ABSTRACT
All over Europe Protestants were fighting against the established faith, peoples were arming against their rulers, and the divine right of kings was being questioned. In England the nation was being divided by religious and economic controversies. The times were out of joint, and to many it seemed obvious that the world was rapidly accelerating in its process of degeneration and decomposition as it approached the end of its course. John Donne’s meditations in the two Anniversaries on the great general themes of the insignificance of this world in comparison with the next and of man in comparison with God and the blessed are more profound and moving than his treatment of more specifically Christian and doctrinal matters in poems written before his ordination in 1615. Meditates, but intellectually, wittily even, rather than profoundly or passionately, exhibiting and, underlining, with characteristic ingenuity, some of the paradoxes inherent in, Christianity and in the two-fold nature of Christ as God and man.
