Subjectivity and paradox in the poetry of Donne

The subject or persona of John Donne's lyric poetry constitutes an important departure from the traditional Petrarchan and epideictic poetic subject. The speaking subject of many of the Songs and Sonets is paradoxically divided against himself. This division manifests itself in the speaker's conflicted attitude toward the Petrarchan mistress, or icon. The speaker resists the difference between subject and object of desire because (for reasons that are both historical and psychological) he does not want to assume the traditional Petrarchan persona. In many poems, he attempts to heal the rupture of difference with a bold rhetoric of Neoplatonic transcendence. In poems such as "A Nocturnall," rejection of the Petrarchan persona produces an evacuated subject who can only signify his absence.;The conflicted subject of the Songs and Sonets is also divided in his relationship to literary tradition. Caught between a waning tradition and an unvalidated originality, Donne is both belated and premature. As further evidence of dividedness, many poems are shown to be self-cancelling arguments.;In the "Holy Sonnets," the subject regards his own dividedness with anguish. In a series of devotional meditations, the speaker confronts his alienation from himself and from God. The poetic subject finally speaks in one single but anxious voice at the end of "Oh, to vex me, contrayres meet in one." In "Goodfriday. 1613. Riding Westward" the speaker is again torn: he is both fascinated and terrified by a vision of the crucifixion.;The Anniversaries record a crisis of the epideictic subject. Elizabeth Drury is not a symbol; rather, "shee" signifies the absence of the epideictic object. Of course, there can be no praising subject without a praiseworthy object. And if we cannot praise, we are lost. Without an icon of virtue to mediate between us and Christ, we lose the possibility of grace and the world loses its coherence. Donne's elegy for Elizabeth Drury thus becomes an elegy for the whole Christian-Platonic tradition, and so records the transformative intellectual and religious upheavals of the Renaissance.