ABSTRACT
As long as scholars assign a late date to the sonnets found only in the Westmoreland Manuscript, there will be no date-related grounds for thinking that Donne used them to try out fabricated roles. However, any idea that this applies to all his post-ordination poetry breaks down when we approach the three hymns Donne wrote in the period 1619 to 1623. In these he returned to the practice of using poetry as a means of dramatising the predicament of the persona, and exploited religion for artistic purposes every bit as vigorously as in the verse composed during the period 1608 to 1613. My description of the voice which speaks in the hymns as Donne’s should be read with this caveat in mind. The copious use of recognisable autobiographical detail in these poems renders the conception of a fabricated speaker inadequate, but I do not wish to imply that Donne speaks in these poems simply in his own voice (by which I mean the voice which we can now hear, if at all, only in his letters).
