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both cipher and code. Nevertheless, it is important to note that Donne does not dismiss earthly
“thoughts,” but instead encourages them.179 As Frank Manley notes on this passage, the speaker’s biddance is not clearly an injunction to stop thinking earthly thoughts and to think twice as much about Heaven, but could suggest that earthly thoughts should be doubled by
“extend[ing them] outward both ways to [their] logical conclusion in the circumference, for God is everywhere, the beginning and the end.”180 Dramatizing the failures of thinking is also staging its seductions, its ability to touch twice more than its own center.
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their parents; nor will we any poor man, if we truly love that God, that made him poor;
And, if his poverty be not of Gods making, but of the Devils, induced by his riot and wastfulnesse, howsoever the poverty may be the Devils, still the Man is of Gods making.182
Donne uses the clock/watch metaphor to articulate a paradoxical fallenness and praiseworthiness in humanity. Humans warrant affection because of qualities that our fallenness disables us from sensing. We may not be able to see a pattern, a direct line of descent from F/father to S/son. We may not even be able to discern what broke the line of transmission. Instead of following these sensible signs, however, we should “love,” trusting that there is an imperceptible Godliness within all humankind
In another sermon arguing not for loving the neighbor who may revel in “riot and wastfulnesse” but in restraining oneself from becoming that neighbor, Donne again emphasizes the clock’s disorderliness and likeness to the human body. He asks:
wouldest thou consecrate a Chalice to God that is broken? no man would present a lame horse, a disordered clock, a torn book to the King. Caro jumentum, thy body is thy beast;
and wilt thou present that to God, when it is lam’d and tir’d with excesse of wantonness?
when thy clock, (the whole course of thy time) is disordered with passions, and perturbations183
“Passions and perturbations” were often synonyms for feeling, for what is now called emotion, and here Donne takes for granted that the human body, like the clock, will be broken by them.
Donne shows closer familiarity with the workings of the watch and again parallels its
182 Sermons, 8.284.
183 Sermons, 8.244.
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actions with devotional ones in his sermon on the Psalms, 6.8-10, in which he argues for structuring prayer according to the model of the watch:
As a Clock gives a warning before it strikes, and then there remains a sound, and a tingling of the bell after it hath stricken: so a precedent meditation, and a subsequent rumination, make the prayer a prayer; I must think before, what I will aske, and consider againe, what I have askt.184
The clock’s order of operations is like the proper order of operations for prayer. The clock can therefore represent an ordering principle or disorder itself.
These paradoxical characteristics of the clock coalesce in Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624), which are themselves structured according to the order—
meditation, rumination (here the expostulation), then prayer185—that Donne aligns with the clock in his Psalms sermon. Expostulation 1 is clearly where Donne is doing some of his most explicit thinking about the relation between body and soul. Immediately after the first meditation, upon the suddenness of his sickness, the abruptness with which the edifice of his health can be destroyed by a momentary blow, he wonders why God does not give the soul as much
“apprehension” as the body, why he does not give it an ability to sense sin as perceptively as the body perceives sickness. But, he says, God does:
Thou hast imprinted a pulse in our Soule, but we do not examine it; a voice in our
conscience, but wee doe not hearken unto it. We talk it out, we jest it out, we drink it out, we sleep it out; and when we wake, we doe not say with Jacob, Surely the Lord is in this
184 Sermons, 6.52.
185John Donne, Devotions vpon emergent occasions and seuerall steps in my sicknes digested into I. Meditations vpon our humane condition, 2. Expostulations, and debatements with God, 3. Prayers, vpon the seuerall occasions, to Him (London, 1624). All further references to the Devotions are to the page numbers in this 1624 edition.
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place, and I knew it not: but though wee might know it, we do not, we wil not. But wil God pretend to make a Watch, and leave out the springe? to make so many various wheeles in the faculties of the Soule, and in the organs of the body, and leave out Grace, that should move them? or will God make a springe and not winde it up? Infuse his first grace, and not second it with more...? (12–14)
Indeed not, Donne concludes. It is not that God has not given our souls this ability; it is that we,
“all prodigal sonnes,” have misspent it (14). And he ends this expostulation by returning to the repetition of time units with which he begins the meditation, (this minute I am well…this minute I am sick): “Every minute hee renewes his mercy, but wee wil not understand, lest that we should be converted, and he should heale us” (15). In the subsequent prayer, he also asks God for spiritual discipline in an unexpected form: “that tendernesse, that rawnesse, that scrupulousness, to feare every concupiscence, every offer of Sinne, that this suspitious, and jelous diligence will turne to an inordinate dejection of spirit” (18). Donne is asking for a foreknowledge of sin that would take the form of increased sensitivity to physical pain, even though his physical
perception does not enable him to see grace.
Later in the Devotions, Donne again ruminates on the clock in Meditation 15, this time on the occasion of his insomnia. At first he sees telling time from the clock while one cannot sleep in the face of the eternal sleep as futile: it is just a measure of earthly time when one is bound to operate according to Heaven’s clock. Eventually, though, he sees it as a kind of preparation for the eternal waking. He writes:
oh, if I be entring now into Eternitie, where there shall bee no more distinction of houres, why is it al my businesse now to tell Clocks? why is none of the heavinesse of my heart, dispensed into mine Eie-lids, that they might fall as my heart doth? And why, since I
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haue lost my delight in all obiects, cannot I discontinue the facultie of seeing them, by closing mine Eis in sleepe? But why rather being entring into that presence, where I shall wake continually and neuer sleepe more, doe I not interpret my continuall waking here, to bee a prasceve, and a preparation to that? (371–73) Donne wonders why his body does not operate in better harmony: why his emotional feeling (the
“heaviness of [his] heart”) does not dictate his physical sensory capacity (the closing of his eyelids resulting in the end of his sense of sight). Ultimately, however, he adopts the perspective that such waking will be a beneficial masochism, one that enables him to prepare for the Heaven he cannot yet see.