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The Progress of The Soul: Donne and Hopkins in Meditation
The Progress of The Soul: Donne and Hopkins in Meditation
context, and the tone of each poem, the poet's very voice, shapes and
modulates itself according to the person who is spoken to " 3 This is
less so for Hopkins in general, but true for the "Terrible Sonnets," which
only make sense if read as a dramatic sequence along Ignatian lines.
Both Donne and Hopkins had direct knowledge of the Ignatian methods,
both, in fact, wrote something on Ignatius: Donne's satirical Ignatius Hxs
Conclave (1610-11) and Hopkins's unpublished Commentary on the Spiritual
Exercises (see Journals and Papers). In spite of Donne's later disaffection
with the Roman Church, he was brought up as a Catholic by a pious mother
the inevitability of suffering, but he uses the condition "of desolation in the
Ignatian manner; it purges the conscience and clears the way for the state
of consolation. I shall go so far as to suggest that the suffering represented
in the "Terrible Sonnets" is something of an affectation, a wilful exaggera-
tion of the poet's angst designed to exploit the religious (meditative) and
dramatic potential of desolation. The sequence is in effect an elaborate
recreation of the Ignatian meditation on the Discernment of Spirits.
Hopkins conceived of desolation in the Ignatian way as "darkness of the
soul, turmoil of the mind, inclination to low and earthly things, restlessness
When the enemy of our human nature has been detected and recog-
nized by his deception . . . it is well for the person who has been
tempted to examine afterward the course of the good thoughts that
were suggested to him. Let him consider their beginning and how
the enemy continued little by little to make him fall from the state
of sweetness . until he finally brought him to his perverse design.
312
With the experience and knowledge thus acquired . . . one may
better guard himself in the future against the customary deceits of
the enemy.M
JAY PABINI
Dartmouth College, U.S.A.