In his introduction, David Marno states that “Donne’s devotional verse has still not seen a book-length study” (31). Death Be Not Proud would fill that void in its consideration of the Holy Sonnets, or rather, in constructing its argument around a single Holy Sonnet. Of its seven chapters, the first, second, and seventh expound this Holy Sonnet and envelop a four-chapter core that recovers the art of holy attention. Understanding holy attention, the cultivation of an “‘undistracted turn to God’” (88), is, according to Marno, the key to unlocking Donne’s Holy Sonnets. These poems constitute devotional thought experiments, “poetic meditations in preparation for prayer” (2), by which the speakers somehow emerge from distraction to attend to God in pure prayer. For Marno, the Holy Sonnets reconcile theology and poetry, the apparent clash of the doctrinal and the creative—religious givenness and poetic invention—by staging the speakers perceiving the given as gift and inventing faith as proof. A human creature is a “thanksgiving machine” (65) and the Holy Sonnets are properly thanksgiving poems where Donne’s speakers finally acknowledge the given as gift. To strengthen his case, Marno contextualizes the famous words in Donne’s thanksgiving sermon on Psalm 6 about a poem’s “‘force’” being “‘left to the shutting up’” (57).

Marno is wary of Louis Martz and Barbara Lewalski’s dependence upon confessional identity for deciphering the Holy Sonnets. His own approach avoids this tack by arguing for Donne’s responsiveness to post-Reformation Christianity’s “collective revival and popularization of devotional techniques … practiced primarily by monks and the clergy” (107). The tracing of the intellectual history of holy attention across the book’s middle is its most sound and rewarding feature. The inquiry’s scope encompasses Stoic ethical concepts of prosochē and apatheia, Pauline theology, Clementine and Evagrian formulations of asceticism, John Cassian’s monastic regulative ideal, Thomist discussion of mental versus vocal prayer, Ignatian devotional exercises, and Augustinian meditations on distraction and extentus, “more durable, more focused” attention (140).

The application of this inheritance of holy attention to Donne’s poetics is the book’s weakest aspect. Marno describes how “every Holy Sonnet uses the sonnet form to drive itself toward its volta and closure; that is, toward a poetic conversion and the ensuing grace” (177). However, not every Holy Sonnet resolves so smartly from resentment into thanksgiving. A one-size-fits-all framework jars with the fascinating mixture and discomforting caprices and quirks of this group of lyrics: “To E. of D. with six holy Sonnets” likens these poems to Nilotic “strange creatures.” Chapter 6 explains the poems’ characteristic tonal dissonance by pressing into service the biting rhetorical trope of sarcasmos, mockery of the flesh. The work charting Christianity’s appropriation of this classical trope to express an ethos against the world, flesh, and devil is again illuminating, but its function in explicating the Holy Sonnets less so. Given the monograph’s tight focus and the manageability of secondary material on the Holy Sonnets, analyses of individual lyrics puzzlingly omit substantial engagement with, and sometimes any reference to, signal close readings that have gone before. The exclusion from Marno’s discussion of “If faythfull Soules” of Robert Reeder’s 2010 John Donne Journal essay, the only essay wholly dedicated to this sonnet, is an oversight, especially when both critics note resemblances between Donne’s speaker and Hamlet as they angst over their fathers’ ghosts.

Chapter 7 retreads the well-traveled path of Donne’s treatment of the resurrection and the possible affinity between corruptible and incorruptible bodies. When, after a 130-page interval, this last chapter returns to the titular Holy Sonnet, Marno asserts that “Donne used poetry as a devotional technology to create the spiritual body” (211). The general claim is that the Holy Sonnets operate as devotional-poetic “engines” (211); the particular claim for the book’s central, much scrutinized Holy Sonnet is that the poem, by fully attending to death as its subject, overcomes “death itself, … distraction itself” (215), and “provides a practical, experiential proof for the mortality of death by showing that distraction may be overcome” (217). For all its eloquence, this interpretation, essentially the study’s profit and punchline, is belief-beggaring, if not, to submit another play on attentio, overstrained and overstretched, “like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.”