Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern England by David J. Davis;

Author:David J. Davis; [Davis, David J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192570864
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2022-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

5

‘Language of the Angels’

The Poetics of Divine Ravishment

What dost thou of the Lord thy God desire

… when with uplifted eyes,

And mind quite rapt with a celestial fire,

Thou dartest thy petitions to the skies?

Rhys Pritchard, ‘The Lord’s Prayer’

John Donne’s death was a drawn-out affair. Donne’s friend Izaak Walton tells us that Donne lay in bed for fifteen days, after having prepared his funeral urn and shroud. In Donne’s final moments in March 1631, Walton recounts that Donne experienced a ‘beatifical vision’, in the manner of St. Stephen, seeing the same heavenly figures as the New Testament disciple. Donne’s ‘soul’ finally ‘ascended’ once he was ‘satisfied with this blessed sight’. William Winstanley, who included Donne in his England’s vvorthies (1660), added that Donne was ‘in a serious contemplation of the mercies of my God’, and God revealed to Donne the providential acts in Donne’s life that led him to the deanship of St. Paul’s. Such deathbed revelations were not unheard of, but it was not an everyday occurrence in early modern England.1 Donne’s vision stands out among many Protestant ravishments because of who Donne was and his description of what he saw and learned; however, in terms of the process of raptus, the account was relatively orthodox. While the elder Donne’s vision presents a more tranquil experience of revelation from the younger Donne’s well-known holy sonnet ‘Batter my heart three-person’d God’, both sonnet and experience echo the traditional discourse of raptus:

Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I

Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish mee.2

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