Holy Sonnets

John Donne (1572-1631) was an English poet and preacher, the most famous of the so-called metaphysical poets. He wrote love poetry, satires, elegies and songs, and later in life he became a priest and Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London, where his sermons drew large audiences. His work is noted for its vibrancy of language and the immediacy of its metaphors, and it has been admired for its realistic and sensual style.

The Holy Sonnets are a group of religious poems that circulated in manuscript during his lifetime and were printed only after his death. Written in the form of the sonnet, they bring together the intellectual ingenuity associated with Donne's love poetry and a deep concern with sin, judgment and salvation. The speaker often addresses God directly, sometimes pleading, sometimes arguing, and sometimes confronting death itself, as in the well-known sonnet beginning Death, be not proud. The poems are known for their abrupt openings, for their tight argument and for their wonderfully surprising images.

The poems have been arranged in different orders by different editors, and the number included in a given edition varies. This LibriVox recording presents nineteen of them, each in its own file and each titled by its first line, such as Holy Sonnet I, Thou hast made me, and shall Thy work decay?

David Barnes reads the whole sequence in about twenty-five minutes. The sonnets are packed with thought and feeling, so they reward being heard more than once. Whether you approach them as devotional poetry, as literary history or simply as some of the most vivid writing of the seventeenth century, they remain an exhilarating experience.