Read Ebook: The Poems of John Donne Volume 2 (of 2) Edited from the Old Editions and Numerous Manuscripts by Donne John Grierson Herbert John Clifford Sir Editor

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PAGE INTRODUCTION v

COMMENTARY 1

INDEX OF FIRST LINES 276

INTRODUCTION

THE POETRY OF DONNE

The only thing that such a criticism leaves unexplained and undefined is the interest which Donne's poetry still has for us, not as an historical phenomenon, but as poetry. Literary history has for the historian a quite distinct interest from that which it possesses for the student and lover of literature. For the historian it is a matter of positive interest to connect Donne's wit with the general disintegration of mediaeval thought, to recognize the influence on the Elizabethan drama of the doctrines of Machiavelli, or to find in Pope's achievement in poetry a counterpart to Walpole's in politics. For the lover of literature none of these facts has any positive interest whatsoever. Donne's wit attracts or repels him equally whatever be its source; Tamburlaine and Iago lose none of their interest for us though we know nothing of Machiavelli; Pope's poetry is not a whit more or less poetical by being a strange by-product of the Whig spirit in English life. For the lover of literature, literary history has an indirect value. He studies history that he may discount it. What he relishes in a poet of the past is exactly the same essential qualities as he enjoys in a poet of his own day--life and passion and art. But between us and every poet or thinker of the past hangs a thinner or thicker veil of outworn fashions and conventions. The same life has clothed itself in different garbs; the same passions have spoken in different images; the same art has adapted itself to different circumstances. To the historian these old clothes are in themselves a subject of interest. His enjoyment of Shakespeare is heightened by finding the explanation of Falstaff's hose, Pistol's hyperboles, and the poet's neglect of the Unities. To the lover of literature they are, until by understanding he can discount them, a disadvantage because they invest the work of the poet with an irrelevant air of strangeness. He studies them that he may grow familiar with them and forget them, that he may clear and intensify his sense of what alone has permanent value, the poet's individuality and the art in which it is expressed.

Donne's conceits, of which so much has been made and on whose historical significance Mr. Courthope has probably said the last word, are just like other examples of these old clothes. The question for literature is not whence they came, but how he used them. Is he a poet in virtue or in spite of them, or both? Are they fit only to be gathered into a museum of antiquated fashions such as Johnson prefixed to his study of the last poet who wore them in quite the old way , or are they the individual and still expressive dress of a true and great poet, commanding admiration in their own manner and degree as freshly and enduringly as the stiff and brocaded magnificence of Milton's no less individual, no less artificial style?

Here lies a king that ruled as he thought fit The universal monarchy of wit; Here lies two flamens, and both those the best, Apollo's first, at last the true God's priest.

It may be doubted if Milton shared this opinion. He never mentions Donne, but it was probably of him or his imitators he was thinking when in his verses at Cambridge he spoke of

those new-fangled toys and trimmings slight Which take our late fantastics with delight.

'There is more of salt in all your verses, than I have seen in any of the moderns, or even of the ancients; but you have been sparing of the gall, by which means you have pleased all readers, and offended none. Donne alone, of all our countrymen, had your talent; but was not happy enough to arrive at your versification; and were he translated into numbers, and English, he would yet be wanting in the dignity of expression. That which is the prime virtue, and chief ornament, of Virgil, which distinguishes him from the rest of writers, is so conspicuous in your verses, that it casts a shadow on all your contemporaries; we cannot be seen, or but obscurely, while you are present. You equal Donne in the variety, multiplicity, and choice of thoughts; you excel him in the manner and the words. I read you both with the same admiration, but not with the same delight.

He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love. In this Mr. Cowley has copied him to a fault; so great a one, in my opinion, that it throws his Mistress infinitely below his Pindarics and his latter compositions, which are undoubtedly the best of his poems and the most correct.'

Even to those critics with whom began a revived appreciation of Donne as a poet and preacher, his 'wit' still bulks largely. It is impossible to escape from it. 'Wonder-exciting vigour,' writes Coleridge, 'intenseness and peculiarity, using at will the almost boundless stores of a capacious memory, and exercised on subjects where we have no right to expect it--this is the wit of Donne.' And lastly De Quincey, who alone of these critics recognizes the essential quality which may, and in his best work does, make Donne's wit the instrument of a mind which is not only subtle and ingenious but profoundly poetical: 'Few writers have shown a more extraordinary compass of powers than Donne; for he combined what no other man has ever done--the last sublimation of dialectical subtlety and address with the most impassioned majesty. Massy diamonds compose the very substance of his poem on the Metempsychosis, thoughts and descriptions which have the fervent and gloomy sublimity of Ezekiel or Aeschylus, whilst a diamond dust of rhetorical brilliancies is strewed over the whole of his occasional verses and his prose.'

What is to-day the value and interest of this wit which has arrested the attention of so many generations? How far does it seem to us compatible with poetry in the full and generally accepted sense of the word, with poetry which quickens the imagination and touches the heart, which satisfies and delights, which is the verbal and rhythmical medium whereby a gifted soul communicates to those who have ears to hear the content of impassioned moments?

Before coming to close quarters with this difficult and debated question one may in the first place insist that there is in Donne's verse a great deal which, whether it be poetry in the full sense of the word or not, is arresting and of worth both historically and intrinsically. Whatever we may think of Donne's poetry, it is impossible not to recognize the extraordinary interest of his mind and character. In an age of great and fascinating men he is not the least so. The immortal and transcendent genius of Shakespeare leaves Donne, as every other contemporary, lost in the shadows and cross-lights of an age that is no longer ours, but from which Shakespeare emerges into the clear sunlight. Of Bacon's mind, 'deep and slow, exhausting thought,' and divining as none other the direction in which the road led through the d?bris of outworn learning to a renovated science and a new philosophy, Donne could not boast. Alike in his poetry and in his soberest prose, treatise or sermon, Donne's mind seems to want the high seriousness which comes from a conviction that truth is, and is to be found. A spirit of scepticism and paradox plays through and disturbs almost everything he wrote, except at moments when an intense mood of feeling, whether love or devotion, begets faith, and silences the sceptical and destructive wit by the power of vision rather than of intellectual conviction. Poles apart as the two poets seem at a first glance to lie in feeling and in art, there is yet something of Tennyson in the conflict which wages perpetually in Donne's poetry between feeling and intellect.

Of all miracles, Donne cries, a constant woman is the greatest, of all strange sights the strangest:

If thou findst one, let mee know, Such a Pilgrimage were sweet; Yet doe not, I would not goe, Though at next doore wee might meet, Though shee were true, when you met her, And last, till you write your letter, Yet shee Will bee False, ere I come, to two, or three.

Now thou hast lov'd me one whole day, To-morrow when thou leav'st what wilt thou say?

Vain lunatique, against these scapes I could Dispute, and conquer, if I would, Which I abstaine to doe, For by to-morrow, I may think so too.

Why ask for constancy when change is the life and law of love?

I can love both fair and brown; Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays; Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays. . . . . . . . I can love her and her, and you and you, I can love any so she be not true.

The South and West winds join'd, and as they blew, Waves like a rolling trench before them threw,

Thousands our noises were, yet we 'mongst all Could none by his right name, but thunder call: Lightning was all our light, and it rain'd more Than if the Sunne had drunke the sea before. . . . . . . . . . Hearing hath deaf'd our sailors, and if they Knew how to hear, there's none knowes what to say: Compared to these stormes, death is but a qualme, Hell somewhat lightsome, and the Bermuda calme.

The sense of tropical heat and calm in the companion poem is hardly less oppressive, and, if the whole is not quite so happy as the first, it contains two lines whose vivid and unexpected felicity is as delightful to-day as when Ben Jonson recited them to Drummond at Hawthornden:

No use of lanthorns; and in one place lay Feathers and dust, to-day and yesterday.

Donne's letters generally fall into two groups. The first comprises those addressed to his fellow-students at Cambridge and the Inns of Court, the Woodwards, Brookes, and others, or to his maturer and more fashionable companions in the quest of favour and employment at Court, Wotton, and Goodyere, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. To the other belong the complimentary and elegant epistles in which he delighted and perhaps bewildered his noble lady friends and patronesses with erudite and transcendental flattery.

However, keepe the lively tast you hold Of God, love him as now, but feare him more, And in your afternoones thinke what you told And promis'd him, at morning prayer before.

Let falshood like a discord anger you, Else be not froward. But why doe I touch Things, of which none is in your practise new, And Tables, or fruit-trenchers teach as much;

But thus I make you keepe your promise Sir, Riding I had you, though you still staid there, And in these thoughts, although you never stirre, You came with mee to Micham, and are here.

So he writes to Goodyere, but the letter to Wotton going Ambassador to Venice is Donne's masterpiece in this simpler style, and it seems to me that neither Daniel nor Jonson nor Drayton ever catches this note at once sensitive and courtly. To find a like courtliness we must go to Wotton; witness the reply to Donne's earlier epistle which I have printed in the notes. But neither Wotton nor any other of the courtly poets in Hannah's collection adds to this dignity so poignant a personal accent.

From this dilemma Donne escaped, not by any opportune change of conviction, or by any insincere profession, but by the way of intellectual emancipation. He looks round in this satire and sees that whichever be the true Church it is not by any painful quest of truth, and through the attainment of conviction, that most people have accepted the Church to which they may belong. Circumstances and whim have had more to do with their choice than reason and serious conviction. Yet it is only by search that truth is to be found:

On a huge hill Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will Reach her, about must, and about must goe; And what the hills suddenes resists win so. Yet strive so, that before age, deaths twilight, Thy Soule rest, for none can work in that night.

Show me, deare Christ, thy spouse, so bright and clear;

and the first result of his 'conversion' was apparently to deepen the sceptical vein in his mind.

Whose mortal taste Brought death into the world and all our woe,

the great soule which here among us now Doth dwell, and moves that hand, and tongue, and brow Which, as the Moone the sea, moves us.

The tone, moreover, of the stanza quoted above suggests that it was no vulgar libel on Elizabeth which Donne contemplated. Elizabeth, the cruel persecutor of his Catholic kinsfolk, now stained with the blood of her favourite, appeared to him somewhat as she did to Pope Sixtus, a heretic but a great woman. He felt to her as Burke did to the 'whole race of Guises, Cond?s and Colignis'--'the hand that like a destroying angel smote the country communicated to it the force and energy under which it suffered.' In a mood of bitter admiration, of sceptical and sardonic wonder, he contemplates the great bad souls who had troubled the world and served it too, for the idea on which the poem was to rest is the disconcerting reflection that we owe many good things to heretics and bad men:

It would have been interesting to read Donne's history of the great souls that troubled and yet quickened the world from Cain to Arius and from Mahomet to Elizabeth, but unfortunately Donne never got beyond the introduction, a couple of cantos which describe the progress of the soul while it is still passing through the vegetable and animal planes, the motive of which, so far as it can be disentangled, is to describe the pre-human education of a woman's soul:

keeping some quality Of every past shape, she knew treachery, Rapine, deceit, and lust, and ills enow To be a woman.

The reflective, philosophic, somewhat melancholy strain of the poems I have been touching on reappears in the letters addressed to noble ladies. Here, however, it is softened, less sardonic in tone, while it blends with or gives place to another strain, that of absurd and extravagant but fanciful and subtle compliment. Donne cannot write to a lady without his heart and fancy taking wing in their own passionate and erudite fashion. Scholastic theology is made the instrument of courtly compliment and pious flirtation. He blends in the same disturbing fashion as in some of the songs and elegies that depreciation of woman in general, which he owes less to classical poetry than to his over-acquaintance with the Fathers, with an adoration of her charms in the individual which passes into the transcendental. He tells the Countess of Huntingdon that active goodness in a woman is a miracle; but it is clear that she and the Countess of Bedford and Mrs. Herbert and Lady Carey and the Countess of Salisbury are all examples of such miracle--ladies whose beauty itself is virtue, while their virtues are a mystery revealable only to the initiated.

The highest place is held by Lady Bedford and Mrs. Herbert. Nothing could surpass the strain of intellectual and etherealized compliment in which he addresses the Countess. If lines like the following are not pure poetry, they haunt some quaint borderland of poetry to which the polished felicities of Pope's compliments are a stranger. If not pure fancy, they are not mere ingenuity, being too intellectual and argumentative for the one, too winged and ardent for the other:

Should I say I liv'd darker then were true, Your radiation can all clouds subdue; But one, 'tis best light to contemplate you.

You, for whose body God made better clay, Or tooke Soules stuffe such as shall late decay, Or such as needs small change at the last day.

This, as an Amber drop enwraps a Bee, Covering discovers your quicke Soule; that we May in your through-shine front your hearts thoughts see.

You teach a thing unknowne To our late times, the use of specular stone, Through which all things within without were shown.

The long poem dedicated to the same lady's beauty,

You have refin'd me

is in a like dazzling and subtle vein. Those addressed to Mrs. Herbert, notably the letter

Mad paper stay,

No Spring, nor Summer Beauty hath such grace As I have seen in one Autumnall face,

are less transcendental in tone but bespeak an even warmer admiration. Indeed it is clear to any careful reader that in the poems addressed to both these ladies there is blended with the respectful flattery of the dependant not a little of the tone of warmer feeling permitted to the 'servant' by Troubadour convention. And I suspect that some poems, the tone of which is still more frankly and ardently lover-like, were addressed to Lady Bedford and Mrs. Herbert, though they have come to us without positive indication.

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