Holy Sonnet VII: At the Round Earth’s Imagin’d Corners, Blow

To view more poems I have examined, click HERE.

Holy Sonnet VII: At the Round Earth’s Imagin’d Corners, Blow

by John Donne

At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall, o’erthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance, hath slain, and you whose eyes,
Shall behold God, and never taste death’s woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space;
For, if above all these, my sins abound,
‘Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent; for that’s as good
As if thou hadst seal’d my pardon with thy blood.

____________________________

This John Donne sonnet is what you might call an epic sonnet, concerning in particular a Speaker who calls for the Apocalypse to begin, but then questions his own readiness for judgment.

Where I live in the United States, there is a strong presence of ‘Evangelical Christianity.’ While these people are generally fantastic community members and neighbors, you will sometimes find among these folks a weird and somewhat irreverent desire to see the End Times just go ahead and get underway.

Donne’s poem here makes me believe that a subset of the Church with this attitude may have always been a part of the Christian community. However, Donne’s work here ends up functioning as something of a warning against that attitude.

The poem is a traditional sonnet. It is 14 lines, in iambic pentameter, The rhyme scheme is ABBAABBACDCDEE. Also as is usually the case in a sonnet, the the work is spit by subject matter between the first eight lines and the final six. Here, the Speaker’s first eight lines are directing angels and dead souls to get going with a typical Christian depiction of Christ’s Second Coming. However, starting in line 9, we see a turn (a volta) wherein the piece shifts from the Speaker giving direction to others, to worrying over his own sin and readiness for judgment. This is signaled by the word “But” to start the 9th line.

The standout line, for me, in the 13th line is this: “Teach me how to repent. Donne here is warning his readers to be careful not to be eager to dole out death and judgment.

For a great reading of the poem, and a better analysis than the one I have just provided, I recommend you check out the following video: