“And show my story, in thy eternal book”: Metempsychosis and John Donne’s Sacramental Poetics
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This study offers a revisionist reading of John Donne’s Metempsychosis, or the Progress of the Soul (1601), a poem that has received only sporadic critical attention. The poem’s abrupt shifts of tone, narrative mode, and uses of generic conventions create a problem in accommodating it within the corpus of Donne’s poetry. Modern critics almost invariably categorizes the poem as a satire, paying disproportionate attention to the poem’s possible socio-political resonances. What is overlooked is Donne’s play with literary form and his spiritual inquiry into how to accommodate the itinerant soul with the charitable body. A combined attention to the poem’s search for the right form and righteous host helps us recuperate Donne’s interest in sacramental transformation, an interest hitherto obscured. Furthermore, the printing history of the poem, which has long been neglected by modern editors and critics, alerts us to its connection with Donne’s divine poems, namely, La Corona and Holy Sonnets. Along with Donne’s more apparently devotional and liturgical artifacts, Metempsychosis forms a meaningful sequence that suggests Donne’s personal progress of the soul and his serious undertaking of poetry-writing as sacramental devotion.
Abstract
This study offers a revisionist reading of John Donne’s Metempsychosis, or the Progress of the Soul (1601), a poem that has received only sporadic critical attention. The poem’s abrupt shifts of tone, narrative mode, and uses of generic conventions create a problem in accommodating it within the corpus of Donne’s poetry. Modern critics almost invariably categorizes the poem as a satire, paying disproportionate attention to the poem’s possible socio-political resonances. What is overlooked is Donne’s play with literary form and his spiritual inquiry into how to accommodate the itinerant soul with the charitable body. A combined attention to the poem’s search for the right form and righteous host helps us recuperate Donne’s interest in sacramental transformation, an interest hitherto obscured. Furthermore, the printing history of the poem, which has long been neglected by modern editors and critics, alerts us to its connection with Donne’s divine poems, namely, La Corona and Holy Sonnets. Along with Donne’s more apparently devotional and liturgical artifacts, Metempsychosis forms a meaningful sequence that suggests Donne’s personal progress of the soul and his serious undertaking of poetry-writing as sacramental devotion.
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