The art of devotion

‘A Litany’ (D, pp. 161–9), written during an attack of neuritis in the winter of 1608–9, ¹ reflects a greater variety of concerns than any other of Donne’s Divine Poems, concerns which range from the strictly spiritual to the impertinently secular. It is his longest divine poem, if we discount the scriptural paraphrase, ‘The Lamentations of Jeremy’, and it shares with ‘An hymn to the Saints, and to Marquis Hamilton’ the distinction of being one of only two of Donne’s Divine Poems unambiguously alluded to in his extant correspondence. ² The discussion of ‘A Litany’ is found in a letter to Sir Henry Goodyer (Gosse 1899, i, pp. 195–7) ³ , with whom Donne corresponded on a regular basis, and it provides us with rare knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the composition of a Donne poem. ‘since my imprisonment,’ he tells Goodyer, ‘I have made a meditation in verse, which I call a Litany’. He then proceeds to the question of his litany’s pedigree:

the word, you know, imports no other than supplication, but all churches have one form of supplication by that name. Amongst ancient annals, I mean some 800 years, I have met two litanies in Latin verse, which gave me not the reason of my meditations, for in good faith I thought not upon them then, but they give me a defence …