ABSTRACT

The anguish of psychic disintegration is perhaps strongest in some of Donne's love lyrics, where he displaces religious imagery onto his treatment of human love. Thus, in Donne's poems, both reader and persona are able to confront the anguishes of death, psychic disintegration, history, sin, and doubt with a renewed intensity. In Donne's Divine Poems, the anguish of death is ever present, for, as Carey observes, death alone will bring him to God: 'Dead, he will at least know whether or not he is saved'. One of the most blasphemous and irritable of Donne's love poems is 'The Canonization'. The poems discussed in the chapter chart the soul's search for God, but never depict its ultimate arrival: for Donne, there is always a gap between the Seeker's desire for God and certainty of God's response – encounter is always just out of reach, but all the more to be desired for that.