Harvard Divinity School

Lyric Autobiography: John Donne's "Holy Sonnets"

Author(s): Frederick J. Ruf
Source: The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 86, No. 3 (Jul., 1993), pp. 293-307
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Harvard Divinity School
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1510012
Accessed: 04/12/2009 07:57
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Cambridge University Press and Harvard Divinity School are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve
and extend access to The Harvard Theological Review.
http://www.jstor.org
Lync Autobiography: John Donne's
Holy Sonnets *
Fredenck J. Ruf
Georgetown University
tn her admirable study of autobiography, Janet Varner Gunn argued that
lthe religious significance of the form "lies not in its literary function but
in its anthropology,''l that is, in its role in articulating and creating human
experience. She also stated that much literary discussion of autobiography
serves to conceal its "strangeness" and "unruly behavior."2
Both of these points seem to me to be important, particularly if it is true
that the human self is protean and receives a multiplicity of shapes accord-
ing to the cultural forces that mold it. To adapt a figure used by William
James, the mind is formed much as a stone is shaped by a sculptor: "In a
sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand dif-
ferent ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extri-
cated this one from the rest."3 Surely one of the central cultural sculptors
is autobiography, the form that claims above all others to possess the shape
of the self. It follows that any claims to the "proper" or "best" form of
*The writing of this article was supported by a Landegger Summer Research Grant in
1 992.
lJanet Varner Gunn, Autobiography: Toward a Poetic of Experience (Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1982) 10.
2Ibid., 11.
3William James, The Principles of Psychology (ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson
Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis; The Works of William James; 3 vols.; Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1981) 1. 277.
HTR 86:3 (1993) 293-307
294 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
autobiography have anthropological and not merely literary consequences:
those "proper" qualities become covertly normative for the shape of the
self. Thus, as Gunn pointed out, "true" autobiography (as distinguished
from other forms such as the memoir, reminiscence, and autobiographical
works, as well as from "inferior" autobiography) "[reifies] certain structural
features (harmony, balance between the inner and the outer, wholeness)" in
its defining of "authentic" autobiography.4 This endorsement of what I call
the magisterial self neglects the "unruliness" that sees a tremendous variety
of forms in which people present their selves.5 It seems not only to be an
attempt to control the genre, as Gunn observed, but also an attempt to
control the self.
Ironically, Gunn herself participated in the control of autobiography when
she proposed a predominantly narrative analysis of the form. This analysis
has tremendous value, but what are we to do with what must be truly
unruly autobiographies that are not narrative (or those that are of a strongly
mixed nature, as, perhaps, all narrative autobiographies are)?6 This question
appears to have important anthropological and thus religious consequences.
Although Gunn was acutely aware of the excesses of narrative, which
she identified as their "compulsion toward wholes,"7 she also asserted (us-
ing the arguments of Stephen Crites) that there is a basic "fittingness"
between narrative and life. She saw (using the arguments of Paul Ricoeur)
a crucial benefit of narrative in that it "operates to deepen, complicate, and
even to dismantle our settled beliefs" and that narrative also provides place-
ment in the world.8 I see three difficulties with this focus on narrative.
First, how can we know that our experience "really is" narrative?9 Second,
is this not such a broad definition of narrative that virtually all "imagina-
tive" literature is narrative?10 Third, what do we do with autobiographies
4Gunn, Autobiography, 11; Roy Pascal made the distinctions that I cite between genuine
and false autobiography in his influential work, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960) 1 -20.
sAs James Olney (Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography [Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1972] 5) has said, "A theology, a philosophy, a physics or a metaphysics-
properly seen, these are all autobiography recorded in other characters and other symbols."
6See Frederick J. Ruf, "Coleridge's Biographia Literaria: Extravagantly Mixed Genres
and the Construction of a'Harmonized Chaos,"' Soundings 75 (1992) 537-53.
7Gunn, Autobiography, 119-20; see also 34-35.
8Ibid., 35; see also 35-44.
9See Frederick J. Ruf, The Creation of Chaos: William James and the Stylistic Making of
a Disorderly World (New York: SUNY Press, 1991) 70-75.
lIn fact, Jerome Bruner has investigated "how we go about constructing and representing
the rich and messy domain of human interaction," attributing such construction and represen-
tation to narrative; he used this form as the sole alternative to the "logico-scientific." See
Jerome Bruner, "The Narrative Construction of Reality," Critical Inquiry 18 (1991) 1 -21.
FREDERICK J. RUF 295
that are insistently not narrative? I have dealt with the first two issues
elsewhere. In this article I shall examine the third.l1
I wish to present an outline of the possibilities and limitations of Iyric
autobiography through an examination of John Donne's Holy Sonnets. First,
I am attracted to this study because it points out the further dimensions of
autobiography's ''unrullness.''l2 Lyric is very different from narrative, yet
narrative has become normative even for a critic as acute as Gunn (who in
her book studied William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," one of the great
Romantic lyric poems, but did so implicitly under the rubric of narrative).
We need, therefore, to be reminded of the distinctiveness of lyric. Second,
if the religious importance of autobiography lies in anthropology-that is,
the sort of person that the genre projects and creates-we need to attend
more closely to the variety and distinctiveness of these models of the self.
W A Theoxy of Genre
To begin this study I need briefly to establish that different genres truly
exist, that narrative does not include everything but analysis. I wish, in
fact, to rehabilitate the classical three genres of narrative, lyric, and drama,
not out of a traditionalist motivation, but because I believe we can see
important differences among them, particularly in the ways in which read-
ersl3 stand in relation to the genres' characteristic speaking voices.l4 This
distinction seems especially important when speaking about the modeling
or the expression of selves in autobiography. I emphasize, however, that I
am not making any claims about the genuine nature of these genres. I am
not attempting to present Platonic forms. Rather, I wish to distinguish these
three genres as sharply as possible so that we can highlight the differences
among them.
For a critique of the loose use of narrative see Frederick J. Ruf, "The Consequences of Genre:
Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic Intelligibility," JAAR (forthcoming).
llRegarding nonnarrative autobiography, see Ruf, "Coleridge's Biographia Literaria:
Extravagantly Mixed Genres."
l2Another way to look at my project is in terms of Mary Gerhart's call for scholars to
"become more flexible in the use of different genres." See Mary Gerhart, "A Proposal for
Genre-Shock," The Council of Societies for the Study of Religion Bulletin 17 (1988) 55.
13since many genres are heard and not only read, it is inaccurate to refer to readers alone.
To avoid the cumbersome locution of"readers and auditors," however, I shall use the term
"readers"; please assume that I mean both readers and auditors.
l4In fact, it is useful to distinguish more than these three, since all genres are imaginative
and all involve a particular speaking voice, even such expository genres as argument, advice,
announcement, request, evaluation, aphorism, and explanation. For an analysis involving
many of these kinds of discourse, as well as narrative and lyric, see Ruf, "Coleridge's Biographia
Literaria: Extravagantly Mixed Genres."
296 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
Briefly, narrative involves what I like to call a magisterial voice which
surveys people, events, and their meanings from a certain distance, as though
all were laid out for the narrator without mystery or confusion. So the
narrator states, "In Uruk [Gilgamesh] built walls, a great rampart, and the
temple of blessed Eanna.''15 There is clarity and an external relationship to
the persons and events described.l6 It is no surprise, then, that scholars
such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and Ronald Thiemann see
cohesion and intelligibility as benefits of narrative:17 the narrator (to para-
phrase Matthew Arnold) sees matters steadily and sees them whole.
The lyric, by contrast, is characteristically spoken without distance or
survey, but personally of private moments (fears, hopes, desires, visions) to
which the voice is intimately related. The lyric voice is vulnerable and
struggling, or, perhaps, passionate and assertive. The lyric vision is often
incomplete. It moves and changes. Rather than a survey of people and
events from without, it is a voice speaking from within:
A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear.18
Drama contains a multiplicity of voices, without an overarching voice
that is able to encompass persons and actions. Each voice presents only
himself or herself generally without the sort of intimacy or exposure of the
psyche that is found in lyric19 and also without the penetration to motives
which is possible with an omniscient narrator. Persons in dramas are thus
more opaque than in the other two forms. Finally, dramatic voices are the
most insistently social since the drama is composed of conversation.20
The Epic of Gilgamesh (ed. and trans. N. K. Sandars; New York: Penguin, 1960) 61.
l6I am taking third-person narration as most representative of narrative. First-person narrators
seem to me to be blends of the narrative and the lyrical, while second-person narrators seem
closer to the dramatic. This bias toward third-person narration is similar to the view articu-
lated by Adrian Marino, "A Definition of Literary Genres," in Joseph P. Strelka, ed., Theo-
ries of Literary Genre (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1978) 44.
l7Alasdair McIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (2d ed.; Notre Dame: Univer-
sity of Notre Dame Press, 1984); Stanley Hauerwas, Truthfulness and Tragedy (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1977); Ronald Thiemann, Revelation and Theology: The
Gospel as Narrated Promise (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985).
l8Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Dejection: An Ode" (lines 21-24), in Selected Poetry and
Prose of Coleridge (ed. Donald A. Stauffer; New York: Random House, 1951) 78.
l9In order to keep the voices of each genre distinctive, I am inclined to consider all
intimate self-exposures, as in a Shakespearean soliloquy, as lyrical asides.
20I am claiming no ontological warrant for these distinctions, nor even an empirical one,
for these divisions do not correspond with historical genres which are more particular (the
FREDERICK J. RUF 297
I think the crucial and definitive difference among these three genres is
what the reader hears when attending to them: namely, radically different
kinds of voices and, hence, radically different kinds of selves. For readers,
the narrative voice models the magisterial self who can survey, encompass-
ing much and pulling it together into a whole, but only by being above and
external (as well as subsequent in time) to persons and events, even of his
or her own life. Such comprehensiveness and cohesion is powerful and
even essential, but it is only one way of viewing the self. The lyric voice,
by contrast, models the self that is severely limited, privileged to intimate
knowledge of the self or another, but with little comprehensiveness or
cohesion. Isolation and partiality are distinct features of such a self. The
dramatic voice, finally, is heard as one among many: it is the most insis-
tently pluralistic but lacking either intimacy or scope.
Even this rough sketch of the voices of the basic genres reveals some
strong differences, such that we cannot hope to view the self as it is pro-
jected by Henry James in Notes of a Son and Brother to be of the same
sort as the self projected by Wordsworth's Prelude. This is not only be-
cause of the widely different ways in which these men saw themselves, but
also because of the very limitations and possibilities of the genres that they
used.
g Donne's Holy Sonnets
Donne composed his nineteen Holy Sonnets between 1609 and 1611,
"the most disturbed and anxious years" of his life.2l He had suffered from
a serious illness from 1608 to 1609 and feared for his life, and thereafter
he suffered from depression. The entire period from the time of his mar-
riage to Ann More in 1601 through the writing of the sonnets was a period
of enormous strain because of the enmity of his father-in-law and the con-
drawing room comedy, the epithalamion, the Bildungsroman, and so forth). I am using these
types for heuristic purposes, because I believe that they help us to see more clearly the actual
works that we encounter, and, in particular, to understand their religious consequences. There
are certainly many actual works that will not conform to the genres as I describe them here.
Nevertheless, we can perhaps better understand the twentieth-century unreliable narrator, for
example, in contrast with the more magisterial one of the nineteenth, by seeing the blending
of lyric or dramatic characteristics into modern narrators.
My study of genre is similar to that of Mary Gerhart ("Generic Competence in Biblical
Hermeneutics," Semeia 43 [1988] 34) in examining the "productive function" of genre in the
sense that "genres can be said to produce, as well as to identify meanings." My study is
different in that it has far less to do with the historical and empirical nature of genres
(detective fiction, the Bildungsroman, a letter notifying of a debt, and so forth). See also
Mary Gerhart, "Generic Studies: Their Renewed Importance in Religious and Literary Inter-
pretation," JAAR 45 (1977) 309-25.
2lRobert Cecil Bald, John Donne: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) 235.
298 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
sequent loss of social position and employment. It was also a period of
considerable religious turmoil for Donne, who was born and raised Roman
Catholic and whose family suffered greatly from the repression of the re-
ligion, yet who later would convert to the Church of England, be ordained,
and then become a renowned preacher and the dean of St. Paul's by 1621.
The Holy Sonnets record a spiritual crisis in powerful and effective terms.
They present a view of his life that is intimate to a degree that few other
works can rival. If an autobiography reveals, as Roy Pascal says, not the
world, not others, but the self,22 these nineteen poems bring us close to
Donne in astonishing fashion. They are also, perhaps not coincidentally,
among Donne's finest poems.
As Barbara Kiefer Lewalski has pointed out, these lyrics are unified by
"the Protestant paradigm of salvation in its stark, dramatic, Pauline terms,"
moving through election, calling, adoption, sanctification, and glorification.23
The painstaking self-analysis that was a requirement of seventeenth-century
English Calvinism found an apt literary match in the religious lyric which,
as Lewalski notes, was "a private mode, concerned to discover and express
the various and vacillating conditions and emotions the soul experiences in
meditation, prayer, and praise."24
A brief summary of these sonnets may be in order for those not familiar
with them.25 The lyrics present Donne in anguish in the first sonnet, de-
spairing of God's calling. In the third he grieves for his past false mourning
("In mine Idolatry what showres of raine / Mine eyes did waste?"). In the
sixth he cries out, "Impute me righteous," and in the seventh he implores,
"Teach mee how to repent." The famous tenth sonnet ("Death be not proud")
reveals Donne's confidence that he shares in the victory over death ("One
short sleepe past, wee wake eternally, / And death shall be no more; death,
thou shalt die"). In sonnet eleven Donne considers Christ's "strange love":
22Pascal, Design and Truth, 5.
23Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious
Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) 265. See her entire discussion, both of
what she calls "Protestant poetics" and of Donne's particular place in that paradigm (pp. 3-
27, 253-82).
24Ibid., 4. It should be noted that there was no conflict between Anglicans and Calvinists
on these theological matters. As Henry R. McAdoo (The Spirit of Anglicanism: A Survey of
Anglican Theological Method in the Seventeenth Century [London: Black, 1965] 5; quoted in
Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 13) stated, "Calvinism. . . was in the ascendant in England until
the middle of the [seventeenth] century. The disagreement between Anglican and Puritan
began with questions of church order and not of teaching, and it has been said that there was
hardly one of the Elizabethan bishops who was not a Calvinist."
25Unless otherwise noted, all references to Donne's Holy Sonnets are taken from Herbert
J. C. Grierson, ed., Donne: Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) 293-
302.
FREDERICK J. RUF 299
"I / Crucifie him daily," and yet he is forgiven. The especially striking and
bold sonnet fourteen presents the paradox of regeneration, asking God to
"Batter my heart" in order to mend it: "for I / Except you'enthrall mee,
never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except you ravish mee." In sonnet
fifteen, Donne meditates upon his adoption as God's son, "Coheire to'his
glory,'and Sabbaths endlesse rest." The final sonnet, nineteen, presents his
vacillations, "to day / In prayers, and flattering speaches I court God: / To
morrow I quake with true feare of his rod."26
g Donne's Lyric Self
We have, then, an extremely close view of Donne as he exemplifies the
stages of salvation, but how do these lyrics present a different sort of
person than a narrative of the events might present?
Let me begin to answer this question by contrasting the octet from the
first sonnet with a brief narrative passage from John Bunyan's Grace Abound-
ing to the Chief of Sinners, a narrative that has many close parallels with
Donne's lyrics:
Thou hast made me, And shall thy worke decay?
Repaire me now, for now mine end doth haste,
I runne to death, and death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday;
I dare not move my dimme eyes any way,
Despaire behind, and death before doth cast
Such terrour, and my feeble flesh doth waste
By sinne in it, which it t'wards hell doth weigh.27
And now was I both a burthen and a terror to myself, nor did I ever
so know, as now, what it was to be weary of my life, and yet afraid
to die. Oh, how gladly now would I have been anybody but myself!
Any thing but a man! and in any condition but mine own! for there
was nothing did pass more frequently over my mind, than that it was
impossible for me to be forgiven my transgression, and to be saved
from wrath to come.28
Most immediately noteworthy is the contrast in tenses: the lyric is spo-
ken in the present tense whereas the narrative is in the past. There are
26The original sequence of these poems or the sequence in which Donne intended them to
be read is a matter of great dispute. I present them here in the order presented by Grierson,
an order with which Lewalski concurs. See Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 264.
27John Donne, "Holy Sonnet I," in Grierson, Donne: Poetical Works, 293.
28John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (ed. Roger Sharrock; Oxford:
Clarendon, 1962) 45.
300 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
many exceptions, but these tenses are characteristic of the two genres,29
and they have powerful ramifications. Foremost among them is the impres-
sion that we are hearing Donne speak or pray now. In fact, we seem to
overhear a very private moment.30 The moment is so intimate that this
might be a silent prayer, our ears close enough to hear silent words. The
anguish of which he speaks is ostensibly taking place in the present ("I
dare not move my dimme eyes any way"); the tense gives his words par-
ticular emotional power.
The word "now" has quite a different force in Bunyan's passage, for
"now" is not the time of the writing, since he concluded his autobiography
at a time in which his "heart [is] full of comfort.''3l "Now" is really "then,"
since as a narrator he is relating his past. Inevitably the life presented
becomes more remote. We are overhearing nothing; instead, we are being
presented with emotions that are long gone. There may be humility in
narrative, but it is magisterial nonetheless. While emotional power is cer-
tainly considerable ("now was I both a burthen and a terror to myself'), it
is cooler by comparison with Donne and with lyric in general.
It is often said that autobiography differs from biography in its turn
from the outside to the inside.32 In the two passages, we can see what
different insides are involved. As Roy Pascal has observed, the conven-
tional (that is, narrative) autobiographer has a standpoint from which he or
she shapes the past.33 This retrospective view and the existence of a per-
spective from which it takes place are prominent in Bunyan's narrative. We
thus have two "insides": the one that is presented (that which is narrated)
and the one that is presenting (that which narrates). Indeed, there is some-
thing of the "outside" in both "insides": the narrated life is merely ob-
served, and, on the whole, the narrator merely surveys and presents without
exposing his or her present inside.34 There is a potential for richness from
the tension between the two selves, and there is incipient drama as well,35
but unless the narrator has lyric characteristics, we are presented with
narrative's well-known "coherent story" in which tensions and incoherences
29See Gerard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse (trans. Alan Sheridan; New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982) 141.
30T. S. Eliot distinguishes narrative from lyric on the basis of the heard and the overheard.
3lBunyan, Grace Abounding, 101.
32Pascal, Design and Truth, 18.
33Ibid., 9.
34If the narrative does present his or her "inside," I would suggest that it is a particularly
Iyric narrator.
35It is here that Paul Ricoeur's conflation of narrative and drama makes sense, although,
as I have indicated, I believe it is valuable to keep the two genres distinct. See Paul Ricoeur,
Time and Narrative (3 vols.; trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer; Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1984) 1. 36-37.
FREDERICK J. RUF 301
are minimized.36 In comparison with Bunyan's relatively static and external
narrative "insides," we seem to glimpse "inside" the lyric Donne at a moment
of helplessness and despair. The standpoint is far less secure, and that
which he presents is far less stable. Of course, there is not an absolute
difference: Donne's speaker is still coherent, and there is, in fact, a stand-
point. There is a powerful distinction, however, between "I fear" and "I
was afraid."37
A whole of a life cannot be presented in any autobiography, and thus
selection must take place. This selection, however, is much narrower in
lyric than in narrative. Bunyan presents a great span of his religious life,
from his life before conversion, the details of the conversion, his calling,
and finally his ministry. Donne gives us nineteen slices, each highly terse:
regret over past, false griefs, pleading for forgiveness, asking God for the
grace to repent, bravado-tinged confidence concerning death, and several
more. Each of these sonnets has two predominant attitudes or tones, one in
the octet and one in the sestet. That is not true, of course, of all lyrics; in
all lyrics, however, economy-the presentation of a single mood or of two
or three closely related emotions-is found. Thus while narrative tends
toward broad scope, presenting the sweep of a life, the lyric offers but a
glimpse. This is why I say that the narrative voice possesses and then
promises the ability to survey. The narrator looks over a wide vista of his
or her life, whereas the lyric voice allows us to overhear a moment's strong
emotions.38
I would underscore how peculiar a presentation of a life the lyric is. Roy
Pascal insisted that true autobiography must contain scope; it must encom-
pass the life, and hence he dealt only with narrative.39 No autobiography,
36I would claim that mixtures such as the lyric with the narrative are very common. See
Ruf, "Coleridge's Biographia Literaria: Extravagantly Mixed Genres"; Genette, Figures of
Literary Discourse, 12743.
37Both Pascal (Design and Truth, 15-18) and Olney (Metaphors of Self, 3845) insisted
that the "better" autobiography is not static. Pascal pointed out that the "oscillations" and
"aberrant meanings" of a life must be given. Olney presented a wonderful evocation of the
discontinuities of the self and argued for the superiority of autobiographies (such as those of
Carl Jung, Michel de Montaigne, and T. S. Eliot) that present change and development. I
would argue that such autobiographies are mixtures of the narrative with lyric, which would
seem to be a likely (and fertile) cross-pollination when narrative is spoken in the first-person.
Nonetheless, such works are still narratives and are sharply distinct from lyrics.
38Vision seems strongly associated with narrative, while hearing is associated with lyric.
We see both, of course, when we read, and we translate that activity into hearing ("In her
poem Dickenson is saying that. . ."), but narrators seem to have seen their lives, while poets
only speak. What Walter Ong has to say of the intimacy of sound may be relevant; see The
Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1967) 1 1 1-75.
39Pascal, Design and Truth, 12.
302 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
however, can contain the entire life. The vast variety of today, these twenty-
four hours with enough content to dwell upon for years, would likely be
overlooked or excised in an autobiography. Only Jorge Luis Borges might
suggest a "true" autobiography containing the absolute transcript of all
instants of a life, filling whole libraries, and then requiring an equal life-
time to read.40 Narrative presents the illusion of comprehensiveness with
(perhaps) hu'ndreds of pages and dozens of people and events. Donne's
Holy Sonnets present nineteen emotional moments and the illusion that
these are the moments that most matter.
What allows these nineteen moments to outweigh the narrative scope in
the poet's eyes is their depth. Donne's language is simply able to absorb us
far more fully than Bunyan's strong but still prosaic words. Gunn argued
that narrative possesses a depth that comes from its "rootedness in the
earth.''41 That is, instead of some quasi-mystical depth that she argued
against both in religion and literature, she felt that depth means being
situated in a time and a place, in "worldliness," to use Hannah Arendt's
term.42 If I have understood Gunn correctly, hers is a compelling depiction
of narrative. Depth means something else in lyric, however.43 Let me present
lyric's depth by using an account by a poet.
Mark Strand began an essay by telling of how his mother, an avid reader
of fiction and nonfiction, fell asleep while he read her a poem. One reason
for her not uncommon reaction, he said, is that "a novel, if it is to believed,
must share characteristics with the world we live in. Its people must act in
ways we recognize as human, and do so in places and with objects that
seem believable." Narrative presents "broad slices of action or characteriza-
tion." What a poem presents, instead, is words. "The world of things or the
world of experience that may have given rise to the poem usually fades
into the background," and we are left just with words; moreover, "those
words seem different in a poem. Even the most familiar will seem strange."44
It is that strangeness that can put us to sleep.
Yet the depth of lyric also comes from its strangeness-a strangeness of
hearing words, not actions and characters, not time and place. The frame-
40Borges (Dreamtigers [trans. Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland; New York: Dutton,
1970] 90) makes an analogous suggestion about maps: "The colleges of cartographers set up
a map of the Empire which had the size of the Empire itself and coincided with it point by
point."
4lGunn, Autobiography, 47.
42See ibid., 29-54.
43It is not a matter of choosing between narrative and lyric depth, for, in my conception,
the multiplicity of genres creates richness, not competition.
44Mark Strand, "Introduction," in idem, ed., The Best American Poetry, 1991 (New York:
Collier, 1991) xiv.
FREDERICK J. RUF 303
work for the view of genre in this article is the voice that seems to speak
in each form. The narrative voice speaks in a familiar way (although I have
been trying to stress its own peculiarity).45 No one needs to be reminded
how peculiarly the lyric voice speaks: "Oh my blacke Soule! now thou art
summoned / By sicknesse, deaths herald, and champion"46 was not every-
day speech even in 1609; even where a poet such as Wordsworth presented
"the language really used by men,"47 the familiar may become strange
when it is placed in a poem. The words of poetry, remarked Strand,
"remystify the world. . ., cloud certainties with ambiguity, . . . [flirt] with
erasure, contingency, even nonsense."48 As a result, we must read slowly.
What I think Strand meant is not anything mystical; rather, to use Gunn's
figure, we must wait a long time for the meanings of lyric's words to rise
to the surface; we must work at digging out those meanings; and we must
be prepared for confusions, reversals, peculiarities, and "even nonsense."
There are only nineteen slices of Donne's life in his Holy Sonnets, only
fourteen lines in each lyric, and only eight or nine words in each line, but
there are hours, weeks, years of waiting, working, discovering, and recon-
sidering in each slice.
Another crucial characteristic of the lyric voice is its social quality. It is
clear in looking at the passages from Donne and Bunyan that both are
speaking to someone, but the lyric contains a far fuller sense of who that
someone is-God, the soul, Death-and is far more interactive, asking
questions, making requests, pleading, flattering, cajoling. The narrator, on
the other hand, presents a harrowing stage of his life to the listener and
implicitly expects understanding and compassion, but the one who is ad-
dressed is quite generalized, and the degree of interaction is relatively
. .
mlnlma. ..
As W. R. Johnson has argued in his discussion of lyric from classical to
modern times, the genuinely lyric voice is pronominal, that is, it involves
address, exchange, and "the effort to try for communion with others."49 It
is a richly interpersonal form of writing. The narrator's voice simply speaks,
whereas the lyric voice beseeches, condemns, and also listens. The narra-
45The "realism" of narrative is, then, tied to its familiarity. As Nelson Goodman (Lan-
guages of Art: An Approach to the Theory of Symbols [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976] 36) has
noted, "Just here, I think, lies the touchstone of realism: not in quality of information but in
how easily it issues. And this depends upon how stereotyped the mode of representation is,
upon how commonplace the labels and their uses have become."
46John Donne, "Holy Sonnet IV" (lines 1-2), in Grierson, Donne: Poetical Works, 294.
47William Wordsworth, "Preface," in idem, Lyrical Ballads (ed. Michael Mason; New
York: Longman, 1992) 59.
48Strand, "Introduction," xv.
49W. R. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1982) 11.
304 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
tive voice is predominantly independent, whereas the lyric voice is interde-
pendent. The narrative voice principally presents and observes, whereas the
lyric voice interacts. It is not that the narrative voice is asocial; it just
presents a different form of sociality.
The most persistently identified characteristic of narrative is that it pre-
sents a sequence. As Ronald Thiemann has written, "Narrative as a literary
category emphasizes the interaction of circumstance and character, incident
and identity, in an ordered chronological sequence."50 Gunn saw the "real-
ism" of narrative in its "one-thing-after-another modality.''51 The insistence
that our "real experience" is sequential (and therefore has special affinities
with narrative) has long puzzled me. Surely we conceive of much of our
experience as "one thing after another," and this way of seeing our lives is
important to us. Is it not also true, however, that in certain moods we are
abstracted from sequence: "the unattended / Moment, the moment in and
out of time, / The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight"?52 Are there
not periods (in dreaming or in reverie) when time reverses or flits about?
What of Ralph Waldo Emerson's experience on the Cambridge Common, "I
become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the
Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God"?s3 Viewed
from the standpoint of "ordinary" consciousness, time was sequential whether
we realized it or not, but surely from the standpoint of mystical experience,
dreaming, reverie, distraction, and much else, time is not always sequential.
Donne's nineteen Holy Sonnets seem sequential, and in many ways they
are. In several ways, however, they are not. We may think, for example,
that as a whole they describe a progression from despair through election,
calling, adoption, and the rest. As Lewalski points out, however,
from the Protestant perspective the question of sequence is irrelevant.
As the Protestant emblem books and lyric collections make plain, except
for a beginning with effectual calling, and an ending with the longing
for final glorification, the various states are not so much sequential as
concomitant.54
Indeed, we may recall Donne's vacillations in sonnet nineteen. Any of the
moods, emotions, or meditations of the lyrics could erupt at any time.
50Thiemann, Revelation and Theology, 86.
5IGunn, "Autobiography," 38. Literally everyone who writes on narrative points out its
sequentiality.
52T. S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages" (lines 206-8), in idem, The Four Quartets (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1971) 44.
53Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (Boston: Beacon, 1989) 13.
54Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 265.
FREDERICK J. RUF 305
Within each lyric the words certainly exist in sequence, the images unfold
sequentially, and any grammatical sense must be revealed sequentially as
well. If we consider the speaking voice, however, we are presented with an
emotion, one that is strong and clear enough to reverberate for a period and
remain unchanged. The reader hears a longing for repentance in sonnet
seven that does not evoke a response by another character or become joy
when repentance is gained or slowly become despair when it is not. Sonnet
seven predominantly presents this desire and no others, and then it ends,
lingering in the mind of the reader-lingering, perhaps, for quite a long
time. To the degree that lyric presents the shape of the self to us, it not
only models a self that moves along in sequential time, but, more power-
fully and characteristically for this genre, it models a self that is caught up
in one moment that expressly has no sequel.Ss
Lest I be accused of being as enthusiastic about lyric as others are about
narrative, let me say, first, that all of the above characteristics are not
necessarily advantages. We need sequence, scope, and a strong sense of
cohesiveness, and when we do require them, the gnomic depth of lyric
slices can be a severe hindrance. We are missing the context of these
poems as well as other relevant events from the poet's life. What of Donne's
"Songs and Sonnets," his youthful loves, his tragic marriage, his struggles
for position at court? All autobiographies may be selections, but there are
many advantages to the broader selections of narrative.
Both expansiveness and inclusivity are lacking in Donne's Holy Sonnets
as in lyric generally, so that we do indeed get the "little world" that he
liked to write about in early lyrics. Thus, not only is there comparatively
little of Donne in these poems, there is even less of the world about him.
The self fills nearly the entire stage in Donne's poems, which makes his
notorious self-absorption not so surprising.S6 The narrator, by contrast, speaks
55It would be a mistake, I believe, to subordinate the moment to the sequence. Por some
purposes, sequence is more important; for example, if we wish to consider the whole life (or
the whole afternoon) of which this is a part; for an individual in the momentary mood,
however, the sequence of which the mood is a part may be wholly unimportant. Serge Meitinger
("Between 'Plot' and'Metaphor': Ricoeur's Poetics Applied on the Specificity of the Poem,"
Philosophy and Social Criticism 14 [1988] 161-78) presented a view of lyric time in an
article that attempted to correct Ricoeur's preferencing of narrative time. He felt that Ricoeur
"seems to reduce the 'reconfiguration' of the time of the human action to a single model of
'temporal synthesis of the heterogeneous"' which equates narrative time with human time (p.
166). Meitinger argued that lyric "maintain[s] a single line of vision less a'story' which
unfolds according to the ineluctable order of a before and after than the integrality of a kind
of present, both living and absolute, worked by the lacinating and contradictory impulsions
of the 'now"' (p. 168).
56There may seem to be a contradiction between the statement that Donne's "self fills
nearly the entire stage" in his sonnets and my claim that genres construct the self. The answer
306 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
only of others (including himself or herself as an other). The lyric world,
then, can be lacking in the richness and variety of many other genres.57
This self-absorption has an impact on the social character of Donne's
lyrics. While there is a strong interpersonal quality to these poems, as I
have pointed out, it is important to notice that no others speak and that
there is no forceful communal dimension. Both of these elements are much
more powerful in drama, which presents a collection of speakers, or in
mixed genres such as the novel, which contain dialogue along with narra-
. . . .
tlve, yr1c, or expos1t1on.
g The Lync Voice
Earlier in this article I suggested that we can distinguish between the
three traditional genres, narrative, lyric, and drama, by distinguishing among
their voices. A reader of these genres hears different kinds of voices speak-
ing and consequently may come to conceive of himself or herself according
to the models that are thus presented. In choosing a genre, a writer is
choosing a voice and a self; in choosing a book, a reader is building a
voice and a self. Any work, therefore, is an unconscious autobiography;
any reading we may term an "autobiogony." If all of this is true, then
autobiography has "unruly behavior" indeed.
This article has not set out to encompass the full range of that unruliness
but to clarify just one aspect of it: the lyric voice. If we attend to the voice
that is speaking in Donne's tIoly Sonnets, what can we say of this voice,
and what can we extrapolate regarding lyric voices more generally?
A primary characteristic of any lyric voice and especially of Donne's
voice in these lyrics is limitation: where narrative tends toward the epic,
encompassing characters and events, Donne's lyric voice is limited to one
moment or a few, to one emotion or a few, to one thought or a few. The
voice is not in a position of power, not in an elevated position, but is
subjected to the confusions of forces both within (despair, helplessness,
false grief) and without (God). Whereas I visualize the narrative voice on
a high point surveying the people and events of his or her life, I see the
lyric voice in a constricted space beset with his or her soul or psyche and
with a world that is principally beyond his or her ken. The lyric voice,
however, is not alone. It addresses another regarding such intimate matters
that the relationship it assumes must be intimate as well. It is also a dif-
ficult voice. As Strand said, to a certain extent it presents just words; thus
is that such construction is a continuing process, so that, presumably, Donne had already
come to view his self in rather lyric terms (through both poetry and many other cultural
forces), and then his sonnets become a medium for the construction of other lyric selves.
57See especially Ruf, "Coleridge's Biographia Literaria: Extravagantly Mixed Genres."
FREDERICK J. RUF 307
we hear the lyric voice, I believe, as challenging and sometimes gnomic.
This is not the voice telling a story, not the voice of easy conversation, not
the voice conveying information. It is the voice of a friend in despair or-
as in the case of Coleridge's Mariner of a stranger talking crazily but
whose words we "cannot help but hear." It is the voice that may entice or
intimidate, but which forces us to encounter some depth that unsettles,
shakes us, and changes us. Donne's lyric voice any lyric voice-is the
voice of a self in a particularly deep sense. It is no wonder that the lyric
has so often been used in writing about love and spirituality. On the radio
this morning I heard a woman say that we cannot know someone just by
imitating what they look like. We need to hear their stories, she said. It is
not only their stories-their narratives that we need to hear, I would add;
we need to hear their lyrics as well.
Yet as we have also seen, the intimacy of the lyric voice is its limita-
tion, as well. It may be partial, biased, skewed, cryptic. It fills the entire
stage, engages us, makes extreme demands on us, but gives us no context
and no competing voices. We can easily lose our equanimity and our per-
spective with this voice, for who could refuse confidences as secret as this,
and who could remain in a critical mind? The lyric voice may intoxicate
with intimacy. Perhaps this is another way in which it may put us to sleep.