Britten's music in the 1940s has been primarily discussed from the analytical perspective of pitch--- with David Forrest and Philip Rupprecht at the forefront of this research; however, throughout this decade, many vocal works, including the Serenade for Tenor Horn and Strings, Festival Te Deum, and The Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, involve a high level of metric experimentation. Britten's song cycle, The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, presents a culmination of this experimentation both in terms of each of the nine songs in the cycle, and in terms of the cycle as a whole. Recent developments in metric theory by Richard Cohn, Danuta Mirka, and Yonatin Malin, have resulted in a series of tools for analyzing meter that moves beyond meter as represented by an initial time signature. These theories underpin the analytical approach taken with The Holy Sonnets.

While this song cycle has received some scholarly attention, analyses fall into one of two camps, focused on either individual songs or on the cycle as a whole. Vicki Pierce Stroeher's dissertation, Form and meaning in Benjamin Britten's sonnet cycles, presents the most extensive scholarly work on The Holy Sonnets to date. She concludes that "the musico-poetic form that results from the creation of song ... is the response of a composer to the [individual] situation of the poem." Arnold Whittall, on the other hand, in his article Tonality in Britten's song cycles with piano, analyzes individual songs of the The Holy Sonnets from the perspective of the cycle: "They chart an emotional landscape, satisfying the same needs for contrast and unity, proportion and propulsion, as any other successful work of art." Whittall's elegant analysis of Britten's song cycles, from the perspective of each song's key and tonic, is one of the first analyses of Britten's song cycles as cycles, addressing the difficult question of how a grouping of songs that doesn't follow a linear story can function as a cycle.

Both analyses yield important insights; however, neither balances the role of song and cycle: Whittall strays too far from each individual song; Stroeher remains too close. Through employing a metric approach, this paper takes a theoretical position that stands between these two camps and builds the foundation for a new way of looking and talking about this song cycle. Through a metrically primed analytical lens this paper offers a new perspective on both the micro- and macro-structure of The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, and brings to light the culmination of Britten's experimentation with meter during the 1940s.