Nov 15 2001
Cathartic Nostalgia
essay by Brian Charles Clark
John Donne wrote the First Anniversarie to commemorate the death of the daughter of Sir Robert Drury (Marotti, 235), but whatever is being eulogized in the poem, it “clearly [refers to] something greater than Drury’s deceased daughter” (236). The poem offers “more affright, then pleasure” (1st, 372) and in that, I think, it is typically Donne. But where the Songs & Sonets are forward looking and testing the ground ahead, the First Anniversarie is dragging its feet like a petulant or fearful child being forced to do something it doesn’t want to. One reason for this petulance is easy to see in a biographical context even though, as Marotti writes, “Critics have largely ignored or taken for granted the patronage context in which the Anniversaries were composed” (236). But what I notice about the poem is the strange lack of logico-rhetorical daring do that characterizes so much of Donne’s (presumably) earlier poetry. The “new Philosophy cals all in doubt” such that “The Element of fire is quite put out” (205-206).
There is fear motivating the First Anniverserie. Marotti and others have emphasized “the patronage context” and Donne’s sociopolitical ambitions as reasons the poem is either or both affectively flat and arcanely obscure. There is some “shee” in poem who is outside “The Law” (465) and Donne is throwing shadows of “incomprehensiblenesse” at “her” and us as he tries “to emprison her” (469-470). “Shee” is “a song” (462) that remains the same despite the Law “Moses” (463) and “the Prophets” (464): “shee” is a Sophia-like personification born of a cathartic nostalgia in a poem full of “extreme acts of idealization” (Marotti, 236).
Aristotle used the word catharsis, meaning “purgation,” in the Poetics, where he wrote, “Tragedy through pity and fear effects a purgation of such emotions” (chap. VI). As Marotti points out, the Anniversaries “were not only… the ‘Occasion’ for Donne to engage in intense meditation and speculation, but also the means to express feelings associated with his personal disappointments arising from his experience in the decade preceding their publication” (236). Whatever biographical “experience” Donne was purging, he was also subject to historical pressures. As Gaston Bachelard wrote, “All scientific culture must begin… with an intellectual and emotional catharsis” (in Jones, 84). The intellectual and rhetorical movement of catharsis is what we see in the First Anniversarie, a movement along the way of the skeptical Renaissance. The poem is nostalgic, backward-looking, not so much an “Anatomy” as an archeology, which directs its “speech to parts, that are of most effect” (438). In general, the poem is cathartic because “Verse hath a middle nature,” and is a mediator between “heaven” and its “soules” (474) and “The grave [that] keeps bodies” (475).
The particulars of the cathartic potential of the poem emerge quickly as a set of themes. One theme is of “This world … / … in a common Bath of teares” (11-12) deprived of “that rich soule” (1) and her “’ntrinsique Balme” (57) who breath “did bestow / Spice” (231-232). Then as now the idea of a Balme “to succor” (55) and act as a “preservative” (57) was rich with connotations of not only the medico-scientific, but of the metaphysical and erotic as well, not the least being the heroic or messianic “Prince, expected long” (34). Another theme is that of renewability, or, more precisely, that which “Can never be renew’d” (58), which is also the status of the Balme: expired, extinct, a resource exhausted. Donne ties a knot between the two themes or conditions, a knot that leaves “the world it selfe… dead” (63). This knot that is also a riddle, “since there is none / Alive to study this dissectione” (65-66). So what exactly is being “dissectione[d]” here? And who is doing the dissecting?
As a metaphor, Donne’s “anatomy” appears labored, which it is, because it is bearing cathartic potential. The catharsis is needed because of a third theme in the poem, that of the “sicke world” which “mistak’st[s it] selfe to bee / Well” (23-24). The archeology of the loss of “sense and memory” (28) since the Fall from a “weedlesse Paradise” (82) is “What we may gaine by [the] Anatomy” (60) of “shee.” We dig deeper by cutting ourselves open, which is only possible in a self-reflexive metaphysic where “there’s a kind of world remaining still” (67), where “Her Ghost doth walke” (70). Presumably, this “world” should be Heaven, but a Heaven where “Her vertue, and the forme our practice is” (78). A Platonic Heaven, in other words, one which categorizes death in opposition to a feminine Balme personified as a “Queene” (7), “of whom th’Auncients seem’d to prophesie” (175) or a reagent who “a faire Kingdome, and large Realme controule[s]” (124). The Gnostic and Alexandrian nostalgia for Platonism, as in Plotinus, and later in Isidore of Seville, is echoed cathartically here with etymological authority which is both recognition and loss, for it was “th’Auncients” who “call’d vertues by the name of shee” (176).
Donne makes clear that human females are not to be confused with this Queene of Vertue, for they kill “mankinde” (100) “one by one” (107), deaths men “doe delightfully… allow” (108). The sexual connotation of “small” deaths is “the poysonous tincture, and the stayne of Eve” (180). The tincture is neutralized (as “Physitians” recommend [92]), and the stain removed, by the transformative purification of “a true religious Alchimy” (182). Bachelard observed that alchemy bore “the heavy burden of ancestrality and unconsciousness” (Jones, 80). This is true because alchemists addressed themselves not only to issues of metallurgical purity, but spiritual purity as well. Because we are “Loth to goe up the hill, or labor thus / to goe to heaven,” we make the mistake of trying to “make heaven come to us” (281-282), thus self-reflecting the “Eccentrique parts” (255) of the world and tearing “The Firmament in eight and fortie sheeres” (258).
Thus, in the person of “She that should all parts to reunion bow” (220), of she who can “fasten sundred parts in one” (222), Donne ties a hyperbolic knot, the dissection of which “no mans wit / Can well direct him” (207-208). She is “each joynt of th’universall frame” (198) and the one “to whom this world must it selfe refer” (235). With the “Firmament” in 48 “sheeres” or spheres, we are in a hall of mirrors where self-reflection and a “neutralitie” of skepticism are a healthy and purifying practice. For this is the final theme of the poem, the theme of the refrain, the theme of learning from death. Or, at least what Donne had already learned, and what he rehearsed in writing this poem.
What we learn from death is the perennial lesson about the Forms: that the One, the True, the Beautiful, and most especially (as with Sophia and Mary Queen of Heaven) the “shee,” dwell in or are Heaven, and we are merely shadows and players. We can only know “Beauties ingredients” (362) as if through a glass darkly, because we know “how wan a Ghost this our world is” (370). This nostalgic doubt or unknowing is a cathartic release from the certainty of death.
Works Cited
Donne, John. The Complete English Poems. C. A. Patrides, ed. Everyman’s Library, New York, 1991.
Jones, Mary McAllester. Gaston Bachelard, Subversive Humanist: Texts and Readings. Univ. Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1991.
Marotti, Arthur F. John Donne, Coterie Poet. Univ. Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1986.
