John Donne - The Holy Sonnets (Variorum Edition, 2005)

John Donne - The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, Vol. 7, Part 1: The Holy Sonnets (Indiana University Press, 2005).

ISBN: 9780253347015 | 720 pages | PDF

The Holy Sonnets -- also known as the Divine Meditations or Divine Sonnets -- are a series of nineteen poems by the English poet John Donne (1572-1631). The sonnets were first published in 1633, two years after Donne's death. Many of the poems are believed to have been written in 1609 and 1610, during a period of great personal distress and strife for Donne who suffered a combination of physical, emotional, and financial hardships during this time. This was also a time of personal religious turmoil as Donne was in the process of conversion from Roman Catholicism to Anglicanism, and would take holy orders in 1615 despite profound reluctance and significant self-doubt about becoming a priest. In The Holy Sonnets, Donne addresses religious themes of mortality, divine judgment, divine love, and humble penance while reflecting deeply personal anxieties.

Edited by Gary A. Stringer, this Variorum Edition presents a newly edited critical text of the Holy Sonnets and a comprehensive digest of the critical-scholarly commentary on them from Donne’s time through 1995. The editors identify and print both an earlier and a revised authorial sequence of sonnets, as well as presenting the scribal collection -- which contains unique authorial versions of several of the sonnets -- inscribed by Donne’s friend Rowland Woodward in the Westmoreland manuscript.

Reviews

". . . This edition immediately displaces all its predecessors, and will be indispensable for scholars and libraries." -- Times Literary Supplement

"Like its predecessors, . . . [this] volume of the Donne Variorum enterprise to appear is a triumph in every way." -- John Donne Journal

"An occasion for celebration. Among the most ambitious and valuable collaborative scholarly enterprises at the end of the twentieth century. Superb." -- Early Modern Literary Studies

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Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.