Reconciliation and Recreation at the Meeting Place for Opposites: Revisiting Donne’s Imagined Corners

In John Donne’s Holy Sonnet beginning “At the round earth’s imagined corners,” the speaker lays bare the poem’s imaginary scenario. John Carey, in his seminal if controversial study, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (1981), titles his final chapter “Imagined Corners,” as he analyzes the gravitation of Donne’s imagination towards “meeting places for opposites.” Although critics recognize Donne as a challenging, introspective poet and frequently explore dimensions of his “poetic imagination,” the role of the imagination as a cognitive faculty in his poetry has received much less attention. This chapter revisits the imagined corners of two Donne poems—the secular love poem, “The Ecstasy,” and the aforementioned Holy Sonnet—to explicate the function of the imagination as a mediator between sense and understanding. Both poems hinge on the imagination’s role as one of the internal senses, which, in Katharine Park’s phrase, “bridge the gap” between, on the one hand, the particular, external sensations of embodiment and, on the other, the highest cognitive operations of the intellective soul. Close readings are set alongside Donne’s own comments on the imagination and cognition, both direct and implicit, taken from his verse and prose letters, sermons, and devotional writings. This chapter argues that Donne’s imagined corners beckon his reader’s imagination to reconcile oppositional concepts and recreate scenarios that have no direct parallel in sensory experience. At the same time, Donne’s poems insist on the embodiment of the imagination, but within a bodily reality that is also the means to approach and understand the spiritual, the eternal, and God. The pronounced stimulation and extension of the reader’s imagination testify to the imagination’s nature as both embodied and ensouled, within the frameworks of early modern psychology. Donne understood the imagination as the brain’s meeting place for opposites: of reader and author, body and soul, humanity and divinity. The imagination emerges as a necessary yet imperfect faculty. It is essential for understanding things we cannot experience through the senses, and it can aid devotion, yet its activities are bound within the corrupted framework of fallen humanity, and so remain unreliable.