Although traditional literary studies and its method, the practical criticism, is extant in secondary education and other institutions, cultural studies has demonstrated some of the ways in which it reproduces its the values of the society that produced. This does not mean that a practical criticism of a poem, in this case John Donne's "I am a little world made cunningly ", has no value in cultural studies. There is certainly psychological satisfaction of finding unity in a poem, even if that unity is known to be forced, biased, and unstable. In the case of metaphysical poems, including those of such paradoxical difficulty as Donne's, the effort to find unity may be seen as leading to language game without a victory condition. But irrespective of one's confidence in any inherent structure or meaning, a practical criticism allows a practitioner of cultural studies to better appreciate the subtleties of its objects. The exercise below provides a historical (re-)familiarization with the declining processes of literary studies from which the emergent processes of cultural studies are descended, and argues that Donne's poem reclaims a Christian sense of value or faith in a cultural context in which traditional Christian belief systems were being superseded by new discoveries.

One might begin with the assumption that the "world" in the poem is, literally, the Ptolemaic Christian world and, metaphorically, the Christian individual. This assumption is rooted in the Christian symbolism and the logic of the poem, two aspects which will become clear as my reading progresses. "[L]ittle world", given the historical context of the poem, the seventeenth century, denotes the dislocation of the world from a pivotal to a marginal, or non-existent, role by Copernican astronomy, Newtonian science, and other discoveries, and connotes its weakness, defenselessness, hence need for protection. This connotation is meaningful since "Black sin" has "betrayed" the world to "endless night". "Black" denotes without light, and connotes without enlightenment, without soul, or with a corrupted soul; sin similarly denotes lack of faith, or betrayal of faith. Here the accusatory "You" refers to astronomers, or explorers, who have gone "beyond" the Christian world and found "new spheres the philosophical, geographical and scientific sense, shows a lack of faith, or an unenlightened, soulless, betrayal of faith. But the act of searching and exposing of Christian narrowness, this "black sin", has disproved Christian ubiquity, marginalizing Christian judgement, so the sin, and faith, is relative, not absolute. After all, "You have found" admits that there is something discoverable beyond Christianity.

Despite this, the initial declarative statement, that the Christian world has been "made cunningly", denotes present faith in this traditional world: faith in both its origin (God, who "made" it), and its constitution (base "elements" and transcendental "sprite"). What does the juxtaposition of declared faith and the declared relativity of faith mean? I would argue that the very act of faithlessness, of looking beyond the Christian world, entails damnation, wrath-like flood. But the "new seas" (new discoveries) are not a damnation of God's wrath, for "wash it if it must be drowned no more" implies contingency rather than prophecy. When people stop believing in God, they will realize how meaningless, how painful, existence outside Christianity is, and will be lost in "endless night". No transcendental sprites, no souls, will be remain to protect, or guide, the "little world". Replacing these sprites will be that "endless night" through which the elements of the world will drift without meaning, without destiny, dead specifically because, without the transcendental God, they have no meaning, no life or purpose. The metaphorical transition to Reason, which is far less reassuring for the individual, is not Christian damnation, but is nonetheless an experience akin to damnation resulting from a lack of faith in Christianity.

But consider: "Pour new seas in mine eyes, that so I might/drown my world with my weeping earnestly". Here the speaker "might" transform the "new seas" into "weeping": his experience of the new knowledge seems to cause the flood, the erasure of God. But "Earnest" can denote not only ardent, serious and zeal, but presage. So the speaker's experience with this knowledge, his pain, somehow presages the pain of the world, or of other individuals like himself. The movement from "I am" to "My" denotes a shift in the speaker's relation to the Christian world, from being it to possessing, or belonging, to it. Indeed if the "new seas" are in the speaker's eyes, it implies that he sees with or through them: they are what he sees: he believes them. This implies that while the speaker still belongs to Christianity, or the Christian world, he has evidence that it is invalid: astronomical or scientific evidence that it is not absolute, or "True". So, since the exterior Christian world has been marginalized, invalidated, the speaker's only claim to it is internally. The "both parts" of the external world die, its elements redefined, its spirit disputed, but the speaker can defy this death through solipsism, through suspension of disbelief, viewing himself as embodying Christian wholeness. He can view the doom of "endless night" as salvation because the judging Christian God speaks through him. The Christian world becomes "My" world because he has internalized it, and all that is beyond himself is still under his Christian world's jurisdiction. For yes, the Christian world is relative, but to the speaker, in who it is still absolute. He now judges the world, rather than it judging him.

The speaker declares that "[The world] must be burnt!" by "the fire of lust and envy". Then he requests that these flames retire and instead burn him because the world has already been burnt by lust and envy. "[L]ust and envy" denote, or connote, Christian sins, material temptation, so it sounds as if a world has been scarred, or punished, for its sins by the flame of those sins. This paradox, sin apparently punishing sin, can be resolved. For "Let their flames retire" implies that the "Lord", the Christian God, still controls these flames. But the control is in God's death, not His revenge. The metaphor runs: people were unfaithful to God, accepting new discoveries and were "fouled", with disorder, as in fire reducing meaning to ash. This punishment was presumed to be caused by the God that judged them. Now new discoveries have undermined God's wrath, because the world is no longer under His jurisdiction. So ("Black") sin no longer entails retribution, because God's judgement has gone: the paradoxical binary collapses. After all, it seems logical that the "new seas" have stopped the "flames": the new discoveries have washed away Christian meaning with the implication that there is no "True" meaning beyond it. So the speaker's appeal that his Lord stop the flames and burn him instead seems to be a rhetorical attempt to (re-)empower Christianity: it appears as if God still has the power to punish sin.

Yet underlying this illusion is the irony that sin can only be judged inside the speaker, not outside him; a world to which sin means nothing cannot be fairly punished for sin. Having internalized the Christian world, including the sin which corrupted it, he becomes responsible for the world's sin. So the speaker's request to be eaten by "a fiery zeal of Thee' and Thy house" is a request to heal the relative Christian world. Through masochism, belief in the Christian world can be saved. Christians can maintain their belief by burning themselves, literally or metaphorically. Indeed perhaps being a Christian individual in a meaningless world with no destiny is the very punishment prescribed? What could be worse for one who believes in absolute meaning and destiny? It can be argued here, then, that the speaker's presage ("earnest") of pain, of suffering, through experiencing the "new seas", validates the Christian world, even if God does not exist in the external world. Relatively speaking, the power of the Christian world is reclaimed in, and by, individuals (like the speaker), whose duty it becomes to impose new order on the now meaningless world as an agent of the internalized Christian world.

In the context of cultural studies, the above reading provides no guarantee of objective meaning: it forces signifieds onto polysemic signifiers to form a prevailing interpretation, and this process has been complicated by the intrinsic paradoxes of metaphysical poetry. This meaningful unity does not simply pre-exist in the poem - an ornate structure waiting to be found - rather it must be actively made and maintained according to the rules of the game of language, and poetry. But the bad faith of this interpretation may ironically be seen as reinforcing itself. To take a simple metaphor, consider the form: "Holy Sonnet". A typical theme of many sonnet's is permanence in transience, or fleeting love, or beauty in decay, and a sonnet's form typically tries to impose order, moral closure, on the paradoxes of this content. Donne's theme involves the decay of Christian belief, but the fact that it is a "Holy" sonnet implies that it is imposing Christian order on a non-Christian world. The poet, at the moment he recognizes the transience and relativity of Christian belief, acts to impose it. The above reading is produced within a framework of cultural studies in which the very act of interpretation is acknowledged to be transient and relative. There is, then, an unusual kinship between the act of interpretation and the experience Donne describes: in the act of reifying meaning against the unstable flux of semiosis, one is practicing a denial of that flux, staving off the abyss of meaninglessness through a need to impose order, even if it be an order or meaning one does not agree with. In this respect, in an odd homage to the metaphysical tradition, the framing device of a faithless interpretation serves as additional ornamentation that complements or mirrors the elaborate construction of Donne's poem.

References

Easthope, Antony. Literary Into Cultural Studies. New York and London: Routledge, 1991. pp. 3-43.

Ed. Alexander W. Alison et al. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. New York and London: W. W. Norton and CompanyInc., 1983. p. 221.