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Doomsday

by Tara L. Lyons

The dawn of the day of resurrection is a time for exultation in Pulter’s “Of Night and Morning”. Her choice then to focus on the joy of rising to a new eternal life, rather than the anxiety of final judgement or the dread of doomsday, aligns with her speaker’s assumption that she will be among the chosen. In contrast, the poems of two of Pulter’s contemporaries, John Donne and George Herbert, reveal conflicting emotions about this final day and what it will mean for the souls of all the living and the dead.

George Herbert, Doomsday
  • COme away,
  • Make no delay.
  • Summon all the dust to rise,
  • Till it stirre, and rubbe the eyes;
  • While this member jogs the other,
  • Each one whispring, Live you brother?
  • Come away,
  • Make this the day.
  • Dust, alas, no musick feels,
  • But thy trumpet: then it kneels,
  • As peculiar notes and strains
  • Cure Tarantulaes raging pains.
  • Come away,
  • O make no stay!
  • Let the graves make their confession,
  • Lest at length they plead possession:
  • Fleshes stubbornnesse may have
  • Read that lesson to the grave.
  • Come away,
  • Thy flock doth stray.
  • Some to windes their bodie lend,
  • And in them may drown a friend:
  • Some in noisome vapours grow
  • To a plague and publick wo.
  • Come away,
  • Help our decay.
  • Man is out of order hurl’d,
  • Parcel’d out to all the world.
  • Lord, thy broken consort raise,
  • And the musick shall be praise.
George Herbert, The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (Cambridge: Printed by Thomas Buck, and Roger Daniel, 1633), page 181. [Transcribed by Tara L. Lyons.]
John Donne, Holy Sonnet VII
  • At the round earth’s imagined corners blow
  • Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
  • From death, you numberless infinities
  • Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go;
  • All whom the flood did, and fire shall o’erthrow,
  • All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,
  • Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
  • Shall behold God, and never taste death’s woe.
  • But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space;
  • For, if above all these my sins abound,
  • ’Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
  • When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
  • Teach me how to repent, for that’s as good
  • As if Thou hadst seal’d my pardon with Thy blood.
John Donne, Poems of John Donne vol. 1 ed. E. K. Chambers (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896), pp. 160-61. Luminarium.org