I sometimes get asked why, on social networks, I tend to use the name @nothingelseis. This old essay from 2005 should go some way to explaining that.

1. Synopsis
In 1628 Donne wrote, ‘How barren a thing is Arithmetique? . . . How empty a thing is
Rhetorique? . . . How weak a thing is Poetry?’, and yet many would agree Donne’s verses
number among the most satisfying, fruitful and powerful in the English language. I argue
that in order to generate these positive qualities, Donne drew on an ever-increasingly
sophisticated concept of ‘nothing’, going so far as to incorporate a mathematical ‘0’ into two
of his poems—‘A Jeat Ring Sent’ and ‘A Valediction: on Weeping’. I also consider how Donne
views the relation between words and objects; at first he seems to flit comfortably between
nominalist and essentialist theories of language, enjoying the paradox. When, however, even
Donne’s most pregnant nothing ‘dissolves’ in heart-break, we realise that a more appropriate
linguistic model would in fact be that of St. Augustine, with its secular ‘cupiditas’ and
enlightened ‘caritas’.

2. “DONNE’S NOUGHTINESS”
Three times in the extant sermons—once at Lincoln’s Inn, once at St. Dunstans,
once at court—Donne guides his listeners through the ‘four words, by which man
is called’ (S.10.197). For two of those names, Adam and Enosh, the interpretation
offered by Donne is consistent throughout because the words themselves, literally
translated “blushing earth” and “calamity” respectively, come to the preacher
with an implied moral force already present. Translating the third of man’s
names however, Gheber, Donne’s position is more apt to shift. At Lincoln’s Inn,
where man is called Gheber, . . . which is derived from Greatness, man is but
great so, as that word signifies; It signifies a Giant, an oppressour, Great in
power, and in a delight to doe great mischiefs upon others, or Great, as he is a
Great mark, and easily hit by others. (S.2.79)
Delivering this sermon in 1618, it is highly unlikely Donne’s congregation would
have contained those same friends or former fellow law students whom Carey
imagined welcoming ‘his satires and elegies . . . [with] their erotic conquests and
lordly postures [that] reversed social reality.’1 But even if Donne wasn’t talking
at familiar faces per se, he would have recognised in his audience at least that
same type of person who wouldn’t mind knocking authority figures a little. Since
Donne considers David the author of the text in question (Psalms 38.3) it is
within this frame of mind that Gheber is made so readily identifiable with
Goliath, ‘a Great mark . . . easily hit by others’ because of his great size. Eleven
years later, and nearing the end of his preaching career, Donne is at court and in
the presence of the King when he must again broach the name of Gheber.
1 John Carey (ed.), John Donne, The Major Works (Oxford, 2000), p. 7.
2

3. One name man hath, that hath some taste of greatnesse, and power in it, Gheber.
And yet, I that am man, says the Prophet, (for there that name of Gheber is used)
I am the man that hath seen affliction, by the rod of Gods wrath. . . . And man,
that is Gheber, the greatest, and powerfullest of men, is yet but that man, that
may possibly, nay that may justly see affliction by the rod of Gods wrath, and
from Gheber be made Adam. (S.9.62)
Given the change of setting one could hardly expect Donne to equate
‘greatnesse’ with ‘giant . . . oppressours’ quite as before. In the earlier sermon—in
the earlier sermons in general—one has a sense of Donne trying to stamp his
own authority on the word and discover the truth of what it signified, in later age
he speaks more of detecting the ‘taste’ of a word. Donne’s message ultimately is
the same in both sermons, the powerful man brought back down to earth (here,
in the phrase ‘from Gheber be made Adam’). The difference lies in the way Donne
proceeds; no longer inviting his audience to take pot-shots, he affords instead
those ‘powerfullest of men’ the opportunity (‘may possibly’) for grace to bow
before the rod of God, making themselves ‘justly’ humble. In 1629, against a
backdrop of violent political and theological unrest (the murder of Buckingham,
the dissolution of Parliament, the appointment of Laud as Bishop of London,
declarations against innovations in religion), it must be said that Donne’s work is
artfully done—the original flavour of Gheber is preserved but in its newfound
subtlety better suits the more sensitive palate of the King.
Of course, Donne could sometimes go too far down this line of sedating an
originally vital idea. In a sermon on Psalms 89.48, Gheber has lost so much
flavour as to become positively bland—‘Mi Gheber’, writes Donne,
the word alwayes signifying a man accomplished in all excellencies, . . . good
opinion justly conceived, keeps him from being Ishe, . . . innocency and integrity
keepes him from being Adam, red earth, from bleeding, or blushing at any thing
hee hath done; That holy and Religious Art of Arts . . . keeps him from being
Enos, miserable or wretched in any fortune; Hee is Gheber, a great Man, and a
3

4. good Man, a happy Man, and a holy Man. (S.2.200-201)
For precisely this kind of sermon writing Donne is roundly, and justly, chastised
by T.S. Eliot in his essay on Lancelot Andrewes; the ‘impure motives’ and hunt
for ‘facile success’2 in words leaves Donne with a radically cheapened and
distorted version of his original translation, now turning a blind eye to the
downsides implicit in ‘greatnesse’. As Joan Webber observed, Donne habitually
‘begins with the word, and lets doubling and piling up . . . runs represent[ing] the
making of a thought, the associative progress of a mind’s movement’3—rather
than deliver the mot juste straight out Donne demonstrates a process of
refinement move him from a grosser expression to one nearer the truth (e.g., ‘a
limited, a determined, a circumscribed work’ [S.4.166]). The passage above looked
to have followed this scheme but in fact lacks clear-minded progression—‘good’ is
less precise a word than ‘great’, ‘happy’ less interesting than ‘good’, ‘holy’ has
little in common with ‘happy’ aside from alliteration. Defining Gheber in terms of
what it is not—non-Ish, non-Adam, non-Enos—and proceeding from that
definition to conclude that Gheber therefore must be ‘a holy Man’ is not a
convincing argument, its language lacks inner-conviction.4 In Donne’s defence,
we know this sermon was delivered ‘to the Lords upon Easter-day [1619] The
King being then dangerously sick at New-Market’; maybe he was just too eager to
please his powerful audience. Still one hopes he had integrity enough to blush a
little at his own inconstancy, beginning as he does with the word ‘alwayes’.
Donne’s grasp of Latin was good-ish, his understanding of Hebrew less
substantial than he made it out to be, his Greek poor. The opinion of Don
2 For Lancelot Andrewes (London, 1928), p. 16.
3 Contrary Music (Madison, 1963), p. 42.
4 Compare the more satisfactory ‘Adam is Blushing, Ish is lamenting, Geber is oppressing, Enosh
is all that.’ (S.2.79).
4

5. Cameron Allen5 was that Donne had ‘“small Hebrew and less Greek” . . . At no
time does Donne seem to know as much Hebrew as Andrewes or even Hall
although he is more ostentatious in his use of it than either of them’ (213). In
spite of a relatively limited grasp of these languages, perhaps even because of it,
the act of translation held for Donne a certain fascination, as if the process were
itself possessed of a mystic power, the effect of which can be seen to operate even
on the pattern of a sermon’s metre—‘When [Donne] follows a Latin quotation
with the English version, he often introduces a new rhythm or tone to the
movement of his paragraph.’6 Dean Donne’s particular interest was in Hebrew,
and in the ‘Eastern tongues’ more generally, ‘where a perpetual perplexity in the
words cannot choose but cast a perplexity upon the things.’7 The East, in
language, as significant for him as East geographically,
Christ’s name is Oriens, the East; . . . First we looke towards our East, the
fountaine of light, and of life. There this world beganne; the Creation was in the
east. And there our next world beganne too. (S.9.49-51)
Approaching Eastern tongues as if they too were a ‘fountaine of light’, he
envisages the words ‘casting perplexity upon the things’ like a sun rising in the
east and casting its shadows over the land in the west. He frequently referred to
Christ’s name of Oriens and, indeed, the final lines of his own epitaph were ‘Hic
licet in occiduo cinere aspicit eum / Cujus nomen est Oriens’, translated by
Archdeacon Wrangham thus: ‘And here, though set in dust, he beholdeth Him,
Whose name is the Rising.’ As he attempts to map ‘the language in which God
spake to man, the Hebrew’ (S.7.62) onto a Western grammar Donne almost
invariably will relate to his listeners some of the semantic differences between
the languages. Having established the precedence of verbum over res (the light
5 ‘Dean Donne Sets His Text’, ELH, 10 (1943), 208-29.
6 A.C. Partridge, John Donne: Language and Style (London, 1978), pp. 221-22.
7 Quoted by Simpson in The Sermons of John Donne (Berkeley, 1962), X, 307.
5

6. comes first and then the dust, perplexity in words before perplexity in things), he
normally succeeds in finding a correlation between the nature of the Hebrew
language and the power of human thought. Take, for example, this passage
discussing the language of the Holy Ghost,
God himselfe is eternall and cannot bee considered in the distinction of times, so
hath that language in which God hath spoken in his written word, the Hebrew,
the least consideration of Time of any other language. . . . it is an indifferent
thing to the holy Ghost whether he speak in the present, or in the future, or in
the time that is past . . . There is no fuisti, nor es, nor eris, That he was, or is, or
will be so (S.9.335)
Then place it side-by-side with these celebrated lines,
I am not all here, I am here preaching upon this text, I am at home in my Library
considering whether S. Gregory, or S. Hierome, have said best of this text, before.
I am here speaking to you, and yet I consider . . . in the same instant, what is
likely you will say to one another, when I have done. You are not all here neither;
you are here now, hearing me, and yet you are thinking that you have heard a
better Sermon somewhere else, of this text before. (S.3.110)
We find a clear contrast, between indifference to tense on the one hand and a
marked ‘hypersensitivity’8 to change on the other. In the latter passage, three
seemingly uncomplicated present tenses (‘I am’, ‘I am’, ‘I am’) are thrown into
disarray both by the physical impossibility of a man being in three places at the
same time—iam, “now”9—and ambiguity as to what ‘before’ actually refers back
to. Is he at home in his Library before he delivers the sermon? He could just as
easily retreat there afterwards, having delivered the sermon before. Man
considers the es present (‘what it is’), the eris future, (‘you will say’) and the fuisti
past (‘I have done’), the last affording the listener another one of those
Donne/done puns. The first passage is serious, but a slightly comical tone in the
8 John Carey, John Donne: Mind, Life, Art (London, 1981), p. 169.
9 Additional to this Latinate pun, Donne may be working a memory of Exodus 3.14, ‘I am that I
am’. Cf. Steiner, ‘Hebrew speech-consciousness, informs and is informed by the sovereign tautology
“I am that I am” . . . the “present absence” . . . from which has sprung the current grammatology of
deconstruction’ (After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 3rd edn [Oxford, 1998], p. 164).
6

7. second does not necessarily mean that Donne’s point is frivolous; to read these
lines merely as an aside—as Eliot and countless commentators have done since
(Carey uses the phrase ‘distracted by his own distraction’)—is surely to
underestimate the severe and central importance Donne places on the process of
translation and on the difficulty of imparting a message across several divides;
the divide of language, the divide of time, the divide of geography. In an
otherwise bewildered landscape, apparently constant names like Oriens and
Gheber have become useful signposts for those who would look closely at them.
It is a declaration of apparent constancy, Antes muerto que mudado, adorns a
portrait of Donne in 1591—‘Better dead than changed’. This line is, in fact,
slightly adapted from one in the last stanza of the first song of Montemayor’s
Diana:10
Sobre el arena sentada On the sand her did I see
De aquel río la vi yo Sitting by yon river bright,
Do con el dedo escribió: Where her finger this did wright
“Antes muerta que mudada.” Rather dead then changed be.
Mira el amor que ordena See how love beares us in hand,
Que os viene hacer creer Making us beleeve the wordes,
Cosas dichas por mujer That a womans wit affordes,
Y escritas en el arena. And recorded in the sand.
The French have a useful expression for such occasions: ‘traduire, c’est trahir’, “to
translate is to commit treason”. Put aside even the fact that Spain was a great
military threat to England at the time—the effect of a Spanish slogan here,
Empson proposed, something akin ‘to a [Cold War era] Englishman or American
displaying a motto in Russian’—and the motto on the portrait still stands as a
particularly fine example of traduction as trahison since Donne’s boast of fidelity
was originally the protestation of a fickle mistress. This raises interesting
10 T. Edward Terrill, ‘A Note on John Donne’s Early Reading’, MLN, 43 (1928), 318-19.
7

8. questions as to whether words have value solely within themselves, and how far
they are dependent on a truthful contextual framework in order to be efficient;
one of the first serious airings those questions received was in the Platonic
dialogue of Cratylus.11
In it, Cratylus acts as spokesperson for an essentialist theory of language, where
words themselves have magic properties and are intricately bound up with the
essence (ε δο , ο σ α) of their object. Set against him Hermogenes, proponent of
the nominalist view of language where stating a name ( νοµ ζειν) is regarded as a
speech-act in its own right thus allowing for the possibility to state either a true
( ληθ ) name or a false (ψε δο ). To prove his point, he flags up the discrepancy
between his own name—literally “offspring of Hermes”—and nature which,
devoid of commercial ability and eloquence, was about as far from Ερµο-γενη as
you could get. Socrates meanwhile introduces the concept of mimesis, before
resolving for himself that we should examine the things themselves rather than
names in order to find out about reality. At no point do we really sense Plato
stepping in to lend authorial backing to any one of his speakers, no sense of a
right or wrong conclusion being reached. Cratylus, unmoved, leaves Socrates on
this exchange:
[Soc.] Reflect well . . . and do not easily accept such a doctrine; for you are young
and of an age to learn. And when you have found the truth, come and tell me.
Crat. I will do as you say, though I can assure you Socrates, that I have been
considering the matter already, and the result of a great deal of trouble and
consideration is that I incline to Heracleitus.12
Subsequent accounts of Cratylus in Aristotle’s Metaphysics render these words
deeply ironic; Aristotle not only makes Cratylus ‘the most extreme of “those who
11 Cf. James Baumlin, John Donne and the Rhetorics of Renaissance Discourse (Missouri, 1991),
pp. 41-42.
12 The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett, 3rd edn, (Oxford, 1892), I, 389. (my italics)
8

9. profess to be followers of Heraclitus”’ but writes also that ‘he finally abandoned
the use of words, and indicated his meaning by gestures’.13 Cratylus may waggle
his finger all he like, he would not be ‘telling’ anyone anything. Logically, the
Heraclitean doctrine of flux, for it to be worthwhile, had to be universal. Colliding
with Cratylus’ system of naming, words became redundant according to their
own earlier essentialist definition: constantly fluctuating words become
meaningless.14 Donne never reaches quite such absolute scepticism though he
certainly has his darker moments:—
How empty a thing is Rhetorique? (and yet Rhetorique will make absent and
remote things present to your understanding) How weak a thing is Poetry? (and
yet Poetry is a counterfait Creation, and makes things that are not, as though
they were) How infirme, how impotent are all assistances, if they be put to
expresse this Eternity? (S.4.87)
Donne is the better preacher and poet because he can recognise the attraction
that lies in both Cratylus’ and Hermogenes’ schools of thought; like Plato he
refuses to choose between them. The confrontation between Catholic rhetoric
(Empson imagines Donne learnt it in Spain) where ‘the individual praised is the
Logos of the virtues he or she typifies’, and the Metaphysicals’ brand of Ramistic
place-logic (which it was felt ‘went with being a protestant’) provided the much of
the energy for Donne’s paradoxical poems. ‘One can quite see,’ writes Empson,
Donne feeling that the Protestant treatment gave an extra gaiety to his defiantly
Catholic but startlingly displaced trope. In any case, when his imported line of
paradox first hit London, it meant something a great deal odder than it had done
in Spain.15
As with the Spanish motto, translation (this time of technique, and across a
quasi-religious divide too) brings on its own set of ironies. And far from it being
13 D.J. Allan, ‘The Problem of Cratylus’, The American Journal of Philology, 75 (1954), 271-87 (pp.
271-72, my italics).
14 Cf. Steiner, p. 18. ‘Language—and this is one of the crucial propositions in certain schools of
modern semantics—is the most salient model of Heraclitean flux.’
15 Empson, pp. 74-75.
9

10. the case, as Robert Frost once said, of poetry being what gets lost in translation,
translation looks to have added significantly to the poetry. If anything, it brings
us closer to understanding the true nature of language—how fickle or empty
words may be—which in turn trahit (reveals) something of the true nature of
Man, namely the fallibility of self-deception. The translation of rhetoric brings
more than ‘extra gaiety’ or novelty ‘odd’-ness. Now, and truly paradoxically, we
see that Gheber-like verbal dexterity Donne’s speakers display in the more
inventive poems may, indeed must, mask a real sense of impotence.
Simultaneously, impotence on the part of language acts as a mask contorting the
features of genuine emotion. In witnessing words manipulated so artfully, we
ask, When does this poem stop being a celebration of the ‘greatnesse’ of a poet’s
skill (that can seem to say anything) and start to become a lamentation on the
capricious, flimsy state of any language post-Babel, where nothing meaningful
can ever be said by anyone? How far, in short, may one truly enjoy ‘counterfeit
Creation’?
If a sixteenth century episteme was—as Foucault believes—built on
comparison, then Donne’s baroque, linguistically confrontational poems at the
start of the seventeenth century demonstrate how this scheme of knowledge
folded in on itself. ‘Similitude is no longer the form of knowledge but rather the
occasion of error, the danger to which one exposes oneself when one does not
examine the obscure region of confusions.’16 In a letter written to Sir Henry
Wotton in 1600, Donne writes the early Paradoxes were composed, ‘to deceive
time and her daughter Truth . . . written in an age when anything is strong
enough to overthrow her’.17 By ‘age’ Donne probably means “number of years
16 The Order of Things (London, 2002), p. 56. (my italics)
17 Donne, Major Works, p. 64.
10

11. alive” and not “era”, though either statement would hold true.
If perchance they be prettily gilt, that is their best, for they are not hatched. They
are rather alarms to truth to arm her than enemies, and they have only this
advantage to scape from being called ill things, they are nothings.18
This letter rather overshadows the staid Paradoxes it accompanied, moving
deftly from a semi-religious tone—‘confession of their lightness and your trouble
and my shame’—to a financial register by word-play on guilt/gilt. Further on he
mentions their ‘low price’, while “hatching” was the name given to the process of
inlaying with strips of gold. Clearly a strong correlation existed in Donne’s
mind—as in the minds of many—between the currency of coins and a currency of
language. “The dearth” in financial terms (a shortage of money accompanying
rising prices) was seen going hand-in-hand with what Harold Bloom later terms
a ‘dearth of meaning’19 (language emptying out amid the rising numbers of
arbitrary signifiers which made paradox possible). Language, like money, could
be cheapened by the gradual wearing away of gold from older generations (the
translation by time whereby truth becomes truism); or could, like money, fall in
value with the influx of foreign gold. ‘Donne repeatedly alludes to . . . Spanish
gold; writing in the persona of a starving poet, he says that “Poetry indeed be
such a sinne / As I thinke / That brings dearths, and Spaniards in.” [‘Satire 2’, 5-
6] Donne knew that Spanish money looked rough, knew how it had become
diffused through Europe, and knew that it brought not prosperity but ruin
wherever it went’:20
Spanish Stamps, still travailing,
That are become as Catholique as their King,
Those unlick’d beare-whelps, unfil’d Pistolets
18 ibid., p. 65.
19 ‘The Breaking of Form’ in Deconstruction and Criticism (New York, 1979, repr. 1995), pp. 1-37
(p. 12).
20 Coburn Freer, ‘John Donne and Elizabethan economic theory’, Criticism, 38 (1996), 497-520 (p.
500).
11

12. That, more than cannon-shot, availes or lets,
Which, negligently left unrounded, looke
Like many-angled figures in the booke
Of some greate Conjurer, which would enforce
Nature, as these do Justice, from her course;
(‘Elegy 1: The Bracelet’, 29-36)
Donne’s uneasy recognition that money was becoming a commodity in its own
right (rare among economic theorists of the time and singular among poets), fits
neatly with the reluctance he had to publish his verses—the one occasion he did
publish The Anniversaries for financial reasons he regretted it bitterly. A near
constant habit of referring to his poetry in letters as ‘light flashes’ or
‘evaporations’ is less, I think, false modesty than it is a shrewd move to protect
whatever value the lines may have by limiting their circulation. More
importantly perhaps, it is demonstrates Donne’s determination not to fall into
some lazy habit of ‘counterfeit Creation’. ‘There were large areas,’ writes
Partridge, ‘of experience which Donne excluded from his consciousness. He is the
least descriptive of poets.’21 Poetic creation would be counterfeit (‘ill’) only so long
as it tried to re-fashion that which already existed—‘makes things that are not’.
Donne, in his most moving poetry, looks to create nothings. Take for example, the
ecstatic who say ‘nothing, all the day’ (‘The Exstasie’, 20); or the lovelorn who
crave ‘nothing’ (‘Loves Exchange’, 22); or these, the first six lines from ‘Aire and
Angels’,
Twice or thrice had I lov’d thee,
Before I knew thy face or name;
So in a voice, so in a shapelesse flame
Angells affect us oft, and worshipp’d bee.
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.
‘Nothing’ is invested with considerable emotional power—carrying far greater
weight than the lines that follow in which the speaker praises the lips, eyes, hair,
21 The Language of Renaissance Poetry (London, 1971), p. 236
12

13. et cetera of his love (‘wares which would sinke admiration’ [18]). Another instance
of a loaded nothing-ness occurs in ‘The Sunne Rising’,
She’is all States, and all Princes, I,
Nothing else is. (21-22)
Until this point the second line of each stanza had been given over to an
impetuous question; ‘Why dost thou thus,’ (2), ‘Why shouldst thou thinke?’ (12).
Line 22 stands out defiantly, a bold statement. Unlike those two earlier lines,
each made up of four monosyllabic words, now ‘Nothing’ stretches over two
strong syllables and acquires gravitas in the process. Introducing, even, ‘a new
rhythm or tone’ (like a Latin quotation in one of the sermons), ‘nothing’ behaves
and is treated as if it belonged to a different language. Also in line 22, we might
notice that ‘is’ has become a strangely powerful word on account of the various
elisions surrounding it: ‘the’India’s’ (17), ‘leftst’ (18), ‘saw’st’ (19), and ‘She’is’ (21)
in the run up; ‘honor’s’ (24), ‘world’s contracted thus’ (26), ‘that’s done’ (28)
coming after. In the majority of these elisions the word ‘is’ goes understood but
not fully voiced, its metrical value of course amounts to nought: when suddenly
this word is sounded—‘Nothing else is’—Donne performs in terms of scansion
what’s maybe best described as creation ex nihilo. Rhetorical poetry of the
highest order because it avoids the pitfalls of ‘rhetorique’: Donne does not make
‘absent and remote things present to [our] understanding’ since the ‘is’ and the
‘Nothing’ had been present all along—only now someone (an ingenious poet) is
managing to make the most of their potential.
‘Nothing’ is a fluctuating concept—dreaded in the ‘Nocturnall upon S. Lucies
Day’, embraced in ‘Aire and Angels’, cast away with contempt in ‘A Jeat Ring
Sent’ where a series of puns are made comparing a ring to the shape of the
13

14. number ‘0’:
Oh, why should ought lesse precious, or lesse tough
Figure our loves? Except in thy name thou have bid it say,
I’am cheap, and nought but fashion, fling me’away. (6-9, my italics)
‘Adam was able to decypher the nature of every Creature in the name thereof’
(S.2.78), but how could one go about deciphering the nature of uncreated
nothing? From its name? A nominalist ‘0’ was well established—the cipher had
two functions: (1) to demonstrate that accounts were balanced in double-entry
bookkeeping; and, (2) to represent an empty column in the decimal counting
system, allowing one to differentiate, for example, between 13, 103, and 130. In
neither of these functions can ‘0’ be said to have an inherent value—hence its use
in Shakespearean insults22 and flatteries,
And therefore, like a cipher,
Yet standing in rich place, I multiply
With one “We thank you” many thousands more
That go before it. (The Winter’s Tale, 1.2.6-9)
It was difficult not to feel contempt for the rows of token noughts (note the
mocking tone of ‘The Computation’); Donne speaks slightingly of large numbers
with their ‘lines of cyphers’. In the same breath as he condemns rhetoric as
‘empty’ and poetry as ‘weak’ he demands, ‘How barren a thing is Arithmetique?
(and yet Arithmetique will tell you, how many single graines of sand, will fill this
hollow Vault to the Firmament)’ (S.4.87). Writing larger and larger numbers to
this purpose seemed as misguided as erecting a tower of Babel, or emptying out a
common language with ever increasing, ever more redundant, ever more high-
flown praise of ‘things’.
22 ‘thou art an 0 without a figure. I am better than thou art, now. I am a fool;’ (King Lear 1.4.174-
75); ‘Which I take to be either a fool or a cipher.’ (As You Like It 3.2.283-84).
14

15. we were still short of numbring the benefits of God, as God; But then, of God in
Christ, infinitely, super-infinitely short. To have been once nothing, and to be
now co-heire with the Son of God, is such a Circle, such a Compasse, as that no
revolutions in this world, to rise from the lowest to the highest, or to fall from the
highest to the lowest, can be called or thought any Segment, any Arch, any Point
in respect of this Circle; To have once been nothing, and now to be co-heires with
the Son of God (S.8.250-51)
Once more the episteme of comparison and similitude folding in on itself—the
very biggest number we can think of still falls ‘super-infinitely short’. But
increasingly the cipher ‘0’ had grown to acquire an essentialist significance, and
as ‘zero’ (a word coined in 1604) became a mathematical figure in its own right.
‘[T]he real paradigm shift,’ writes Kaplan, ‘was this:
the invisible house of memory, where mathematics had lodged for so long, was
giving way to an even more abstract structure. . . . [allowing] you to say what
before you couldn’t even think. x² + 3x – 22 = 0 puts areas (x²), lengths (3x) and
constants (22) together in one sentence: hard enough to visualize. But now you
could as easily write x4 + 3x – 22 = 0, and solve it – yet how picture the dimension
called up by x4? No wonder William of Malmesbury spoke of ‘dangerous Saracen
magic’.23
With such oriental magic, nought becomes practically divine—‘How invisible,
How inintelligible a thing is this Nothing’ (S.4.100). Already interested in
translating three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional representations,
Donne could look in wonder at this new 0 simultaneously passing through all
dimensions imagined and unimaginable; he also probably shared in the popular
misconception that to divide any number by zero would result in infinity. ‘A Jeat
Ring Sent’ may be in many ways a flat, stale and unprofitable poem but the
Valedictions, often retreating into similar circles and noughts, show just how
much mileage Donne could get out of zero. With sexual connotations buzzing
around in the background, the ‘nothing’ in ‘A Valediction: of Weeping’ is the polar
opposite of ‘barren’; stamped like a coin—a standard two-dimensional image—in
line 3, the tear grows ‘preganant’ (6) and the zero has become ‘a round ball’ (10),
23 The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (London, 1999), p. 75
15

16. and then a globe, then ‘quickly . . . that, which was nothing, All’ (13), eclipsing
even the celestial bodies, ‘O more than Moone’ (19). For a few stanzas, the
‘Valediction: of Weeping’ confounds the preacher’s every definition, breaks every
rule, of poetry, rhetoric, arithmetic—these ‘nothing’ lines are strong, and full,
and fruitful; are so by very virtue of their naughtiness.
Yet even the most pregnant nothing is unsustainable. Donne is no
mathematician—if he were, dissolution into non-dimensional being could be the
crowning glory of the valediction; instead it occasions the very greatest sorrow,
and the heart breaks. This, because the system of naming Donne most closely
follows is neither Cratylian (Cratylus stops talking) nor Hermogenian, nor
Socratic or Aristotelian; rather it is that of St. Augustine, as outlined by Martin
Elsky in Authorizing Words:
The heart, or mind, can speak spiritual truths only when it is one with those
spiritual truths, . . . it may also truly speak spiritually repellent words “when we
rightly dislike and censure them.” It is possible, however, for a word to be
conceived “either by desire [cupiditas] or by love [caritas],” that is, in accordance
with one’s spiritual attitude toward the object of knowledge and the contents of
language. The inner word thus always indicates the absence or presence of
caritas in the speaker. The primal act of interior discourse, Augustine seems to
imply, always accompanies an acknowledgement that the object of knowledge
exists either through itself or through God. In the former case, one conceives
words through cupiditas, in the latter through caritas.24
The gradual dawning in Donne’s Valediction that his love exists only through
itself, through cupiditas, makes his heaven dissolve (18): it comes with a
realisation that ever since the Fall—and that heaven dissolved—the raison d’être
of the love poem, really, has been translation of caritas into cupiditas, traversing
the boundary of post-lapsarian worldliness. Not that we should not be unduly
distressed by ‘A Valediction: of Weeping’, it too serves as an alarm to this truth
24 op. cit., p. 73.
16

17. rather than her enemy—in light of the ‘present absence’ of caritas, poetry’s not
what gets lost in translation; poetry is the translation.
17

18. Abbreviations
S = Sermons of John Donne (followed by volume number then page number)
ELH = English Literary History
MLN = Modern Language Notes

19. Primary Sources
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19

20. Firth, J.R., The Tongues of Men (London, 1937).
Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London, 1970, repr.
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20

21. Stanwood, P.G., and Heather Ross Asals (eds.), John Donne and the Theology of Language
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The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1989).
21