Introduction

In 1560, a new poetic voice was heard in London with the publication of A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner, appended to Sermons of John Calvin, upon the Songe that Ezechias made. This Meditation introduced the religious sonneteer into English-speaking culture, presenting a strong persona with a paradoxically ‘febled sprite’, ‘daseld’ by the ‘lothesome filthe’ of a sinful life lived under the threat of God’s ‘mighty wrath’. 1 The opening poem announces the tone of the sequence as passionate and insistent, with a manner modelled on the penitential Psalms but crafted into the form of an English sonnet :

These pleading lines, based on Psalm 51:1, encapsulate the mood of much early modern devotional verse: the desperate desire for forgiveness (highlighted in the repeated use of the word ‘mercy’), the urge to address God while simultaneously feeling unworthy to take his name into a sinner’s ‘wretched mouth’, the consequent paralyzing mixture of hope and dread, the perpetual circling of justice and mercy at odds with one another, and finally the ‘greater’ mercy required to redeem the speaker’s ‘great offence’.