Abstract
Mark Jarman’s Unholy Sonnets work in dichotomies, drawing on both Renaissance and Modern poetics; biblical texts with complex approaches to faith, especially the books of Job and Ecclesiastes; strict form and formal experimentation. A close examination of the contradictory impulses in Jarman’s work illustrates his unique connection to John Donne, whose Holy Sonnets engage with a silent God. Jarman extends this tradition into modernity, identifying, through subtle wordplay, allusion, and religious tradition, the deficiencies of human language and the difficult but worthwhile endeavor of searching for, and occasionally finding, communion with God.
Mark Jarman, one of the great theological poets of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, straddles multiple worlds. He draws heavily on the traditions of Renaissance and Metaphysical poets while employing modern poetic techniques. He engages deeply with biblical texts, anticipating readers’ fairly extensive knowledge of the Bible, while questioning and challenging tenets of faith on both individual and institutional levels. He is associated with a formalist school but also transfigures form, experimenting with structure and metrics in a range of unconventional ways. He explores topics of the utmost severity – the meaning of life, God’s presence or absence in the world, human frailty, the apparent failures of religious belief – but does so with a lighthearted, almost joking sensibility. These dichotomies of style, theme, and tone offer a window into Jarman’s work and nuanced poetic worldview. His poetry, sometimes deceptively simple, captures the complexity of maintaining faith in a modern world; rather than encouraging “blind faith,” Jarman pushes readers towards a wide-eyed faith, one that begins and ends with deep thinking and questions, exploding the binaries so often associated with contemporary religious belief.
Jarman’s contradictions are nowhere more evident than in his Unholy Sonnets, a sequence that he says serves as a “response” to both John Donne’s Holy Sonnets and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Terrible Sonnets. Of these two influences, Jarman seems to draw more heavily on Donne’s work; his invocation of Hopkins’ poems lies primarily in the poets’ shared willingness to confront the pain that faith sometimes entails. As Hopkins’ speaker laments that he is “pitched past pitch of grief” and that “God’s most deep decree/ Bitter would have me taste,” so Jarman’s speakers consider God’s apparent absence in the world and the pain of knowing that, in the face of tragedy, prayer falls downward, unheard, ineffectually striking “the blank face of the earth.” But while Hopkins’ sonnets from the short “Terrible Sonnets” sequence demonstrate pain and frustration throughout and serve as a counterpoint to his more conventionally joyous works, Donne’s sonnets, like Jarman’s, move gradually and erratically through a series of emotions. Both Donne and Jarman, even at their most conventionally faithful, express their doubts and therefore differ from Hopkins, whose poems can be easily be divided into categories of unwaveringly piety, on the one hand, and deep self-loathing, on the other.
Unlike Hopkins’ neatly classifiable sonnets, each of Donne’s Holy Sonnets bewails the speaker’s own sinning but remains utterly committed to God’s sovereignty and omnipotence: “O God, first I was made/ By thee, and for thee, and when I was decay’d/ Thy blood bought that, the which before was thine” (II); “burne me, O Lord, with a fiery zeale/ Of thee and thy house, which doth in eating heale” (V); “The Father having begot a Sonne most blest,/ And still begetting (for he ne’r begonne)…” (XV). Thus, each of Donne’s sonnets seems to support the “holiness” of the sequence’s title in its content. The speaker requests God’s intervention in his life, lamenting his own fundamentally flawed nature but never doubting God’s power to repair and redeem him. Jarman highlights his indebtedness to Donne by distinguishing Donne’s “holy” sonnets from his own “unholy” ones. Jarman’s allusion to Donne’s work, not only in his sequence’s title but also in the poems’ content, serves as a starting point for exploring his complex theologies within a literary historical context.
In contrast to the unwavering faith of Donne’s poems, Jarman’s sonnets, on their surface, seem to live up to their “unholy” moniker, including a number of lines that appear to question or undermine God’s supremacy. In the first sonnet, Jarman refers to God as “Cash Award” and “Auditor Who Approves Our Bottom Line,” among other things, and ends with the apparently solipsistic conclusion that “You/ Solve nothing but the problems that I set,” an implied critique of God’s ineffectiveness. Jarman’s Sonnet 14 feels similarly irreverent, listing the various elements of church service in a bored voice and ending with seeming unrepentance: even “after the praying, after the hymn-singing,/…There is still murder in your heart.” This sonnet, in its movement from church ritual to murderous intention, suggests the ineffectiveness of church and prayer, if not of God Himself. The ceremony, introspection, and instruction that occur in church do not alter the central fact of the supplicant’s murderous feelings.
This superficially simple reversal of Donne’s holiness, though, is complicated by a more nuanced understanding of both Donne and Jarman. Readers of Donne’s poems have long noted the absence of a divine voice and the lack of resolution in most of the poems. Donne’s speaker repeatedly beseeches, invokes, and appeals to God, but God Himself does not appear. The sonnets demonstrate great faith but often end in dissatisfying ways, absent true communion with God. 1 Readers may find this aspect of the poems troubling and wonder whether Donne hints at God’s absence from the world by omitting divine answers to the speaker’s probing, often desperate questions. Donne’s speakers do not express doubt, but they also do not experience catharsis.
Lawrence Beason suggests, though, that Donne works within the via negativa tradition, positing that the lack of divine response in Donne’s poems “need not be an image of despair” nor “a surrender to doubts about God’s concern for humankind of even God’s existence.” 2 Instead, Beason argues, Donne labors to depict the “radical otherness” of God, which roots him in “a long tradition of Christian mysticism” and the Psalms. The via negativa tradition “sees God working to effect the salvation of his believers even in their experience of his silence, his apparent absence.” By engaging with this tradition – one that, in many ways, reflects contemporary discussions of the feeling of God’s absence in daily life – Donne, like Jarman, implies that human incapacity to hear or see God does not signify God’s absence.
Donne’s speaker’s experience of divine silence, even in a context of profound faith, prefigures Jarman’s approach to God, which draws on the literary tradition of the dramatic monologue in addition to the overtly religious via negativa tradition. Jarman’s speakers have similar experiences to Donne’s, often missing God’s presence or feeling a lack of evident communion, but Jarman’s poems move outside of the individual, confessional voice of the first-person penitent that Donne employs and raise communal questions about God’s role in the world and the universal experience of searching for Him. Despite Jarman’s choice of an oppositional title, his poems are not “unholy” while Donne’s are “holy.” They are instead “also holy” or, perhaps, “holy for a modern world.”
While Donne primarily questions how to reconcile the individual’s sin with God’s presence in the world, Jarman fundamentally questions how to conceive of God in human language and imagination and thus understand God’s role in the world. In both cases, entrapment in human limitation – because of inherent sinfulness, linguistic constriction, absence of sufficient imagination, self-centeredness, or other human truths – prevents full communion with God and omits God’s voice from these human monologues. Jarman may not undo Donne’s “holy” approach but instead changes its focus, from explicit sin to a different sort of flaw: the inability to wrap our limited minds around God’s limitlessness.
This refocusing on Donne’s approach is evident in a closer reading of Jarman’s Sonnet 14, which seems on its surface to criticize the ineffectual church service and the shortcomings of organized Christianity in a way that might, especially in its final lines, suggest atheism or conventional undermining of organized religion. After the praying, after the hymn-singing, After the sermon’s trenchant commentary On the world’s ills, which make ours secondary, After communion, after the hand wringing, And after peace descends upon us, bringing Our eyes up to regard the sanctuary And how the light swords through it, and how, scary In their sheer numbers, motes of dust ride, clinging— There is, as doctors say about some pain, Discomfort knowing that despite your prayers, Your listening and rejoicing, your small part In this communal stab at coming clean, There is one stubborn remnant of your cares Intact. There is still murder in your heart.
Even in the first sonnet in the sequence, wherein Jarman lists a range of traditionally pious and irreverent terms for God, he leaves open the possibility of an interpretation that emphasizes not God’s shortcomings but humans’. After listing those many epithets, including “Cash Award,” in the octave, the sestet begins, “I can say almost anything about you,/ O Big Idea, and with each epithet,/ Create new reasons to believe or doubt you.” This presentation, like that of Sonnet 14, might imply a problem with God Himself or might, instead, point towards an insufficiency in the human capability to conceive of God. To some degree, the interpretation of the sestet’s beginning depends upon the reader’s emphasis. Emphasizing the word “you” in the sestet’s first line introduces God’s culpability for His own lack of definition, but emphasizing the word “I” suggests that the problem lies not in the Mystery being defined but in the limitations of the mortal definer. Noticing both possibilities simultaneously recalls Donne’s frustrations with an apparently absent God and a self drawn to sin at the same time that it implicates the failures of human language.
Certainly a reader could argue that calling God “Cash Award” demonstrates unequivocal irreverence, but if that name and others like it highlight language’s insufficiency rather than God’s, as the sestet implies, the poem may present no criticism of God whatsoever. The poem ends with an ambiguous question and answer in considering “epithets” for God: “But what’s the anything I must leave out? You/ Solve nothing but the problems that I set.” “You solve nothing,” taken out of context, highlights God’s irrelevance or incompetence, but the complete line, reading through the enjambment, is “You solve nothing but the problems that I set.” Reading the grammatical rather than the poetic line complicates the line’s meaning with its penultimate word, “I:” does God solve nothing, or is human perception of God limited by our inadequate vision? Perhaps God’s apparent inadequacy lies in human inability fully to “set” the correct problems, to envision the world in its entirety. Such an interpretation re-envisions a line that insults God instead as one that highlights human deficiency. The enjambment in the final couplet, using “You” as a momentary stand-alone answer to the posed question, adds a third possibility as well: that God Himself is inevitably omitted from each human consideration of God’s containment in language, a reading that further supports the notion of human incapacity.
Like Donne’s Holy Sonnets, in which God’s voice remains conspicuously absent, Jarman’s poems neglect to have God answer his speakers’ questions nor clarify their potential misconceptions. While the Unholy Sonnets explore the echoes of Donne most deeply, Jarman’s “Psalm: First Forgive the Silence” explicitly addresses the via negativa. The second of five “psalms” in 2004’s To the Green Man, it overtly announces God’s missing voice in prayer and, perhaps, in verse: First forgive the silence That answers prayer, Then forgive the prayer That stains the silence. Excuse the absence That feels like presence, Then excuse the feeling That insists on presence. Pardon the delay Of revelation, Then ask pardon for revealing Your impatience. Forgive God For being only a word, Then ask God to forgive The betrayal of language.
As Jarman draws on Donne, both explicitly through his sequence’s title and implicitly through his engagement with the via negativa, so Donne drew on the sonnet sequences that predated his in ways that can meaningfully shape contemporary readers’ understandings of Jarman as well. These sequences, which enjoyed enormous popularity in England between 1560 and 1620, 4 were shaped in turn by Petrarch’s 14th century Italian works. While Donne was likely composing his Holy Sonnets at the height of the love sequence’s popularity, in around 1609–10, he approached “love” quite differently from other sonneteers, a view to which readers were not privy until Holy Sonnets was published in 1633, two years following Donne’s death. Donne, in many ways, stood on the boundary of two eras, between the reigns of the Tudor Elizabeth I and the Stuart James I, and between the secular love of the Renaissance sonneteers and the overt religiosity of Milton. Donne’s work reflects the latter dichotomy in his own distinct styles: his many poems of sexual love contrast markedly with his religious poems. Jarman, composing in an age of extreme secularism, may see himself in a similar position, thinking deeply about faith in an age when writing poetry about faith feels passé and hopelessly old-fashioned, a relic of another time. Like Donne, though, Jarman does not shy away from this unpopular topic, instead embracing it for a new-world context.
In his religious poems, Donne effectively employed techniques of the sonnet sequences that immediately preceded his because he recognized a kind of via negativa in the love poems: readers of those poems are accustomed to hearing the voice primarily or exclusively of the lovelorn speaker, yet no one doubts the existence of a loved woman. Her unwillingness or inability to respond within the text of the poems elicits a certain kind of despair, more so for some speakers than others, but it also focuses the speakers’ love and gives them purpose. Carol Thomas Neely points out that Renaissance sonnet sequences, including those by Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, frequently conclude with the speaker’s paralysis and solitude: “In concluding sonnets of the major sequences, the poet-lover is … trapped. He is pictured alone, in darkness, consumed by the flames he has been fanning throughout.” 5 That technique is precisely the one Donne uses, but in place of a beloved woman, he substitutes a beloved God. Within the Renaissance love sequences, each speaker emphasizes his beloved’s perfection – an ideal fit for Donne’s experimental work with the divine in verse – and “this praise flatters the beloved to seduce her and justifies the poet’s passion. Creating the beloved, he is brought into relationship with her,” 6 precisely the relationship Donne tries to establish with an apparently absent God. Jarman, like Donne, presents his speakers as desiring a closer relationship with the divine, occasionally finding it and then losing it again, and engaging in what is, essentially, a romantic dalliance with an elusive Beloved.
In addition to focusing on the human object of love, the Renaissance sonnet sequences underscore the speaker’s creation and memorialization of his beloved in verse, thus bringing the focus back to him and his own creative, god-like work. These sequences often hint at the beloved’s reaction to each speaker, but the reader’s attention remains on the speaker and the love he feels, which exists almost as an independent entity, separate from the object of his desire. Love is frequently personified in the Renaissance sonnet sequences, drawing on an Ovidian, and later Petrarchan, tradition that represents love as “a malicious and vindictive tyrant,” 7 an independent character who can wound and issue decrees. Certainly one can see how both Donne and Jarman adapt such traditions to their own theological purposes, thus working within and beyond an established poetic tradition.
The biggest surprise for Donne’s seventeenth-century readers in the title “Holy Sonnets” is that sonnets might be holy. Petrarch’s sonnets focus on human, carnal love, even as they conjure images of eternality. Shakespeare’s sonnets, too, emphasize earthly love, and the hints of eternal life in the poems are prompted by considering the lastingness of poetry itself, not the divine. Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella follows a similar pattern, with a persona employing sonnets to express his human desires. Donne's Holy Sonnets sequence resembles its predecessors in that its emphasis remains on the speaker’s beseeching desire and in that his feelings of love and faith are presented as embodied characters. The primary difference between Donne’s sequence and these others is the object of desire: the eternal God instead of a mortal woman. The absent woman in others’ sequences presumably exists in the world, but the sequence emphasizes the speaker’s love rather than its object’s reality; for Donne, too, the absence implies a presence. The via negativa tradition within which Donne works offers a positive, faithful approach to the silence on the other end of a conversation with God.
Of course, the Renaissance sonneteers also allude to religion, as Sidney does in his suggestion of idolatry in Astrophil and Stella, referring to Stella as “an image which we ourselves do carve” or as Samuel Daniel does in Delia. According to Danijela Kambasković-Sawers, Daniel “appropriates the subtext of Christ’s passion to signal his speaker’s suffering at the hands of the lady.” 8 These potentially idolatrous notions are made literal in Donne’s work and therefore avoid idolatry; if the beloved is God, then describing the beloved as God offers no theological affront. Donne took a secular tradition with religious overtones and made it overtly parochial.
Jarman builds on Donne’s religious experimentation by taking the now-familiar “love poem to God” and rewriting it as a poem about an apparently absent God. His speakers’ longing and desire, like Donne’s, are palpable, but so is his frustration. While Donne’s speaker’s irritation is almost exclusively self-focused, unlike the Renaissance sonneteers who direct their resentment equally at their overzealous feelings of love and the inattentive objects of that love, Jarman synthesizes Donne’s theological approach with the other sonneteers’ external annoyance. That combination of self-critique and externally-focused frustration, directed at self and God, may lead readers to see Jarman as denouncing God. But understanding the ways in which Jarman draws on both Donne and Donne’s poetic predecessors, many of whose speakers, like Astrophil, are hapless, silly characters, can help contemporary readers to understand Jarman’s use of poetic tradition to criticize people for their failed love of God. The fault lies not with the beloved but with the speaker/lover.
As Jarman draws on Donne and Renaissance poets, he also employs a wordplay and complexity that more closely resemble modern poetic technique, a quality he shares with Hopkins as well. Donne is, of course, a master of wordplay, but his verbal complexity rests on the surface of his poems; his extended metaphors and poetic conceits shape his poems explicitly and engage readers quite openly in his textual gaming. Modern poets, on the other hand, beginning subtly in the late Victorian era with Hopkins’ auditory experimentation, often use wordplay in ways beyond the pun or double entendre. Early twentieth-century poets occasionally even employ wordplay that seems more like trickery or that has the potential to be self-undermining, and Jarman engages in such guile as well.
It is not uncommon in modern poetics, for instance, to find lines that, in isolation, seem to mean the opposite of their contextual meanings, a “trick” of language that has led to widespread interpretive confusion. One of the most famous examples is Robert Frost’s “Good fences make good neighbors,” a line so prominent that it has taken on a meaning quite separate from its poem and is used as a truism of modern neighborliness (or lack thereof). In fact, though, “Mending Wall,” the poem from which this line comes, goes to great lengths to undermine this popular sentiment, with the speaker of the poem asserting, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,/ That wants it down” and questioning why such a wall is necessary: “My apple trees will never get across/ And eat the cones under his pines.” What has stuck in the popular imagination about this poem, instead, is precisely the opposite of the poem’s argument: “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Along the same lines, Philip Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb” has a lovely and sweet final line, sometimes used on wedding invitations and the like: “What will survive of us is love.” In describing an earl and countess who have been buried alongside one another and whose stone figures adorn their tomb, Larkin depicts the statues holding hands and imagines what they would think about their lasting effigies. Unfortunately for those who wish for the poem to mean what its last line says, the lines that preface this one are quite important to the line’s contextual meaning: Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone fidelity They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.
Jarman plays similarly with the befuddling and beautiful language of duplicity, although perhaps even more subtly than these modernists do. Many of Jarman’s lines, taken in isolation, suggest a problem with faith or an encouragement of disbelief. But the subtlety of his language in context demonstrates much more nuanced possibilities for theological meaning. As we have seen in the few examples above, readers are placed in the difficult situation of having to puzzle out the various possibilities for Jarman’s meanings and lean towards one or another rather than settle on one with absolute certainty. How to determine which of these interpretations deserves primacy may be controlled by readers’ preexisting beliefs, by their knowledge of Jarman as a churchgoer and preacher’s son, by reading an individual sonnet in isolation, or by finding patterns across the entire sequence. The poems’ engagement with the difficulty of belief suggests that all of these approaches have a place. The poems reiterate that piety is deeply complicated, difficult, and always being challenged, not only by external forces but by individual observations, experiences, and linguistic (or other) insufficiencies. By drawing simultaneously on the Metaphysical poets and the modernists, Jarman reiterates his in-betweenness, which represents his readers’ similar positioning. We are situated between tradition and modernity, old and new: that is the contemporary condition, which is captured in Jarman’s allusions and his invocation of this wide range of poetic voices.
His use of these poetic predecessors, however, is only one of the ways in which Jarman captures the liminality of modern faith. He also alludes to biblical texts to demonstrate the complexity of meaningfully juxtaposing modernity and belief in an omnipotent God. To emphasize this problematic balance, Jarman confronts the most difficult and confounding biblical texts head on. Although he continued publishing “unholy sonnets” in 2000’s volume of that name, his first effort at unholy sonnets came three years earlier, in his volume meaningfully titled Questions for Ecclesiastes. The Book of Ecclesiastes may, more articulately than any other biblical book, explore the dichotomous feelings that accompany human relationships with God. Ecclesiastes, known in Hebrew as Kohelet and attributed to King Solomon, not only doubts God in many places but also offers arguments and reversals, assertions and their opposites. The biblical book begins with despondency – “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity,” (1:2) (which might be translated from the Hebrew instead as “futility”) – but ends with a sense of purposefulness and blind faith: “Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil” (12:13–14). In between those rather radical poles, the biblical text wavers between “For he cometh in with vanity, and departeth in darkness, and his name shall be covered with darkness” (6:4) and “Consider the work of God: for who can make straight, that which he hath made crooked?” (7:13). To come away from Ecclesiastes with an uncomplicated or straightforwardly “faithful” understanding of God often requires some rather creative interpretation.
Such efforts at interpretation are regularly undertaken. For example, the InterVarsity Press, the publishing arm of the popular college organization InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, presents this view of Ecclesiastes, after acknowledging that it may feel confusing as a biblical book because of its emphasis on “the meaninglessness of life”: “Chasing after meaning is transformed into the pursuit of God. This exploration of life’s meaninglessness outside of knowing God thus becomes an invitation to know him. In its own unique way, Ecclesiastes is ultimately an introduction to the One who ‘came that we might have life abundantly’—Jesus Christ himself.” 9 This is hardly the surface or literal meaning of the text, and one must read either selectively or metaphorically in order for this meaning to resonate.
Jewish approaches to Ecclesiastes also tend to offer a hermeneutic that seems to transgress the text in order to find a meaning that seems, at the very least, not to be its most literal interpretation: “The usual Midrashic interpretation of the book is that the description of all human life ‘under the sun’ as ‘vanity of vanities’ applies only to earthly pursuits (‘under the sun’), not to the way of the Torah, which is ‘above the sun,’ eternal and beyond time.” 10 Both the IVF interpretation and this Jewish reading, while reassuring for the faithful who may feel a need to integrate this book’s meaning into their larger religious worldview, overlook what the text appears, on its surface, to say: that human experience differs sharply from what other parts of the Bible tell us to believe, and that the purity of vision and coherence of human existence that people may wish for does not actually exist.
Jarman’s invocation of Ecclesiastes stays true to the complications of that text rather than to its more consistently pious contemporary rereadings, and, like Ecclesiastes itself, Jarman’s poems raise questions of whether the speaker is a believer. By offering apparent self-contradictions and undercutting his own statements, Jarman, like the Ecclesiastical author, underscores the complexity of faith. In this way, his work resembles Hopkins’ Terrible Sonnets, which express existential loneliness, questioning, and the futility of human life. And yet, as Aron Pinker notes, Ecclesiastes is interpreted in widely divergent ways, ranging from an understanding of the text as “cynical satire” to a message that “life under God must be taken and enjoyed in all its mystery” to an assertion that “no discernible principle of order governs the universe.” Pinker’s own conclusion is that “the many issues that the kohelet discussed and textual indeterminacy make it difficult to define the book’s message.” 11 Indeed, Ecclesiastes has the most divergent views on faith in the biblical canon, attempts to devise or locate continuity notwithstanding. Jarman’s work is even one level removed from Ecclesiastical holiness in that it offers merely “questions” for Ecclesiastes, already the most doubting of biblical books.
By drawing on Ecclesiastes specifically, Jarman also asks readers to question notions of “holy” and “unholy,” terms that seem to have straightforward meanings, but, as in Ecclesiastes, can be deeply fraught. The notion that “holy” and “unholy” may be less distinct than their linguistic formulations suggest is borne out by certain Christian approaches to God’s creation, as articulated in the second book of the Paraphrase of Erasmus on Paul’s Epistle to Titus (1534): “Neyther ought they to thynke ny thinge that God hathe made to the vse of man to be holyar or vnholyar one than an other.” All of God’s creations are equally “holy,” according to this view, all of them having come from God. Of course, numerous other Christian statements, including many biblical passages, do employ “unholy” as the opposite of holy: Tyndale’s 1526 translation of Timothy iii.2 calls the men “vnthankfull, vnholy, churlisshe,” highlighting “unholy” as synonymous with those explicitly negative qualities; and R. Baxter’s 1685 paraphrase of Matthew xxv.26 asserts that “To confess God’s holy Government, and yet to be unholy, is to be self condemning.” Both Donne and Jarman destabilize binaries, but Jarman’s “unholiness” is hardly the perfect opposite of Donne’s “holiness,” perhaps following the Paraphrase of Erasmus’ view. The unholiness of raising questions and expressing doubts contains, at its core, a holiness in confronting “any thing that God has made” and endeavoring to understand it better. Ecclesiastes understands this “unholy” approach to holiness, as do those who included the book in the biblical canon.
Ecclesiastes is, technically, a “holy” book, but it presents a very evident sort of unholiness through its speaker’s doubt and wavering feelings. At the same time, its engagement with questions about God and its caring about God’s presence in the face of potential apathy are meaningful, holy endeavors. Following the same line of thinking, “holiness” in a poem might suggest that the text presents an unquestioning piety or a devotion to traditional organized religion, as in the poems of Luci Shaw (“Glory be to God for changes… For the north pole and the/ South pole and the equator and everything between”). It might mean, instead, that the poem expresses some doubt but reaches a place of belief, as in many of George Herbert’s poems, which begin with questioning (“Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word”) or anger (“I struck the board and cried, ‘No more;/ I will abroad!”) but end with consolation and grace (“Methought I heard one calling, Child!/ And I replied, My Lord”). Or it might offer the engaged, frustrated holiness of Ecclesiastes, which was canonized but articulates controversies about faith that continue today. Jarman seems to prefer this last type, a holiness that smacks of unholiness.
Perhaps puzzlingly, even while maintaining his place as one of the great contemporary poets of faith, Jarman states that his sonnets work “against the grain of piety and devotion.” 12 What Jarman means by “against the grain” is also open to interpretation: do the poems genuinely mean to undermine traditional piety? Do they aim to demonstrate the difficulty of faith in modernity but ultimately to reinforce it? Are they only “against the grain” when contrasted with the consistency and depth of belief demonstrated in the poems of their predecessors, Donne and Hopkins? Or is that statement itself a diversion from the poems’ central truths? As is clear from Jarman’s use of Ecclesiastes, the poems do challenge “piety and devotion” in some ways even as they strive for a different, modern piety and a troubled devotion; they adhere to traditional belief even as they resist it, an attitude the Ecclesiastic speaker himself seems to embody.
In addition to the overarching invocation of Ecclesiastes, Jarman refers in one of the Unholy Sonnets to the other most theologically difficult of biblical texts, the Book of Job. Sonnet 12 tells the story of a man “afflicted with trials like Job’s” who asks why. God explains the affliction this way: “I can’t say./ Just something about you pisses me off.” That Jarman explicitly refers to the biblical text – “There was a pious man upright as Job,/ In fact, more pious, more upright,” – while noting that God just felt “pissed off” about this character encourages readers to grapple with a similarly conflicted biblical text. The poem may feel irreverent, but it suggests nothing very different from what the Book of Job itself says. God, in that book, is willing to destroy his loyal servant Job to resolve what is, at root, a simple bet with “satan,” a devilish figure who plants doubt in God’s mind. God’s powerful speech in that book (chapter 38) reiterates his power and the limitation of human knowledge, a theme to which Jarman frequently returns. But the Book of Job also demonstrates the difficulty of accepting God’s will, subject as it is to whim, devilish influence, and a willingness to challenge even the best, most faithful of his followers. Jarman does not work around Biblical ideas, though; he works within them. He just happens to choose those texts, like Job and Ecclesiastes, that most overtly challenge conventional notions of steadfast faith. Through his references to these texts, Jarman reminds readers of the complexities of faith and of the grappling with faith that occurs even in the Bible itself.
Thematic and theological dichotomies clearly emerge in studying the content of Jarman’s Unholy Sonnets, and his use of form helps to highlight those thematic juxtapositions. Donne’s Holy Sonnets follow an abba, cddc, effe, gg rhyme scheme and fit clearly and consistently into a pattern of three quatrains and a couplet. Jarman, while retaining the fourteen-line sonnet form, also experiments liberally with the sonnet structure within those fourteen lines. On some level, the “unholiness” of Jarman’s sonnets may comment on their form as much as their content. Richardson suggests that Jarman’s association with New Formalism supports his use of “old forms” to engage with new ideas or, as Richardson puts it, “a fruitful pouring of new wine into old wineskins,” 13 but in fact, in Jarman’s poems, neither the wine nor the wineskin is old. Jarman has certainly been closely associated with New Formalism, an association that was concretized by his co-editorship of the 1996 volume Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, and his obvious and self-identified use of the sonnet form may suggest the straightforward “old form” of his poems. But a closer examination of his sonnets highlights their inconsistency in adherence to sonnet traditions. They are, instead, old wineskins refashioned into new ones, or perhaps new wineskins remade to appear old.
Jarman upends sonnet traditions by moving outside the clear “three quatrains and a couplet” tradition of the English sonnet, a form that might be regarded as “three squares and a rectangle.” While using this hard-edged form, Jarman instead plays with ideas of circularity. For instance, Jarman’s sonnets 5 and 6 of the Unholy Sonnets explore the circularity of life and death, and their forms replicate that circular arrangement, each in its own way. In sonnet 5 (“This is the moment”), Jarman asks questions and purposefully uses “empty” pronouns to create a sense of circularity within a usually linear form: This is the moment. This is all we have. But how can we say this? What do we mean By saying this to children, like sad men With minds gone rotten in a sexual hive, Who show children the secret thing they have – The answer to all questions? What do we mean, Then, by the souls of children, women, men? The question stung and swollen in the hive. I think I know sometimes and feel the joy Of loving only for a lifetime. Death Will smoke us out like bees, but we’ll forget That we were going to see the end of joy. Our souls will keep like honey after death. We’ll forget that we were going to forget.
The octave is comprised of three statements – the first two of which are discarded as hypocritical and false – and three questions, two of which ask “what do we mean”? The questions and statements alike point to an emptiness of meaning, with their absent antecedents, pronouns referring to previous statements with absent antecedents, and lines building each on the last, all structures that rely on a kind of emptiness, a “this” that could be nearly anything. The core of this poem is a mysterious, undifferentiated pronoun, and it shakily supports the rest of the poem.
The sestet, however, provides more answers and a direction that the octave lacks. The speaker admits that he understands the feeling of life’s earthly presence and of “loving only for a lifetime” but then undermines that feeling by asserting, with far more certainty than appears anywhere else in the poem, that “our souls will keep like honey after death.” Ultimately, he argues, “we’ll forget/ That we were going to see the end of joy.” In other words, humans’ post-life joy will be so great that they’ll never remember that joy was meant to end or that loving occurred “only for a lifetime.” And, beyond that first forgetting, humans will additionally “forget that we were going to forget,” removing “us” even a step farther from where the poem began: “This is the moment. This is all we have.” And yet, “this” will be forgotten, and our forgetting will also be forgotten.
While the poem opens with emptiness (“This”) and closes with a different sort of emptiness (“forget”), the final lines reinforce the poem’s sense that such forgetting is a positive thing: “we’ll forget/ That we were going to see the end of joy.” Jarman may refer here to Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality,” which argues that birth “is but a sleep and a forgetting,” “not in entire forgetfulness… But trailing clouds of glory do we come/ From God.” Thus the forgetting itself allows for a continuation of joy and a return to God. In this reading, even “death,” perhaps the most negative word in the poem, is associated with the sweetness of honey and the “keeping” of human souls. Jarman’s apparent assertion that this poem belongs in a series of “unholy” rather than “holy” sonnets is belied by the sonnet itself, which resembles Donne’s in meaning and in theology. Like Donne’s sonnets, Jarman’s presents an alternate view of death’s fearsome presence. As Donne states, “Death, thou shalt die,” so Jarman argues that death will both preserve human souls and prevent them from seeing the end of joy. Its primary distinction from Donne is its vague diction and circular form, not an undercutting of Donne’s theology.
Sonnet 6 begins “Look into the darkness and the darkness looks –/ As if massed before a telescope/ Or turned because it heard your step –/ The darkness looks at you.” This opening quatrain also suggests a circularity, using Donne but also, interestingly, hinting at Nietzsche, who writes in Beyond Good and Evil, “And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”
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Jarman, however, equates the darkness not with Nietzsche’s abyss but with an absence that is a kind of presence. The poem ends this way: Who says that when we look for God, remember God looks for us? If that’s what starts the thing, Then we must drive in circles till we find It’s all one. To be looked for is to look for. And seeing is believing and being seen.
This poem employs neither regular rhythm nor regular rhyme, and instead seems to experiment with a formalism beyond that of the line. The octave rhymes vaguely, but no rhyme is perfect. The sestet does not employ even half or slant rhyme. And yet the poem feels oddly cohesive, at least in part because of its circularity, ending as it does with “seen,” which seems to bring readers back to “looks,” almost like a crown of sonnets. In this case, though, the “crowning” occurs within a single sonnet that emphasizes searching and looking as “all one,” a concept that informs not only the substance but the structure of the work. Jarman’s finely crafted formal structures reflect the complex theological content of the poems and also underscore his challenge to traditions: a sonnet that fits neatly into its fourteen-line structure but also feels, somehow, more like a sestina or villanelle than a sonnet.
Ultimately, Jarman’s poetic response to Donne demonstrates a complexity of both content and form but one that respects and upholds tradition as it raises questions. Jarman’s Unholy Sonnets serve as a reinforcement of Donne’s sonnet sequence, a challenge to it, and a modern completion thereof: by engaging in the via negativa in a modern context, Jarman explores the ways in which Donne’s theological conundrum continues to exist today, but, by writing twenty sonnets to Donne’s nineteen, Jarman also suggests that he can add something to Donne’s work. The final line of Jarman’s sequence speaks of God, saying, “We’ll greet him as the children would have done.” Ending cheekily with the word “done,” Jarman utilizes a homophone of Donne’s name to create a pun that is both tribute and completion.
For Jarman, questions and doubt inevitably give way to comfort in absence. The duality of each religious encounter reinforces the power of pursuing God. As Donne’s speaker asks God to “break, blow, burn and make me new,” so Jarman’s speaker recalls having once experienced the transcendent feeling of God’s presence during prayer, “the intrusion of an overwhelming joy,” and describes his endless endeavors to recreate that powerful moment. His speaker cannot, however, recapture that phenomenon, and “once was enough to be dissatisfied.” This central dilemma exists in each of Jarman’s sonnets, as it does in Donne’s: God’s presence in human lives is real but fleeting; human experience of it is powerful beyond human language as God “recedes from every metaphor, / Turns the hardest data into untruth, /And fills all blanks with blankness.” That blankness, though, is patently not absence; it is presence so great that humans can hardly, or can only momentarily, comprehend it. In Jarman’s Unholy Sonnets, the power of an overwhelming blankness speaks to the most modern of religious experiences in moments that may, on their surface, feel unholy but that bring readers back to their beginnings to see the congruence of form and content, the connection between a fallible human’s doubt and the reality of a boundless God.