SOURCE: DiPasquale, Theresa M. “The Cunning Elements of ‘I am a little world’” and “The Three Sonnets of ‘Goodfriday, 1613.’” In Literature and Sacrament: The Sacred and the Secular in John Donne, pp. 101-19, 119-29. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999.

In the following excerpt, DiPasquale explores the spiritual anxiety that she perceives in Donne's religious poetry, using La Corona, “I am a little world,” and “Goodfriday, 1613” as a basis for the discussion.

The sonnet is a problematic form for post-Reformation English poets because of the idolatrous implications of its history as the Petrarchan poets' verse-form of choice. As Ernest Gilman points out, Sidney uses the “the language of Protestant iconoclastic polemics” to define Astrophil's folly in Sonnet 5: “What we call Cupid's dart, / An image is, which for our selves we carve; / And fooles, adore in temple of our hart” (Gilman, 12-13, quoting Astrophil and Stella 5:5-7). As suggested in Sidney's...