Processes of Reformation in Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions: Bells, Brass, and the Reader’s Work

This essay offers a reassessment of the famous bells in Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624) and suggests that we should read these as one kind dissolvable body among many. Donne builds on established understanding subjects, with voices identities; he joins conversations about their tenacious survival objects, practices, sounds post-Reformation church. In 1620s, were objects always potentially point being melted down reformed: bodies, like own, vulnerable to dissolution but could also generatively be re-made. Bells help develop an artisanal poetics, drawing sculptural metaphors which matter is continually re-formed, model continuous work demands its readers. I suggest might pay more attention literary study not only form processes formation—these moments (re-)making—that act middle term between two. [K.H.]