Louisa McGillicuddy
‘Restore thine image’: the emblematic influence in Donne’s Divine Poems
Plutarch was one of the first to point out the parallels between the literary and
the visual arts, quoting Simonides in calling poetry ‘articulate painting’ and
painting ‘inarticulate poetry’.1 John Donne seems to share this
interdisciplinary attitude, moving beyond mere biblical tropes to make use of
particularly idiosyncratic religious imagery in his divine poetry. For instance
in the ‘Holy Sonnets’ (c. 1609), he likens the connection between Christ and
man to that of ‘adamant draw[ing] mine iron heart’, a striking simile with no
scriptural precedents. But the conceit is, however, seen almost verbatim in the
accompanying verse to an emblem from Georgette de Montenay’s Emblemes,
ou Devises Chrestiennes (1571): ‘As the iron is drawn by the magnet, / So the
man of God is drawn by Christ.’2
These emblem books first came into fashion after the Italian publication of
Andrea Aliciati’s Emblematum Liber in 1531, and although they were not
published in England until 1586, it is critically established that Donne would
have had access to the wider European pool of emblem literature as well.3 He
makes passing reference to the culture itself throughout his works,
mentioning ‘emblems’ six times in his poetry and once in his prose letters.4
Indeed, the tradition was so pervasive that in the introduction to his seminal
work Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery (1939), Mario Praz states that
‘every poetical image contains a potential emblem’.5
However, as Helen Gardner rightly points out, in all artistic
representations of religion, there is a perennial conflict between the
‘ostensible emotion’ being portrayed and the artist’s own ‘satisfaction in
Plutarch, Moralia, Book IV, ed. G. P. Goold (London: Heinemann, 1999), 347a, p.501.
John Donne, The Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978);
Georgette de Montenay, Emblemes, ou Devises Chrestiennes (Lyon: Jean Marcovelle, 1571), no.
5. My translation from the French: ‘Comme le fer s’esleve par l’aymant, / L’homme est de Dieu par
Christ tiré aussi.’
3 Josef Lederer, ‘John Donne and the Emblematic Practice’ in The Review of English Studies, Vol.
22, No. 87 (July 1946), 182-200 at 183.
4 Cf. ‘Elegy 13: Love’s Progress’, l. 79; ‘To the Countess of Bedford at New Year’s Tide’, l. 2;
‘Upon the Annunciation and Passion falling upon one day’, l. 4; ‘A Hymn to Christ, at the
Author’s last going into Germany’, l. 2 and 4; ‘A Valediction: of Weeping’, l. 7; letter to Sir H.
R., l. 6.
5 Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, Vol. I (London, 1939), p. 2.
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Louisa McGillicuddy
achieving perfect expression’ in the work.6 While Donne’s employment of use
of emblem symbology ostensibly seems to make poetic descriptions of faith
and prayer all the more thorough, the poet seems self-consciously aware that
such attempts are ultimately self-defeating. Although it is the poet’s
‘delight…to write after thy Copie’, he is also alert to the dangers inherent in
‘studying copies, not Originals’.7 He subsequently pleads in ‘Good Friday,
1613. Riding Westward’:
Burn off my rusts, and my deformity,
Restore thine image, so much, by thy grace,
That thou mayst know me
(ll. 40-3; emphasis mine)8
The use of the word ‘restore’ is pertinent, suggesting Donne’s awareness that
the true image of God has been subverted in its poetic transformations from
original biblical scripture. Donne subscribes to the Platonic anxiety that the
poet’s ‘art of representation is…a long way removed from reality’, and as
such his divine poetry seems constantly to be in search of the ‘original’ – i.e.,
God.9
One of the most common tropes used to describe Christ, whether in art
or literature, is the attention to his ubiquitous spiritual presence. In the Bible
he is repeatedly described in terms of vastness and plenitude, ‘For in him
dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily’ (Colossians 2:9), and ‘of his
fulness have all we received’ (John 1:16).10 Donne reiterates the point in ‘La
Corona’, writing of ‘he / Which fills all place, yet none holds him’ (III, ll. 910), the conceit itself not even being able to be held in a single line, spilling
onto the next line of the stanza. He further explores this concept of spiritual
fullness through the physical profusion of Christ’s blood, which is in itself a
canonised emblem. Clayton G. MacKenzie attests to its ‘powerful presence’
throughout all ‘Renaissance representations of Christ’, and Donne echoes this
sentiment, describing the vastness of the ‘flood [which]/ Shall be to me an
emblem of thy blood’ (‘A Hymn to Christ, at the Author’s last going into
Germany’, ll. 3-4, emphasis mine).11
However in the most explicit display of Christ’s blood, the crucifixion,
the emblem tradition falls short of portraying the event in its entirety. There is
a habit of compartmentalising the scene, focussing only on one of the five
wounds of Christ, rather than a full depiction of the crucifixion itself. In
Donne, The Divine Poems, pp. xv-xvi.
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions & To the Countesse of Bedford, begun in France but never
perfected
8 John Donne, Selected Poetry, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), l. 2. All
further references will be to this edition.
9 Plato, The Republic, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941),
598b, p. 321.
10 The Bible: Authorized King James Version, eds Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998).
11 Clayton G. MacKenzie, Emblem and Icon in John Donne’s Poetry and Prose (New York: Peter
Lang), p. 49.
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Benedictus van Haeften’s Schola Cordis (1629) - a popular emblem book
published towards the end of Donne’s lifetime but in circulation years before
in manuscript form - Christ is depicted in separate emblems with blood
dropping from his pierced hand and bloody forehead, into the heart of man:12
In both instances Christ is miniaturised to a cherub with a halo and wings,
and man’s heart is seen as a neat receptacle that is literally filled up by
Christ’s spilling forth of blood. The artist seems to deliberately veer away
from accurately graphic depictions of the wounded Christ, instead sanitising
and censoring his appearance and the scene around him.
Similarly, in the ‘Holy Sonnets’, Donne considers ‘the picture of Christ
crucified’ (IX, l. 3), but only focuses his description on separate areas, rather
than looking at the whole: the ‘blood [that] fills his frowns’, the ‘tears in his
eyes’, and the ‘pierced head’ (IX, ll. 5-6). Indeed, when Donne was ordained
into the Church of England in 1615, he took a new seal that depicted the
crucifixion, but his friend Izaak Walton described it with the same aversion
from real representation; it was ‘like those which Painters draw when they
would present us with the picture of Christ crucified on the Cross’ (emphasis
mine).13
Donne continues in this vein in ‘Upon the Annunciation and Passion
falling upon one day’, writing of the ‘one drop, which thence did fall, /
Accepted, would have served, he yet shed all’ (l. 41-2). The image of dripping
blood is repeated in ‘La Corona’:
Moist, with one drop of thy blood, my dry soul.
6 RESURRECTION
Moist with one drop of thy blood, my dry soul
(V, l. 14 – VI, l. 1)
Benedictus van Haeften, Schola Cordis (Antwerp, 1629), no. 25.
Izaak Walton, ‘The Life of Dr John Donne’ in Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd
Hooker, George Herbert, &C (London, 1670), p. 56.
12
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Louisa McGillicuddy
As throughout the whole of ‘La Corona’, the final line of each stanza links to
the first line of the next, but here the mise-en-page eerily seems to reiterate the
falling drops of blood, dripping from one section to the next, subtly weaving
the crucifixion into the structure of the poem but still refusing to depict it in
its entirety.
Donne ultimately betrays much keener anxieties in describing the
crucifixion than that of the emblem tradition. He considers that he should
‘almost be glad, I do not see / That spectacle of too much weight for me’
(‘Good Friday’, ll. 15-16). He goes on to rhetorically wonder, ‘Could I behold
those hands which span the poles, / And tune all spheres at once, pieced with
those holes?’ (ll. 21-2). The line break seems significant again here, as ‘the
hands which span the poles’ horizontally are suddenly dragged forward by
the next line to ‘tune all spheres at once’. Donne puppeteers Christ’s
movements on the cross, yet ‘as thou hangst upon the tree; / I turn my back
to thee’ (ll. 36-7) – all attempts at describing him upon the cross more
precisely are deliberately undermined by the speaker. It is not until his
sermons, such as ‘Death’s Duell’, that Donne describes the scene with any real
degree of completeness:
There now hangs that sacred Body upon the Crosse, rebaptised in
his owne teares and sweat, and embalmed in his owne blood alive.
There are those bowels of compassion, which are so conspicuous,
so manifested, as that you may see them through his wounds.
There those glorious eyes grew faint in the light: so as the Sun
ashamed to survive them, departed with his light too.14
The entire picture of Christ on the cross is described here in a single
paragraph with almost chilling phrases such as ‘embalmed in his owne blood
alive’ and ‘bowels...that you may see…through his wounds’. Donne’s description
is noticeably more graphic than any previous poetical attempts, perhaps
because the form of the sermon itself, based on scripture, is intrinsically closer
to God than that of the poem. As Donne writes, ‘There are not so eloquent
books in the world, as the Scriptures: Accept those names of Tropes and
Figures.’15
The image of man’s blood spilling onto Christ is seen again in van
Haeften’s emblems (no. 9), but the most interesting depiction is probably in
Thomas Jenner’s The Soules Solace (1626):16
Donne, John Donne's Sermons on the Psalms and Gospels, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson (London:
University of California Press, 2003), pp. 247-8, ll. 653-9.
15 Donne, Sermons, II, 170-1
16 Thomas Jenner, The Soules Solace (London, 1626), no. 5.
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The emblem shows a pail of water being poured onto a dirty floor, and
another being poured into the sea, representing Christ’s and man’s blood
respectively, and in the accompanying verse to the emblem, Jenner writes:
‘But though thy sinnes bee dipt in scarlet die /…Lay them on Christ; in him
doth sulnes dwell’. Donne also uses the image of man’s own blood pouring
onto Christ in a two-way exchange - it was a common Protestant belief that
blood was not only the carrier of Christ’s sacredness, but also man’s
sinfulness, and as such he echoes Jenner’s sentiments in his wish to be ‘Dy'd
scarlet in the blood of that pure Lambe’ in An Hymn to the Saints, and to the
Marquesse Hamilton (l. 34; emphases mine).
Jenner’s piece clearly directs the reader from the its symbolic to its
literal meaning, including written annotations on the images referring to
blood poured ‘on us’ and ‘on Christ’, even compartmentalises the two
contrary actions by distinctly dividing the two images in separate boxes.
Whereas in ‘A Litany’, Donne expresses this same crossover between man
and Christ, but deliberately blurs these boundaries for the reader:
Son of God hear us, and since thou
By taking our blood, owest it us again,
Gain to thy self, or us allow;
And let not both us and thy self be slain;
(XXVIII, ll. 244-7; emphasis mine)
Christ clearly takes ‘our blood’ to ‘thy self’, but the myriad of ‘us’, ‘thou’, ‘our’
and ‘thy’ pronouns seem to confuse the distinctions between Christ and man,
reinforcing the flowing over of blood between the two to the point of
cacophony.
Within these depictions of the exchange between the sinful man and
the cleansing Christ, Gilles Deleuze and Rosalind Krauss point out an
important paradox:
God made man in His own image and to resemble Him, but
through sin, man has lost the resemblance while retaining the
image. Having lost a moral existence in order to enter into an
aesthetic one, we have become simulacra.17
Gilles Deleuze and Rosalind Krauss, ‘Plato and the Simulacrum’ in October, Vol. 27 (Winter,
1983), 45-56 at 48.
17
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Louisa McGillicuddy
Attempts to rid oneself of sin can thus be considered as part of man’s
collective desire to return to the original ‘image’ of God. If it is accepted that
man has already become the very ‘simulacra’ that the poet had hoped to
overcome, then the issue of representing Christ accurately takes on a renewed
sense of anxiety. In emblem portraiture, this tension is responded to with a
forceful physical union between Christ and man. Van Haeften’s emblem no.
38 shows the cherub Christ and man grasping each other’s right hands, and
with their left holding the twine that joins their hearts:
Their complementary body language reinforces the symmetry that man hopes
to regain in becoming closer to the original ‘image’ of God, yet they also seem
to be pulling away from each other, becoming further apart, indicative of the
Christian’s similarly paradoxical quest to become closer to God.
Donne characteristically tears apart this concrete image of the hope for
union, taking this urge to reunite to the extreme; as the simulacrum ‘implies
great dimensions, depths, and distances’, he tries to narrow this gap by
yoking together familial relationships in an uncomfortable intimacy:18
thou
Wast in his mind, who is thy son, and brother,
Whom thou conceiv’st, conceived; yea thou art now
Thy maker’s maker, and thy father’s mother
(‘La Corona’, II, ll. 9-13)
Donne tautologically refers to the Virgin Mary as ‘thy maker’s maker’,
describing Christ as both her ‘son’ and ‘brother’; and he also draws together
the contrary relationships of ‘father’ and ‘mother’ together in one conjunction,
increasing the collective confusion of this description. He goes even further by
developing an uncomfortable romantic intimacy in the divine relationship,
speaking of ‘our mistress fair religion’ in ‘Satire 3’ (l. 5). In her compelling
study on seventeenth century religious poetry, Barbara Lewalski points out
18
Gilles Deleuze and Rosalind Krauss, ‘Plato and the Simulacrum’ at 49.
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Louisa McGillicuddy
that divine emblems were often created by ‘simple transformation of
characteristic figures form the love-emblem books’, citing the example of Otto
van Veen’s Amorum Emblemata (1608) and subsequent Amoris divini emblemata
(1615) - the Eros and Anteros figures neatly substituted with Divine Love and
Anima.19 But in Donne’s work, he reverses this process entirely, eroticising
pre-existing divine figures in a move that recalls the similarly uncomfortable
ambiguities of the Song of Songs. In the ‘Holy Sonnets’ he goes on:
Yet dearly’I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy,
Divorce me…
Take me to you…
…you ravish me
(X, l. 9-14)
Donne begins his description of love for God in an ostensibly traditional way,
but in calling himself ‘betrothed’ to Satan and needing a ‘divorce’, by
implication he involves God in a romantic relationship too, ending the stanza
with the awkward desire to ‘ravish me’, betraying an overinvestment in the
sanctified body which seems to carry a trace of fervour.
This impulse to narrow the gap of the simulacrum leads to a violent
desperation in some depictions – both the artists of emblem portraiture and
Donne display a desire to be crucified along with or instead of Christ. They
position themselves within one of the defining images of his life in a bid to
regain the original ‘resemblance’ they were made in. In the case of emblems,
we can see Christ helping man regain this position; in van Haeften’s
collection, the two emblems (no. 47 and 48) are placed alongside one another:
In the first (above left), man imagines his heart being nailed to the cross
instead of Christ’s – but it is being stretched and twisted out of its shape,
suggesting that it can never completely fill this position. The opposite emblem
(above right) depicts a similar scene, affixed with the lines ‘You were fixed on
Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyrics (Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 184.
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Louisa McGillicuddy
the cross with nails instead of me’, but again seems to reiterate the fact that
man can never fully step into Christ’s image – the nail does not seem to fit
into the heart, and man recoils at the attempts to do so.20
Donne similarly imagines himself being crucified with Christ, but in a
way that still manages to circumvent whole descriptions of the crucifixion. As
he asks in ‘The Cross’: ‘Since Christ embraced the Cross itself, dare I / His
image, th’ image of his Cross deny?’ (ll. 1-2). This ostensibly reveals an
impulse to more closely represent the crucifixion, but on closer analysis it
seems that the repetition of ‘His image, th’ image’ focuses more on the
symbolism of the object of the cross, rather than its graphic reality. Indeed,
the poem was written partially as a response against the 1604 Puritan
demands that the sign of the cross should not longer be used in baptisms,
showing a contextual mistrust of the emblem too. The comma and pause
between the phrase also seems to indicate a slight alteration of meaning: ‘His
image’ being God’s ‘original’ image, and ‘th’ image’ being the ‘copy’ image of
God that is portrayed by the artist. Donne continues to gesture to the physical
pose he will adopt: ‘Who can deny me power, and liberty / To stretch mine
arms, and mine own cross to be?’ (ll. 17-18), and again in ‘La Corona’: ‘Now
thou art lifted up, draw me to thee’ (V, l. 12), now the puppeteer of himself,
rather than of Christ as in ‘Good Friday’.
However these descriptions become increasingly violent, moving
beyond the allegorical nature of the emblem tradition to represent a very real
urge to reconnect with Christ. In the notorious section of the ‘Holy Sonnets’,
Donne calls out: ‘Spit in my face you Jews, and pierce my side, / Buffet, and
scoff, scourge, and crucify me’ (VII, ll. 1-2), the harsh consonance of use of the
imperative in each verb reinforcing the vehemence of the line. And again in
‘A Litany’, Donne imagines the scene even more clearly:
O be thou nailed unto my heart,
And crucified again,
Part not from it, though it from thee would part,
But let it be by applying so thy pain,
Drowned in thy blood, and in thy passions slain.
(‘A Litany’, II, ll. 14-18)
Donne repeats the emblematic image of being ‘nailed unto my heart’, but goes
further to express his wish to ‘part not from it’, but rather to ‘apply…thy pain’
and ‘drown…in thy blood’. This attack upon the heart is a noticeable feature
throughout van Haeften’s collection too:21
20
21
My translation from the Latin, ‘pro me qui clauis in cruce fixus eras’.
Cf. nos 5, 11, 12, 13, 16, 18, 35.
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Louisa McGillicuddy
In this emblem, no. 43, Christ and man are depicted flogging ‘the heart of one
who is unwilling to follow the better things’ with whips.22 The sinner is
reformed through violence to the heart, or what seems to have become the
symbol for his soul. Donne shares this belief, noting: ‘Mark in my heart, O
soul, where thou dost dwell’ (‘Holy Sonnets’, IX, ll. 1-2). Both van Haeften
and Donne identify an emblem behind the emblem; but in doing so their
descriptions of the soul are all ultimately only nearer to the simulacrum, and
further from the original image - as Plato outlines a continuum of
reproduction from the original model, through to the copy, and onwards to
increasingly less recognisable imitations ending in the simulacrum: ‘The art of
representation is…able to reproduce everything because it has little grasp of
anything.’23 Perhaps an awareness of this accounts for some of Donne’s attack
towards the heart, hoping to literally beat through to the original, as in the
‘Holy Sonnets’:
Batter my heart, three-personed God; for, you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
(X, ll. 1-4)
The speaker’s call for Christ to ‘Batter…break, blow, burn’ his heart – or soul
– is seen in the attack pictured in van Haeften’s emblem, with the tough
alliteration seeming to increase the force behind each blow. T. O. Beaucroft
argues that ‘the true emblematic image stands motionless’, but Donne imbues
action into the image, tearing and distorting it beyond recognition to show
that there is no such thing as a ‘true emblematic image’ of God. 24
My translation of the affixed verse from the Latin, ‘inuitum cor meliora sequi.’
Paraphrased from Andrew Otwell, ‘Gerhard Richter and the Simulacrum’ (1997),
available at http://www.heyotwell.com/work/arthistory/Richter.html. Quotation from
Plato, The Republic, 598b.
24 T. O. Beaucroft, ‘Quarles – and the Emblem Habit’ DubR, 188 (1931), 407-25, at 414.
22
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After the observable preoccupation with joining man with Christ,
Donne’s depictions of death – when the body and the soul are torn apart – is
accordingly seen both a negative and positive process. As he expands upon in
‘Death’s Duell’, although man’s body remains and decays on earth, the soul
flies upwards and is liberated with God. A similar relationship is accepted
within the emblem tradition, as Georgette de Montenay shows in emblem no.
88, subtitled ‘desiderans dissolvi’ or ‘desiring to depart’:
As the subtitle would suggest, the picture shows the skeletal figure of death
gladly helping man out of earth without dispute. In the Latin edition of
Montenay’s work, published later in 1584, the text beneath the emblem
describes the ‘the soul…[that] takes flight’ and looks down from heaven
‘joined to Christ’, at the ‘buried body’.25 This clear separation of soul and
body is depicted almost identically in Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnets’ too:
my gluttonous death will instantly unjoint
My body, and soul…
…
my soul, to heaven her first seat, takes flight,
And earth-born body, in the earth shall dwell
(III, ll. 5-10; emphases mine)
The stanza outlines the ‘unjoint[ing]’ of the body from the soul, and their
oppositional movements from remaining in the ‘earth’ to taking flight to
‘heaven her first seat’. Clayton G. MacKenzie also points out that Juan de
Horozco y Covarrubias’s Emblemas Morales (1591) develops on this view of
death:
My translation from the Latin, ‘Suave mori, quoties scelerum mens libera, nullum / Judicis
horrescens judicium refugit. / Suave etenim Christo conjungi: et corpus humatum / Regno sublimè
despicere aethereo.’
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In the first emblem (above left), titled ‘Enla Muerte esta La Vida’ (‘In Death
there is Life’), a flourishing vine grows up through a pile of skulls. In the
second (above right), titled ‘Enla Vida esta La Muerte’ (‘In Life there is Death’),
a skull balances on top of a decaying shrub.26 The pair typifies Donne’s
attitude towards death as a necessary separation, as expounded upon in
‘Death’s Duell’, the final sermon he wrote before his death, which was aptly
subtitled ‘A Consolation to the Soule, against the dying Life, and living Death
of the body’.
Affixed to the frontspiece of the first publication of this work was also,
perhaps most importantly, a portrait which Donne had posed for months
before his death, showing him clothed in a shroud. Lewalski comments on
Donne’s last action as showing an impulse to ‘make of himself in his burial
weeds an emblem for his own and others’ contemplation.’27 Indeed, the
portrait (below) even uncannily resembles the form of an emblem itself,
complete with an image, encircled by a motto, and subscribed with verse:
26
27
Clayton G. MacKenzie, Emblem and Icon in John Donne’s Poetry and Prose, p. 44.
Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, p. 201.
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Donne’s friend Walton describes the shroud:
this sheet up on him, and so tyed with knots at his head and feet, and
his hands so placed…he was purposely turned toward the East, from
whence he expected the second coming of his and our Saviour28
Donne deliberately crafted his position in the shroud to correspond to the
symbolic eastward position of Christ’s second coming, emblematising himself
alongside his saviour in a final mocking of the attempt to bring the copy as
close as possible to the divine original.
The emblems discussed have clearly been sources of inspiration for
Donne. But each image he has used has been stylised, subverted, and made
more violent for his own poetic purposes of expressing the fraudulence
behind the idea of a stable divine relationship between man and Christ.
Emblem portraiture is limited by the fact that its very nature is allegorical,
symbolic, metaphoric – despite their omnipresence throughout the
Renaissance, they are beset with an intrinsic degree of artificiality. Donne
accepts Aquinas’s well-worn dictum that metaphor shadows the truth, where
theology should make clear, and knowingly draws from the emblem tradition
to make known his own acceptance of the fact that ‘God, as God, is never
represented to us’.29 All other expressions of divine poetry merely ‘thrust into
Walton, ‘The Life of Dr John Donne’ in Lives, p. 58.
Paraphrased from Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia, vol. 3, trans. Herbert McCabe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), question 12, article 9. Donne, Sermons, VII,
67
28
29
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strait corners of poore wit / Thee, who art cornerless and infinite’ (‘Upon the
Translation of the Psalms, by Sir Philip Sidney’, ll. 3-4):
God’s image, and seal
Makes us idolatrous,
And love it, not him, who it should reveal,
When we are moved to seem religious
Only to vent wit, Lord deliver us.
(‘A Litany’, XXI, ll. 185-9)
List of works cited
Primary sources
Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologia, vol. 3, trans. Herbert McCabe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
The Bible: Authorized King James Version, eds Robert Carroll and Stephen
Prickett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
Donne, John, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa
(Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1975)
–––––-. The Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner, 2nd edn (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1978)
–––––-. John Donne's Sermons on the Psalms and Gospels, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson
(London: University of California Press, 2003)
–––––-. Selected Poetry, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
Plato, The Republic, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1941)
–––––-. Plato’s Theory of Knowledge: the Theaetetus and the Sophist of Plato,
trans. Francis Macdonald Cornford (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1964)
Plutarch, Moralia, Book IV, ed. G. P. Goold (London: Heinemann, 1999)
Emblem books
Alciatus, Andreas, Emblematum Liber (Augustae Vindelicorum: H. Steynerum,
1531)
Combe, Thomas ,The Theater of Fine Devices (London, 1593)
van Haeften, Benedictus, Schola Cordis (Antwerp, 1629)
H. G., The Mirrour of Maiestie (London: William Jones, 1618)
Jenner, Thomas, The Soules Solace (London, 1626)
Montenay, Georgette de, Emblemes, ou Devises Chrestiennes (Lyon: Jean
Marcovelle, 1571)
Peacham, Henry, Minerva Britanna (London, 1608)
Paradin, Claude, The Heroicall Devises of M. Claudius Paradin, (London:
William Kearney, 1591)
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Whitney, Geffrey, A Choice of Emblemes (Leyden: F. Raphelengius, 1586)
Willet, Andrew, Sacrorum Emblematum Centuria Una (Cambridge, 1592)
Vaenius, Otho, Amorum Emblemata (Antwerp, 1608)
–––––-. Amoris Divini Emblemata (Antwerp, 1615)
Secondary sources
Bath, Michael, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture
(London: Longman, 1994)
Coffin, Charles M., ‘Donne's Divinity’, in The Kenyon Review, Vol. 16, No. 2
(Spring, 1954)
Daly, Peter M., Literature in the Light of the Emblem (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1979)
Deleuze, Gilles and Rosalind Krauss, ‘Plato and the Simulacrum’ in October,
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