Thanks to the Incarnation, Una participates in the nature of God. It is in accordance with this that she has a strongly Trinitarian aspect. Her identification with the Trinity is made most obvious through the House of Holiness, which is inhabited by three quasi-divine matrons and an overlapping, generally younger, triad. Una is also identified with the Trinity through her affiliation with the medieval figure of Sapience, as treated in the Horologia Sapientiae of Henry Suso. Una’s three animals suggest Christ as God Incarnate, reflecting the interdependence of the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the Incarnation of Christ—which are proclaimed, respectively, in the first and second of the Thirty-Nine Articles.
the general arc of the poem, but the speeches that we have just seen from the poem, and their emphasis on the interdependence of the senses, also suggest something else. The metamorphosis of the object of desire might be said to prompt a transformation of the perception of desire, in other words, it may be necessary to change or exchange senses in order to maintain an
acknowledging her emotional state (‘Ah lady deere, quoth then the gentle knight / Well may I ween, your grief is wondrous great’, I.vii.40.1–2) before renewing his entreaties with some urgency (‘But woefull Lady, let me you intrete, / For to vnfold the anguish of your hart’, I.vii.40.5–6). When their roles are reversed in canto ix, Una frames her own questions of Arthur with grateful compliments that would, were they not justified, amount to flattery (I.ix.2.8–9, 6.1–2, 7.8–9).10 The interdependence of Arthur and Una is reiterated in Arthur’s relationship with his squire
speaker and listener, so that the speaker’s own personality is backgrounded: Heare us, for till thou heare us, Lord We know not what to say. Thine ear to’our sighes, teares, thoughts gives voice and word. O Thou who Satan heard’st in Jobs sicke day, Hear thy selfe now, for thou in us dost pray. (ll. 203–7) God’s listening encourages and inspires the speaker’s words. Sense relies on the interdependence of performing and being listened to. Once again, speaker and audience are not altogether distinct from one another, for, as the speaker argues, it is God who prays in
discussion of his pulpit performances. Moreover, the above quotation places Christ in a humble position, picturing him, together with the speaker of this verse, in the act of praying. Donne’s sermon on this text observes Christ acting here ‘as though God needed us, to intreat us to be reconciled to him’, ‘he proceeds with man, as though man might be of some use to him, and with whom it were fit for him to hold good correspondence’ (X, 5, 120). The relationship between God and humankind is imagined as one of mutuality, even interdependence, where giver and recipient, God
negotiating with political power – that model in which, as we saw at the end of Chapter 3, the Virgilian poet remains trammelled by his dependency on that power, even as he asserts the mutual interdependence of the relationship in order to drive his bargain. Pastoral here is no longer a bargain with power. Thus there are no gifts in this Irish setting – those garlands and lambs which symbolized the pastoral negotiation in the Calender. In the dedicatory epistle to Ralegh, the poem itself is still figured as a ‘present’, but it is neither a wooing gift nor a tribute to a