The Greater Wonder of God's Subjection in John Donne's Holy Sonnet “Why are wee by all Creatures waited on?”

Abstract

In his deceptively simple, but really extremely rich, sonnet, “Why are wee by all Creatures waited on?”, John Donne uses all the tools of prosody available to him and plays with the English and Italian forms of the sonnet to give a rich meditation on the order of creation, the history of salvation, and the relationship of nature and grace. He begins with what seems an irenic scholastic discussion, asking why humans are able to subjugate elements and animals which are purer and stronger than they. In the third quatrain, however, he shifts to a deep moral plaint. At the same time, he interweaves the philosophical idea of the Great Chain of Being with the theological distinction between nature and grace. He does so by employing both the Italian and the English sonnet forms simultaneously. The Italian sonnet poses and then resolves the question about the order of nature, while the English sonnet takes the question of the order of nature up into the question of the order of redemption. In the final couplet, he goes beyond both the metaphysical question and the moral plaint by turning the reader's attention to the Incarnation, in which God subjects Himself to both that which is lower and that which is worse than Himself. In doing so Donne transforms the images he evokes in a poem surprisingly devoid of his typical metaphysical conceits into one sustained conceit which elicits in the reader a humble awe before the Divine condescension.