The Anyan Strait and the Far East: John Donne's Global Vision and Theological Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

On 16 September 2009, two German ships-the Beluga Fraternity and Beluga Foresight-passed Novaya Zemlya, an island off Russia's north coast. Global warming has serendipitously opened up fabled Northwest Passage, an Arctic route that had been earnestly sought after and ultimately deemed impassable by navigators in early modern England. While modern nations compete over their rights to polar sea-lanes, few realize that Arctic dream has originated from England's desire to reach China and Far in sixteenth century. This essay traces genesis of Arctic passage project as related to China dream by examining historical and metaphorical associations of John Donne's image of Strait in his poem Hymn to My God, in My Sickness (1623). By uncovering Far Eastern background of early modern maritime adventures, I mean to show how Donne's invocation of some seemingly incidental geographical features reveals a surprisingly global vision and cosmopolitan spirit.Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (1589-1600), an extensive travel compendium that documents maritime explorations, proved pivotal to raising England's consciousness of a globalizing world. Donne was numbered among those who responded nimbly to new message about recently discovered worlds that was trumpeted by Hakluyt's multivolume compilations.1 Images of new geographical discoveries pervade Donne's works, especially his divine poem Hymn to My God, in My Sickness. Here we hear speaker remark,Is Sea my home? Or areThe riches? Is Jerusalem?Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar,All straits, and none but straits, are ways to them,Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Shem.(Hymn, lines 16-20)2This stanza distinguishes both by number of geographical references that it contains and juxtaposition of biblical figures with some newly revealed regions. There are two general critical approaches to Donne's spatial imagery. One focuses on his physical places. Robert R. Owens claims that since Donne's geography is mystical in intent, designation of places is unimportant.3 But other scholars recognize importance of exact locations to understand Donne's works. Donald Anderson associates Donne's images of earth with medieval T-in-O maps.4 Whereas Robert Sharp traces these images to sixteenth-century cordiform maps, Claude Gandelman and Noam Flinker link them with anthropomorphic landscapes.5 Second, some scholars do see relevance of Donne's new geographic names, but, for most of these critics, John Gillies rightly points out, Donne's new regions are remorselessly typologised and sacralised, incongruously translated into patristic geography in which all places point towards ultimate place (the omphalos [center or hub] of Jerusalem) and in sacred direction (east).6 In contrast, Gillies himself proposes to regard Donne's new places on their own accounts.Neglected in scholarship on Donne's geographical images is their significance in a global context and part played by particular region of Far in shaping his global perspective.7 In his The English Voyages of Sixteenth Century (1905), historian W. A. Raleigh observes that [m]odern travel and geography owe their chief advances to search for fabled realm of Cathay [China], and it is through the discovery of a passage through one of innumerable inlets of North that the story of English Voyages begins (PN, 12:10).8 Three of six spatial images in Donne's Hymn to God refer to Far East-the Anyan Strait, Pacific Sea, and regions-a predominance that indicates an intense attention to this newly discovered region. By passage, Raleigh means both northeast pathway through Russia to China and northwest route to eastern riches via Strait in Pacific.9 It is these Arctic passage programs launched by English in sixteenth century that led ultimately to discovery of New World or America, the fourth part of world (PN, 7:160) Western Europeans encountered in race for Far East (PN, 12:8). …