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Article: 'Let them sleepe': Donne's personal allusion in 'Holy Sonnet IV.' (John Donne)
- Article from:
- Papers on Language & Literature
- Article date:
- June 22, 1993
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1993 Southern Illinois University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Editors and commentators have remarked on the biblical authority for the curious, "vivid" composition of place which opens John Donne's fourth Holy Sonnet (fourth in the 1633 first printed edition and in the early Westmoreland manuscript).(1) The poetic mediator's figuration of Judgment Day--
At the round earths imagin'd corners, blow Your trumpets, Angells ... (1-2)
-- Recalls the precise details of the prophetic vision of the Apocalypse in Revelations:
And after these things I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds ... (7:1)
rendered in more poetic terms in The Vulgate,
Post haec ...