The importance of being God in John Donne's 'Holy Sonnets'.

摘要

Many of the devotional sentiments expressed in John Donne's Holy Sonnets exist side by side with impassioned, and often impertinent, pleas and challenges to God to reveal His presence and authority. The plethora of paradoxes expressed in these sonnets characterizes a man deeply laden with discomfort and anxiety not only with his own devotional anxieties, but with God's inadequacies as well. It is this conflict, the paradox of human fallibility as an effect of God's fallibility, which Donne struggles to reconcile and which my thesis will attempt to establish as a dominant crisis that permeates the Holy Sonnets. Close examination of four significant paradoxes or problems inherent in these sonnets will bring forth the enormity of Donne's internal wrestling as he seeks to resolve his resistance in accepting the sovereignty of God, while struggling to assimilate God's infinite but conditional grace.