A Litany by John Donne (1609)
The speaker conducts an extended prayer for spiritual renewal, addressing divine power and invoking the aid of the blessed, the angels, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, martyrs, virgins, and teachers of the church. He asks to be purged of pride, lust, despair, vanity, false humility, appetite for fame, neglect of duty, and misplaced confidence in ritual or inherited holiness. The prayer turns incarnation, poverty, suffering, and death into pleas for freedom from sin and readiness for death. It also asks for steadiness amid sickness, war, plague, heresy, corrupt preaching, and unjust rule. Throughout, the speaker distrusts even the act of praying, begging not to rely on intercession more than grace. He ends by asking that promises awaken amendment, that learning and beauty remain rightly used, and that sin be removed so completely that it has nowhere to return.
By John Donne · First published 1609 · Genre: Devotional Poetry, Metaphysical Poetry, Liturgical Poetry · 2,792 words
First lines
Father of Heaven, and Him, by whom / It, and us for it, and all else for us, / Thou madest and govern'st ever, come / And recreate me, now grown ruinous. / My heart is by dejection, clay, / And by self-murder, red. / From this red earth, O Father, purge away / All vicious tinctures, that new-fashioned / I may rise up from death, before I'm dead.
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A Litany is listed on Textopian as a poem by John Donne, dated 1609 CE.
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- Work type: Poem
- Author: John Donne
- Date: 1609 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Devotional Poetry, Metaphysical Poetry, Liturgical Poetry, Baroque Poetry, Meditative Verse
- Length: 2,792 words
- Structure: 1 section, 28 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Difficult (College Level)
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Genres
- Devotional Poetry — The work is structured as a formal prayer liturgy addressing God the Father, Son, Holy Ghost, and the Trinity, with repeated petitionary formulas ('deliver us', 'hear us') seeking spiritual purification and divine intercession, making it fundamentally a devotional supplication.
- Metaphysical Poetry — Exhibits Donne's signature metaphysical conceits—elaborate intellectual paradoxes and extended metaphors comparing spiritual concepts to physical phenomena (e.g., the body as a 'glass lantern', the soul requiring purging from 'red earth'), central to the metaphysical poetry movement.
- Liturgical Poetry — Follows the formal structure of Christian liturgical litany with formulaic repetitions, invocations of saints and patriarchs, and collective supplication patterns characteristic of ceremonial prayer forms in ecclesiastical tradition.
- Baroque Poetry — Displays baroque sensibilities through ornate and elaborate language, emotional spiritual anguish, intricate paradoxes, complex imagery combining the sacred and corporeal, and densely packed intellectual and sensory intensity.
Tags
metaphysical poetry · devotional · prayer · religious · seventeenth-century literature · baroque · spiritual meditation · sacred verse · theologically complex · liturgical · wit and conceits · Catholic themes