Crucibles of the Male Soul: Metaphysical and Postmodern Masculinities in John Donne’s Holy Sonnets and RM’s Indigo

Masculinity has long been constructed as steady, rational, and invulnerable, i.e., an identity solidified through performances of control, restraint, and emotional impermeability. However, the lyric form has often unsettled these assumptions by staging the masculine self in moments of desperation, instability, confession, and spiritual or existential testing. This paper argues that John Donne’s Holy Sonnets and RM’s 2022 solo album Indigo form two powerful lyric archives in which masculinity is not affirmed but disassembled, not triumphant but trembling. Across four centuries and radically different cultural worlds, Donne and RM share a common impulse: to dramatize the masculine soul in crisis and expose the fragility beneath its surface.