. When Edward VI passed a law permitting priests to marry, the protests were greater than any others in his reign. Archbishop Cranmer ordered an inquiry into the state of affairs in the province of Canterbury, directing the investigators to ask "Whether any do contemn married priests, and, for that they be married, will not receive the Communion or other sacraments at their hands."(21) A popular rising of 10,000 armed men in Devonshire, 1549, demanded the revival of the Six Articles.Some midwives refused to attend the confinement of women married to priests.(22)

Mary, bringing back the whole papal system, sentenced priests to be divorced from their wives. Her sister Elizabeth, trying in this as in all things to establish a via media, declined to legislate either for or against priestly marriages; refused to restore married priests whom Mary had deprived of their benefices;and most strangely, forbade anyone but a servant to marry a priest.The intent seems to have been, that if priests must make marriages, at least let the marriages not be advantageous. (It may or may not be relevant that the stereotype of the minister-on-the-make,looking for a wealthy bride, continues to excite derision from Jonson's Zeal-of-the-Land Busy through Austen's Mr. Ellwood and Trollope's Mr. Slope to Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry.) Consequently, legislation confirmed a popular prejudice, that a woman who would marry a priest must be a desperate case. In 1621 Robert Burton complained that the best wife a clergyman could get was a "poor kinswoman, or a cracked [non-virgin] chambermaid, to have and to hold during the time of his life.."(23)A minister named Sandys complained, "the queen's majesty will wink at [marriage of priests], but not stablish it by law, which is nothing else but to bastard our children."(24)

A union of dubious legality, between a poor non-virgin and a clergyman despised by many of his own congregation, with illegitimate children, was the miserable compromise that the Anglican church had produced between the celibate Roman priest and the "polyphiloprogenitive...sapient sutler of the Lord" of Protestantism; and Anglicanism paid the price later with the "Contempt of the Clergy"in Restoration England, the Parson Trullibers of the Eighteenth Century.(25)By the 1680's, young Englishwomen of good family were brought up to respect two moral rules: (1)to save their virginity for their wedding night, and (2)under no circumstances to marry a clergyman.(26)

Elizabeth actually promoted married priests to bishoprics, and one of them, Matthew Parker, became her Archbishop of Canterbury. In private she tiraded at him, calling married priests "beasts without knowledge to Godward...men of effrenate intemperancy,without discretion."(27) That bishops should marry was a much greater scandal than that the parish clergy should do so, and hence bishops' wives were kept under house arrest to avoid exposure to the public eye, and were never permitted to go to Whitehall Palace to see the Queen. With a reversed kind of avoidance, the wives of heads of colleges were forbidden, except on rare occasions, to enter the colleges,(28) and lastly,deansmight not live with their wives in their deaneries. So if James had promoted Donne four years before he did, John Donne and Anne Donne would have had to embark on a grotesque life in two houses. Once one little room had been an everywhere, then it had been a dungeon,now each would be alone in it.

As long as Anne was alive, Donne was blocked from promotion. No one would want to reduce"Since she whome I lovd..." to a meaning as vulgar as that; but, after all that Donne had been through, it must have been a factor.

Elizabeth once visited Matthew Parker's wife in her Moslem seclusion in Lambeth House. When it was time to go, and the queen had thanked all and sundry for their hospitality, she turned to her hostess and sneered:"And you--madam I may not call you, mistress I am ashamed to call you, so I know not what to call you--but, howsoever, I thank you."(29) In this precise insult, because the sacrament of matrimony was invalid between this woman and Parker, the queen might not call her madam or wife. Because having a harlot live with her Archbishop of Canterbury was nearly the greatest disgrace her church could suffer, she was ashamed to call her mistress or unmarried woman.

This narrative just given, fully justifies Donne's objection to the Anglican church: its laws were "still new like fashions."(30) Shortly after Henry's Act of Supremacy, a priest could marry; under the Six Articles, he could not; under Edward he could; under Mary, not; under Elizabeth he might, but it was a disgrace. During the two years and seven months Donne was both a priest and living with Anne (ordination, 23 Jan. 1615-death of Anne, 15 Aug. 1617) what did he think he was living with--wife or harlot, madam or mistress?

Many in Donne's age held that, since the human mind is incapable of attaining truth anyway, one might as well assent to the religion of his country,having sufficient reason to do so in the need for peace and the desire to be a good citizen.(31) Against this blend of skepticism and fideism, Donne reacted with righteous anger:

Foole and wretch, wilt thou let thy Soule be tyed

To mans lawes, by which she shall not be tryed

At the last day? Oh, will it then boot thee

To say a Philip, or a Gregory,

A Harry, or a Martin taught thee this?

Is not this excuse for mere contraries,

Equally strong?Cannot both sides say so?(32)

We must seek the truth, then. But how?

...aske thy father which is shee [the true church],

Let him aske his; though truth and falshood bee

Neare twins, yet truth a little elder is.(33)

The doctrines and ceremonies that can be traced right back to the Apostles, then, constitute the true church. All heresy is innovation, and only innovation is heresy.

Richard Hooker, the most influential theologian in the church of Elizabeth and James, offers this explanation of the permission of priestly marriage:

St. Paul indeed doth exhort Timothy after this manner: "Suffer thou evil as a noble soldier of Jesus Christ: no man warring is entangled with the affairs of life, because he must serve such as have pressed him into warfare."...

As well might we gather out of this place,that men having children or wives are not fit to be ministers, (which also hath been collected, and that by sundry of the ancient),and that it is requisite the clergy be utterly forbidden marriage...even so St. Paul doth say, that the married are careful for the world, the unmarried freer to give themselves wholly to the service of God.Howbeit...as many as are of sound judgment know it to be far betterfor this present agethat the detriment be borne which haply may grow through the lessening of some few men's spiritual labors, than that the clergy and commonwealth should lack the benefit which both the one and the other may reap through their dealing in civil affairs.(34)

This puts into noble prose Elizabeth's hypocritical policy. Had she been omnipotent, she would have created a celibate clergy and prelacy. But being, early in her reign, vulnerable and put to her shifts, she made do with the clergy she had inherited from Edward VI, many of whom were married. Needing able administrators in the most important posts, she promoted priests who happened to be married, notably Parker. This violated her conscience, but she, a practical woman, appeased it by ranting at Parker and insulting his wife.

Hooker, rationalizing the situation,here says that indeed, Saint Paul's words were taken by the ancients to forbid priestly marriage, but the institution is too useful to be forgone in this present age. With what scorn Donne must have read this paragraph! A clearer example of heresy in his meaning of the word could not be found.

This may clear up a mystery in Donne's life which has been puzzling since 1607. In that year Thomas Morton, Dean of Gloucester, offered Donne a benefice. Donne politely declined, giving three reasons. (1)"some irregularities in my life" which he feared would bring the clergy into disrepute;(2)sheer desperation, his needing a job so badly that he might succumb to the temptation to take it for primarily worldly motives;and (3)"other reasons that dissuade me; but I crave your favor that I may forbear to express them"(Gosse, I, 159).If Donne can talk to Morton about "irregularities," why can't he talk about these other reasons?They might be something offensive to Morton's beliefs, as for example,"The Anglican church's custom of priestly marriage is a heresy, and I am married, so if I took orders in your church, I and my wife would be in danger of hell fire." This brings on the further surmise that he accepted orders in 1615 because he foresaw that Anne would not live long and decided to chance it.

As noted above, when ordination collides with matrimony, the former is intact and the latter abolished. So to Donne's seeming, the day he took orders, his wife metamorphosed into his harlot.God could not favor a man living so, and hence the frequent note of desperation in The Holy Sonnets:

Oh I shall soone despaire,when I doe see

That thou lov'st mankind well, yet wilt' not chuse me.

(II,"As due by many titles,"lines 12-13).

In XIV, "Batter my heart," the poet seems to ask God to free him from marriage to the devil:

Yet dearely' I love you'and would be loved faine,

But am betroth'd unto your enemie,

Divorce mee,'untie, or break that knot againe...(lines 9-11).

In traditional Christian rhetoric, to be unregenerate is to be,not married to the Devil, but enslaved by him.Conversely, Donne uses the word divorceto signify the separation of two human beings by death:

Two graves must hide thine and my coarse,

If one might, death were no divorce.

If Devill in "Since she whom I lov'd" means Anne,and Divorce mee in "Batter my heart" means separate me from your enemy by death,we may plausibly surmise that Donne in the Holy Sonnetspetitions God to make Anne die. If so,"Batter My Heart" contains the prayer and "Since she whome I lovd,"the answer.

Notes

(1)Wayne State U.P., Detroit, 1966; p.202, note 1.

(2)The Sonnets of Petrarch, ed. Thomas G. Bergin, Heritage Press, n.p.,1966, p.262.

(3)Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,Chapter LXX, Note 2.

(4)"So long as her being at York House this had foundation, and so much then of promise and contract built upon it as, without violence to conscience, might not be shaken." Donne means that as soon as Anne arrived, in 1600, they swore vows that according to the custom of "contract marriage," made them man and wife in the eyes of God, though witnesses were needed to make the agreement stand up in court.--Edmund Gosse, Life and Letters of John Donne, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959, I, 101.

(5)Gosse, I, 62.

(6)Herbert J.C. Grierson,ed.,The Poems of John Donne, Oxford U.P., London, 1912,I, 353.

(7)Gosse, I, 194.

(8)I,207.

(9)Biathanatos,ed. Ernest W. Sullivan, Newark:U.of Delaware Press, London, 1984, p. 29.

(10)Page 80.

(11)Gosse, I, 189.

(12) I, 194.

(13)II, 134.

(14)II, 140.

(15)II, 244.

(16) The Cambridge History of English Literature,Vol.IV, Part iii. Sir Walter Ralegh, Paragraph 4, Guiana, Paragraph 16. Found on the Internet.

(17)Gosse, II, 148.

(18) James Anthony Froude, History of England,New York:Scribner, 1865, IV, 481.

(19) Henry Charles Lea, The History of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church,New York: Russell & Russell, 1957: p. 401.

(20)Page 403.

(21) Pages 405-406.

(22)Page 408.

(23) The Anatomy of Melancholyed. Holbrook Jackson (Random House, New York, 1977), I, 307.

(24) Lea, p. 419.

(25)The Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy and Religion Enquired Into was published by John Eachard in 1670.

(26)T.B. Macaulay, History of England, New York:John Wurtele Lovell, n.d., I, 300.

(27) Lea, p. 423.

(28)Page 424.

(29)Page 421.

(30)Satyre III,line 57, in Grierson, I,156.

(31) See Richard Popkin,The History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Descartes,Humanities Press, 1961.

(32)Satyre III, lines 93-99.

(33)Lines 71-73.

(34) Works ed. John Keble, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1888: III, 247-48. The emphasis is added.