The ordo salutis: Sacred Circularities in John Donne's “Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward”

Summary

JOHN Donne's “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward” opens with an elaborate conceit that asks the reader, in what Thomas Sloane calls “the language of a geometrical theorem” to imagine the inner workings of man's soul as a Ptolemaic Universe where devotion should be the prime mover. The speaker in this poem appears to be the same as the speaker in Donne's “Holy Sonnets,” a stand-in for the poet himself, and also, according to Sloane, a stand-in for the Roman god Janus, a two-faced deity, “a juxtaposition, of two directions” whose very being “suggests multiple, even incongruous perspectives, looking backward and forward” simultaneously. Sloane argues that “the speaker experiences pulls in opposite directions”—vocalized in arguments from the mouths on either side of his head—the end result of which is the “paradoxical expression of [his] inability to act … within which the poem's present is defined.” But the poem's present, of course, is defined by action. The present progressive form of the verb “to ride” in the poem's title conjures the image of a poet in the very act of “Riding Westward.” As Joe Glasser points out, “Donne is not only looking but moving in the opposite direction” from that which he thinks is correct. The speaker is capable, then, of acting, but not of acting in the way he believes he should because his body and the mortal world that surrounds it limit this type of action. Yet the speaker has not actually accepted “pleasure or business”—or both—as his soul's “first mover” as he claims to have done in line 9, for this poem is—in and of itself—an act of devotion, which is for this speaker, as he explains in line 2, “the intelligence that moves.” Instead of Sloane's “curiously Janus-faced man,” I suggest that we find a devoted man, consumed with thoughts of Christ and the crucifixion. Though, like all mortal men, this man cannot help but ride westward toward death. This poem, therefore, as many of Donne's poems, doesn't call for something to happen, but seeks to explain why something is currently happening. It is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. If the speaker in “Good Friday” continues riding westward, he will eventually circumnavigate the globe and wind up back where he started.