Absence and Presence: The Unfinished Language of John Donne's "Resurrection, imperfect"
Long considered unfinished, "Resurrection, imperfect" remains among the least studied of John Donne's poems. A recent flurry of interpretation, however, has entertained the possibility that the poem's incompleteness is poetic artifice - often relating the poem's unfinished n...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Dep.
2021
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| In: |
Religion & literature
Year: 2021, Volume: 53, Issue: 2, Pages: 73-94 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Donne, John 1572-1631, Resurrection, Imperfect
/ Dionysius Areopagita ca. 5./6. Jh.
/ Jesus Christus
/ Presence
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| RelBib Classification: | KAB Church history 30-500; early Christianity KAH Church history 1648-1913; modern history NBF Christology |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Long considered unfinished, "Resurrection, imperfect" remains among the least studied of John Donne's poems. A recent flurry of interpretation, however, has entertained the possibility that the poem's incompleteness is poetic artifice - often relating the poem's unfinished nature to its transcendent subject, Christ's resurrection. While this essay draws from that recent context, it abstains from the question of intentionality regarding the poem's incompleteness and instead considers the theological and poetic import of the resurrection as a limit to finite speech. Does transcendence, as the poem might suggest, silence speech? Does poetry fail in its encounter with the ineffable? The aim of this essay is to complicate such conclusions by arguing that the difficulty presented by Christ's resurrection arises not from transcendence as such but from the character or the nature (or we might say, theologically, the fact of) divine presence in the incarnation. The essay draws out this argument by interpreting the poem alongside a christological rereading of Pseudo-Dionysius's corpus. The apophatic and cataphatic registers of the Areopagite's theology, rendered as meditations upon Incarnate presence rather than abstract reflections on a Plotinian God-beyond-being, bring into focus the christological threads that connect "Resurrection, imperfect" to the wider context of Donne's poetics. Read thus, the poem offers an image of how the limit presented by divine absence is one that both silences and bequeaths language; it is a limit that gives language to itself, and it does this, unexpectedly and paradoxically, because the limits of language are cleaved by divine presence. |
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| ISSN: | 2328-6911 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Religion & literature
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1353/rel.2021.0003 |