Marke in my heart, O Soule, where thou dost dwell,
The picture of Christ crucified, and tell
Whether that countenance can thee affright,
Teares in his eyes quench the amazing light,
Blood fills his frownes, which from his pierc'd head fell.
This passionate penitence, this beating as it were against the bars of self in the desire to break through to a fuller apprehension of the mercy and love of God, is the intensely human note of these latest poems. Nothing came easily to his soul that knew so well how to be subtle to plague itself. The vision of divine wrath he can conjure up more easily than the beatific vision of the love that 'moves the sun in heaven and all the stars'. Nevertheless it was that vision which Donne sought. He could never have been content with Milton's heaven of majesty and awe divorced from the quickening spirit of love. And there are moments when he comes as close to that beatific vision as perhaps a self-tormenting mind involved in the web of seventeenth-century theology ever could,—at moments love and ecstasy gain the upper hand of fear and penitence. But it is in the sermons that he reaches these highest levels. There is nothing in the florid eloquence of Jeremy Taylor that can equal the splendour of occasional passages in Donne's sermons, when the lava-like flow of his heated reasoning seems suddenly to burst and flower in such a splendid incandescence of mystical rapture as this:—
'Death and life are in the power of the tongue, says Solomon, in another sense: and in this sense too, If my tongue, suggested by my heart, and by my heart rooted in faith, can say, non moriar, non moriar: If I can say (and my conscience do not tell me that I belie mine own state) if I can say, That the blood of the Saviour runs in my veins, That the breath of his spirit quickens all my purposes, that all my deaths have their Resurrection, all my sins their remorses, all my rebellions their reconciliations, I will hearken no more after this question as it is intended de morte naturali, of a natural death; I know I must die that death; what care I? nor de morte spirituali, the death of sin, I know I doe, and shall die so; why despair I? but I will find out another death, mortem raptus, a death of rapture and of extasy, that death which St. Paul died more than once, the death which St. Gregory speaks of, divina contemplatio quoddam sepulchrum animae, the contemplation of God and heaven is a kind of burial and sepulchre and rest of the soul; and in this death of rapture and extasy, in this death of the Contemplation of my interest in my Saviour, I shall find myself and all my sins enterred, and entombed in his wounds, and like a Lily in Paradise, out of red earth, I shall see my soul rise out of his blade, in a candor, and in an innocence, contracted there, acceptable in the sight of his Father.'
This is the highest level that Donne ever reached in eloquence inspired by the vision of the joy and not the terror of the Christian faith, higher than anything in the Second Anniversary, but in his last hymns hope and confidence find a simpler and a tenderer note. The noble hymn, 'In what torn ship so ever I embark,' is in somewhat the same anguished tone as the Holy Sonnets; but the highly characteristic
Since I am coming to that Holy roome,
Where with thy Quire of Saints for evermore,