English 630B
Spring 1976
Ways of Surrender
It is generally understood that George Herbert’s submission to the will of God brought him peace. At least, when we read Herbert’s surrender in his poems, we hear always at their conclusions sounds of serene acceptance. He struggled, but he found some ease. John Donne battled with his Maker and verified his tension. What we read of his struggles is agonized and heated. At the end of each bout, Donne is spent and surrendered, but somehow more sullen than serene.
For both men, the basic conflict was between the demands of the flesh and those of the spirit. But there was a difference. It’s true that both sought profitable preferments in the church, but Donne’s war was more concentratedly between his desires for physical, especially sexual, satisfaction and a kind of purity of mind and body he felt necessary for full devotion to God. Herbert apparently was never tempted by a human body; at least he doesn’t mention any such conflict in his poetry. It occurs to him, however, and so he versifies, to be free of clerical duties and at least to consider the high life. Donne had his women. Herbert kept to his church. Both men lived with a sense of unworthiness while busy being worthy.
I shall consider here each man’s expressions of surrender in their religious poems. I shall discuss the specific emotions each reveals. And I’ll comment on the nature or quality of each surrender as it is outlined in the poetry.
There was a time, says Donne, before men had a Christian revelation to protect them from earth’s temptations. In “Satyre III” On Religion, he asks “Are you not heavens joyes as valiant to asswage / Lusts, as earths honour was to them? Alas” (11. 8-9). The pursuit of honor on earth was enough then, in Greece and Rome, to keep man virtuous, free from presumably awful lust. Asking the question at all now, whether the Church is enough, implies a serious doubt in Donne’s mind. He urges the troubled “desperate coward” (1. 29) to “seeke true religion” (1.43) because
Flesh (it selfes death) and joyes which flesh can taste
Though lovest; and thy faire goodly soule which doth
Give this flesh power to taste joy, thou dost loath.”
(11. 40-42)
But by “true religion” he doesn’t mean just any man’s determination. There’s the rub. Donne astonishes himself, really, when he urges caution in listening to mere mortals’ view of God. Each man has true roots, which are necessary in God. Uprooted, he is lost: “So perish Soules, which more chuse mens unjust / Power from God claym’d, than God himselfe to trust.” (11. 109-10). The answer is within, and the quest is each man’s lonely journey.
The soul gives flesh its very being, yet we will not celebrate it as we do the flesh. It is Donne’s dilemma. He knows, of course, that God governs all in the end of all:
Foole and wretch, wilt thou let thy Soule be tyed
To mans lawes, by which she shall not be tried
At the last day? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(11. 93-95)
It is his willingness that will enable him to repent and thereby to be purified. But not smoothly. First, he must be punished: “I turn my backe to thee, but to receive / Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave” (11. 37-38) says Donne to the hanging Christ in “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward.” Donne wants to participate in Christ’s humiliation, immediately, not merely in distant contemplation of a dim legend:
O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee,
Burn off my rusts, and my deformity,
Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace,
That thou may’st know mee, and I’ll turne my face.
(11. 39-42)
Find me worthy of chastisement in the first place, then scourge me and make me worthy. In other words, Donne accepts the condition that it is God who causes him to want redemption at all, and then grants redemption, as well. Richard E. Hughes writes in The Progress of the Soul that “along with the primacy of faith, Donne believed in a prevenient grace, a preparation for faith; and he believed that man owes all his faculties to God: faith, for him, was no passive acquiescence” (p. 250).
Donne has applied not only his emotion, but his reason, including his doubt and anger, to his contemplation of God in these poems. He is wholly committed, but he is not nicely comforted: “I have a sinne of feare, that when I have spunne / My last thred, I shall perish on the shore;” (11. 13-14) cries he in “A Hymne to God the Father.” He is afraid, though he is trying; and even though he knows where peace abides, though fearful, he is able to pun, even dunning his Maker:
Sweare by thy selfe, that at my death thy stonne
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, Thou haste done,
I fear no more.
(11. 15-18)
Donne knows all in all proceeds from God, by His grace; he wants His finest; but he is constrained to impatiently demand. He reasons his way into doubts, determined to resolve them with his mind while feeling his way into surrender. He intellectualizes his shortcomings and tries to give both his heart and mind in complete submission.
In “The Alter,” on the other hand, George Herbert acknowledges in himself the same imperfections Donne admits, but Herbert thinks less:
A Heart alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow’r doth cut.
Even more than sharing in Christ’s sacrifice, Herbert prays to be the sacrifice: “O let thy blessed Sacrifice be mine, / And sanctifie this Alter to be thine.” This doesn’t make Herbert more faithful. The differences between his and Donne’s expressions are in temperament and thought. Donne fulminates, but Herbert seems more purely emotional. Donne is angry, fearful and demanding. Herbert seems tranquil. He requests in “Easter-wings”: “Lord . . . O let me rise,” and with a light heart, “As larks, harmoniously,” imaging a happy surrender. At the end of the poem, he sees even the lowest fall as the means to the highest joy: “For, if I imp my wing on thine, / Affliction shall advance the flight in me.”
Donne knows the Christian paradoxes as well. In number XIV of the “Holy Sonnets,” he accepts them: “That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, ‘and bend / Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.” Richard E. Hughes, commenting on “Good Friday, 1613. . . . ,” might just as well be speaking of this sonnet, or any of several others when he says:
The emphasis on action, power, stress in all of Donne’s
Comments on faith is seen in the poem’s energy, the
Swift play of ideas, the stretched imagination, the
Exercise of all the faculties; and this too springs
From Donne’s attitude toward man’s cooperating in redemption.
(p. 251)
Donne cooperates by not following blindly, but reasoning first, then giving away. He participates by pleading, even demanding, that he be subdued and freed from himself:
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you ‘enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.
Both Donne and Herbert suffered from egoistic assertions of self in their efforts to conform to God’s will. Such acts appear to be contradictory to their goal, but they are not. Herbert asserts his will to serve God, but ambition draws him, as he tells us in “The Collar.” But his most violent act was that he “struck the board, and cry’d, No more.” That’s all. He has felt bound in servitude and so missing the pleasures of the outside world. He lists his longings and finally in rebellion declares:
I will abroad.
Call in thy deaths head there: tie up thy fears.
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need,
Deserves his load.
(11. 28-32)
Herbert appears to sneer at those who, unlike himself, haven’t the courage to tear off their collars and escape to a wider existence. But there is another layer of meaning in the apparently rebellious lines. What Herbert finds out is that to serve his need is to be a clergyman. The sneer is hardly a smirk. The poet knows that true freedom for him is, indeed, devotion to his clerical duties. Herbert never does take the pleasures he claims to miss. In “The Pearl” he declares, “I know the wayes” of “Learning” and “Honour” and “Pleasure.” But he has foregone them. He says it has not been easy, but here as in “The Collar,” there is little flailing, and the temperature seems low and controlled. Herbert has modulated his submission carefully, even coolly, in retrospection. Perhaps it’s that he resolved these conflicts in himself before he presented them to us. His pain is “recollected in tranquility” and consequently not immediately as disturbing as Donne’s. In its sincerity and directness, however, it is equally affecting, for both mean love. Joan Bennett, in FiveMetaphysical Poets, tells us that “To reject God, for Herbert, would be to prefer the prizes and praises of the world to the act of loving, for God has no rival in his heart” (p. 55).
It seems clear, as Herbert declares in “Affliction (I),” that he was indeed taken almost from the very start, out of himself and to his calling:
Whereas my birth and spirit rather took
The way that takes the town;
Thou didst betray me to a lingering book,
And wrapt me in a gown.
His poems then become a record of fairly certain surrender, so much so that in his metre “He recreates regular patterns of feeling,” says Joan Bennett (p. 61). There is little surprise in Herbert’s journey through the arguments of his poems, she is telling us. “Despite his use of logic, his poems rarely progress (as Donne’s do) to an unforeseen conclusion.” (p. 61) Herbert’s acceptance is usually, as we have seen, as regular as the refrain of “The Pearl”: “Yet I love thee.” He doesn’t stray far from his purpose of praising God and submitting, as he tells us in “Jordan (I)”:
Shepherds are honest people; let them sing:
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for Prime:
I envie no mans nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with losse of rime,
Who plainly say, My God, My King.
Donne, however, had of course a whole body of work before his religious poems that chronicled his romantic and sexual passions. That is not the place for discussion of the love poems, except to say that the ardor expressed in them was to Donne the same ecstasy that fired his lust for God. His doubts, both secular and religious, were the same.
Joan Bennett puts it this way:
He expresses his love for God in terms of that of a
lover for his mistress, or . . . a woman for her
lover, he trusts and mistrusts God’s pity as the lover
vacillates between the secure sense of being loved and
the recurrent fear that love may yet be withdrawn;
(p. 26)
Out of that doubt Donne, in each poem, experiences an uncertain emotional course. There is plenty of surprise, as Donne seems to be revealing himself to himself. In Holy Sonnet XIV, he demands at first, submits, relenting a bit, but ends by asserting himself again:
Take mee to you, imprision mee, for I
Expect you ‘enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.
Always the paradox. Herbert accepts it quietly; Donne, however, wrestles with it. Herbert speaks of release from his church duties to greater freedom in the social world. Donne agonizes a prayer for release from bondage of self. Perhaps Joan Bennett’s comment reflects on Herbert, as well. She says of Donne: “In the religious poetry, as in the secular, profound emotion works upon Donne’s intellect not as a narcotic, but as a stimulant” (p. 27).
Herbert’s acceptance does ultimately lull, while Donne’s stirs. Speaking of the torments of religious idealists of the seventeenth century and Donne’s specific channels of expression, Helen C. White, in The Metaphysical Poets says, “The first of these [channels] is the consciousness of his own instability, his changeableness, his incapacity for that steady equilibrium which is one of the great ideals of the spiritual life of his age.” (p. 127) Sometimes Donne attacks his subject railing, as in “Satyre III, On religion”: Kinde pitty chokes my spleene; brave scorn forbids / Those teares to issue which swell my eyelids;” and resentful of his confusion. Running hot then cold, ranting and prostrating himself alternately, he faces his duality calmly near the end of the poem:
To adore, or scorne an image, or protest,
May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way
To sand inquiring right, is not to stray;
To sleepe, or runne wrong, is . . . . . . .
(11. 76-79)
In the fifth of the “Holy Sonnets,” Donne lowers his voice, even using words of smallness: “I am a little world made cunningly / Of Elements, and an Angellike spright,” which apparently bespeak submissiveness. But he is neither calm nor really reduced. By number X he is defying death itself: “Death be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe,” and in number XIV he begs of God, “Batter my heart,” with the same intensity. Donne is restless, and desperate to know himself through knowing God.
For Herbert, says Helen C. White, the problem was a little different: “For the great thing in the religious experience of Herbert was that he wished to know his God for His own sake alone:” (p. 173). Herbert seems to know himself already: his calling, his duties, his place as God’s humble child: “Ah, my deare God, though I am clean forgot, / Let me not love Thee, if I love Thee not.” Thus does he give himself entirely in “Affliction (I).” In the same poem, Herbert speaks of sorrows, pains, and storms from which he was rescued by a loving God. Always was he taken, held, and transformed, almost automatically overwhelmed. He speaks here of the same power mentioned in “The Altar,” that insists on reducing him: “Thus doth thy power crosse-bias me, not making / Thine own gift good, yet me from my wayes taking” (11. 53-54). He knows and accepts that he will be exactly what God wants him to be, despite any other fantasies:
Now I am here, what thou wilt do with me
None of my books will show:
I reade, and sigh, and wish I were a tree;
For sure then I should grow
To fruit or shade: at least some bird would trust
Her household to me, and I should be just.
(11. 55-60)
Knowing himself already, Herbert accepts that God’s wish for him will be better than his own passing fancies for himself.
In the end of all, both Herbert and Donne wanted the same thing: to be worthy of being received into God’s house. And similarly too, each capsulizes his distinctive attitude in a late poem. In Hymne to God My God, in My Sicknesse,” Donne is resigned, indeed sullen: “Since I am coming to that Holy roome,” is an appropriately drooping beginning. Some of its dreary tone has to do, of course, with the fact that Donne is ill and depressed, but even when Donne wasn’t so low physically, he often struck the same note. Besides, Herbert suffered as well, but wrote with a lighter sound. He ends his volume The Temple with “Love (III).” As a late statement of acceptance and surrender it is, typically for Herbert, cheerier: “Love bade me welcome:” seems a much happier prospect than Donne’s. Donne speaks of having come full circle, being now a map on which East meets West. It was his circle of confusion before, his stormy whirling, about to resolve itself now in the ultimate paradox: “So death doth touch the Resurrection.” He is flat and being worked on. Herbert is upright before a friendly host. Though he is shy, he is not really afraid. He is going to a banquet and takes himself willingly into God’s house. Donne, however, is fearful. Right to the end, he is pleading:
Looke, Lord, and finde both Adams met in me;
As the first Adams sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adams blood my soule embrace.
He allies himself with Christ and Adam as two supremely acceptable sons of the Father. Herbert shows his sense of unworthiness by averting his gaze from God. His God only smiles and forgives. But Donne’s God is sterner. At least, Donne feels he must offer physical affliction as Christ did, and a self-centered (if reverent) plug for his sermonizing as tickets to Paradise. Herbert’s God, on the other hand, reassures him that his sins are already forgiven, and bids him sit down. Through heated struggles and pain silently borne, through relentless reasoning and simple acceptance, through fear of final judgement and joyful realization of forgiveness both men brought themselves to the only home each knew for certain all along would offer peace.
Bibliography
Seventeenth Century Poetry. ed. Hugh Kenner. Rinehart Editions, 1964.
Bennet, Joan. Five Metaphysical Poets. Cambridge, 1964.
White, Helen C.. The Metaphysical Poets. Collier Books, 1962.
Williamson, George. Six Metaphysical Poets: A Reader’s Guide. Noonday Press, 1967.
Hughes, Richard E.. The Progress of the Soul, The Interior Career of John Donne. New York, 1968.
Leishman, J.B.. The Metaphysical Poets. Oxford, 1934.
Williamson, George. The Donne Tradition. Noonday Press, 1958.
Chute, Marchette. Two Gentle Men, The Lives of George Herbert and Robert Herrick. New York, 1959.
Seventeenth Century English Poetry, Modern Essays in Criticism. Edited by William R. Keast. Oxford University Press, 1961.