The Sermons of John Donne, Volume X

The Sermons of John Donne, edited by Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter, Volume X, brings to completion the monumental sequence of Donne’s preaching, concluding with his final and most famous sermon, *Deaths Duell*, delivered before King Charles I in February 1631. Spanning the breadth of his ministry, this concluding collection situates Donne’s work in its full arc—from his late and hesitant ordination, through his triumph as Dean of St. Paul’s, to the physical decline and spiritual intensity of his last years. What emerges is not only the record of a preacher of extraordinary rhetorical power but also the unfolding of a life increasingly surrendered to the office he had once resisted.

This final volume emphasizes the unity-in-diversity of Donne’s achievement. While anthologies often favor his morbid or rhetorical extremes, the full sermons reveal a more balanced Donne: a preacher of careful structure, plain counsel, pastoral sympathy, and theological depth. Here we find sermons of controversy, defending the English Church against both Roman Catholics and Separatists; sermons of civic and parochial duty, rooted in his life as Vicar of St. Dunstan’s; and sermons of profound spirituality, where images of light, peace, and resurrection dominate. The early undated sermons retain the imaginative flourish of his middle period, while the later ones—though marked by prolixity and repetition—convey an aged preacher intent on plainness, reconciliation, and consolation. *Deaths Duell* epitomizes this dual movement: Donne, visibly dying, preaches both his own farewell and a meditation on Christ’s Passion, closing with words of hope in the Resurrection.

Read together, these sermons display Donne as an artist in prose whose variety of moods—quiet, argumentative, imaginative, oratory—parallel the mosaics of Christian art, each figure distinct yet part of a greater pattern. In ending with Donne’s meditation on mortality and divine love, the volume secures his reputation as both poet and preacher, one who turned his own afflictions into testimony, and who, in Yeats’s words, convinces us that “one who is but a man like us has seen God.”

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1962.