‘Darke Texts Needs Notes’: On Prophetic Prophecy, John Donne and the Baroque

Abstract

Taking issue with a view of literature as artfully-crafted, smooth discourse, and questioning Romantic and New Critical readings of prophetic language, this article argues that prophetic language is better understood as baroque. I take my cue from Hermann Gunkel’s 1923 essay ‘The Prophets as Writers and Poets’ and argue that there is something about the prophets that is ‘dark’, ‘stammering’, ‘secretive’, ‘shadowy’, ‘bizarre’ and ‘colossal’. Whereas Wisdom literature conceives of words as choice delicacies to be savoured or as soothing ointment, the prophetic word describes itself as fire, metal or sword. Whereas Wisdom has most in common with an Augustan aesthetic of ‘what oft were thought, but ne’er so well expressed’ (Pope), prophetic language has more in common with the strange disjunctive images of an ‘anti-literary’ figure like John Donne. Like Donne’s poetry/sermons, prophecy creates heterogeneous, counter-intuitive linkages and makes itself felt through the skin and through the flesh. What Donne and prophecy have in common is the desire to split and disrupt language—a desire that, in prophecy, represents the speech of God as a mind-bending, wor(l)d-bending force.