"What draws the reader to the novel," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about."[1] Such, too, is one appeal of John Donne's Anniversaries, which promise to warm their cold readers with the radiance of Elizabeth Drury's death. Moreover, though the poems are far from novelistic, a teleological principle informs them which can properly be called plot, defined by Peter Brooks as "the internal logic of the discourse of mortality."[2] In "A Funerall Elegie," first printed with An Anatomy of the World in 1611, Donne himself represents the girl's truncated life as though it were a story in a book:

He which not knowing her sad History,
Should come to reade the booke of destiny,
How faire and chast, humble and high shee'ad beene,
Much promis'd, much perform'd, at not fifteene,
And measuring future things, by things before,
Should turne the leafe to reade, and read no more,
Would thinke that eyther destiny mistooke,
Or that some leafes were tome out of the booke.[3]

"Life story" is an easy metaphor, but taking it seriously is harder. In the Anniversaries Donne takes it so, which means that his telling of Elizabeth Drury's "sad History" may be read first neither as typology nor as exhortation but as a plot.[4] Her life, as rendered in these poems, reveals a principle of order, though incompletely realized, and an energy of procession, though imperfectly discharged. Her mourners become readers of narrative, and Donne's readers become mourners, driven to find a proper end for her story. They keep turning the pages.

Most interpretations of the Anniversaries--whether religious, symbolic, generic, or rhetorical--relate the two poems to each other in ultimately nonteleological ways. It is often assumed that the two installments constitute one whole poem, but that wholeness is usually taken to be defined by what Barbara Lewalski has called Donne's "coherent symbolic meaning and method as well as . . . careful logical articulation."[5] As a result of this assumption, interpreters spatialize the poems in order to view them all at once. According to Paul Parrish, for example, the poems in their "complementary nature" are like a diptych.[6] Ruth Fox claims that Donne "does not anatomize . . . in order that he may then leave the first process and move to progression"; instead, she contends, the two Anniversaries enact "concurrent processes" that "depend on and comment on each other" (p. 533). It could be said that claims for synchronic awareness of the two elegies derive from the necessary circularity of hermeneutics and not from the poems themselves. A teleological reading, by contrast, looks for that narrative wholeness which gives the Anniversaries a relation like that between desire and satisfaction, a movement through tension to pleasure.

In a controversial essay of 1970, Carol M. Sicherman suggested that "the two parts of the poem relate to each other as draft to revision, as problem to tentative solution," a solution in which crystallize "the ultimate insights which unify the entire bipartite poem."[7] She aimed to uncover these insights by reading the Anniversaries" for themselves alone" (p. 127), an attempt to which historical scholars naturally objected.[8] But a narrative or teleological reading of the poems does not have to repeat Sicherman's New Critical claims. In fact, it much more logically entails two other beliefs: first, that the Anniversaries are not timeless at all but bound to time; second, that their course may hold much ambivalence and disunity. Because reading the poems for their logic of mortality need not rest on New Critical assumptions, it can, twenty years later, reassert a psychological and consecutive way of interpreting the poems.

This approach, if it does nothing else, respects the publication history of the poems. "A man . . . who died at thirty-five will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty-five," Benjamin writes, because "the 'meaning' of his life is revealed only in his death" (pp. 100-101). The remark bears poignantly, of course, on Elizabeth Drury, who died in December 1610 at "not fifteene" ("A Funerall Elegie," line 86), but it also illuminates the publication of the Anniversaries.[9] Soon after the girl's death, perhaps encouraged by his sister, who had known her, Donne wrote "A Funerall Elegie" and presented it to her parents, noble mourners but also prospective patrons.[10] In return, the Drurys asked him to compose a Latin epitaph for their daughter's monument and, late in 1611, to accompany them to France. Donne complied with both requests, but before he left England in November, he also wrote and got into print the text which we call The First Anniversarie. It was his first published poem. As far as a public audience was concerned, however, no text by that name existed until some months later. An Anatomy of the World, the short form of Donne's original title, became The First Anniversarie only when it was reprinted together with a new poem, which he had written in France, called The Second Anniversarie or Of the Progres of the Soule.[11] Thus, without changing a line, the 1612 volume turned An Anatomy into a previously nonexistent work. The meaning or real name of the poem could thenceforward be revealed in its relation of sequence as closure with The Second Anniversarie. Circumstances of the publication strengthened the temporal dimension of both poems, inviting readers to interpret the Anniversaries, now first and second, by appealing to codes of succession or narrative.

If the Anniversaries have a plot, one should be able to describe its shape and the agents or "characters" who carry it out. Broadly speaking, Donne arranges his agents in the familiar triangle of the morality plays, where a central figure wavers between good and bad influences. Here that figure is not Elizabeth Drury but Donne himself as narrator and surrogate hero. The girl (even if she represents "the Idea of a Woman," as Donne reportedly said to Ben Jonson[12]) stands on one side of him as both the goal and the model for his quest. On the other stands the world, both as scene and as antagonist.

This triangle is oriented, in turn, toward a fictive audience, those implied readers to whom the Anniversaries are addressed--fictive because it does not coincide with either Donne's coterie of 1611-1612 or his new public readership. By definition, its members are prepared to measure the girl's worth and participate in Donne's poetic action. By doing so, he says in The First Anniversarie, they can become "new creatures" and "weedlesse Paradises" (lines 76, 82). In The Second Anniversarie, this fictive audience is reduced by the anima mea topos to a single "insatiate" soul (line 45), but its relation to the narrative remains constant. The audience is thus closely tied to the working out of Donne's narrative drives. "The ambitious hero," according to Brooks, "stands as a figure of the reader's efforts to construct meanings in ever-larger wholes, to totalize his experience of human existence in time, to grasp past, present, and future in a significant shape" (p. 39).[13] In the Anniversaries, Donne stands in for Drury's readers and mourners, attempting to "make up that booke" of her life, totalizing its movement by "filling up" the "blanks" ("A Funerall Elegie," lines 101-109).

Because the story Donne tells is abstract or allegorical rather than mimetic, certain qualities need to be recognized in its agents. First, abstract narratives, as Angus Fletcher has shown, permit part and whole to exchange attributes.[14] Consequently, the agents of these poems, like many of Spenser's characters, combine restricted natures with elaborated characterizing detail. For example, whether we conceive of the world as a trifle, cripple, monster, ghost, or cinder, Donne restricts its essence to the worst thing imaginable. Likewise, Elizabeth Drury's character is elaborated as queen, balm, alchemist, magnet, compass, harmony, paradise, and demiurge, but her characteristics all signify perfect virtue and power. This synonymy is held in common by the flanking agents of the Anniversaries. The second quality of abstract narratives makes Donne's own character somewhat different from the others, however. The logic of the narrative drives him, as Spenser's chivalric heroes are driven, to search for an idea and an identity. Moreover, this obsessive process is full of conflict. Fletcher (pp. 85-88) argues that most allegorical heroes are divided agents, not only pursuing their quest but also generating from within their helpers and opponents. So Donne here plots to split and project himself in ways that can be specified.

As soon as the Anniversaries begin, the dynamic just described comes into play. Donne starts with a classic narrative gesture, a "when" clause, which specifies the moment of this action:

When that rich soule which to her Heaven is gone,
Whom all they celebrate, who know they' have one,
(For who is sure he hath a soule, unlesse
It see, and Judge, and follow worthinesse,
And by Deedes praise it? He who doth not this,
May lodge an In-mate soule, but 'tis not his.)
When that Queene ended here her progresse time,'
And, as t'her standing house, to heaven did clymbe,
Where, loth to make the Saints attend her long,
Shee's now a part both of the Quire, and Song,
This world, in that great earth-quake languished;
For in a common Bath of teares it bled, .
Which drew the strongest vitall spirits out:
But succour'd then with a perplexed doubt,
Whether the world did loose or gaine in this,
(Because since now no other way there is
But goodnes, to see her, whom all would see,
All must endevour to be good as shee,)
This great consumption to a fever turn'd,
And so the world had fits; it joy'd, it mournd.

Elaboration of characterizing detail is easy to observe here, as is Donne's nearly obsessive concentration. Also at work in these opening lines, however, is the splitting typical of an abstract hero. Ambivalence appears in small details. With good reason, for instance, Fox has called the syntax of these lines "diabolical" (p. 535). Donne weaves ten subordinate clauses into the first sentence, not even counting the tortuous, three-clause parenthesis in lines 3-6. The second sentence of the poem is another compound-complex arrangement with a difficult parenthesis of its own. A New Critic might have argued that such hypotaxis can control focus and embody mature, perhaps even "ultimate" insight. By placing subordinate clauses around a central element, a poet can defy the onward rush of normal predication and, Janus-like, appear almost omniscient. But these clauses that begin The First Anniversarie, encountered one after another, suggest little control or certainty. Instead, Donne's syntax isolates and fragments the lines of his inception. Its two predications, "this world . . . languished" and "this consumption . . . turn'd," are overwhelmed by the elements they are supposed to control.

Like syntax, imagery works against itself in this beginning. Donne's subordinate clauses, for example, associate the girl's death with images of wealth, royalty, and celestial song. In the first independent clause, however, the same event is a "great earthquake" and a bloodbath (lines 11-12). What should one make of this contrast? According to Fox, Donne opens in confusion in order to warn the reader that "the poems exist as denials of straightforward development of ideas" (p. 535). If Donne's beginning is fully "diabolical," however, its contradictory syntax and imagery can be read less as metadiscursive signals than as tokens of emotional disturbance that must be worked through. Caught between mourning and mirth, the speaker is "succour'd . . . with a perplexed doubt" (line 14). His mind is trapped in what interpreters have called "deadly oscillation" (Martz, p. 40) or "inner strife" and "spiritual vacillations" (Sicherman, p. 128). Thus, from the start of the Anniversaries, one process wavers between two competing metaphors. Although his thoughts do not fit together, the speaker tries, as Samuel Johnson saw, to yoke them by violent syntax. Here, however, the psychology of violence is, in fact, its own story. In other words, such incongruity is less an aporia than a type of anacolouthon, which is "both a vice and a device to demonstrate emotion."[15] What fails as syntax may succeed as plotting.

The problem of this inception is repeated throughout The First Anniversarie, as Donne, by continuing to wrench together incommensurate attitudes, generates the "middle" that narrative requires. In the satiric passages which actually dissect the old world, he seems willing to disrupt traditional orders. For example, Donne claims with some relish that "in length is man, / Contracted to an inch, who was a span" (lines 135-36), just as the earth's face, once imagined in "round proportion" (line 285) is now seen to be disfigured by "warts, and pock-holes" (line 300). These apparent devaluations of the world are crossed by other gestures, however. Donne cannot really do away with worldly orders by simply manipulating scale. When he says that an adult is really only a pigmy or that the rondure of the earth is really all scabs and pits, he implicitly invokes the normal scales of anatomy and geometry. Thus the heralded anatomy does not ever dismember the world's body. Instead, it enacts a series of displacements where, counter to the normally anagogical path of Christian allegory, the objects of satire slip backward in being. This process can best be described as katagogy, a leading downward.[16]

Taking the satiric portions of The First Anniversarie as downward-tending allegory brings them into line with what happens in the other portions of the poem. Thus when he speaks of Elizabeth Drury, Donne reverses the exponential series and raises his claims for her to the highest imaginable power. For example, a most familiar couplet asserts that "new Philosophy cals all in doubt, / The Element of fire is quite put out" (lines 205-206). Soon after, however, Donne claims that "Ayre, and Fire but thicke grosse bodies were, / And liveliest stones but drowsie, 'and pale to her" (lines 367-68). Martz originally complained that Donne barely connects his praise of the dead child with his anatomy of the world; this complaint was not strong enough, however.[17] The halves of the poem are not merely tangential to each other but powerfully contradictory.

Having given this ambivalent structure of feeling to his Anniversaries for Elizabeth Drury, Donne must continue to generate an onward impulse for her history. This necessity draws attention to those places where, in their narrative "middle," the poems shift between satire and encomium. W.M. Lebans has claimed that Donne's way of turning from "meditative insight" or "ecstatic contemplation" to the inescapable fact of death always "surprises and impresses with a sense of control."[18] Whether consciously or not, in these turns Donne never simply juxtaposes Elizabeth Drury and the world but always asserts some logical or metaphorical relation between them. Moreover, he finds a distinctive way of making these turns in each Anniversarie.

Some lines on the colorlessness of the world may illustrate how Donne moves between satire and encomium in The First Anniversarie:

Sight is the noblest sense of any one,
Yet sight hath onely color to feed on,
And color is decayd: summers robe growes
Duskie, and like an oft dyed garment showes.
Our blushing redde, which us'd in cheekes to spred,
Is inward sunke, and onely'our soules are redde.
Perchance the world might have recovered,
If she whom we lament had not beene dead:
But shee, in whom all white, and redde, and blue
(Beauties ingredients) voluntary grew,
As in an unvext Paradise . . .

Shee, shee is dead; shee's dead.

Here the turn comes in a conditional clause: if Elizabeth Drury had not died, the world might have regained its original colors. Yet like the opening sentences of the poem, this subjunctive, contrary-to-tact clause crosses itself with its own contradictions: if the girl had not died (but she did), the world might have recovered (but it has not). In The First Anniversarie, we find this structure of feeling almost every time Donne moves between the dead child and the world. On the plane of grammar, these subjunctive turns. advance and reiterate the central conflict.

In The Second Anniversarie, Donne manages his turns somewhat differently. For example, in another passage about colors, Donne describes the flight of the dead girl's soul through the elemental and planetary spheres of the universe. Along its path, the soul (like Milton's Raphael) resolutely declines to settle disputes in theoretical astronomy. Instead, "ere shee can consider how shee went," the soul "At once is at, and through the Firmament" (lines 205-206). Donne continues:

And as these stars were but so many beades
Strunge on one string, speed undistinguish'd leades
Her through these spheares, as through the beades, a string,
Whose quicke succession makes it still one thing:
As doth the Pith, which, least our Bodies slacke,
Strings fast the little bones of necke, and backe;
So by the soule doth death string Heaven and Earth,
For when our soule enjoyes this her third birth,
(Creation gave her one, a second, grace,)
Heaven is as neare, and present to her face,
As colours are, and objects, in a roome
Where darknesse was before, when Tapers come.

The ancient figure of plot as a soul (or, here, as a soul of string or pith) conjoins narrative and personal continuity. Having reasserted that identity in vivid detail, Donne is ready to turn from praise to exhortation:

This must, my soule, thy long-short Progresse bee;
To'advance these thoughts, remember then, that shee,
Shee, whose faire body no such prison was,
But that a soule might well be pleas'd to passe
An Age in her . . .

Shee, shee, thus richly,'and largely hous'd, is gone.

"To'advance these thoughts": this way of moving between clauses, typical of The Second Anniversarie, makes a new narrative gesture. The turnings of The First Anniversarie, as I have suggested, imply a subjunctive, conditional structure of feeling that is symptomatic of inner division. Now, though, Donne begins to use a fortiori reasoning: if Elizabeth Drury can relinquish her body to death, surely, he reasons, he can part with his own "small lump of flesh" (line 164). Although this sort of turn is also conditional and thus permits conflict to be implied (one can imagine a number of rebuttals to almost any a fortiori conclusion), the feeling here is far less troubled than before. Donne's images of praise and condemnation do not move closer together as we approach the end of the Anniversaries, but he does change the trajectory of his crossings between them. To explain this difference, we must return to the notion of plot, considering the unusual dynamic of these poems.

I have suggested that Donne, much like many allegorical heroes, acts out the duality of his aversion and desire. Before turning to the end of this action, I would like to introduce as possibly fruitful analogies three similar abstract plots. In the Bible, and not just in its overt narratives, plot often unfolds from inward division. The Psalms, for example, often act out dual impulses to preserve and destroy. The duality is strongly marked in the phrases of exile that are so familiar from the Authorized Version: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth" (Psalm 137:5-6). The imagination of revenge in the same psalm is no less strong, however, for the community taunts the "daughter of Babylon" with murderous wishes: "Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones" (verses 8-9). Thus both hatred and longing generate little conditional narratives here. The Epistle to the Romans provides a more complex example of duality. Paul first uses a favorite topic of the Psalms, claiming to "delight in the law of God after the inward man." But then, interiorizing the Psalmist's exile, he defers redemption even as he imagines it: "I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members." This new captivity causes Paul to cry, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" (Romans 7:18-24).[19]

I take a final analogy from Plato's Republic, where, in Book 4, Socrates tells a story about a certain Leontius, who one day happened upon the corpses of some executed criminals. According to Socrates, Leontius "felt a desire to see them, and also a dread and abhorrence of them." From this minimal conflict, something like Donne's in the Anniversaries, an ambiguous action unfolds. "For a time," Plato writes, Leontius "struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire got the better of him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the dead bodies, saying, 'Look, ye wretches, take your fill of this fair sight'."[20]

These examples act out conflicts in two different ways. The Psalmist keeps his affective objects, Jerusalem and Babylon, entirely distinct and recognizes no subterranean passage between them. Also confronted with the logic of mortality, however, both Paul and Leontius are caught between contradictory impulses--to look or not to look at the corpses, to delight in the law of God or in "all manner of concupiscence" (Romans 7:8). Neither two nor one, their single natures have double names. In the context of the Republic, the story of Leontius illustrates such inward divisions, coming as part of Plato's analysis of human psychology. It shows why reason and desire, the two chief faculties of the soul, require a third entity, spirit, to shuttle between them.

If Donne, too, moves between aversion and desire in the Anniversaries, then it is fair to ask which of these narratives his resembles. At first, the dualities of the Anatomy and the Progres seem most like the Psalmist's decisive oppositions. The "Idea of a Woman" and the anatomy of a dying world appear to remain distinct and unbridgeable in the poems, like Jerusalem and Babylon. As long as Donne keeps his objects of desire and aversion apart, he may hate the world and love Elizabeth Drury at once, and with equanimity. As I have suggested, however, the Anniversaries, once in motion, in fact bring these poles of value into conflict. Just as Leontius both wants and abhors the pleasure of seeing the corpses, so, by predicating two things at once, Donne both allows and represses a desire to speak death. In each case, the repressed wishes crowd to the surface of speech or action. Leontius defends against contradiction by personifying his eyes, casting on them his undesirable desire. But the wish, projected, remains his. Nor can Donne escape any better the antithetical pull of his desires, enacted at the level of syntax. He may inwardly delight in the holy death of Elizabeth Drury, but, like Paul, he feels a different principle at work in his members. The narrative premise of the Anniversaries is thus Donne's attempt to maneuver among his contrary impulses toward the world in its systems and scales. The life these systems constitute, with humanity at its center, is vital and beautiful. In turn, however, worldly life is sinful and dying. As it dies, humanity is being decentered. In both parts of the Anniversaries, Donne would like to join and not to join in this paradoxical world-structure. What gets him over this conflict--and thus what gives the poems as narrative an ending--is finally a change in his defensive strategies.

In The First Anniversarie, as I have suggested, Donne is torn between wishes and finds a defense against ambivalence or, in theological terms, against temptation, by splitting the world into objects of desire and aversion. Following the Psalmist's way, he then "kills" the world symbolically by saying, "the world is dead," attacking the signifier to hurt the signified.[21] But this defense against ambivalence is insufficiently complex. Donne's original wish in the Anniversaries is not simply that the world may die. It is rather: "May what is evil in me die so that what is good may live." In The First Anniversarie, however, this original wish never comes out straight. It emerges instead as the claim that Elizabeth Drury's death has slain the world.

True, Donne really believes that the girl survives both in Heaven and in the register of fame. This comfort summons its antithesis, however. It may be granted that the good is not really dead, but neither then is the world. Joseph Hall (or whoever wrote the introductory poem called "To the Praise of the Dead, and the Anatomy") pertinently asked Donne, "How can I consent the world is dead / While this muse lives?" (lines 7-8). How, indeed? As some have argued, The First Anniversarie fails, if it is considered as an attempt to resolve Donne's inward distress.[22] This beginning cannot, in fact, break the spell of the world on Donne's narrative. Instead, he uses the very tropes in his blessings that he rejects in his curses. It can mean little to call Elizabeth Drury a beautiful queen if royalty is dead and beauty with it. Such opposites contaminate one another in the beginning of the girl's story and supply the psychodynamism of those curious transitions, with their contrary-to-fact grammar, in The First Anniversarie.

Although many have felt that The Second Anniversarie is more successful than the first, Donne begins it by repeating his old defenses against doubleness.[23] For example, in the opening lines, which endeavor to explain why Donne has survived a year since Elizabeth Drury's death, a group of similes repeats vividly his attempt to kill the world. One, reminiscent of the story of Leontius, likens the world's movements to the last twitchings of a decapitated corpse:

His eies will twinckle, and his tongue will roll,
As though he beckned, and cal'd backe his Soul,
He graspes his hands, and he puls up his feet,
And seemes to reach, and to step forth to meet
His soule.

Such men's final confessions were one origin of the novel and of its warmth for the shivering survivors, grimly noted by Benjamin. But these bodily movements of the condemned, Donne says, are motiveless signification; like this man,. the world dies in dumb futility. Imperatives throughout The Second Anniversarie particularize that death. "Thinke thy selfe laboring now with broken breath," Donne insists, "Thinke thy selfe parch'd with fevers violence," "Thinke that thou hearst thy knell" or "'Thinke that thy body rots" (lines 90, 96, 99, 115).

But as the Anniversaries move toward their end, there is a subtle change in Donne's defensive strategy. Before, he repressed worldly desire by saying that the world is dead. Now he meets the same desire for the world with an injunction: "Think thyself dead," that is, "remember that you must die." A clear difference separates this strategy from the former. To say that the world is dead is unconsciously to literalize a metaphor. It is wish-fulfillment. By thinking himself dead, however, Donne becomes conscious of the metaphorical gesture required of one who would assume a dead man's perspective. Imagining something certain to happen, his own death, he recognizes at the same time that he is not dead yet. This recognition, in turn, gradually frees energy that had earlier gone into repression. Gone at the end of The Second Anniversarie is the effort to kill the world by vivisection. To the last, Donne still questions whether health, beauty, and honor can have lasting meaning, but he does not vainly try to define life out of existence. Thus a kind of freedom eventuates from the logic of mortality in the Anniversaries, the central figure of this plot no longer squandering but sublimating his desires.

Two final points of contrast between the first and second installment may further define the curve of Donne's plotting. The first contrast concerns illness and memory. In The First Anniversarie, Donne imagines that once she gets free of "the carcasse of the old world," Elizabeth Drury will create "a new world" and populate it with "new creatures" (line 76), his fictive audience, who will in turn extend the girl's virtue by imitation. Remembering Elizabeth Drury is not sufficient to prevent illness, however. Donne admits that "though to be thus Elemented, arme / These Creatures, from home-borne intrinsique harme" (lines 79-80), no small gain,

Yet, because outward stormes the strongest breake,
And strength it selfe by confidence growes weake,
This new world may be safer, being told
The dangers and diseases of the old.

Elizabeth Drury's creatures assure themselves of health by rehearsing the symptoms of "venemous sinne," transmitted to humankind by "some lorraine Serpent" (lines 83-84).

As Freud knew, however, repeating is not remembering, especially when illness is alienated, attributed to someone else, an old world. The Second Anniversarie breaks the compulsion to repeat not by further rehearsal but by a deliberate and paradoxical forgetfulness:

Forget this world, and scarse thinke of it so,
As of old cloaths, cast off a yeare agoe.
To be thus stupid is Alacrity;
Men thus lethargique have best Memory.

Closing the abstract motion of the poems, Donne finally abandons his defense against wanting and not wanting the world. In the end, remembering and forgetting are extinguished in prophecy.

The idea of the prophetic leads to a final point of contrast between the two Anniversaries. In the first, Donne compares himself with Moses, Elizabeth Drury with the Scripture itself. God gave Moses a song, recorded in Deuteronomy 32, that encapsulated "The Law, the Prophets, and the History" (line 465). The Israelites might otherwise have forgotten their story. Just so, Donne claims, his song can preserve the essence of Elizabeth Drury's story, even though it may be a "matter fit for Chronicle, not verse" (line 460). The Second Anniversarie ends with a similar analogy. Again putting himself into a triangular relationship with God and the dead girl, Donne seeks to define the status of his own voice:

Since his will is, that to posteritee,
Thou shouldst for life, and death, a patterne bee,
And that the world should notice have of this,
The purpose, and th'Autority is his;
Thou art the Proclamation; and I ame
The Trumpet, at whose voice the people came.

As Lewalski has shown (pp. 277-80), in the metaphor of the trumpet Donne claims for himself both the prophetic and the priestly office. Moreover, the lines may recall the unique trumpet blast that announces the theophany of Yahweh and the giving of the Law upon Sinai in Exodus 19.

If these triangles that end the Anniversaries were identical, we might lose confidence in a teleological reading of the poems. But they are not the same. What separates them can be read in a third triad, too easily dismissed, at the very end of The First Anniversarie. There Donne figures not between God and the people but between death and life. Verse, he says, has a "middle nature" between the grave, which "keeps bodies," and heaven, which "keepes soules" (lines 473-74). What verse keeps or "enroules" is "the fame" (line 474). Verse holds out neither certain corruption nor certain bliss but rather something that shuttles between them. So long as its movements are reified and alienated from the versifier, this shuttling may seem untroubled. But Donne's task, and ours when we read the Anniversaries as a plot or discourse of mortality, is precisely to negotiate what is taken as settled in the final biblical analogies of the poems. "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit" (Romans 8:1). These trumpeting words announce the end of Paul's "life story" of division and ambivalence. In his Anniversaries for Elizabeth Drury, Donne blows a similar blast but accomplishes something else. He imagines the temporal accommodations by which such freedom as Paul describes might be narrated.

1 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 101.

2 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 22.

3 John Donne, The Epithalamions, Anniversaries, and Epicedes, ed. W. Milgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 38 (lines 83-90). Subsequent quotations will be from this edition.

4 According to Rosalie L. Colie, these lines describe "the process of figura, that is, how one reads present events as the fulfillment of an actual and symbolic event from the past" (" 'All in Peeces': Problems of Interpretation in Donne's Anniversary Poems," in Just So Much Honor: Essays Commemorating the Four-Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of John Donne, ed. Peter Amadeus Fiore [University Park and London: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1972], p. 211). Likewise, according to Ruth A. Fox, "Men who want to be good will accomplish her fate . . . by themselves completing her chronicle" ("Donne's Anniversaries and the Art of Living," ELH 38 [1971]:532). In my view, a figural or typological understanding of these lines, while useful, may underestimate the narrative impulse recorded by Donne's image.

5 Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Donne's Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), p. 7. Lewalski speaks of the poems for Elizabeth Drury as "companion-pieces" (p. 7) or "contrary arguments" (p. 303). Fox claims that "'Anatomy' and 'progress' are concurrent processes" (p. 530). Louis L. Martz has endorsed this position, calling the Anniversaries "axis" poems ("Donne's Anniversaries Revisited," in That Subtile Wreath: Lectures Presented at the Quatercentenary Celebration of the Birth of John Donne, ed. Margaret W. Pepperdene [Decatur: Agnes Scott College, 1973], pp. 33, 48). Acknowledging that the poems cannot be read simultaneously, Colie says that the "scientific dubieties of the first poem are swept away in the wind from the cosmic excursion of the second," but she sees at the end of The Second Anniversarie a resolution that is "epistemological," not narrative (p. 207). Cf. Paul A. Parrish, "Poet, Audience, and the Word: An Approach to the Anniversaries," in New Essays on Donne, ed. Gary A. Stringer, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies, no. 57 (Salzburg: Institut fur Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1977), pp. 129,133-34.

6 Parrish, "Donne's 'A Funerall Elegie'," PLL 11 (1975):85.

7 Carol M. Sicherman, "Donne's Timeless Anniversaries," UTQ 39 (1970):129.

8 For trenchant criticism of Sicherman's article, see Colie, pp. 189-90.

9 I follow the summary of biographical research presented in Milgate's edition, pp. xxix-xxxi. Cf. R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 237-44.

10 The context of patronage for the Anniversaries is emphasized by both John Carey (John Donne: Life, Mind and Art [New 'York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981], pp. 101-104) and Arthur F. Marotti (John Donne, Coterie Poet [Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1986], pp. 235-45).

11 The 1611 volume also contained "A Funerall Elegie" and the commendatory poem "To the Praise of the Dead, and the Anatomy," probably the work of Joseph Hall. The 1612 volume retained these and added, before The Second Anniversarie, another poem by Hall, "The Harbinger to the Progres."

12 "Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden," in Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-1952)', 1:133.

13 The ambitious hero Brooks has in mind is typically male, but the Anniversaries may also anticipate the stories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century female heroes, which take "a more complex stance toward ambition, the formation of an inner drive toward the assertion of selfhood in resistance to the overt and violating male plots" (Brooks, p. 39).

14 Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 35-38.

15 Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: A Guide for Students of English Literature (Berkeley and London: Univ. of California Press, 1968), p. 7.

16 The term is used by Fletcher, p. 142. Cf. Anthony F. Bellette's description of a "downward movement" in the poem ("Art and Imitation in Donne's Anniversaries," SEL 15 [1975]:92).

17 Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation, Yale Studies in English, no. 125 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954), p. 222. Cf. "Donne's Anniversaries Revisited," p. 38, for a qualification of the original complaint.

18 W.M. Lebans, "Donne's Anniversaries and the Tradition of Funeral Elegy," ELH 39 (1972):556.

19 Robert S. Jackson also quotes Romans 7:24 in connection with The First Anniversarie (John Donne's Christian Vocation [Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1970], p. 116).

20 The Works of Plato, ed. and trans. B. Jowett, 4 vols. in I (New York: Tudor Publishing, n.d.), 2:163-64. I am indebted to Fletcher's discussion of this story (pp. 225-26) in connection with Freud's Totem and Taboo.

21 According to Fletcher, this classical defense is widespread in allegories (pp. 185-88).

22 See Sicherman, p. 129. Cf. Martz, "Donne's Anniversaries Revisited," p. 48.

23 Sicherman finds in the second poem "a better balance of intellect and emotion" (p. 129). Colie, too, although openly critical of Sicherman's approach, says that the "mind gives way to the soul, philosophy to theology" in The Second Anniversarie, "since only the soul can learn, can experience joy, can achieve reward in heaven" (pp. 208-209).

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By JAMES ANDREW CLARK

James Andrew Clark is Associate Professor of English at Auburn University. He is currently editing The Practice of Prelates for a forthcoming edition of The Independent Writings of William Tyndale.