t is wearisome to need to go to confession every week, week after week, but it is more wearisome to go once a year, even once every several years. I don’t know why I have so often chosen the latter. The sins pile up like laundry you stare at in denial. That’s my problem this Ash Wednesday: soiled clothes. Maybe it’s my problem every Ash Wednesday.
•••
Ten Lents ago, when it was my first year blogging, I spent a liturgical season writing about the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti. I’ve not done that kind of thing since, so perhaps it’s time again. This year I’m going to talk about John Donne—with a break one week for George Herbert and another week for Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Donne, who may best be known for the poem “No Man is an Island,” was a recusant who later left the Church for Anglicanism and wrote fierce anti-Catholic polemics. And yet he was a deeply Christian poet who wrote some of the best religious verse, including this poem that I first encountered in my twenties, in the wake of a very grievous sin, about which the less said the better. It’s called “A Hymn to God the Father.”
A HYMN TO GOD THE FATHER
Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallow’d in, a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done;
I fear no more.
•••
One can hear John Donne’s own weariness with the litany of his sins. “When thou hast done, thou hast not done / For I have more.” I can easily imagine saying this in Confession, when it’s been a year or two, or score, since my last and the priest—growing weary himself—thinks the long train of self-accusation has finally reached the caboose. Oh no, Father: I have more. I have more, I have more. Donne knows weariness with unending frailty.
•••
Donne belonged to a school called the Metaphysical poets. The term was coined a century later by Dr. Johnson to refer to philosophical poets of the seventeenth century who employed “conceit.” Conceit is a fancy word for the use of metaphor to convey a central idea of the poem.
Donne employs several conceits in this poem which are striking to me.
- “That sin through which I run.”
The idea of sin as something you run through, like a building or a park, is unusual. I have an image of Donne making a mad dash to commit this sin, to get it over with, perhaps so no one will notice. Perhaps so he himself won’t notice. Or maybe he wants to do it quickly, lest his conscience trouble him too much, or compel him to change his mind. Or possibly it’s a sin he runs toward. He says he “deplores” it, but he keeps running. He doesn’t slow down; he doesn’t halt. The metaphor of running conveys all these senses.
- “Made my sin their door.”
If I am angry (and I often am), I can cause others to sin that same sin. I get online and say, “I’m angry,” and my friends decide to be angry with me. So my sin is a door for them to sin. Donne is aware that often we don’t sin alone. We invite others into sin with us. We open our door and say, “Come inside.”
Of course, Donne is also alluding to John 10:7. Christ is the door to eternal life, but Donne is accusing himself of being the door for others to enter eternal death.
- “Wallowed in.”
Sin is like nothing so much as it is like a muck we love to sit in, as though we are swine.
- “Spun my last thread.”
This may have several meanings. Donne could mean “when I have breathed my last breath.” He could mean “when I have sinned my last sin,” with the idea that sin is a thread with which we spin a shroud of death for ourselves.
- “Thy Son shall shine.”
Donne is playing on the homophones Son and sun.
•••
In my view, Donne’s best conceit in this poem is not even a metaphor but a pun. Throughout the entire poem, he puns on his own last name. “Donne” is pronounced like the word done, or dun. Whenever he writes, “When thou hast done, thou hast not done,” we’re supposed to read it this way:
When thou hast done, thou hast not Donne.
You may have forgiven this sin, or that sin, but “thou hast not Donne,” that is to say, you haven’t reclaimed me from Satan. “For I have more.”
I have more, and I have more, and I have more, and I have wallowed.
But his greatest sin, which he saves for last, is fear. “I have a sin of fear.” He fears his own eternal death. If presumption is a sin, so is despair. He worries that he will “perish on the shore.” In asking God to “swear” that Christ will be greater than Donne’s sins, Donne is actually reminding himself of what Christ has already done.
Donne wrote this poem after recovering from “spotted fever,” which may have been an outbreak of typhus. Donne writes about it in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624). (“No Man is an Island” appears in this book.) Donne came very close to death, and one gets the sense of the effect that had on him when he writes about his fear of what would happen when he had “spun his last thread.”
He needed the reminder, as all of us do, of what Christ has already done.
“Having [already] done that,” Donne reminds himself, “thou hast done.”
Or: Thou hast Donne.
•••
No, it’s not really wearisomeness that has kept me from Confession. It’s fear. It’s fear of telling someone else that I have done these wicked things. Thus is my sin a door for more sin to enter. Thus I continue to wallow.
But after every Confession, Christ gives himself to us at every Mass. And I won’t perish on the shore. Leaving every Confessional feels like nothing so much as rebirth.
Not me, but Christ, has done. I fear no more.
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