The Full Text of “Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness”
1Since I am coming to that holy room,
2 Where, with thy choir of saints for evermore,
3I shall be made thy music; as I come
4 I tune the instrument here at the door,
5 And what I must do then, think now before.
6Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
7 Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie
8Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown
9 That this is my south-west discovery,
10 Per fretum febris, by these straits to die,
11I joy, that in these straits, I see my West;
12 For, though their currents yield return to none,
13What shall my West hurt me? As West and East
14 In all flat maps (and I am one) are one,
15 So death doth touch the resurrection.
16Is the Pacific Sea my home? Or are
17 The Eastern riches? Is Jerusalem?
18Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar,
19 All straits, and none but straits, are ways to them,
20 Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Shem.
21We think that Paradise and Calvary,
22 Christ's cross and Adam's tree, stood in one place;
23Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;
24 As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face,
25 May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace.
26So, in his purple wrapp'd, receive me, Lord;
27 By these his thorns give me his other crown;
28And, as to others' souls I preach'd thy word,
29 Be this my text, my sermon to mine own:
30Therefore that he may raise the Lord throws down.
The Full Text of “Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness”
1Since I am coming to that holy room,
2 Where, with thy choir of saints for evermore,
3I shall be made thy music; as I come
4 I tune the instrument here at the door,
5 And what I must do then, think now before.
6Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
7 Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie
8Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown
9 That this is my south-west discovery,
10 Per fretum febris, by these straits to die,
11I joy, that in these straits, I see my West;
12 For, though their currents yield return to none,
13What shall my West hurt me? As West and East
14 In all flat maps (and I am one) are one,
15 So death doth touch the resurrection.
16Is the Pacific Sea my home? Or are
17 The Eastern riches? Is Jerusalem?
18Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar,
19 All straits, and none but straits, are ways to them,
20 Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Shem.
21We think that Paradise and Calvary,
22 Christ's cross and Adam's tree, stood in one place;
23Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;
24 As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face,
25 May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace.
26So, in his purple wrapp'd, receive me, Lord;
27 By these his thorns give me his other crown;
28And, as to others' souls I preach'd thy word,
29 Be this my text, my sermon to mine own:
30Therefore that he may raise the Lord throws down.
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“Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness” Introduction
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In "Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness," John Donne (1572-1631) explores the consolations of faith and the hope of a Christian afterlife. The poem's speaker, a preacher on his deathbed, reflects that the "straits" (or sufferings) he's going through now are also the "straits" (or narrow sea passages) that lead to a new world. Death, this poem argues, is simply the gateway to heaven—and Christians can take comfort from the idea that Christ himself had to pass through agony on the way to resurrection. Likely written sometimes in the 1620s, this passionate hymn was first printed after Donne's death in the 1635 edition of Poems by J.D.
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“Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness” Summary
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Since, God, I'm on my way to that sacred place where, alongside your choir of holy souls, I'll become part of your eternal song; since I'm definitely on my way, I'll start preparing myself to be one of your musical instruments, and get ready on earth for what's to come in heaven.
My doctors, through their love of their art, have become scholars of the earth and skies—and I, lying flat on my back in bed, become their map. On me, they point out the route I'm taking, south-west: by the pains of fever, I'll travel through the "straits" (that is, both the agonies and the water passages) of death.
But I'm overjoyed that, through these "straits," I can see the sunset of my life coming. Even if no one who goes through this journey ever comes back, what harm can death do me? Just as the furthest points west and east, on a flat map of the globe (which is what I am), turn out to be exactly the same spot, death turns out to be exactly the same thing as new life.
Is my home in the Pacific Ocean (on the map of my body)? Or in China? Or in Jerusalem? The Strait of Anyan, the Strait of Magellan, the Strait of Gibraltar—all straits, and nothing but straits, are passages from one place to another, whether they lead to Europe, Africa, or Asia, where Noah's sons Japhet, Cham, and Shem (respectively) set up home.
Traditionally, we say that the Garden of Eden and the spot where Christ died—the cross and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—were in exactly the same place. So look down on me, God, and see that I'm going through what both Adam and Christ went through. As I sweat in pain like Adam did, allow Christ's sacrificial blood to wrap around my very soul.
So please, God, admit me into heaven draped in Christ's royal purple blood. Since I suffer like he did under a crown of thorns, please give me his crown of victory and resurrection, too. And since I preached your truths to other people, let me preach to myself now, saying: in order to raise people up, God first has to knock them down.
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“Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness” Themes
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Death as a Journey Toward Heaven
In “Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness,” a dying man sees his own approaching death as a new beginning rather than a horrible end. Leaning on his Christian faith, the speaker imagines his feverish body as a map to a new world and trusts that his illness is just a difficult journey toward God. Death is not a horror, to this speaker, but an adventure and even something to look forward to; the path might be rough, but the destination is heaven itself.
Lying in his sickbed, the poem’s speaker knows he’s doomed: a whole host of “physicians” (or doctors) tell him that he’s going to die “per fretum febris”—in other words, in the pains and struggles of an agonizing fever. But rather than feeling frightened, sad, or angry, the speaker is calm and even excited: he describes himself “tun[ing] the instrument” of his own soul outside the “door” of heaven, like a performer getting ready to go onstage. Since he believes he’ll become part of God’s “eternal music” when he dies, he feels more as if he’s preparing to begin a new life than to say goodbye to the one he’s known.
Because the speaker sees death as merely stepping through a “door” into a new and better place, he can treat even his terrible illness itself as a journey toward that door. The feverish “straits” (or sufferings, as in “dire straits”) he’s going through now, he declares, are also the “straits” (or water passages, as in “the strait of Gibraltar”) through which he’ll sail to heaven. He may have to suffer, but since he believes he’ll join a loving God when he dies, he can treat his pain as a noble (and even rather exciting) adventure, a voyage of discovery.
The speaker’s sick body thus becomes, in his imagination, a “map” of the globe: just as the furthest points “West” and “East” on a map of the world turn out to be the same spot, “death doth touch the resurrection.” In other words, the speaker’s Christianity means he can treat life’s exit door as heaven’s entrance: he believes he’ll follow in the footsteps of Jesus, who died and was resurrected. To this speaker, then, death and rebirth into eternal life are exactly the same thing, and mortal illness is only a journey to the gates of heaven.
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Suffering and the Consolations of Faith
Christian faith, this poem argues, means learning to trust that pain and suffering aren’t inexplicable cruelties, but tools God uses to create glory and beauty. As the poem’s speaker lies on his deathbed, he consoles himself with the thought that, in the Christian tradition, death and loss have always been the prelude to rebirth and glory. God, this poem says, always transforms pain and death into beauty and new life—and faith in God can thus give people the strength to endure agonies.
Suffering through the last stages of a fatal fever, the speaker is in terrible pain. Lying “flat on this bed,” he can’t even sit up—and his doctors assure him that it’s “by these straits” (that is, through these sufferings) that he’s going to “die.” Everything seems pretty bleak: there’s no earthly hope that the speaker will survive, and as he waits to die he’s going to have an awful time of it.
But even under these conditions, the speaker is able to take comfort in his faith. In the Christian story, the poem reflects, the journey through pain to glory is an eternal and universal one, part of God’s mysterious but loving plan for the world. When the speaker observes that “Christ’s cross, and Adam’s tree, stood in one place,” he both draws on a longstanding Christian tradition that Jerusalem was built where the Garden of Eden once stood and argues that God has always worked by transforming suffering into glory. Adam’s exile from Eden paves the way for Christ to come and redeem the world; Christ’s crucifixion paves the way for Christ’s resurrection, and for the resurrection of his followers.
The speaker thus concludes that, mysterious though this might seem, people have to suffer and die in order to experience the glory of rebirth and the joy of heaven. By enduring his suffering, the speaker follows in Christ’s footsteps, wearing his god’s “thorns” (an allusion to the Crown of Thorns, the painful, mocking crown Christ was forced to wear on the day of his execution) so that he can one day wear his “other crown” of eternal life.
The Christian faithful, this poem thus argues, must learn to believe that “Therefore that he may raise, the lord throws down”: in other words, suffering and death are God’s path toward miraculous beauty and eternal bliss. That idea is itself transformative, helping the speaker turn his illness from an awful prison into a sacred journey.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness”
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Lines 1-3
Since I am coming to that holy room,
Where, with thy choir of saints for evermore,
I shall be made thy music;"Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness" starts off, appropriately enough for a hymn, with images of music. As the poem's speaker lies on his deathbed, he prepares himself to join the choirs of heaven—but not in quite the way that readers might imagine.
First off, the heaven this speaker imagines isn't spectacular: it's not a palace, a temple, or a kingdom in the clouds. Rather, it's a "holy room" he's making his way toward—a simple chapel, maybe. It's what happens inside that chapel that matters.
Listen to the way the speaker unveils his idea of heaven in lines 2-3:
Where, with thy choir of saints for evermore,
I shall be made thy music; [...]Line 2 here might encourage first-time readers to get ready for an image of singing with a heavenly choir: think harps, wings, haloes, all the clichés about what heaven might be like. Instead, the speaker casually slides into the idea that he "shall be made thy music."
In this speaker's vision of heaven, then, the souls of the dead are transformed into song. Each person becomes an interwoven part of something vast: many individual notes form one eternal symphony. If that's so, God is the composer and the conductor of this divine music.
Looking back, readers will observe that this whole first stanza is an apostrophe to God—a God whom the speaker refers to not with a formal "My God" or "Dear Lord," but as a simple "thee," as if God were a friend sitting quietly at the speaker's bedside. (This quiet stands out next to the poem's title, with its intense cry to "God My God"—the kind of cry one might make from the depths of terrible pain.)
Everything in these first lines thus helps to create a mood of mingled intimacy and awe. God is right there next to the speaker—and God is the great composer of the music of heaven. Heaven is a simple "holy room"—and heaven is a place of miraculous, mysterious, beautiful transformation.
This first surprising image of a heavenly metamorphosis will be the first of many in a poem that's all about transformation. Endings will transform into beginnings, pain into glory, and a sickbed into a sailing boat.
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Lines 3-5
as I come
I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think now before. -
Lines 6-10
Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie
Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown
That this is my south-west discovery,
Per fretum febris
, by these straits to die, -
Lines 11-15
I joy, that in these straits, I see my West;
For, though their currents yield return to none,
What shall my West hurt me? As West and East
In all flat maps (and I am one) are one,
So death doth touch the resurrection. -
Lines 16-20
Is the Pacific Sea my home? Or are
The Eastern riches? Is Jerusalem?
Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar,
All straits, and none but straits, are ways to them,
Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Shem. -
Lines 21-22
We think that Paradise and Calvary,
Christ's cross and Adam's tree, stood in one place; -
Lines 23-25
Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;
As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace. -
Lines 26-27
So, in his purple wrapp'd, receive me, Lord;
By these his thorns give me his other crown; -
Lines 28-30
And, as to others' souls I preach'd thy word,
Be this my text, my sermon to mine own:
Therefore that he may raise the Lord throws down.
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“Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness” Symbols
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Cardinal Directions
The poem's references to cardinal directions carry all sorts of symbolic meanings:
- When the speaker's doctors warn him he's sailing "south-west," they allude to the south's symbolic association with heat (a reference to the speaker's fatal fever) and to the west's association with death (since west is the direction where the sun sets).
- But the speaker isn't disturbed by either of these thoughts: west, to him, might as well be east (the direction of the sunrise, symbolically associated with new life and rebirth), since the furthest points west and east on any "flat map" of the globe are actually the same spot!
Direction symbolism thus helps the speaker to explore the idea that death and rebirth are one and the same.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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“Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Conceit
Donne often built his poems like cathedrals, using conceits (or elaborate extended metaphors) as solid pillars to support a soaring philosophy. Here, three linked conceits—death as a journey, pain as a passageway, and the body as a map—help the speaker to express his faith in a God who transforms suffering into glory.
As the speaker lies on his deathbed with "physicians" bustling around him, he feels as if he's become a "map"—and that map provides directions only to the afterlife. Like "cosmographers" (that is, people who study and map the earth and sky), the speaker's doctors point out his "south-west discovery" on his failing body:
- "South" is a direction traditionally associated with heat: the speaker has a terrible fever.
- "West" is the symbolic direction of death: to go west is to travel toward the sunset, the end of life.
In other words, the speaker's symptoms mark out a one-way street to the undiscovered country of death. It won't be an easy death, either. The speaker's doctors warn him he'll die "per fretum febris"—"through the pains of fever," an agonizing way to go. But through a pun, the speaker transforms these dire "straits" (difficulties and sufferings) into the "straits" (narrow sea passages) through which he'll journey to a new world. Traveling through pain, he'll make a new discovery on his body-map:
- His physicians may only see that his journey points "West" to death. But the speaker knows that, on a "flat map" of a "globe," the furthest points "West" and "East" are actually exactly the same spot.
- When he dies, then, he'll also be reborn into his eternal life in heaven: just as west and east touch on a a map, "death doth touch the resurrection."
To pull all the speaker's conceits together into the outline of his argument, then:
- The body is a map that points the way toward everyone's inevitable death.
- The pain and suffering of dying (and of life in general, for that matter!) are the "straits" through which people must travel to reach that death.
- Consolingly, though, death turns out to be only the doorway to eternal life.
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Pun
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Metaphor
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Apostrophe
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Allusion
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Rhetorical Question
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Repetition
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Parallelism
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"Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Thy
- Physicians
- Cosmographers
- South-west discovery
- Per fretum febris
- Straits
- The Eastern riches
- Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar
- Japhet, Cham, and Shem
- Paradise and Calvary
- Adam's tree
- Both Adams
- In his purple wrapp'd
- By these his thorns
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An old-fashioned word for "your." "Thy" might sound fancy now, but in Donne's time it was an intimate word you'd use to address a loved one—think "tu" in modern French or Spanish.
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness”
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Form
As he often did, Donne invents his own form here. This reflective poem is built from six five-line stanzas (also known as cinquains). They're written in iambic pentameter: lines of five da-DUM feet in a row: "Therefore | that he | may raise, | the Lord | throws down." And they use an ABABB rhyme scheme that caps an alternating pattern of sounds with a gently surprising couplet.
These choices reflect the speaker's philosophy that "death doth touch the resurrection"—in other words, that the end of earthly life is just the beginning of heavenly life:
- Cinquains are relatively unusual in English poetry; they're far outnumbered by quatrains, couplets, and other even-numbered stanza forms.
- These particular cinquains even seem to build on a familiar form: quatrains rhymed ABAB. That ubiquitous rhyme scheme turns up everywhere from nursery rhymes to ballads.
- Instead of ending there, though, the stanzas lift off into a final unexpected line, creating a couplet that suggests something new emerging from what could have just been an ending.
These overflowing stanzas thus fit the poem's interest in the Great Beyond.
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Meter
"Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness" is written in iambic pentameter. That means that each line is built from five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here are lines 11-12 for an example of how that sounds:
I joy, | that in | these straits, | I see | my West;
For, though | their cur- | rents yield | return | to none,Since a lot of spoken English falls naturally into this rhythm, iambic pentameter is one of the most common meters in English-language poetry. It also has a wonderfully wide range: iambic meters can feel humble or soaring, depending on how the poet uses them! Here, iambic pentameter helps the speaker's voice to sound ruefully funny and fervent in turn.
Little variations in the meter also create moments of drama. For instance, listen to how the rhythm changes when the speaker prays that he'll follow in the footsteps of both Adam and Christ:
As the | first Ad- | am's sweat | surrounds | my face,
May the | last Ad- | am's blood | my soul | embrace.Both of these lines push two stresses into the second foot, creating intense spondees, feet with a DUM-DUM rhythm. Those dense stresses help to give the speaker's prayer its fervor.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem's inventive rhyme scheme runs like this:
ABABB
Here, the speaker plays a trick with readers' expectations. An ABAB pattern is an old and familiar one in English poetry, natural as a nursery rhyme. By capping that alternating rhyme pattern with an extra B rhyme, the speaker mirrors his ideas in his poem's sounds. "Death doth touch the resurrection," as the speaker says; the echoing B couplets here reflect that idea of a seeming ending that isn't an ending at all.
Readers should note that a lot of the rhymes that feel slant here, like "Lord" and "word" or "room" and "come," would likely have been perfect in Donne's 17th-century English accent.
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“Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness” Speaker
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The speaker of "Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness" is a dying priest. Lying on his deathbed, enduring all the agonies of a powerful fever, this man takes comfort from his religious faith. For Christians, he reflects, suffering is always the prelude to new life and beauty; to die is only to follow in Christ's footsteps, and to follow in Christ's footsteps also means to look forward to "resurrection."
In both his profession and his witty, passionate voice, this speaker seems likely to be a version of John Donne himself. While this poem was probably written a few years before Donne died, it reflects his own deep faith and his fascination with death and rebirth. It also touches on his role as the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London: he indeed "preach'd" to many "souls" as a clergyman in that famous church.
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“Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness” Setting
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The poem moves from a tight, limited spot—the room where the speaker, deathly ill, lies "flat on this bed"—to the furthest, freest reaches of the universe. The speaker isn't going anywhere now: he's so sick he can't even sit up. But in his imagination, his sickness itself is a journey. Its "straits" (or pains) transform into the "straits" (or water passages) through which he'll voyage to heaven.
While the speaker himself never leaves his room, then, his mind ventures from the "Pacific Sea" to "Paradise" (the Garden of Eden) to "Calvary" (the hill where Christ was crucified) to the "holy room" of heaven itself.
The poem's metaphor of death as a voyage also fits right into John Donne's 17th-century world. Written only a hundred-odd years after European eyes first saw the "Pacific Sea," this poem uses the language of exploration to depict every soul's final great journey into the unknown.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness”
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Literary Context
John Donne (1572-1631) is remembered as one of the foremost of the "metaphysical poets"—though he never called himself one. The later writer Samuel Johnson coined the term, using it to describe a set of 17th-century English writers who wrote witty, passionate, intricate, cerebral poetry about love and God; George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Thomas Traherne were some others.
Donne was a master of elaborate conceits, complex sentences, and love poems that mingle divinity with filthy puns. But during his lifetime, he was mostly a poet in private. In public life, he was an important clergyman, rising to become Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Like the vast majority of his poetry, "Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness" didn't appear in print until several years after his death. This poem was first published in the posthumous 1635 collection Poems by J.D.
Donne's mixture of cynicism, passion, and mysticism fell out of literary favor after his 17th-century heyday. Johnson, for instance, a leading figure of the 18th-century Enlightenment, did not mean "metaphysical poet" as a compliment, seeing Donne and his contemporaries as obscure and irrational. But 19th-century Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge were stirred by Donne's mixture of philosophy and emotion, and such influential admirers' enthusiasm slowly resurrected Donne's reputation. Donne is now remembered as one of the most powerful of poets, and he's inspired later writers from T.S. Eliot to Yeats to A.S. Byatt.
Historical Context
John Donne lived and wrote during a time of intense change. He was born at the end of an era, growing up during the last years of Elizabeth I's reign.
After a rocky start, Elizabeth stabilized an England still thrown into turmoil by religious schism: her father Henry VIII's decision to split from the Pope and found his own national Church of England led to generations of conflict and bloodshed between English Protestants and Catholic loyalists. Elizabeth's political skill, her dramatic military victories against the Spanish, and her canny decision to present herself as an almost supernatural, Artemis-like "Virgin Queen" all helped to create a new sense of English national identity in the midst of chaos.
The ambitious Donne first gained a political foothold as a courtier in Elizabeth's service, but he was ignominiously thrown into prison when he eloped with Anne More, the daughter of an important official. By the time he was released, reconciled with his father-in-law, and returned to polite society, he had to work his way into the favor of a whole new monarch: James I, who took the throne in 1603.
The new king's court was worldly, intellectual, and superstitious all at once: James was a great patron of the arts and sciences, but also pious in a rather paranoid way, anxious about demons and witches.
Luckily for Donne, James was a good enough judge of talent to be impressed with his poetry. But James was also a good enough judge of talent to spot that Donne would make an outstanding clergyman, and he refused to accept the poet as a run-of-the-mill courtier. The reluctant Donne eventually had to accept the king's will, and he was appointed Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London in 1621. Just as James had predicted, Donne became a passionate and influential Anglican priest. Today Donne lies buried in the very cathedral where he once preached.
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More “Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness” Resources
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External Resources
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about John Donne via the British Library.
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The Metaphysical Poets — Read about the Metaphysical Poets, the loosely linked group of writers of which Donne was one of the most notable members.
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Donne's Portrait — Admire a famous, rather piratical portrait of Donne.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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A Lost Donne Manuscript — Read an article about a recently rediscovered volume of Donne's poetry.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by John Donne
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