[Holy Sonnet XIV]
To my ear, this is where the feminine/masculine schema is less efficient. Donne sounds slightly too contestatory and manipulative, like he's trying too hard, or picking a fight. Or trying to write a good sounding poem, which it is.
Compare George Herbert's _Church Monuments_ (a great poem).
While that my soul repairs to her devotion, Here I intomb my flesh, that it betimes May take acquaintance of this heap of dust; To which the blast of death's incessant motion, Fed with the exhalation of our crimes, Drives all at last. Therefore I gladly trust
My body to this school, that it may learn To spell his elements, and find his birth Written in dusty heraldry and lines; Which dissolution sure doth best discern Comparing dust with dust, and earth with earth. These laugh at jet and marble put for signs,
To sever the good fellowship of dust, And spoil the meeting. What shall point out them, When they shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat To kiss those heaps, which now they have in trust? Dear flesh, while I do pray, learn here thy stem And true descent, that when thou shalt grow fat
And wanton in thy cravings, thou mayst know That flesh is but the glass which holds the dust That measures all our time; which also shall Be crumbled into dust. Mark, here below How tame these ashes are, how free from lust, That thou mayst fit thyself against thy fall.
[end]
This is a "her" ("my soul") that knows her place, so to speak. Herbert gives us a moral masochism, with none of the "lust of pain" ("how free from lust") characteristic of feminine ertotogenic masochism; here the gendered descriptives get murky--there's none of Donne's "hysteria" or, conversely, masculine provocation. One way of understanding this might be as a sublimated feminine masochism. But what exactly registers as feminine vs. masculine, and the value of the masochism (not at all degrading), is not clear cut and doesn't easily fit a gendered matrix.
Alec
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