SOURCE: Halewood, William H. “The Predicament of the Westward Rider.” Studies in Philology 93, no. 2 (spring 1996): 218-28.

In the following essay, Halewood provides a detailed reading of Donne's poem, “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward” and suggests that the poem does not achieve closure, but remains concerned with the conflict between Protestant and Catholic ways of understanding humanity's relationship to God and salvation.

A body of commentary has begun to accumulate around “Good-friday, 1613. Riding Westward” that promises to enhance its already almost central position among Donne's religious poems—to make it fairly certain, for example, to be the poem taken up first in classroom lectures aimed at outlining Donne's religious position and making the set-piece sonnets (“Batter my heart,” “Spit in my face,” “O my blacke Soule!”) less simply surprising. Agreement about the importance of the poem is to some extent paralleled by agreement about what it means, though there is perhaps...