John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions X: A Spiritual Diagnosis of Degeneration and Its Remedy

The main purpose of this article is to examine how John Donne’s prose, D evotions upon Emergent Occasions X , manifests his unswerving investigation into the deterioration of the world and human beings, and concurrently the feasible solutions for its regeneration. I n his initial writings of the 1590s and early 1610s, D onne was concerned with giving forth the precise examples of corruptions deeply ingrained in individual, political, social, religious, and legal domains. D evotions upon Emergent Occasions X , composed during the author’s later period in 1623, points up human decay among the other 22 chapters of the same work. Chapter X , however, greatly elaborates on the way by which the phenomena of degeneration germinate and henceforth develop. Furthermore, the writer meditates on how to confront and solve the fatal problem of declination by turning to religious perception and awakening.