Donne's Bright Materials: Counterfeit Poetics in "The Funerall" and "The Relic"

• In Event: Donne in Dialogue

Abstract

Taking up the scenes of burial and disinterment in which John Donne twice imagines his own grave, this paper argues for a “counterfeit poetics” at work in his Songs and Sonets. The polyvalent notion of counterfeit in early-seventeenth-century England, I suggest, helps us to attend to a hermeneutic imperative—more than an expressive or mimetic one—shaping figuration and organizing lyric temporality. The way in which Donne’s poems resolve the shared etymon of the fact and the fake constitute statements of faith—where spiritual propriety is insisted upon in face of the disintegration of the body and the perpetual translatio of meaning from individual to individual and community to community. In the discussion, I draw on Martin Luther’s “moderate” image theology in order to explore the “mereness” of image in these poems, suggesting that they paradoxically come to produce an idea of stubborn materiality at the center of interpretive crisis.

Author

• Kathryn Crim, University of California, Berkeley