Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism by Regina Mara Schwartz

Author:Regina Mara Schwartz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2011-07-28T16:00:00+00:00

The bride of Christ pleases God most when she gives to most; in this sense, “betrayal” is completely transvalued to become liberality. At her best, the bride of Christ is promiscuous, the sonnet says provocatively. No one church has exclusive possession of the faithful; conversely, they come from all churches: “from the Eastern Church, and from the Western Church too, from the Greek Church, and from the Latine too, and, (by Gods grace) from them that pray not in Latine too.” Embracing eros as divine takes the speaker to the logical conclusion that the more love the better.21 Dangers do not lurk from love, but from its lack, from not enough love, partial love, false love, and above all, no love: this is the devil. God offers himself to all, fully and freely; man’s challenge is to receive that love and to reciprocate. “But though I have found Thee, and Thou my thirst has fed, A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yet. But why should I beg more love?”22 Desire, insatiable love, more love and love of More coalesce. Over and over, the theological ground of eros informs Donne’s approach to human love as surely as his theology informs his life-world.

Donne’s love poetry has vexed critics most when it seems most “rakish.” How can the speaker be now the suffering Petrarchan lover and now the Ovidian game-player: how could he play the devoted lover in some lyrics and the indiscriminate libertine in others? A lyric like “The Indifferent” seems to challenge the conclusion that Donne embraces human desire as the path to divinity.

I can love both fair and brown,

Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays,

Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays,

Her whom the country formed, and whom the town,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I can love her, and her, and you and you,

I can love any, so she be not true.

(“The Indifferent,” 1–9)

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