DiPasquale AeviternityDonnesAtemporal 2012

From Here to Aeviternity: Donne’s Atemporal Clocks
Author(s): Theresa M. DiPasquale

Source: Modern Philology , Vol. 110, No. 2 (November 2012), pp. 226-252
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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From Here to Aeviternity: Donne’s Atemporal Clocks
THERESA M. DIPASQUALE
Whitman College
Clocks meant something to John Donne. When he made his last will and
testament, ‘‘that Strykinge clocke wch I ordinarilye weare’’ was the first of sev-
eral items, followed by various other valuables, including paintings, medals,
and plate, that he made a point of bestowing upon trusted friends.1 The fact
that Donne thought his pocket watch a precious possession is not in itself
remarkable; in the seventeenth century, watches were expensive and valu-
able possessions, as some still are today. But timepieces also appear fre-
quently in Donne’s prose and poetry. Particularly fascinating are passages
in which he compares human beings to timepieces only to insist that these
chronometric creatures have the potential to escape temporal limitations.
In The First Anniversarie, the narrator says that ‘‘Measures of times are all de-
termined’’ (40)—terminated—by Elizabeth Drury’s death; yet in ‘‘A Funer-
all Elegie,’’ the speaker imagines the deceased girl as a clock disassembled
in order to be restored as a perfectly accurate timepiece in heaven.2 And in
‘‘Lecture upon the Shadow,’’ the speaker describes himself and his beloved
as the gnomon of a human sundial only to express his desire that their love
should achieve a perpetual noon in which they will cast no afternoon
shadows.
These timepiece tropes articulate the poet’s idiosyncratic understand-
ing of time’s relationship to eternity and to the intermediate state of being
that the scholastics dubbed ‘‘aeviternity,’’ the atemporal state of angels and
disembodied souls. The term ‘‘aeviternity,’’ I would note, does not appear
1. John Donne, quoted in R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press,
1970), 563.
2. Quotations of Donne’s Anniversaries, including the two long poems and ‘‘A Funerall Ele-
gie,’’ are taken from The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, vol. 6, ‘‘ The Anniversaries’’
and the ‘‘Epicedes and Obsequies,’’ ed. Gary A. Stringer et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1995), and cited parenthetically by line number. Other Donne poems, including the love
lyric ‘‘The Anniversarie,’’ are quoted from The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shaw-
cross (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1967), and cited parenthetically by line number.
Ó 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2012/11002-0004$10.00
226

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Theresa M. DiPasquale From Here to Aeviternity 227
in Donne’s writing; he may have inclined toward the views of later scholas-
tics, including William of Ockham, who rejected the notion of an interme-
diate state between eternity and time, asserting that the only truly atempo-
ral state is divine eternity.3 Donne’s ideas about the mode of duration
experienced by the angels and by human souls in heaven are, however,
clearly influenced by Aquinas’s writings on aeviternity.4 Indeed, many of
Donne’s human clocks and dials might be called aeviternometers rather
than chronometers, for they mark not the intervals of time as it is ordinarily
understood but the ages of aeviternity as time transfigured. Examining
these paradoxically atemporal timepieces provides new insight into the
much-discussed topic of time and eternity in Donne’s works. In particular,
it helps to explain how ‘‘Donne juggles time, trying to redress the imbal-
ance between the shortness of the present and the length of eternity.’’5
I. DONNE’S ARTICULATIONS OF ETERNITY,

AEVITERNITY, AND TIME
Eternity is defined by Augustine and his heirs as a perfect and motionless

state of being outside the time line, the immutable timelessness of God that
3. See Rory Fox, Time and Eternity in Mid-Thirteenth-Century Thought (Oxford University
Press, 2006), 244–81; and Armand Maurer, The Philosophy of William Ockham in the Light of Its
Principles (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1999), 353–57.
4. In Essayes in Divinity, Donne cites the Summa theologica at several points and refers to
Aquinas as one of the most acute and ‘‘endeavourous’’ minds to explore the question of time
(Essayes in Divinity, ed. Anthony Raspa [Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001], 20).
Raspa notes in his introduction that the Essayes are ‘‘an attempt by a profoundly philosophical
mind to grasp the meaning of time and eternity and the link between the two’’ (xiii).
5. Jonathan Z. Kamholtz, ‘‘Imminence and Eminence in Donne,’’ Journal of English and
Germanic Philology 81 (1982): 485. Other studies dealing with Donne’s understanding of time
include G. F. Waller, ‘‘John Donne’s Changing Attitudes to Time,’’ Studies in English Literature,
1500–1900 14 (1974): 79–89; Anne Ferry, All in War with Time: Love Poetry of Shakespeare, Donne,
Jonson, Marvell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 65–125; A. B. Chambers,
‘‘La Corona : Philosophic, Sacred, and Poetic Uses of Time,’’ in New Essays on Donne, ed. Gary A.
Stringer (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1977), 140–72; Paul Stan-
wood, ‘‘Time and Liturgy in Donne, Crashaw, and T. S. Eliot,’’ Mosaic: A Journal for the Compara-
tive Study of Literature and Ideas 12, no. 2 (1979): 91–105; Terry G. Sherwood, Fulfilling the Circle:
A Study of John Donne’s Thought (University of Toronto Press, 1984), 10–15, 22–30, 173–90,
196–98; Achsah Guibbory, The Map of Time: Seventeenth-Century English Literature and the Idea of
Pattern in History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 69–104; Anthony Raspa, ‘‘Time,
History, and Typology in John Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr,’’ Renaissance and Reformation, n.s., 11
(1987): 175–83, and the introduction to his edition of Essayes in Divinity; and Helen B. Brooks,
‘‘Donne’s ‘Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward’ and Augustine’s Psychology of Time,’’ in John
Donne’s Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross, ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain
and Frances M. Malpezzi (Conway: University of Central Arkansas Press, 1995), 284–305. See
also the chapter ‘‘Change,’’ in John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1981), 67–97.

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228 MODERN PHILOLOGY
contrasts with the constant movement, fragmentation, and decay that char-
acterize temporal existence. Augustine’s exploration of time in book 11 of
The Confessions sets out the parameters of this definition: ‘‘eternity . . . stands
for ever,’’ while time’s ‘‘fugitive moments . . . never stand still. . . . In eternity
nothing passes, for the whole is present, whereas time cannot be present all
at once.’’6 Dividing time into the past, the present, and the future, Augus-
tine notes that all three are unreal; for ‘‘the past no longer exists and the
future does not exist yet,’’ while ‘‘the present time, if [it] were always present
and never slipped away into the past . . . would not be time at all; it would be
eternity.’’7
Donne echoes Augustine in Meditation 14 of his Devotions when he calls
time an ‘‘Imaginary halfe-nothing’’ and says that ‘‘howsoever it may seeme to
have three stations, past, present, and future, yet the first and last of these are
not (one is not, now, & the other is not yet) And that which you call present,
is not now the same that it was, when you began to call it so in this Line,
(before you found that word, present, or that Monosyllable, now, the present, &
the Now is past).’’ By contrast, Donne continues, ‘‘Eternity’’ is that into which
‘‘Tyme never Entred; Eternity is not an everlasting flux of Tyme . . . ; and Eter-
nity had bin the same, as it is, though time had never beene.’’8 Having thus
distinguished eternity from mere everlastingness, however, Donne ponders
a posttemporal ‘‘Perpetuity’’ that is also distinct from time: ‘‘If we consider,
not Eternity, but Perpetuity,’’ he says, ‘‘not that which had no tyme to beginne
in, but which shall out-live Tyme and be, when Tyme shall bee no more, what A
Minute is the life of the Durablest Creature, compared to that?’’9 Perpetuity
thus described is a mode of duration distinct from both time and eternity.
And that, according to Aquinas, is precisely what aeviternity is; it ‘‘differs
from time, and from eternity,’’ he explains, ‘‘as the mean between them
both.’’ Aeviternity is the state in which the angels exist; they are not change-
able by nature but ‘‘have change annexed to them’’; they possess ‘‘unchange-
able being as regards their nature with changeableness as regards choice;
moreover they have changeableness of intelligence, of affections and of
places in their own degree. Therefore these are measured by aeviternity
which is a mean between eternity and time.’’10 Aquinas does not comment
6. Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding, ed. John E. Rotelle (Hyde
Park, NY: New City, 1997), 11.11.
7. Ibid., 11.14.
8. John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987), 71.
9. Ibid., 71–72. On the varied scholastic usage of the term ‘‘perpetuitas,’’ see Fox, Time
and Eternity, 247–55.
10. The ‘‘Summa theologica’’ of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican
Province, 2nd and rev. ed., 22 vols. (London: Burns, Oates & Washburne, 1920–42), pt. 1,

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definitively on whether aeviternity is also the mode of duration experienced

by disembodied human souls, but he implies that this is the case in question
10, article 6, in which the responses to objection 3 include human souls
among the ‘‘aeviternal things.’’
Aquinas’s explanation of ‘‘annexed’’ change is difficult to grasp; for a
more accessible articulation of that concept and of aeviternity’s relation-
ship to time and eternity, we may turn to the mid-twentieth-century Roman
Catholic writer Frank Sheed, whose Theology and Sanity (1946) was designed
as an introduction to theology for the uninformed layman. Sheed explains,
in scholastic language that John Donne would have recognized, that there
are three ways in which an entity may be related to change: there is ‘‘the
utter changelessness of God; the substantial permanence combined with
occasional accidental change that belongs to spirit; and the liability to sub-
stantial change and the continuous accidental change that goes with mat-
ter.’’11 Sheed elaborates further, drawing heavily on Aquinas:
To each of these three [relations to change] corresponds its own kind of
duration. For the changelessness of God there is Eternity; for the
continuous changefulness of matter, there is Time. Time is the duration of
that which changes, as eternity is the duration of that which changes not.
But what of spirit? Because it knows change at all, even if only accidental
change, it is not in eternity; but because the changes it knows are not
continuous, it is not exactly in time either. The spirit does indeed know a
before and after. If God gives an angel a particular revelation, for instance,
then something in the angelic mind is aware of his state when he did not
have the revelation and his state when he has it. But there is nothing in the
nature of spirit which requires these changes; they happen when they
happen, they do not bring change into his nature itself; and in between,
the spirit rests in the changeless possession of what he has. His ‘‘now’’ is
more closely akin to the abiding now of eternity than to the flowing
now of time. For his duration too there is a word—the word aevum or
aeviternity, the duration of that which in its essence or substance knows no
change: though by its accidents it can know change, and to that extent is in
time too, but a sort of discontinuous time, not the ever-flowing time of
matter.12
The Thomistic categories of duration underlying Sheed’s explanation are
the keys to understanding Donne’s ideas about how human beings may
transcend the limits of temporal existence, whether through grace, through
virtue, or through love.
quest. 10, art. 5. This translation is also available at http://www.newadvent.org/summa/, ed.

Kevin Knight (2008).
11. F. J. Sheed, Theology and Sanity (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1946), 115.
12. Ibid., 115–16.

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For any thinker operating within a scholastic frame of reference, tempo-

ral limits are, at least to some extent, a function of bodily existence. As
Sheed explains:
Aeviternity is the proper sphere of every created spirit, and therefore of
the human soul. But the soul’s special relation to the matter of the human
body gives it a necessary and proper relation to continuous time (which is
the body’s duration) which other spirits are not troubled by. At death, this
distracting relation to matter’s time ceases to affect the soul, so that it can
experience its proper aeviternity. But during this life, time presses upon
the soul, if only by way of the heartbeats that never cease. The soul can
become too much immersed in matter, in the limitations of time and
space and change. Love of change is a disease that the soul contracts from
the body.13
When Donne stresses in the Devotions that the perpetuity of the next life
‘‘shall out-live Tyme and be, when Tyme shall bee no more,’’ he is—like
Sheed—insisting on a sharp distinction between the time in which human
beings exist as mortal bodily creatures and the aeviternity in which their
immortal souls will exist after death.
But Donne was deeply invested in what Sheed refers to as ‘‘the soul’s spe-
cial relation to the matter of the human body’’; he passionately affirms,
throughout his works, that the event scheduled for the end of time is the
general resurrection and that the body thus has an immortality of its own.
And as Donne was well aware, the question of what state the reunited body
and soul will inhabit after the resurrection complicates any attempt to dis-
tinguish sharply between time and aeviternity.14 He thus often treats atem-
poral duration as something that is not utterly distinct from time but
related to it in the same way that the resurrected body is related to the mor-
tal body: as a perfected, permanent, and glorified version of the familiar
thing.
Donne’s sense of the relation between time and aeviternity is revealed
in a sermon passage on angels. They are ‘‘Creatures . . . not a minute elder
now, then when they were first made, if they were made before all measure
of time began; nor, if they were made in the beginning of Time, and be
13. Ibid., 116.

14. Fox explains that most medieval thinkers ‘‘tended to identify at least three kinds of par-
ticulars as falling in the ‘in-between’ category of aeviternal existence: angels, heavenly bodies
(such as stars and planets), and resurrected bodies.’’ He notes, ‘‘In addition, . . . thirteenth-
century thinkers generally wanted to identify the human soul as aeviternal.’’ However, ‘‘souls
were also recognized as forming body-soul composites with the thoroughly temporal matter
that constituted human bodies. This factor clearly worried some thirteenth-century thinkers’’
(Fox, Time and Eternity, 260–61). See also Christina Van Dyke, ‘‘Human Identity, Immanent
Causal Relations, and the Principle of Non-repeatability: Thomas Aquinas on the Bodily Res-
urrection,’’ Religious Studies 43 (2007): 373–94.

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now six thousand yeares old, have they one wrinckle of Age in their face,
or one sobbe of wearinesse in their lungs. . . . They are super-elementary
meteors, they hang between the nature of God, and the nature of man,
and are of middle Condition.’’15 Emulating Aquinas, Donne leaves open
the question of whether angels were created at the same time as the physi-
cal universe or before it was made and therefore outside of time (which orig-
inates with the heavenly bodies that measure out the temporal units of
day and night). They may be ageless inhabitants of the aevum or the eldest
of temporal beings; they may exist within time or outside it. But Donne
clearly believes the distinction moot, for, as he says in the sentence just pre-
ceding the passage on their age, angels are paradoxically both bodiless (as
would befit aeviternal beings) and possessed of corporeal superpowers:
they ‘‘have not so much of a Body as flesh is, as froth is, as a vapor is, as a sigh
is, and yet with a touch they shall molder a rocke into lesse Atomes, then
the sand that it stands upon.’’ Such beings are, Donne concludes, ‘‘ænig-
mata Divina, the Riddles of Heaven, and the perplexities of speculation.
But this is but till the Resurrection; Then we shall be like them, and know
them by that assimilation’’ (8:106).16
Donne’s association of the resurrected human body with the paradoxi-
cal riddle of the angelic body is instructive. Ramie Targoff, exploring
Donne’s nearly obsessive insistence on the human creature as a composite
of soul and body, observes that ‘‘only the meeting of the immortal soul and
the invulnerable body satisfies [Donne’s] deepest aspiration for the after-
life.’’17 I would stress, in turn, that the poet’s strong desire to affirm the en-
during life of the apparently time-bound flesh has implications for his con-
struction of time and aeviternity; to paraphrase Targoff, only the meeting
15. The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1953–62), 8:106. Subsequent quotations from The Sermons
are taken from this edition and cited parenthetically by volume and page number.
16. See the discussion of this sermon passage in Carey, John Donne, 261–75. See also Raspa’s
remarks about a passage from Essayes in Divinity in which Donne surveys ‘‘the existing explana-
tions of the age of the world. . . . He concludes that even if asking the question how old the
world is, is a valid one, an absolutely correct answer is not necessary because it is not the age of
the world but the eternity that informs it that counts. Time exists so that humanity may know
eternity, not that it may know when the world emanated out of eternity and how old it is’’
(introduction to Donne, Essayes in Divinity, xxxiv). Nevertheless, as Raspa goes on to observe,
the Essayes, like many other humanist exegetical works on Genesis and Exodus in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, were not merely expressions of faith but rational arguments allow-
ing ‘‘thinkers to come to terms with their existential, historical and sociological situation’’
(xxxix) in the midst of the challenges posed to traditional thought by New World exploration
and the fragmentation of Christendom.
17. Ramie Targoff, ‘‘Traducing the Soule: Donne’s Second Anniversarie,’’ PMLA 121 (2006):
1506–7. See also Carey, who stresses Donne’s nearly obsessive fascination with the resurrection
of the body, his ‘‘need for bodily existence in heaven,’’ and his reluctance ‘‘to imagine his soul
existing apart from his body’’ ( John Donne, 219–23).

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of the eternal and the temporal in a dynamic aeviternity satisfies Donne’s

durational needs. He looks to affirm the angel-like, aeviternal existence of
the redeemed human body/soul not as strictly atemporal but as an experi-
ence of time transfigured.
II. KEEPING TIME IN THE AEVUM

Donne paints a particularly vivid portrait of transfigured time in the ser-
mon he preached to commemorate Magdalen Herbert Danvers shortly
after her death; the text was 2 Peter 3:13: ‘‘Neverthelesse, we, according to
his promises, looke for new heavens, and new earth, wherein dwelleth
righteousnesse.’’18 Affirming the views of Augustine and Jerome, Donne
asserts that this verse promises the transformation of the world we know,
rather than the creation of something altogether different from it: ‘‘these
Heavens, and this Earth shall be so purified, so refin’d by the last fires of con-
flagration, as that all corruptible qualities shall bee burnt out of them, but
they, in their substance, remaine still. . . . The world shall bee made better,
but it shall not bee made nothing’’ (8:81). With this notion of transformed
matter in mind, Donne proceeds to explain that the new creation will
include
Heavens, where the Moone is more glorious than our Sunne, and the Sunne
as glorious as Hee that made it; For it is he himselfe, the Sonne of God, the
Sunne of glorie. A New Earth, where all their waters are milke, and all their
milke, honey, where all their grasse is corne, and all their corne, Manna; where
all their glebe, all their clods of earth are gold, and all their gold of
innumerable carats ; Where all their minutes are ages, and all their ages,
Eternity; Where every thing, is every minute, in the highest exaltation, as
good as it can be, and yet super-exalted, and infinitely multiplied, by every
minutes addition; every minute, infinitely better, then ever it was before.
(8:82)
This passage introduces the transfiguration of time as the ultimate and
consummate transformation in a catalog of transformations beginning
with the apotheoses of those heavenly bodies that were, according to Gene-
sis, created to demarcate ‘‘seasons, and . . . days, and years’’ (Gen. 1:14
[KJV]). The deified sun/son and exalted moon (which Donne derives
from Isa. 30:26) look down upon a landscape in which every material sub-
stance is enhanced either by becoming richer and more nourishing (water
becomes milk; grass becomes corn) or sweeter (milk becomes honey; corn
becomes manna) or more costly (earth becomes gold; gold is infinitely
18. Donne, Sermons, 8:63. This wording slightly modifies the King James translation, which
refers to God’s ‘‘promise’’ (singular) and includes the indefinite article ‘‘a’’ before ‘‘new
earth.’’

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purified). And in this refined creation, time will be transmuted into aeviter-
nity without losing its substance or essence. Donne’s choice of terms con-
veys his sense of the continuity between the two: specifically, the shift of
‘‘minutes’’ into ‘‘ages’’ does not signify a lengthening process but a transfor-
mation of kronos into aevum, of time as we know it into aeviternity as the
angels know it.19 Likewise, the ‘‘ages’’ of aeviternity will metamorphose into
‘‘Eternity’’ itself; time, aeviternity, and eternity are thus not utterly separate
and distinct but linked by a kind of evolutionary continuum. And lest his
auditory feel that ‘‘minutes’’ and the time they measure are rendered obso-
lete in this scheme, Donne concludes by describing those ‘‘minutes’’ turned
‘‘ages’’ in terms that stress their status as the measure of both an unchang-
ing, static superlativity associated with eternity (‘‘every thing, is every min-
ute, in the highest exaltation, as good as it can be’’) and a dynamic positive
flux in which things are ‘‘super-exalted, and infinitely multiplied, by every
minutes addition.’’
What kind of clock could measure such minutes? In a sermon preached
about a year before the sermon for Magdalen Herbert Danvers, Donne says
that in God’s heavenly house, ‘‘there was never heard quarter clock to
strike, never seen minute glasse to turne’’ (7:139). Such devices are not
needed partly because the endless ‘‘mansions’’ or resting places of heaven
are an aeviternal day that is undivided into lesser units and is its own best
measure.20 But they are also rendered superfluous because the living time-
pieces of heaven are those of the sort Donne imagines when, searching for
ways to console Elizabeth Drury’s parents for the loss of their child, he asks,
But must we say shee’s dead? May’t not be said
That as a sundred Clocke is peece-meale laid,
19. See the OED etymology for the noun ‘‘age,’’ which derives from the Latin aevum. All
references to the OED are from the online version, http://www.oed.com.
20. The sermon explicates John 14:2, in which Jesus asserts that there are ‘‘many mansions’’
in his father’s house. Explaining that Christ refers not just to the number of places in heaven
but also to its duration, Donne notes that ‘‘mansions’’ ‘‘signifies a Remaining, and denotes the
perpetuity, the everlastingnesse of that state’’ (7:138). The OED confirms that the word ‘‘man-
sion’’ derives from the Anglo-Norman ‘‘mansion,’’ meaning ‘‘dwelling, abode, action of abid-
ing, staying,’’ and that it is related to the English verb ‘‘remain.’’ Taking into consideration the
classical Latin root mansiōn–, mansiō, which refers to ‘‘the fact of remaining or staying, a dwell-
ing or place where one stays, especially a stopping place on a journey, also a day’s journey’’
(OED), Donne further notes that Jesus promises ‘‘A state but of one Day, because no Night
shall over-take, or determine it, but such a Day, as is not of a thousand yeares . . . but of a thou-
sand millions of millions of generations.’’ And such a day is not to be divided into smaller units
of time such as those measured by the ‘‘quarter clock’’ and ‘‘minute glasse’’: ‘‘No time lesse
then it selfe would serve to expresse this time, which is intended in this word Mansions’’ (7:138–
39). Donne thus collapses distinctions between time and eternity, between place and time, and
between time’s essence and its measurement or expression by timepieces; the redeemed will
dwell within ‘‘mansions’’ that both are and tell heavenly duration.

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Not to be lost, but by the makers hand

Repolish’d, without error then to stand,
Or as the Affrique Niger streame enwombs
It selfe into the earth, and after comes,
(Hauing first made a naturall bridge, to passe
For many leagues,) farre greater then it was,
May’t not be said, that her graue shall restore
Her, greater, purer, firmer, then before?
Heauen may say this, and ioy in’t.
(‘‘Funerall Elegie,’’ 37–47)
Death as described here is not the removal of the soul from the body;
rather, it is figured through two conceits that underscore the continuity
between Elizabeth’s earthly existence as an embodied soul and her ulti-
mate resurrected existence as such.
In the clock analogy, death is the disassembling of a complex apparatus,
the ethical and spiritual functions of which cannot be neatly distinguished
from physical, mechanical functions. Thus, when the ‘‘Repolish’d’’ human
clock is restored in heaven, both the body and the soul will be a part of it,
and though spiritual bodies can be conceptualized as atemporal, Donne’s
analogy in these lines from ‘‘A Funerall Elegie’’ specifically militates against
thinking of them in that way. On the contrary, by comparing the restored
selfhood of the resurrected Elizabeth to a perfectly accurate clock, and thus
conjuring the image of a clock in heaven, he implies that there must be
celestial time of some sort for her to tell. He reinforces that implication by
providing, as an alternative and supplement to the clock simile, a conceit
comparing the deceased girl to that other, more natural symbol of time: a
flowing river. Drawing, probably, on what he had read about the river Niger
in John Porie’s 1600 translation of Leo Africanus’s Geographical Historie of
Africa,21 Donne imagines death creating ‘‘a naturall bridge’’ beneath which
flows an intact self that will eventually emerge—like the new heavens and
new earth of the sermon on Magdalen Herbert Danvers—as a ‘‘greater,
purer, firmer’’ version of itself, born again after having ‘‘enwomb[ed] / It
selfe into the earth’’ (‘‘Funerall Elegie,’’ 43, 46, 41–42). Like the image of
the resurrected Elizabeth as a fully refurbished timepiece, Donne’s conceit
comparing the dead girl to a born-again African river anticipates heavenly
existence, the life that ‘‘after comes’’ (‘‘Funerall Elegie,’’ 42), as a state of
being in which the ideas of before and after still have meaning.
Aquinas himself did not rule out the notion of heavenly time, as is clear
from the Angelic Doctor’s inconclusive discussion of how glorified bodies
21. See Herbert J. C. Grierson, ed., The Poems of John Donne, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon,
1963), 2:194–95.

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move (time being the measure of bodily movement, as Augustine had

noted long before).22 And in the monistic Milton’s Paradise Lost, both the
narrator and the angel Raphael will stress the ‘‘Grateful vicissitude’’ of light
and dark that informs the angelic experience of duration in heaven.23
Donne, less confidently monistic than Milton would be, represents the con-
cept of heavenly time as far beyond mortals’ capacity to comprehend. In
‘‘A Funerall Elegie,’’ the speaker doubts that the joy afforded by heavenly
watch repair is available to those left behind in the mortal realm: ‘‘but can
wee / Who liue, and lacke her, here this vantage see?’’ he asks, ‘‘What is’t to
vs, alas, if there haue beene / An Angell made a Throne, or Cherubin? /
We lose by’t’’ (47–51). But even these lines reinforce the notion that the
aeviternity of angels and redeemed human beings is a realm of happy
events unfolding in celestial time rather than a state of perfect stasis. In
‘‘Satyre II,’’ ‘‘time (which rots all, and makes botches poxe, / And plodding
on, must make a calfe an oxe)’’ turns Coscus the poet manqué into some-
thing even worse: it ‘‘Hath made [him] a Lawyer’’ (41–43). What else but
the positive, celestial version of such a process could make ‘‘a Throne, or
Cherubin’’ of a mere ‘‘Angell’’?
A clock capable of measuring such aeviternal change is, according to ‘‘A
Funerall Elegie,’’ made to ‘‘stand’’ without error (40), not to run that way;
for it must operate within an aeviternal now that, even as it accommodates
heavenly events, resembles the motionlessness of eternity. In Donne’s
Anniversaries, becoming such a clock is the ultimate consolation for the mis-
eries of a mortal existence in which ‘‘Alas, we scarse liue long enough to
trie / Whether a new made clocke runne right, or lie’’ (First Anniversarie,
129–30). This brilliant couplet evokes the brevity of human life in terms
that personify the clock, making it capable of truthful or mendacious
behavior. Given the unreliability of early seventeenth-century clocks, the
lines gesture eloquently not only toward the shortness of human life
(which makes the speed implicit in ‘‘runne’’ a threat even when the run-
ning is ‘‘right’’) but also toward the frequency with which human beings,
like the imperfect chronometers they manufacture, are prone to falsehood
and failure. In The Second Anniverarie, the narrator advises readers to cease
trying to monitor either the flow of time or the truthfulness of human
beings, and the terms in which he proffers this advice again—as in The First
Anniversarie couplet on life’s brevity—elide the distinction between chro-
nometry and ethical assessment: ‘‘Be not concern’d: study not why, nor
22. Aquinas, Summa theologica, suppl. to pt. 3, quest. 84; Augustine, Confessions 11.23. The
supplement to part 3 of Aquinas’s Summa theologica was completed after his death on the basis
of notes ‘‘gathered from St. Thomas’s commentary on the Fourth Book of the Sentences of
Peter Lombard’’ (Kevin Knight, editor’s note, http://www.newadvent.org/summa/5.htm).
23. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1971), 6.1–15,
5.579–83, 627–29.

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whan; / Do not so much as not beleeue a man. / For though to erre, be

worst, to try truths forth, / Is far more busines, then this world is worth’’ (Sec-
ond Anniversarie, 51–54). There is no loss, these lines assert, in missing the
chance to ‘‘try’’ the truthfulness of men or of clocks, for spiritual benefit
inheres neither in the temporal exactitude of knowing ‘‘whan’’ something
occurs nor in the ethical certainty of knowing whether a ‘‘man,’’ who rhymes
with and lives within that ‘‘whan,’’ is telling the truth. But by ‘‘Forget[ting]
this rotten world’’ and making one’s ‘‘owne times as an old story’’ (49–50)—
that is, by treating present as past and ignoring temporal chronology as we
know it—human beings can enter into a mode of existence in which both
they and time are transformed, a state in which ‘‘accidentall things,’’ such
as the duration of an event, ‘‘are permanent’’ and in which ‘‘ioy doth euery
day admit / Degrees of grouth, but none of loosing it’’ (488, 495–96).24 But
Donne does all this, one must note, in a poem marking an anniversary of
death, a poem that arises from the human need to observe, with solemn cel-
ebrations, the passing of years. How appropriate, then, that such a poem
should evoke a mode of existence in which humans can spend their time
and escape it, too.
III. IN SEARCH OF AEVITERNAL LOVE

Many of the speakers of Donne’s ‘‘Songs and Sonets’’ claim that love is the
key to achieving such unassailable yet dynamic permanence even in this
life. The speaker of ‘‘The good-morrow’’ is concerned more with space—
with love’s power to transform ‘‘one little roome’’ into ‘‘an every where’’
(11)—than he is with time, but his evocation of love also turns upon a pow-
erful contrast between the ‘‘dreame’’ that is the past and the ‘‘now’’ in
which the lovers bid ‘‘good morrow to our waking soules’’ (7, 8). The poem
subtly suggests the lovers’ unique independence from others’ conceptions
of both space and time when the speaker uses an oddly wrenched present
perfect to dismiss the exploration of the world outside the lovers’ ‘‘one
world’’: ‘‘Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, / Let Maps to others,
worlds on worlds have showne,’’ he says using the simple present tense only
when he moves to verbs that apply to himself and his beloved: the two of
them ‘‘possesse one world’’; each of them ‘‘hath one, and is one’’ (12–13, 14,
emphasis added). As Wilbur Sanders observes, however, ‘‘the poem moves
slowly (and a trifle sadly) away from that supreme, and supremely natural,
moment’’; it ends by ‘‘turning over the conditions of an impossible perma-
24. Targoff briefly notes ‘‘that what differentiates heavenly joys from earthly joys’’ in The Sec-
ond Anniversarie, lines 487–90, ‘‘is their duration’’ (‘‘Traducing,’’ 1506). On the temporal dura-
tion of things as accidental rather than essential, see Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s ‘‘Phys-
ics,’’ trans. Richard J. Blackwell, Richard J. Spath, and W. Edmund Thirlkel (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1963), 272.

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nency (two hemispheres with neither a West nor a North)’’ and relying
instead upon a ‘‘conditional construction—conditional upon impossible
stabilities’’:25 ‘‘What ever dyes, was not mixt equally; / If our two loves be
one, or, thou and I / Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die’’
(‘‘Good-morrow,’’ 19–21). Sanders wonders whether this irresolute conclu-
sion arises when the poet ‘‘loses the burning awareness of the woman’s pres-
ence which makes the first two [stanzas] so potent’’ ( JDP, 67–68); he hovers
on the brink of calling it a deliberate artistic failure, generated when
Donne, ‘‘forced into an unreal choice between art and integrity, . . . opted
for integrity’’ (67). But in the end, Sanders demurs: ‘‘Or perhaps I am
wrong, and there was no attempt at affirmation—only the inevitable and
eloquent sadness at the passing of a supreme moment’’ (68).
Sanders goes on to describe ‘‘The good-morrow’’ ‘‘as part of a triptych,
with ‘The Sunne Rising’ at the centre and ‘The Anniversarie’ flanking it,’’
and to discuss how these poems present a ‘‘lover’s sensation of immunity
from time’’ ( JDP, 68), yet show ‘‘Donne’s extreme sensitivity to the solipsis-
tic, egocentric blasphemy against the common reality, which lovers are prone
to fall into’’ (70). He stresses in particular the ways in which ‘‘The Sunne Ris-
ing’’ undercuts its own claims to love’s pure atemporality. Though the
speaker of that poem claims that ‘‘Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor
clyme, / Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time’’ (9–10),
‘‘love is also (demonstrably) revelling in this very particular moment after
sunrise and enhancing its blissful sense of immunity by forming mental
images of ‘time’’’ ( JDP, 72). Indeed, even the famous couplet about the
‘‘rags of time’’ is ambiguous, since one might well say that not knowing
time’s rags—its fragmented bits or its ragged clothing—does not necessar-
ily exclude the knowledge of time itself in some less tawdry form.26
The speaker of ‘‘The Anniversarie,’’ for his part, moves almost seamlessly
from claiming that his love is exempt from time’s effects to celebrating its
temporally circumscribed joys as preferable to the blisses of heaven. He
begins by denying that his love is part of the temporal realm, observing that
everything in the world, including ‘‘The Sun it selfe, which makes times, as
they passe, / Is elder by a yeare, now, then it was’’ when he and his beloved
met (3–4), but while
All other things, to their destruction draw,
Only our love hath no decay;
25. Wilbur Sanders, John Donne’s Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1971), 67, hereafter
cited parenthetically as JDP. I am indebted to Richard Strier for calling my attention to the
connections between my argument and Sanders’s analysis of temporal issues in Donne’s love
lyrics.
26. For more on the temporal implications of ‘‘The Sunne Rising,’’ see Theresa M. DiPas-
quale, ‘‘Donne’s Naked Time,’’ John Donne Journal 29 (2010): 33–44.

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This, no to morrow hath, nor yesterday.

Running it never runs from us away,
But truly keepes his first, last, everlasting day.
(6–10)27
These lines operate like a riddle that asks, ‘‘What runs constantly but never
runs away?’’ The answer? ‘‘A good watch!’’ Donne’s speaker thus describes
true love in terms that are simultaneously chronometric and atemporal.
Love is specifically not identified here, as Anne Ferry claims that it is, with
the sun ‘‘which, though ‘Running’ unceasingly, ‘never runs’ from its own
source of light, and therefore ‘keepes’ a perpetual ‘day.’’’28 For the sun is
one of the many human and natural things that the speaker lists as aging;
it, along with ‘‘All’’ the others, ‘‘Is elder by a yeare’’ after its movement
‘‘makes’’ that span of time pass. Making times pass is the sun’s job; it is thus
in the business of generating or begetting an endless succession of moving
units of time—which might be said to be an activity exactly opposed to
‘‘keep[ing]’’ the aeviternal present of a ‘‘first, last, everlasting day.’’29 For to
‘‘keepe’’ a day, it should be noted, is not to generate it but ‘‘To preserve [it]
in being’’ and ‘‘To observe [it] with due formality . . . ; to celebrate, solem-
nize’’ it, just as the speaker of the Anniversaries solemnizes the day of Eliza-
beth Drury’s passing from this life to the next and as the speaker of ‘‘The
Anniversarie’’ celebrates the day when he and his beloved first met.30 The
speaker of the love poem thus defines the sun as a time maker, but love as a
timekeeper, which is to say an ‘‘instrument for registering the passage of
time; a timepiece.’’31 And his and his beloved’s love is, he claims, a perfect
timekeeper, immune to time’s effects, one that runs flawlessly and thus
keeps perfect time while dwelling itself in an aeviternal ‘‘now’’ that never
succumbs to the ravages of time’s forward movement.
In the stanzas that follow, the speaker goes on to admit—in language
that recalls the ‘‘till death us departe’’ of the wedding liturgy—that death
will be a ‘‘divorce’’ that will part their bodies, which will lie separately in
‘‘Two graves’’ (12, 11).32 And ‘‘When bodies,’’ he explains, go ‘‘to their
graves, soules from their graves’’—the bodies—‘‘remove’’ (20). But the joys
27. See Sanders’s remarks on ‘‘The Anniversarie’’: ‘‘The lovers are still resisting time, but
not with that resonance of scorn (‘houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time’). Rather
with a religious solemnity’’ ( JDP, 75).
28. Ferry, All in War with Time, 102.
29. Compare the sacred paradoxes of ‘‘Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward,’’ in which
Christ is ‘‘a Sunne’’ who, ‘‘by rising’’ on the cross, ‘‘set[s], / And by that setting endlesse day
beget[s]’’ (11–12).
30. OED, s.v. ‘‘keep, v.,’’ defs. 23, 12.
31. OED, s.v. ‘‘timekeeper, n.,’’ def. 1a.
32. Church of England, The Book of Common Prayer (London, 1559), http://justus.anglican
.org/resources/bcp/1559/BCP_1559.htm.

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that the lovers’ disembodied souls will experience in heaven hold little
appeal for the speaker, since they will there be ‘‘throughly blest, / But . . .
no more, then all the rest’’ of the noncorporeal heavenly entities in whom
‘‘nothing dwells but love’’ (21–22, 17). The speaker’s explicit reason for dis-
missing this heaven is that it is noncorporeal and thus spectacularly un-
exclusive, a realm of souls that are all essentially alike in that they are all
inhabited by love rather than themselves inhabiting discrete, distinguish-
able bodies.33 Here we see in play what Targoff has so accurately identified:
Donne’s strong need to affirm a heaven that can accommodate resur-
rected bodies as the only truly acceptable hereafter. But as the ending of
‘‘The Anniversarie’’ implies, the thing most poignantly absent from such a
noncorporeal heaven is time itself, the experience of life as a durational
event in which love triumphs by adding ‘‘Yeares and yeares unto yeares’’
(29) as a gracefully aging couple chalks up another year of mortal life with
each passing anniversary. As Sanders explains, ‘‘The temptation to which
all celebratory love poetry is prone, is to erect . . . a doctrine of transcen-
dence—which cuts the love off from those very warm and fleshly realities
upon which it depends for its validation.’’ ‘‘The Anniversarie’’ avoids this
temptation, he argues, because Donne carefully preserves the ‘‘structural
paradox’’ at the heart of his poem: the fact that ‘‘the ‘everlasting day’ of
love began exactly one year ago’’ ( JDP, 78).34 The speaker of ‘‘The Anniver-
sarie’’ ends by affirming the delimited mortal time frame of the relation-
ship with a celebratory salute to ‘‘this’’ year as ‘‘the second of’’ the couple’s
earthly ‘‘raigne’’ (30). For though that reign will not last forever, it is better
than a version of heavenly eternity in which the temporal concept of ‘‘then’’
is reduced to the ‘‘throughly’’ completed, over-and-done-with past participle
‘‘blest,’’ which rhymes with ‘‘all the rest’’ (21–22), a static remainder in
which there is no motion or growth.
The speaker of ‘‘Loves growth’’ is more certain that love is both tempo-
rally dynamic and aeviternally enduring; he does not define the alternative
to time as the ‘‘throughly’’ pallid heaven of ‘‘The Anniversarie’’ but instead
envisions love’s capacity to achieve a mode of being like the heaven of The
33. On the ‘‘individuating properties of matter’’ as Aquinas and Donne understood them,
see Edward W. Tayler, Donne’s Idea of a Woman: Structure and Meaning in ‘‘The Anniversaries’’
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 30, 153–54 n. 27.
34. On Donne’s attraction both to temporality and to the transcendence of time, see also
Waller, ‘‘John Donne’s Changing Attitudes,’’ 82; and Kamholtz, ‘‘Imminence and Eminence,’’
483. Raspa’s introduction to the Essayes in Divinity makes clear that Donne grapples with these
issues in his humanist prose as well: ‘‘The exegetical commentary of the first of the two parts of
Essayes dealing with Genesis seeks to explain the emanation of time out of the infinite, against
the backdrop of a universe whose received concept had just been called into question. The
exegesis of Exodus that follows in the second part of the work attempts to elucidate how the
human consciousness sojourns through time, today as well as yesterday, and succeeds in under-
standing its destiny during the passage of its days, years, and decades’’ (xiii).

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Second Anniversarie, in which ‘‘ioy doth euery day admit / Degrees of

grouth, but none of loosing it’’ (495–96). In order to characterize love as
an aeviternal force that is as organically liquid as time, yet free from the
negative implications of temporal flux, the speaker of ‘‘Loves growth’’
begins by establishing himself as a lover who has just discovered his own
love’s temporal character and is disturbed by it: he worries about the fact
that his love has grown greater, since this ‘‘vicissitude’’ (4) implies that it is
not ‘‘so pure / As [he] had thought it was,’’ so free from fluctuations of
‘‘season’’ (1–2, 4). Attempting to accommodate the disturbing change that
love’s growth implies, the speaker shifts to considering that growth as a pro-
cess of revelation rather than of enlargement; as time passes, love manifests
anew aspects of itself that were already there in potentia rather than mutat-
ing into something that it was not before. But that notion does not suffi-
ciently capture the sense of quantitative increase that he feels; he thus turns
to another series of images: ever widening but ‘‘concentrique’’ circles ema-
nating from a central point in ‘‘water stir’d’’ (24, 21); successive springs that
‘‘adde to love new heate’’ each year (25), and finally, by way of analogy with
that ‘‘new heate,’’ a provocative image of taxes that go up and never come
back down. The point of all these images is to stress that his love is indeed
able to change and expand but that it does so in a manner characteristic of
the aeviternity Donne will envision in the sermon on the new heavens and
new earth ‘‘Where every thing, is every minute, in the highest exaltation, as
good as it can be, and yet super-exalted, and infinitely multiplied, by every
minutes addition’’ (8:82). ‘‘No winter shall abate the springs encrease,’’ the
speaker of ‘‘Loves growth’’ concludes (28). Love here is thus not a timeless,
static phenomenon but a seasonal entity, and yet (at the same time) its sea-
son of growth is permanent and will never decline into winter. With this
definition of love’s durational properties in mind, then, I would modify
Anne Ferry’s description of Donne’s love lyrics as asserting an ideal that
‘‘exists in time, not in the ‘eternall lines’ of verse.’’35 It is more accurate to
say that Donne’s erotic ideal exists neither in time as it is usually under-
stood—as a fragmented, ever-mutating continuum—nor as a poetically
evoked eternity but in an aeviternal present that love defines for itself
within time’s flux.
35. Ferry, All in War with Time, 76. Ferry makes this remark about the speaker of ‘‘The good-
morrow’’ specifically; her overarching thesis is that Donne’s imagination was ‘‘hostile’’ toward
‘‘conventional eternizing poetry’’ and that his poetry idealized the ‘‘mutable experience of
mortal lovers’’ (125). The phrase ‘‘eternall lines’’ is from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18. See also
Sanders’s remarks on ‘‘Loves growth’’: ‘‘The living, growing reality is so much more satisfying
than the static perfections of infinity which a barren love-idealism could propose. . . . The
acceptance of the actual is founded upon a faith in the endlessness of the natural—a faith in
love’s growth’’ ( JDP, 32).

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IV. THE ART OF ATEMPORAL DIALING

Perhaps Donne’s most complex exploration of how time and aeviternity
meet in the experience of eros is ‘‘Lecture upon the Shadow.’’ The poem
works by combining the functions of chronometer and aeviternometer. It is
chronometric in that an implicit analogy links the bodies of the two lovers,
the gnomon of a human sundial, and the two stanzas of the poem, which—
like a pair of east- and west-facing vertical sundials—trace the morning and
afternoon hours of a particular day in the life of those lovers. But the poem is
no ordinary sundial, for it also functions atemporally to display upon its two-
dimensional face the ‘‘brave clearnesse’’ of a faithful love’s aeviternal noon.
In the opening lines of ‘‘Lecture upon the Shadow,’’ the speaker asks his
beloved to ‘‘Stand still’’ so that he can ‘‘read to’’ her ‘‘A Lecture . . . in loves
philosophy’’ (1, 2). As John E. Parish points out, ‘‘philosophy’’ here ‘‘means
physical science, just as it does in Hamlet’s declaration that ‘There are more
things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philoso-
phy.’’’36 More specifically, given the shadow imagery that follows, it means
gnomonics, which was referred to in the seventeenth century as the art of
dialing.37 Assigning his and his beloved’s bodies the role of a gnomon, the
projection on the face of a sundial, the speaker observes that by reading
their own shadows, they can tell what time of day it is. Similarly, he says, one
can tell what time of love it is in a relationship by assessing the shadows of
secrecy and disguise that a couple casts to hide their love from prying eyes:
Stand still, and I will read to thee,
A Lecture, Love, in loves philosophy.
These three houres that we have spent,
Walking here, Two shadowes went
Along with us, which we our selves produc’d;
But, now the Sunne is just above our head,
We doe those shadowes tread;
And to brave clearnesse all things are reduc’d.
So whilst our infant loves did grow,
Disguises did, and shadowes, flow,
From us, and our care; but, now ’tis not so.
That love hath not attain’d the high’st degree,

Which is still diligent lest others see.
(1–13)
36. John E. Parish, ‘‘‘Sun, Stand Still!’ Secular Parody of Sacred Wonders,’’ English Miscel-
lany 25 (1976): 207; see OED, s.v. ‘‘philosophy, n.,’’ def. 5a.
37. See, e.g., Thomas Fale, Horologiographia. The Art of Dialling: teaching an easie and perfect
way to make all kinds of Dials (London, 1593); and John Blagrave, The art of dyalling in two parts
(London, 1609).

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Having drawn an analogy between love and sunlight, and between

morning shadows and the various ‘‘Disguises’’ the couple has used to keep
the early stages of their love hidden from others, the speaker turns in the
poem’s second stanza to consider afternoon shadows, which he compares
to the falsehoods the lovers will use to deceive each other if their love does
not remain constant:
Except our loves at this noone stay,
We shall new shadowes make the other way.
As the first were made to blinde
Others; these which come behinde
Will worke upon our selves, and blind our eyes.
If our loves faint, and westwardly decline;
To me thou, falsly, thine,
And I to thee mine actions shall disguise.
The morning shadowes weare away,
But these grow longer all the day,
But oh, loves day is short, if love decay.
Love is a growing, or a full constant light;

And his first minute, after noone, is night.
(14–26)
Given the inevitability of sunlight’s natural progression from noon to
afternoon, many readers have felt that the analogy at the heart of the ‘‘Lec-
ture’’ undercuts the speaker’s shadowless ideal and have concluded that
the poem must be read as an admission of love’s mutability. John Carey,
for example, argues that the speaker’s warning is futile: ‘‘How [can the
beloved woman] make the sun stand still, or immobilize shadows? By cast-
ing his poem in these materials, Donne puts love’s collapse beyond ques-
tion. Love has as much chance of lasting as twelve o’clock. With the jealous
scruples of the second stanza, ‘brave clearnesse’ has already vanished. The
poem dissolves itself.’’38 But does the speaker’s frank expression of his con-
38. Carey, John Donne, 181. Others critics who read the poem as implying the inevitable
decay of love include Thomas Docherty, John Donne, Undone (London: Methuen, 1986), 97–
104; and Jeff Westover, ‘‘Suns and Lovers: Instability in Donne’s ‘A Lecture upon the
Shadow,’’’ John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne 17 (1998): 61–73. See also Frederick
Kiley, ‘‘A Larger Reading of Donne’s ‘A Lecture upon the Shadow,’’’ CEA Critic: An Official Jour-
nal of the College English Association 30, no. 7 (1968): 16–17; Louis L. Martz, The Wit of Love:
Donne, Carew, Crashaw, Marvell (University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 52–54; and Barbara
Everett, ‘‘Donne: A London Poet,’’ Proceedings of the British Academy 58 (1972): 245–73. Sanders
observes that the ‘‘analogical structure’’ of the poem’s argument ‘‘serves mainly as a prelude to
the breakdown of the analogy’’ and notes that ‘‘the breakdown dramatises the frightening dis-
continuity between natural expectation and the real conditions of love,’’ but he stresses none-
theless that ‘‘the persisting will-to-analogy reveals Donne’s determination to keep cool in the
crisis’’ ( JDP, 14).

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cerns necessarily annihilate ‘‘brave clearnesse’’? One might argue that it is

precisely such honesty that keeps love alive over the years. And as Jonathan Z.
Kamholtz argues, the poem’s sunlight and shadow imagery may be read as
a healthy acknowledgment of love’s mortal limitations: ‘‘If one must recon-
cile oneself to love’s decay, one may also admit the entrance of liveliness
into love—love will be growing, organic, alive.’’39 Nor does the speaker of
‘‘Lecture upon the Shadow’’ seem to yearn for a static eternity utterly free
from change and motion; the ‘‘full constant light’’ of enduring love as he
imagines it is still the light of ‘‘this noone,’’ this measurable moment in
time.
It is thus too simple to say that the ‘‘Lecture’’ dismisses eternity in favor
of time or vice versa. As ‘‘A Funerall Elegie’’ demonstrates, Donne is capa-
ble of imagining that there are clocks in heaven. He thinks of the saints’
aeviternal existence in paradise as at once radically different from their
experience of life in the time-bound flesh and inextricably linked to that
experience by the temporal implications of bodily resurrection. ‘‘Lecture
upon the Shadow’’ presents the durational mode of mature and faithful
love as similarly paradoxical in its aeviternal middle ground between time
and eternity.40 It does so through the deployment of gnomonic form.
In a chapter of her numerological study of the Devotions, Kate Frost
briefly discusses Donne’s familiarity with ‘‘the tradition of numerical com-
position’’ and his use of ‘‘number structures’’ in various poems. Within this
context, she casts a glance at ‘‘Lecture upon the Shadow,’’ noting the
poem’s ‘‘strong suggestion of the demarcations of a sundial.’’ Frost does
not elaborate, except to note that the ‘‘perception of such structures’’ in
poetry ‘‘entails new habits of reading’’ and to assert that ‘‘our improved
skills as readers of schematically constructed artifacts will reveal a new crite-
ria for coherence.’’41 While there seems to me to be no exact correspon-
dence between the numerical structure of Donne’s poem and that of either
a horizontal or vertical sundial, the poem does blend gnomonic language
and numerically calibrated form in ways that suggest an analogy between its
function and that of a dial.
The poet prompts the reader to think arithmetically as well as verbally
by placing the speaker’s reference to the three-hour duration of the lovers’
walk in line 3 of the poem. Reading ‘‘These three houres that we have
39. Kamholtz, ‘‘Imminence and Eminence,’’ 483.

40. Some previous interpretations of the poem explore the ways in which it undermines
clear-cut distinctions between time and eternity. See esp. Roger A. Cognard, ‘‘The Solstice
Metaphor in Donne’s ‘Lecture upon the Shadow,’’’ Essays in Literature 7 (1980): 11–20; and
Diane Elizabeth Dreher, ‘‘‘A Growing or Full Constant Light’: A Reading of Donne’s ‘A Lec-
ture upon the Shadow,’’’ Quidditas 1 (1980): 83–86.
41. Kate Gartner Frost, Holy Delight: Typology, Numerology, and Autobiography in Donne’s ‘‘Devo-
tions upon Emergent Occasions’’ (Princeton University Press, 1990), 102–4.

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spent’’ in line 3 of a poem’s opening stanza, the reader is encouraged to

think of her own progress through the lines of the poem as corresponding
to the lovers’ forward progress through three hours of walking. The lines
of the poem thus appear, like the lines on the face of a sundial, to corre-
spond to the hours of the day. With this chronometric concept of the
poetic line established, the poet reinforces the dial-like quality of his verse
by positioning the speaker’s first reference to the fact that it is ‘‘now’’ noon
at the mathematical center of the stanza—in the sixth of its eleven lines:
‘‘But, now the Sunne is just above our head.’’42 As the description of noon
continues in lines 7–8 (‘‘We doe those shadowes tread; / And to brave
clearnesse all things are reduc’d’’), and as the stanza may also be consid-
ered to be part of a thirteen-line unit completed by the addition of the cou-
plet appended to it, one may also read line 7—a trimeter, and thus the
shortest (most clearly ‘‘reduc’d’’) line in a stanza otherwise consisting of
tetrameter and pentameter lines—as the stanza’s most provocatively quan-
titative representation of noon.43 The first half of the poem thus resembles
the face of a horizontal sundial that is evenly divided into two halves on
either side of the noon hour.
The poem as a whole also works gnomonically; its two halves, which deal
with the morning and afternoon hours, respectively, function like east- and
west-facing vertical sundials. Explaining the construction of dials designed
to be mounted on walls facing east and west, Thomas Fale notes, ‘‘They be
very like, differing onely in the naming of the houres, for the one contain-
eth houres for the forenoone, and the other for the afternoone.’’44 He
goes on to specify how the sundial maker should arrange the lines on the
face of each ‘‘erect’’ dial: ‘‘You may have in the East Diall, two aboue the 6.
houre, the 4. and 5. in the morning, and under it 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. In the West
Diall likewise 7. and 8. in the euening aboue the 6. houre, and vnder it 6, 5,
4, 3, 2, 1. Neither of them doe shew the 12. houre, because at that time the
Sunne beames be Parallele to the plat.’’45 At the bottom of folio 8r, Fale
directs the reader to ‘‘Behold the figures folowing,’’ and when one turns
the leaf, one sees the two designs for the two dials facing one another
42. In the canonical hours (which divide the day and night into intervals and assign prayers
to each), the noon hour is the sixth hour (sext). None or nones, the ninth hour, fell from
around 3 p.m. until 5 p.m. (Michael R. Matthews, Time for Science Education [New York: Kluwer
Academic/Plenum, 2000], 361 n. 6). On the process by which ‘‘noon’’—a derivative of the
Latin none —shifted in meaning to indicate midday rather than 3 p.m., see the etymological
note to OED, s.v. ‘‘noon.’’
43. See Cognard: ‘‘The trimeter, or short, lines may function as symbols of noon, dividing
each half of the ‘Lecture’ into six hours (i.e. lines) of forenoon and six hours of afternoon.
The twenty-four long lines of the poem would comprise, therefore, the hours of ‘love’s day’’’
(‘‘Solstice Metaphor,’’ 14).
44. Fale, Horologiographia, fol. 7v.
45. Ibid., fol. 8r.

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Figure 1. Diagrams for east- and west-facing dials. From Thomas Fale,
Horologiographia. The Art of Dialling: teaching an easie and perfect way to make all
kinds of Dials (London, 1593), fols. 8r–9v. Image published by permission of
ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited. This item is reproduced by
permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
across two opposite pages (fig. 1).46 The diagrams for the two dials are so
precisely symmetrical with each other that John Blagrave, discussing similar
designs in his 1609 The art of dyalling, notes that ‘‘the backe side of the pat-
terne of the East diall before made in paper serueth the West wall beeing
applied thereto.’’47 Prompted by Donne’s gnomonical language, readers
of ‘‘Lecture upon the Shadow’’ may encounter the text of Donne’s poem
as a two-dimensional visual artifact like Fale’s facing-page diagrams of the
east and west direct dials. Its two stanzas are not only verbal texts to be
scanned line by line as the written record of an audible ‘‘Lecture’’ taking
place in a three-dimensional scene and occupying a particular amount of
speaking time; they are also two sets of horizontal lines inscribed in such a
46. Image produced by ProQuest as part of Early English Books Online. Inquiries may be made
to ProQuest, 789 E. Eisenhower Parkway, Box 1346, Ann Arbor, MI, 48106-1346 USA; tele-
phone: 734-761-4700; e-mail: info@il.proquest.com; web page: http://www.proquest.com.
47. Blagrave, Art of dyalling , 54.

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way that the eye can take them in all at once, even as it does the markings
on the surface of a sundial or the printed lines of the sundial ‘‘figures’’ in
Horologiographia.48
Donne’s stanzas resemble Fales’s dial diagrams in content as well as in
form; one traces the morning hours, the other the afternoon. Like the
lineated diagram of the east-facing dial, the first stanza of the poem stops at
line 11 (it does not include a twelfth line, even though it refers to the noon
hour).49 And like the diagram of the west-facing dial, the second stanza of
the ‘‘Lecture’’ is a looking-glass image of the text preceding it, mathemati-
cally equivalent to the first stanza in meter and line length but reversing its
content.50 Stanza 2’s opening line ends with the word ‘‘stay,’’ which is a syn-
onym of ‘‘Stand,’’ the word that begins stanza 1’s opening line. The fifth
line of the second stanza (line 18 of the poem) repeats the ‘‘our selves’’ of
line 5 in stanza 1 but shifts the grammatical function of those words from
subject to object: the morning shadows are those ‘‘which we our selves pro-
duc’d,’’ but the speaker fears lest their afternoon shadows ‘‘Will worke
upon our selves.’’ The evocation of the sun at its zenith in line 6 of stanza 1
48. Donne’s ‘‘Lecture’’ is not, of course, a ‘‘shaped poem’’; nevertheless, it does have a visual
dimension. As John Hollander observes in a chapter ‘‘The Poem in the Eye,’’ ‘‘the impulse to
pattern the stanza’’—which is at its height in emblematic poems shaped to resemble altars,
wings, pillars, or lozenges—‘‘is often submerged beneath a different one, deriving from the
Elizabethan and Jacobean lyrical poem of varying line length. . . . There is no symbolic picture
here, nor no abstract shape of one of the conventional sorts. . . . But the look of such stanzas,
which abound in minor seventeenth-century poetry, was clearly a thing in itself, and great care
was taken by typographers to preserve the shape in the justification of the lines’’ (Vision and Res-
onance: Two Senses of Poetic Form, 2nd ed. [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985], 269).
See also Hollander’s discussion of George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589), in
which Puttenham uses what he calls ‘‘ocular examples’’—diagrams consisting of horizontal
lines in various patterns—to represent the ‘‘proportions’’ of various stanzas (quoted in Hol-
lander, 260).
49. The correspondence between the east-facing dial and the first stanza of Donne’s poem
is not exact; there are eight lines on the dial to mark the hours from 4 a.m. until 11 a.m., and
eleven lines in the stanza; the stanza, moreover, deals with the ever-shortening morning shad-
ows cast by bodies on the surface of the horizontal plane of the ground, while the shadows on
the dial’s vertical surface grow first shorter, then longer. Fales’s diagram nonetheless creates a
visual effect very much like that of Donne’s ‘‘Lecture’’ stanza as it is formatted in the 1635
Poems, by J. D. (the first print publication to include ‘‘Lecture’’), for the stanza as it is printed
contains four couplets followed by a triplet, and the part of the diagram enclosed within the
diameter of the circle contains four equidistant intervals followed by a slightly longer interval;
both artifacts thus contain four slender rectangles followed by one chunkier rectangle. Many
influential twentieth-century editions of Donne’s poems, including those by Grierson, Shaw-
cross, and Patrides, preserve the 1635 pattern of indentations. The 1635 Poems also—fortu-
itously—presents the two stanzas of the ‘‘Lecture’’ on two facing pages of text, dramatically
positioned as the final poem of the ‘‘Songs and Sonets.’’ See the images of this artifact at
http://digitaldonne.tamu.edu/.
50. Cognard stresses that the ‘‘poem is actually a ploce, folding back on itself in mathemati-
cal proportion’’ (‘‘Solstice Metaphor,’’ 14).

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(‘‘But, now the Sunne is just above our head’’) is paired in line 6 of stanza 2
(line 19 of the poem) with sunset language anticipating the possibility that
‘‘our loves’’ may ‘‘westwardly decline.’’ The ‘‘disguise’’ in line 8 of stanza 2
(line 21 of the poem) reverses line 8’s ‘‘brave clearnesse,’’ and the ‘‘grow’’
of line 9 morphs into the antonymic ‘‘weare away’’ in the ninth line of the
second stanza (line 22 of the poem). Most dramatically of all, the final trip-
let of stanza 2—taken as a whole—answers the final triplet of stanza 1,
replacing a self-satisfied backward glance at growing ‘‘infant loves’’ (9) with
an anxious look ahead at a potential future in which ‘‘loves day is short, if
love decay’’ (24). The couplets appended to each stanza are also mirror
images of each other: the first commenting on the immature light of love’s
morning and the second insisting that love can have no afternoon.51
Both of these couplets and a number of other lines in the poem ring,
moreover, with the pithy, aphoristic certainty of traditional sundial inscrip-
tions. Noting that dials have from very early in their history been engraved
with various mottos, René R. J. Rohr explains, ‘‘A sundial . . . has something
to say and says it. It speaks about . . . the flight of time, its tragedy and irre-
versibility for man. The thoughts arise of death, of the end of everything, of
eternity, of the world beyond.’’52 Lines 22–23 of the ‘‘Lecture’’ (‘‘The morn-
ing shadowes weare away, / But these grow longer all the day’’) would serve
admirably as an inscription reading from left to right along the top or bot-
tom edge of a horizontal dial with lines representing the hours from sunrise
to noon on the left of the gnomon and lines for the hours from noon to
sunset on its right. It is the final couplet of ‘‘Lecture upon the Shadow,’’
however, that serves as the inscription best suited to mark the poem itself as
differing in function from a sundial of stone or metal: ‘‘Love is a growing,
or a full constant light; / And his first minute, after noone, is night’’ (25–
26). These memorable lines resonate with paradoxical energy, for they
define love as resolutely atemporal in its capacity for ‘‘full constant’’ bright-
ness, yet they use temporally inflected language to describe love as a light
with a ‘‘growing’’ morning phase and a noontime. In addition, the final line
describes the instant that plunges love into the night of nonbeing as ‘‘his
first minute, after noone,’’ thus personifying love as a man whose timepiece
continues to work—and perhaps even to be consulted—in the darkness of
51. Reading the first and second stanzas of ‘‘Lecture upon the Shadow’’ as east- and west-
facing dials is an alternative to trying to determine in which direction the speaker and his
beloved are walking. For discussions of the directional question, see Mark Van Doren, Introduc-
tion to Poetry (New York: Hill & Wang, 1951), 26–31; Peter R. Moody, ‘‘Donne’s ‘A Lecture upon
the Shadow,’’’ Explicator 20 (1962): item 60; and John T. Shawcross, ‘‘Donne’s ‘A Lecture upon
the Shadow,’’’ English Language Notes 1 (1964): 187–88.
52. René R. J. Rohr, Sundials: History, Theory, and Practice (University of Toronto Press,
1970), 126.

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the grave.53 Indeed, the construction ‘‘growing, or full constant’’ repre-

sents, in itself, a refusal to choose between temporal and atemporal concep-
tions of love. Its stubborn pairing of ontogenesis and changelessness invites
the reader to respond to the poem as a whole as both sundial and love dial,
both chronometer and aeviternometer.
It can be both because human beings themselves, as Donne conceives of
them, are neither purely temporal creatures nor eternal beings exempt
from time’s joys and sorrows. Their physical shadows are exclusively tempo-
ral projections, but they themselves are embodied souls rather than merely
shadow-casting bodies, and, as such, they have the ability to ‘‘Stand still’’ in
the shadowless ‘‘now’’ of spiritual fidelity and emotional vigilance. This
kind of stillness implies not stasis but the strenuous effort required in an
isometric exercise: the effort to ‘‘stay’’ in a particular, clearly defined posi-
tion. Such a physical, spiritual, and emotional posture is neither purely non-
corporeal nor simply physical and thus is also neither utterly divorced from
temporal reality nor clearly confined within it. The speaker of the ‘‘Lecture’’
clearly believes that faithful lovers can achieve such athletic stillness, for he
leaves truly open the possibility that the love he and his addressee share will
not ‘‘westwardly decline’’ as the sun does in the sky. Line 24 is not plaintive
but cautiously idealistic: ‘‘But oh, loves day is short, if love decay,’’ he warns;
his exclamation implies that love’s day ought not to be short, while his ‘‘if’’
notes that it will be so only if they do, indeed, begin to hide the truth from
one another.
The language of Donne’s poem suggests that noon may endure in love
and in poetry, even if not on the face of a sundial. As I note above, there is
no single center to the opening stanza around which the rest of the lines
are arrayed. Instead, there are multiple evocations of the precise shadow-
less moment at which the speaker urges ‘‘Stand still’’ (1). And when the
reader reaches the second stanza, she finds that the speaker is still speaking
of ‘‘this noone’’ (14). Does the entire poem dwell within that evanescent
moment? It may; for despite the speaker’s use of ‘‘these’’ to refer to after-
noon shadows in lines 17 and 23, the pronoun’s definition—‘‘Denoting
things . . . actually or ideally present or near; esp. those that have just been
mentioned’’54 —leaves open the possibility that the afternoon shadows just
mentioned by the speaker in line 15 as ones not yet cast, remain present in
lines 17 and 23 only ideally—that is, ‘‘In idea, mental conception, or imagi-
nation; mentally, imaginarily.’’55
53. Compare Donne’s ‘‘The Will,’’ in which the speaker says that he will ‘‘undoe / The
world by dying; because love dies too’’; when that happens, he tells his mistress, ‘‘all your graces
no more use shall have / Then a Sun dyall in a grave’’ (46–47, 50–51).
54. OED, s.v. ‘‘these, pron.,’’ def. 1.
55. OED, s.v. ‘‘ideally, adv.,’’ def. 1.

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It requires some suspension of disbelief, of course, to read 26 lines of

metered verse as occupying no time at all, as occurring entirely within the
indivisible interval that separates forenoon from afternoon and standing
(like Milton’s Jesus on the temple pinnacle) miraculously upon the prick
of noon. Thomas Docherty will have none of it. Alluding to the Augustin-
ian idea of ‘‘the present moment’’ as ‘‘virtually non-existent,’’ he rejects the
concept of ‘‘noon.’’ He asserts that ‘‘there can be, indeed must be, shadows
there to ‘read,’’’ that the speaker’s opening ‘‘plea for fixity’’ conjures a
‘‘moment’’ that is, in fact, ‘‘impossible to locate and identify.’’ For Docherty,
then, ‘‘one of the points of the poem’’ is to assert that ‘‘the fullness of love
or the purity of love is unattainable or unidentifiable, for the moment of
clear mutual recognition cannot endure.’’56 And as the passages I have
quoted above attest, the author of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions might
well agree with this assessment, for the ailing dean of Saint Paul’s mocks
the very idea of finding an enduring happiness within the flux of time and
points out, with Augustinian irony, that any verbal articulation that is not
the divine Word is by its very nature transitory and fleeting: ‘‘that which you
call present, is not now the same that it was, when you began to call it so in
this Line, (before you found that word, present, or that Monosyllable, now, the
present, & the Now is past,) if this Imaginary halfe-nothing, Tyme, be of the
Essence of our Happinesses, how can they be thought durable? Tyme is not so;
How can they bee thought to be?’’57 It is almost as if the ‘‘you’’ that the sick
man addresses are the speakers of ‘‘The Anniversarie’’ and ‘‘Lecture upon
the Shadow,’’ whom he would disabuse of their belief in love’s ‘‘first, last,
everlasting day’’ and of their hope that their love will not ‘‘westwardly
decline.’’
Even in the Devotions, however, time has its uses. In the Meditation fol-
lowing the one in which Donne insists on eternity as an utterly timeless
state of being and on perpetuity as a state likewise outside time, he cries
out in anguish at his inability to sleep, and in so doing tacitly admits that
his earlier, clear-cut distinction may oversimplify a more complex reality:
‘‘Oh, if I be entring now into Eternitie, where there shall bee no more dis-
tinction of houres, why is it al my businesse now to tell Clocks?’’ he asks.58 The
answer may lie in the fact that composing a numerologically precise
account of each stage of one’s illness makes that record of temporal agony
a means of communicating with the God who transcends time. As Anthony
Raspa notes in his introduction to the Devotions, the ‘‘Book of Creatures,’’ as
56. Docherty, John Donne, Undone, 98–99.

57. Donne, Devotions, 71. Compare Augustine’s contrast between God’s eternal Word and
ordinary words that sound only to pass away (Confessions 11.6–7, 27–28). Raspa’s commentary
(Donne, Devotions, 165) cites additional passages from The Confessions that inspire Donne’s
remarks.
58. Donne, Devotions, 78.

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Donne conceives of it in that meditative work, is ‘‘an eternal God’s love

poem to himself in time.’’59 Each station of the Devotions ends with a prayer,
and prayer is, as George Herbert puts it, the ‘‘Angels age,’’ the human taste
of the angels’ aevum, a temporal act that transfigures time, ‘‘The six-daies
world transposing in an houre,’’ and provides ‘‘Heaven in ordinarie,’’ a tem-
porally accessible glimpse of the aeviternal realm.60
Donne’s ‘‘Lecture’’ is no prayer to God; indeed, it is not even a plea to
the beloved. The speaker’s only imperative is his opening ‘‘Stand still,’’
which, far from making a plaintive request, issues a professorial directive
preparing his audience of one for the ‘‘Lecture . . . in loves philosophy’’
that he proceeds to ‘‘read to’’ her. The rest of the poem is composed of
descriptive statements, theoretical propositions about hypothetical scenar-
ios, and sententious apothegms commenting on the nature of love. But,
like the Devotions, ‘‘Lecture upon the Shadow’’ is a precisely calibrated and
symmetrically organized text, divided into measured sections in order to
advance an aeviternal agenda within an explicitly temporal context. Augus-
tine asks, ‘‘Who shall take hold of the human heart, to make it stand still
[ut stet] and see how eternity, which stands firm [stans], has neither future
nor past. . . . Has my hand the strength for this, or my mouth the persua-
siveness to achieve such a thing?’’61 The bishop of Hippo is willing to try,
but if anyone thought he had the ability to take hold of a reader’s heart
with his writing hand, to make it ‘‘Stand still,’’ and to persuade it that love
can stand firm, it was John Donne.
To enter the aevum while still living beneath the sun that ‘‘makes times
as they pass’’ does require a miracle of eros, but, as John E. Parish points
out, solar miracles—in which the sun stands still, is delayed in its rising, or
goes backward in the sky—are featured prominently in many Renaissance
love poems.62 Early modern English poets, Parish observes, draw not only
on the pagan myths in which the dawn is delayed for the sake of lovers (as
when Athena extends the night of Odysseus and Penelope’s reunion) but
also on passages from the Hebrew scriptures, such as Joshua 10:12–14, in
which Joshua, imploring God to allow him more time to defeat an enemy
in battle, cries out, ‘‘Sunne, stay thou,’’ and ‘‘the Sunne abode in the mid-
des of the heauen, and hasted not to goe downe for a whole day. And there
59. Anthony Raspa, introduction to Donne, Devotions, xxviii. See also, in the same volume,
Raspa’s preface to the Oxford edition, in which he notes that ‘‘the variability of time, which is
one of the major philosophical questions in any civilization,’’ is ‘‘the central concern of the
work’’ (viii).
60. George Herbert, ‘‘Prayer [I],’’ lines 1, 7, 11, in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E.
Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941), 51.
61. Augustine, Confessions 11.11. I quote the Latin text from Augustine, Confessions, vol. 1,
Introduction and Text, ed. James J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 153.
62. Parish, ‘‘Sun Stand Still,’’ 191–209.

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was no day like that before it, nor after it, that the Lord heard the voyce of a
man.’’63 Parish sees in the opening words of the ‘‘Lecture’’ a direct quota-
tion of Joshua, and ‘‘Stand still’’ is exactly what Joshua says to the sun in the
King James translation (1611) that Parish quotes. Parish sees the poem
echoing this in order to prepare the reader for the conclusion, in which
the speaker ‘‘wants a miracle and hopes that he and his lady differ enough
from dull sublunary lovers to deserve one [a miracle] from the god of
love.’’64
But in light of the poem’s shadow imagery, I would argue that the ‘‘Lec-
ture’’ evokes even more provocatively the story of King Hezekiah, which Par-
ish also discusses as an example of solar miracles recorded in the Hebrew
scriptures. In 2 Kings 20:1–11 and Isaiah 38, the virtuous King Hezekiah,
who has abolished idolatry in Judah and defeated invading enemies, falls ill
and is told by the prophet that he must prepare to die, but the king prays
fervently to God, asking him to ‘‘Remember now, how I haue walked before
thee in trueth and with a perfit heart’’ ([2 Kings 20:3] ‘‘meaning,’’ according
to the 1599 Geneva Bible gloss, ‘‘without all hypocrisie’’). In response to this
prayer, God does relent, promising to heal Hezekiah and extend his life
another fifteen years. When Hezekiah asks for a sign to confirm that God
will do as he has promised, moreover, God gives him a choice: ‘‘Wilt thou
that the shadow goe forward ten degree, or goe backe ten degrees? And
Hezekiah answered, It is a light thing for the shadow to passe forward ten
degrees: not so then, but let the shadow go back ten degrees. And Isaiah the
Prophet called vnto the Lord, and he brought againe the shadow ten
degrees backe by the degrees whereby it had gone downe in the dial’’ (2
Kings 20:9–11). Hezekiah and his miraculously atemporal sundial (known
as the Dial of Ahaz, since it had been constructed by Hezekiah’s father, King
Ahaz) set a particularly encouraging precedent for the speaker of the ‘‘Lec-
ture,’’ who also claims to walk in perfect candor and who is similarly unwill-
ing to settle for such a ‘‘light thing’’ as time’s forward motion. For Hezekiah
is inspired by his experience of miraculously altered temporality to com-
pose a ‘‘writing’’—a hymn of eleven verses. The king’s poem acknowledges
that his first minute after noon was to be night, that God’s original plan was
to ‘‘cut me off from the height: from day to night, . . . [to] make an end of
me’’; but in the end, he exults that God preserves him, and ‘‘therefore wee
will sing my song, all the dayes of our life’’ (Isa. 38:9, 12, 20).65
63. Since ‘‘Lecture upon the Shadow’’ may predate the King James Bible, I quote here and
subsequently from The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1599 Edition (Ozark, MO: Brown, 1990).
64. Parish, ‘‘Sun Stand Still,’’ 207.
65. Raspa notes that Hezekiah is Donne’s ‘‘prototype’’ in the Devotions and that the Hebrew
king’s story ‘‘was obviously in the forefront of Donne’s mind during the composition’’ of the
work, as ‘‘he refers to it several times’’ (introduction to Donne, Devotions, xxii–xxiii, and com-
mentary, 129). Given God’s promise that Hezekiah would rise from his bed after three days,

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‘‘Lecture upon the Shadow’’ does not allude directly to the sundial mira-
cle of King Hezekiah, but the story provides scriptural warrant for the atem-
poral chronometers of Donne’s poems. When the eternal God himself uses
the technology of time to intervene in time’s flow and to transform a king’s
experience of his own mortality, he models Donne’s poetic use of clocks
and dials to keep time from here to aeviternity.
the king became a type of the resurrected Christ, and his hymn (often rendered into metrical
paraphrases by Renaissance poets) a celebration of belief in the general resurrection. On Heze-
kiah’s relevance to Donne’s sense of time, numerological design, and bodily healing in the
Devotions as well as a discussion of sundial iconography, see Frost, Holy Delight, 44–77, 111–25.

153.90.170.23 on Thu, 30 Nov 2023 01:40:16 +00:00

DiPasquale AeviternityDonnesAtemporal 2012

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From Here to Aeviternity: Donne’s Atemporal Clocks

Author(s): Theresa M. DiPasquale

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Ó 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2012/11002-0004$10.00

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I. DONNE’S ARTICULATIONS OF ETERNITY,

Eternity is defined by Augustine and his heirs as a perfect and motionless

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definitively on whether aeviternity is also the mode of duration experienced

quest. 10, art. 5. This translation is also available at http://www.newadvent.org/summa/, ed.

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For any thinker operating within a scholastic frame of reference, tempo-

13. Ibid., 116.

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of the eternal and the temporal in a dynamic aeviternity satisfies Donne’s

II. KEEPING TIME IN THE AEVUM

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Not to be lost, but by the makers hand

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move (time being the measure of bodily movement, as Augustine had

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whan; / Do not so much as not beleeue a man. / For though to erre, be

III. IN SEARCH OF AEVITERNAL LOVE

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This, no to morrow hath, nor yesterday.

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Second Anniversarie, in which ‘‘ioy doth euery day admit / Degrees of

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IV. THE ART OF ATEMPORAL DIALING

That love hath not attain’d the high’st degree,

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Having drawn an analogy between love and sunlight, and between

Love is a growing, or a full constant light;

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cerns necessarily annihilate ‘‘brave clearnesse’’? One might argue that it is

39. Kamholtz, ‘‘Imminence and Eminence,’’ 483.

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spent’’ in line 3 of a poem’s opening stanza, the reader is encouraged to

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the grave.53 Indeed, the construction ‘‘growing, or full constant’’ repre-

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It requires some suspension of disbelief, of course, to read 26 lines of

56. Docherty, John Donne, Undone, 98–99.

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Donne conceives of it in that meditative work, is ‘‘an eternal God’s love

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