‘Some lovely glorious nothing’: Lesley Sharpe considers the quality of recognition in poems by John Donne and Edwin Muir.

If recognition and immanence touch the essence of friendship, then it seems to me that the first lines of John Donne’s poem ‘Air and Angels’ capture this sense of closeness. The poet makes an emphatic, and moving, opening gambit: ‘Twice or thrice had I lov'd thee/ Before I knew thy face or name’, launching the poem into a multiple frame of reference that plays to both his innate Catholic sensibility - the religious iconography of his youth - and a Platonic idealism in which the body of the beloved can be apprehended in its ideal form, the beautiful long assonance of ‘shapeless flame’ full of the brightness of such an encounter. In addition, the extended simile which follows weaves in a Petrarchan preoccupation with the divine in its secular and romantic aspect, an ideal of courtly love that can elevate the beloved into a rarified, otherworldly creature, while pursuing more earthly designs.

            Those small repeated words, ‘so in’ - ‘So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame’ - lift us into the heart of the poem, dominating the first stanza and accumulating a presence which underpins the connection being described. They create an easy movement to a world where ‘Angels affect us oft and worshipped be’. The beguiling simplicity of the language and its precision, its sense of brightness and rhythm, plays with the way language can be used to embody that which can be imagined:

                     Still when, to where thou wert, I came,

            Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.

Yet this is a poem that keeps its feet firmly on the ground:

                   But since my soul, whose child love is,

         Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,

                   More subtle than the parent is

         Love must not be, but take a body too;

            The argument of the poem takes another turn, moves out of the realm of romance by introducing the dynamic of parent and child to explore ideas of causality, and also the possibility for what the thirteenth century theologian Thomas Aquinas called ‘the mixed life’, of both contemplation and action, captured in Donne’s witty use of ‘do’. Thus, an apparently dialectical approach can ensue, by which to rationally approach the beloved:

                    And therefore what thou wert, and who,

                            I bid Love ask, and now

            That it assume thy body, I allow,

            And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.

            Here we find more of Donne’s layered imagery, where the ‘lip, eye and brow’ seem at once to be playing to conventional Petrarchan imagery, where the beloved is so indistinct as to be generic, a sentiment at odds with the insistent particularity captured in the opening line of the poem. The ambiguous multiplicity of ‘twice or thrice’, however, to describe angelic visitation, is almost casual in its reckoning – who wouldn’t remember exactly how many times? There is also the lingering sensuality of those ‘limbs of flesh’. Simultaneously Donne is engaging with the way an angelic being can take form and manifest itself in and to the human realm, according to the medieval world whose philosophy he inherited. Air, being the purest of the elements, but lower than the angelic beings in the great chain of being which defined the medieval universe, is now the medium for this transformation from ‘glorious nothing’ to physical reality. 

            This is angelic being as fierce intelligence positioned above man, but the verb ‘fix’ here is also at odds with the mutable nature of both ‘air’, and, as will later be explored in the poem, the alchemy of human affection in its male and female aspects. To add another layer of complexity, angels were understood mostly to be male – think Gabriel, the messenger, or archangels Michael and Raphael. Or they were possessed of a kind of gender neutrality, above and beyond the distinctions of sex.  So why did Donne choose this iconography to explore a poem about human, sexual love, weaving into it so many other resonances?

            The poem was first published in 1633 in Poems, though written earlier, and engages with what might have seemed an easy convention that men occupy a higher spiritual position than women. Perhaps by using the distinction between ‘angels’ and ‘air’, one (superior) taking form through the other (inferior) - nearly, but not quite, identical - Donne can introduce, in the midst of perfect recognition, an almost indiscernible tension, an image which can be used later to also capture the complexity of desire. Developing the analogy, he considers the best medium for his own feelings of love to be manifested. What about his lover’s body? – ‘perhaps to ballast love I thought,/ And so more steadily to have gone’. As Katherine Rundell writes in Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, ‘he kicked aside the Petrarchan traditions of idealised, sanitised desire: he joyfully brought the body to collide with the soul’[i]. But its complex relation to the body is his constant preoccupation. For him love is a mixture of elemental things, ‘as all else being elemented too’ (‘Love’s Alchemy’). For all its mood of transcendence, love must fulfil its physicality, ‘else a great prince in prison lies’ (The Exstasie’).

            In ‘Air and Angels’, Donne explores how these two apparent opposites, body and soul, might find their middle ground, ‘For, nor in nothing, nor in things/ Extreme, and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere’. But, extending ideas of hierarchy, the beloved’s body, ‘love’s pinnace’ (a small ship going out from the main ship) would be overloaded by the strength of his feeling, with ‘wares which would sink admiration’, not the compatible medium for his pure love at all. The wry pun in pinnace (penis) shouldn’t go unnoticed, however, nor the seventeenth century association of these small boats with the precarious, and exciting, exploration of new worlds.

            Donne’s argument leads him away from an obvious hierarchy into the new, and somewhat abstract, world of science, to conclude that he must encircle her: ‘So thy love may be my love's sphere’, exploring the ways in which two aspects might find themselves in one relation.  The woman is also perhaps more specific in her immanent presence than in her realised form, hinting at a process of becoming that is never complete. As modern readers we might object to the apparent misogyny of Donne’s conclusion – men are like angels, women like air - or take this imagined ordering as a conventional conceit of his age. Or we might find in it an intricate metaphor for the almost imperceptible differences that create tension, and therefore energy and movement, in even our closest relationships, a way of articulating soulfulness and physicality:

                     Just such disparity

            As is 'twixt air and angels' purity,

            'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.

That the poem is divided into two fourteen-line stanzas, with lines of uneven length and differing rhyme scheme, is perhaps appropriate to the complexity of Donne’s argument.

            In Orkney poet Edwin Muir’s sonnet, ‘The Confirmation’ (Collected Poems, 1952), the poet expresses a similar sense of recognition, exclaiming in the opening lines, ‘Yes, yours my love is the right human face/ I in my mind had waited for this long’. Again, this Platonic sense of immanence must be brought into physical manifestation through the action of the poem, where it is the elements of the pristine natural world which might shape the metaphor by which the poet attempts to disclose and describe his love:

            - what shall I call thee? A fountain in a waste,

            A well of water in a country dry

            Or anything that’s honest and good, an eye

            That makes the whole world bright …

            Unlike Donne’s poem, however, the argument of the sonnet uses this sense of profound arrival and satiety to unfold an image of completeness, not to test it.  However, like Donne’s poem, it roots itself in beginnings and causality, where adjectives like ‘primal’, with its sense of primary echoed in ‘first’, creates a mood of both purity and potential, amplified in the soft alliteration of ‘blossom’ and ‘blowing’, which animate becoming:

                                                 …your open heart,

            Simple with giving, gives the primal deed,

            The first good world, the blossom, the blowing seed,

Again, we are in a heightened territory, where the ‘primal deed’ is love. It appropriately finds an echo in ‘seed’, the metaphor for its own continuous expansion and multiplication, and the images of the beloved are so integrated and harmonised with the natural world, that all its elements can be appropriated to build her physicality.

            The poet realises his love through language, giving it a solidity and universality by which he can imagine it. Now she is like ‘The hearth, the steadfast land, the wandering sea’, images of rest, of homeliness, mixed with a sense of expansion, of swell and movement, even of restlessness. Tucked inside the image of ‘the wandering sea’ we can also find an image of return, where the poem comes full circle to the seeker of the earlier part of the poem, ‘a traveller’ who, in meeting the beloved,

                                              …finds a place

            Of welcome suddenly amid the wrong

            Valleys and rock and twisting roads.

The comfortless isolation of the journey is expressed in words like ‘false’, ‘waste country’ and ‘dry’, as the protagonist of ‘The Confirmation’ wanders through a physical world empty of soul, but his search for the ‘true’ is connected through rhyme to the idea of ‘you’. Muir’s shift of tone in the sestet expands a mood of purity where ‘the whole world’ seems ‘bright’, and the echo of this phrase in ‘the first good world’ heightens the sense of return to unconditional love. It loops in something of the Anglo-Saxon sense of life as a journey through the harsh elemental world (‘All is toilsome in the earthly kingdom’[ii]), with echoes of Auden’s response to that poem, ‘The Wanderer’ – ‘ever that man goes/ Through place-keepers, through forest trees’, carrying with him an image of consolation:

            There head falls forward, fatigued at evening,

            And dreams of home,

            Waving from window, spread of welcome,

            Kissing of wife under single sheet.[iii]

            ‘The Confirmation’ is a poem that I often return to. As with Donne’s poem, I love its opening sense of recognition, and find its apparent simplicity endearing, although its metaphors extend themselves through multiple images to create a complex and layered sense of what it means to feel completely at home with someone.  Having created a whole world to serve as metaphor for the beloved, it is towards one particular quality that the poem is moving. ‘The hearth, the steadfast land, the wandering sea’ are ‘Not beautiful or rare in every part,/ But like yourself, as thy were meant to be.’ Reminiscent of the final couplet of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, ‘My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun’, which parodies conventional attempts to eulogise the beloved through a naming of parts, the word ‘rare’ in Muir’s poem resonates with a similar energy to its Elizabethan forbear: ‘And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare/ as any she belied with false compare.’ [iv]

            Here we have acceptance as another aspect of friendship, allowing for its imperfections. But tucked inside the word ‘rare’ is this idealism again, meaning both ‘few in number’, ‘unusual’, and therefore precious, but also, in an older meaning from the fifteenth century, ‘airy’. We might use it in this way to describe an atmosphere as ‘rarified’. Such an atmosphere is the natural home of Donne’s protagonist, allowing his poem to begin with the idea of steadfastness to which Muir’s poem also comes in its conclusion. In ‘The Confirmation’ the personification of ‘the wandering sea’ and ‘steadfast land’ give a positive agency to the forces of nature, and establish a feeling of constancy within the natural rhythms of change. For Donne the journey towards physical manifestation brings a tantalising lack of resolution, leaving us with ‘Just such disparity/ As is 'twixt air and angels' purity’. A hair’s breadth, perhaps, but an enlivening tension, nevertheless, between those things of differing substance, and the capturing in word, and experience, of ‘Some lovely glorious nothing’.

Lesley Sharpe

Air and Angels by John Donne | Poetry Foundation    John Donne, Poems (1633)

The Confirmation - National Poetry Day   Edwin Muir, Collected Poems (Faber, 1952)

[i]   Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Faber, 2022)

[ii] ‘The Wanderer’ The original Anglo-Saxon text dates from c. 900, and is by an unknown author.

[iii]  Auden’s response, ‘The Wanderer’, was first published in 1930. W.H. Auden, Collected Poems (Faber, 1945)

[iv]  William Shakespeare, Sonnet 130