Blood fills his frownes, which from his pierc'd head fell.
Chambers alters the comma after 'affright' to a full stop, the Grolier Club editor to a semicolon. Both place a semicolon after 'fell'. Any change of the old punctuation seems to me to disguise the close relation in which the fifth and sixth lines stand to the third. It is with the third line they must go, not with the seventh, with which a slightly different thought is introduced. 'Mark the picture of Christ in thy heart and ask, can that countenance affright thee in whose eyes the light of anger is quenched in tears, the furrows of whose frowns are filled with blood.' Then, from the countenance Donne's thought turns to the tongue. The full stop, accidentally dropped after 'fell' in the editions of 1633 and 1635, was restored in 1639.
l. 14. assures. In this case the MSS. enable us to correct an obvious error of all the printed editions.
Page 329, XVI. 9. Yet such are thy laws. I have adopted the reading 'thy' of the Westmoreland and some other MSS. because the sense seems to require it. 'These' and 'those' referring to the same antecedent make a harsh construction. 'Thy laws necessarily transcend the limits of human capacity and therefore some doubt whether these conditions of our salvation can be fulfilled by men. They cannot, but grace and spirit revive what law and letter kill.'
l. 11. None doth; but all-healing grace and spirit. I have dropped the 'thy' of the editions, following all the MSS. I have no doubt that 'thy' has been inserted: (1) It spoils the rhyme: 'spirit' has to rhyme with 'yet', which is impossible unless the accent may fall on the second syllable; (2) 'thy' has been inserted, as 'spirit' has been spelt with a capital letter, under the impression that 'spirit' stands for the Divine Spirit, the Holy Ghost. But obviously 'spirit' is opposed to 'letter' as 'grace' is to 'law'. In W both 'grace' and 'spirit' are spelt with capitals. Either both or neither must be so treated. 'Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.' 2 Cor. iii. 6.
If 'thy' is to be retained, then 'spirit' must be pronounced 'sprit'. Commentators on Shakespeare declare that this happens, but it is very difficult to prove it. When Donne needs a monosyllable he uses 'spright'; 'spirit' he rhymes as disyllable with 'merit'.
Page 330, XVII. 1. she whom I lov'd. This is the reference to his wife's death which dates these poems. Anne More, Donne's wife, died on August 15, 1617, on the seventh day after the birth of her twelfth child. She was buried in the church of St. Clement Danes. Her monument disappeared when the Church was rebuilt. The inscription ran:
 | Annae |  | ||||
| Georgii |  | More de |  | Filiae | ||
| Robert | Lothesley | Soror. | ||||
| Wilielmi | Equitum | Nept. | ||||
| Christopheri | Aurator | Pronept. | ||||
| Foeminae lectissimae, dilectissimaeq' | ||||||
| Conjugi charissimae, castissimaeq' | ||||||
| Matri piissimae, indulgentissimaeq' | ||||||
| xv annis in conjugio transactis, | ||||||
| vii post xii partum (quorum vii superstant) dies | ||||||
| immani febre correptae | ||||||
| (quod hoc saxum fari jussit | ||||||
| Ipse prae dolore infans) | ||||||
| Maritus (miserrimum dictu) olim charae charus | ||||||
| cineribus cineres spondet suos, | ||||||
| novo matrimonio (annuat Deus) hoc loco sociandos, | ||||||
| JOHANNE DONNE | ||||||
| Sacr: Theol: Profess: | ||||||
| Secessit | ||||||
| Ano xxxiii aetat. suae et sui Jesu | ||||||
| CIↃ. DC. XVII. | ||||||
| Aug. xv | ||||||
XVIII. It is clear enough why this sonnet was not published. It would have revealed Donne, already three years in orders, as still conscious of all the difficulties involved in a choice between the three divisions of Christianity—Rome, Geneva (made to include Germany), and England. This is the theme of his earliest serious poem, the Satyre III, and the subject recurs in the letters and sermons. Donne entered the Church of England not from a conviction that it, and it alone, was the true Church, but because he had first reached the position that there is salvation in each: 'You know I never fettered nor imprisoned the word Religion; not straitening it Frierly ad Religiones factitias, (as the Romans call well their orders of Religion) nor immuring it in a Rome, or a Wittenberg, or a Geneva; they are all virtuall beams of one Sun, and wheresoever they find clay hearts, they harden them, and moulder them into dust; and they entender and mollifie waxen. They are not so contrary as the North and South Poles; and that they are connatural pieces of one circle.' Letters, p. 29. From this position it was easy to pass to the view that, this being so, the Church of England may have special claims on me, as the Church of my Country, and to a recognition of its character as primitive, and as offering a via media. As such it attracted Casaubon and Grotius. But the Church of England never made the appeal to Donne's heart and imagination it did to George Herbert:
Beautie in thee takes up her place