The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, Vol. 12: Sermons Preached at St Paul's Cathedral, 1626

摘要

'He sits upon his Church, as a Hen upon her Eggs': so proclaims John Donne of the Son of God, in the first sermon included in this impressive latest instalment of the monumental Oxford edition that is emerging volume by tantalizing volume. Kevin Killeen, reviewing the first tome to appear, remarked that the Donne of the sermons 'is by no means the waggish wit readers may be familiar with from his poetry' but 'a sombre, sometimes waspish preacher' (review of Vol. 3, Sermons Preached at the Court of Charles I, in The Seventeenth Century, 29 (2014), 412-14). While this is doubtless true in general, this fleeting suggestion of a brooding, clucking Christ struck me as precisely the kind of head-spinningly audacious comparison for which Donne's poetry has long been admired, and occasionally taxed: as Mary Ann Lund's note observes, the comparison takes its bearings from Matthew 23:37, in which Jesus tells Jerusalem 'how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings', but the bluntness of Donne's comparison, and the shift from chickens to eggs, is at once daring and engagingly domestic; it calls to mind and perhaps anticipates the 'brooding' of Milton's Holy Spirit at the opening of Paradise Lost.