John Donne’s Holy Sonnet VII

At the round earth’s imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o’erthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death’s woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
‘Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that’s as good
As if Thou hadst seal’d my pardon with Thy blood.

No Spring, nor Summer beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one Autumnal face.

— John Donne, The Autumnal

Autumn is the most poetic of all seasons because it speaks with a double voice. With one voice it says that everything is ripe. With the other it says that everything is dying.

On January 29, 1626 at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, John Donne preached a sermon on Psalm 63: 7, “Because thou hast been my help, therefore in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice.” It is surely one of the greatest sermons ever preached on a psalm in the English language. There are ample reasons for thinking so. Here’s one. Donne gets his congregation to see themselves as enemies of God.

It may be said that God’s enemies is not all that we are. What too often is left unsaid is what makes possible that subjunctive. We lack, too many of us preachers, a biblical theology of God as destroyer, what it cost God for us to get involved with him. That we are at enmity with God is indeed but one aspect of our relation to him, but that there is more to knowing God than resisting him, that there are other aspects of our involvement with God including our loving him, depends utterly on the mercy of the Most High, the mercy that makes possible our hope of receiving it.

Imagine yourself sitting in the nave of St. Paul’s in 1626 as the Dean mounts the pulpit steps. Donne is a man who for all his inimitable talent, for all his genius with words, knew on good authority dejection and death. By 1626, he had lost his beloved wife Ann and five of the twelve children he had with her. Imagine yourself hearing — don’t read but hear them — these words. What you hear is a man preaching to his congregation, but what falls on your ear also is the sound made by a man praying, a man whose emotional skills have been subjected to and shaped not merely by his subjective experience willy-nilly but by the psalms. And therein lay his sermon’s lyric power; Donne speaks as the psalmist does, taking his grief directly to the Most High.

When I shall need peace — because there is none but thou, O Lord, that should stand for me — and then shall find that all the wounds that I have come from thy hand, all the arrows that stick in me, from thy quiver; when I shall see that because I have given myself to my corrupt nature, thou hast changed thine, and because I am all evil towards thee, therefore thou hast given over being good towards me; when it comes to this height, that … mine enemy is not an imaginary enemy, fortune, nor a transitory enemy, malice in great persons, but a real and an irresistable and an inexorable and an everlasting enemy, the Lord of Hosts himself, the Almighty God himself — the Almighty God himself only knows the weight of this affliction, and except he put in that pondus gloriae, that exceeding weight of an eternal glory, with his own hand into the other scale, we are weighed down, we are swallowed up, irreparably, irrevocably, irrecoverably, irremediably.

In the red corner, desiring nothing less than the consignment of the semicolon to the dustbin of grammatical history, are a pair of treacherous French writers and (of course) those perfidious Anglo-Saxons, for whose short, punchy, uncomplicated sentences, it is widely rumoured, the rare subtlety and infinite elegance of a good semicolon are surplus to requirements. The point-virgule, says legendary writer, cartoonist and satirist François Cavanna, is merely “a parasite, a timid, fainthearted, insipid thing, denoting merely uncertainty, a lack of audacity, a fuzziness of thought”.

Philippe Djian, best known outside France as the author of 37°2 le matin, which was brought to the cinema in 1986 by Jean-Jacques Beneix as Betty Blue and successfully launched Beatrice Dalle on an unsuspecting world, goes one step further: he would like nothing better than to go down in posterity, he claims, as “the exterminating angel of the point-virgule”. Objectionable English-language typesetting practices, as used by most of the world’s computers, are also to blame for the semicolon’s decline, its defenders argue.

In the blue corner are an array of linguistic patriots who cite Hugo, Flaubert, De Maupassant, Proust and Voltaire as examples of illustrious French writers whose respective oeuvres would be but pale shadows of themselves without the essential point-virgule, and who argue that - in the words of one contributor to a splendidly passionate blog on the topic hosted recently by the leftwing weekly Le Nouvel Observateur - “the beauty of the semicolon, and its glory, lies in the support lent by this particular punctuation mark to the expression of a complex thought.”

The semicolon, continues this sadly anonymous defender of the Gallic grammatical faith, “finds its rightful home in the subtlety of a fine and rich analysis, one which is not afraid to pronounce - and sometimes to withhold - judgment where mere affirmation might be found wanting. It allows the writer to link ideas without breaking a train of thought; by contrast, over-simplified communication and bald, efficient discourse whose simplistic style is the best guarantee of being widely understood is naturally wary of this punctuation mark.”

thanks Alan, [here]