When First and Last Concur: Closure in John Donne's “The Annuntiation and Passion”

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1I was led to this passage by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, pp. 3 and 7. Curiously, she does not discuss Donne elsewhere in her book. Although there is much that I think must be qualified about Smith's arguments, her book remains for me the most helpful and provocative study of poetic closure yet published. 2“[F]or Donne the process of imprinting the coin and the imprint itself were the vital points of focus. A coin for him … was not an object but a relationship,” notes John Carey. “It was the correlation between metal and imprint that fascinated him” (153–54). On the connection between fraud and the “adulterating of money” through false “coyning,” see Sermons 4.313. Donne was equally concerned with “empty … Rhetorique” and could ask, “How weak a thing is Poetry? (And yet Poetry is a counterfait Creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were)” (Sermons 4.87). For Donne's comments on Dante's pertness, see his letter to Sir Henry Wotton (Selected Prose 110). All of the poems discussed appear in Complete Poetry. 3I have considered this mode of closure at greater length in “Donne, Salvation, and the Biblical Basis of Poetic Action.” 4“Donne discovered for himself that life had meaning at the moment of conjunction,” Frederick A. Rowe observes (221). The potential concurrence of the Annunciation and the Passion has engaged the imaginations of others as well. Marjorie Reeves reports that a prophecy circulated around 970 “that the world would end in the year in which the Feast of the Annunciation coincided with Good Friday” (46). Likewise, Russian Silver Age poet Mikhail Kuzmin recorded in his journal that “The Annunciation (conception) used to be celebrated in antiquity on the same day as the Passion or the Resurrection. Does this not confirm my thoughts about the erotic significance of the Passion?” (qtd. in Malmstad and Bogomolov 262). On the Annunciation (which is also the vernal equinox) as the typological recapitulation of the great events of salvation history, see Mazzotta 51–52. Donne's “The Annuntiation and Passion” is discussed in passing in numerous sources, but the only two attempts to render a comprehensive reading of the poem are Albrecht 98–105 and DiPasquale. 5In a chapter titled “John Donne and the Paradoxes of Incarnation,” Rosalie Colie concludes that “God's creative problem was to make flesh of the Word; the poet's, to make word and words of the mortal flesh—in other words, God's incarnation must be reworked, worked the other way, so that the transient experiences of the mutable body may lay some claim to immortality” (141). Colie's description of Donne's challenge seems the perfect description of “The Annuntiation and Passion,” a poem she does not discuss. 6Frances Malpezzi notes that “the play on words in the last line is significant. The story is the speaker's (and humanity's) spiritual currency and is, through the constant telling, always to be made spiritually current. The spiritual treasure of salvation history is never depleted and always accessible” (150).