This week’s poem is one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets: “At the round earth’s imagin’d corners, blow”.
At the round earth’s imagin’d corners, blow
John Donne (1571—1631)
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scatter’d bodies go;
Poem 313. Holy Sonnets: At the round earth’s imagin’d corners, blow
At the round earth’s imagin’d corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scatter’d 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.
In this seventh of his holy sonnets, Donne meditates on the Day of Judgement and the power of penitence.
He imagines the resurrection of multitudes of the dead at the behest of the angels of the Book of Revelation—each soul returning to its body regardless of the means of death: flood, fire, battle, famine, and so on—and the assembly of those who will “never taste death’s woe”: the souls who are still living at the Day of Judgement.
He then prays that this may not happen for “a space” since he fears that his sins are so many and so grave that to ask forgiveness (or “abundance of thy grace”) on that final day will be too late—he needs time to learn penitence and to repent of all his trespasses which will be as sure a pathway to Heaven as if God should pardon him through the blood of Jesus.
This sonnet is one of nine set to music by Benjamin Britten after he visited the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, though I can’t say I admire it personally. I prefer Williametta Spencer’s setting which is beautifully performed by the Hastings College Choir. The poem also inspired the title of Philip Jose Farmer’s 1972 book, the first in his Riverworld series: “To Your Scattered Bodies Go.”
I like this poem because of the imagery and because it is another of those read by Richard Burton which I encountered so long ago.