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

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 966 lines and 170744 words, and 20 pages

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.

Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with teares,

Poetry is the language of passion, but the passion which moves the poet most constantly is the delight of making poetry, and very little is sufficient to quicken the imagination to its congenial task. Our soberer minds are apt to think that there must be an actual, particular experience behind every sincere poem. But history refutes the idea of such a simple relation between experience and art. No poet will sing of love convincingly who has never loved, but that experience will suffice him for many and diverse webs of song and drama. Without pursuing the theme, it is sufficient for the moment to recall that in the fashion of the day Spenser's sonnets were addressed to Lady Carey, not to his wife; that it was to Idea or to Anne Goodere that Drayton wrote so passionate a poem as

Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part;

and that we know very little of what really lies behind Shakespeare's profound and plangent sonnets, weave what web of fancy we will.

Of Lady Bedford's feeling for Donne we know only what his letters reveal, and that is no more than that she was his warm friend and generous patroness. It is clear, however, from their enduring friendship and from the tone of that correspondence that she found in him a friend of a rarer and finer calibre than in the other poets whom she patronized in turn, Daniel and Drayton and Jonson--some one whose sensitive, complex, fascinating personality could hardly fail to touch a woman's imagination and heart. Friendship between man and woman is love in some degree. There is no need to exaggerate the situation, or to reflect on either her loyalty or his to other claims, to recognize that their mutual feeling was of the kind for which the Petrarchian convention afforded a ready and recognized vehicle of expression.

Since there must reside Falshood in woman, I could more abide She were by Art, than Nature falsifi'd.

Woman needs no advantages to arbitrate the fate of man.

has ceased to be Petrarchian and become Platonic, their love a thing pure and of the spirit, but none the less passionate for that:

First, we lov'd well and faithfully, Yet knew not what wee lov'd, nor why, Difference of sex no more wee knew, Then our Guardian Angells doe; Comming and going, wee Perchance might kisse, but not between those meales; Our hands ne'r toucht the seales, Which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free: These miracles wee did; but now alas, All measure, and all language, I should passe, Should I tell what a miracle shee was.

Such were the notes that a poet in the seventeenth century might still sing to a high-born lady his patroness and his friend. No one who knows the fashion of the day will read into them more than they were intended to convey. No one who knows human nature will read them as merely frigid and conventional compliments. Any uncertainty one may feel about the subject arises not from their being love-poems, but from the difficulty which Donne has in adjusting himself to the Petrarchian convention, the tendency of his passionate heart and satiric wit to break through the prescribed tone of worship and complaint.

May! be thou never grac'd with birds that sing, Nor Flora's pride! In thee all flowers and roses spring, Mine only died,

Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding Seas Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld,

and some of his loveliest allusions:

In the metaphysical elegy as cultivated by Donne, Beaumont, and others there was no escape from extravagant eulogy and sorrow by way of pastoral convention and mythological embroidery, and this class of poetry includes some of the worst verses ever written. In Donne all three of the strains referred to are present, but only in the third does he achieve what can be truly called poetry. In the elegies on Lord Harington and Miss Boulstred and Lady Markham it is difficult to say which is more repellent--the images in which the poet sets forth the vanity of human life and the humiliations of death or the frigid and blasphemous hyperboles in which the virtues of the dead are eulogized.

There entertain him all the Saints above, In solemn troops, and sweet Societies That sing, and singing in their glory move, And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.

But in spiritual sense, in passionate awareness of the transcendent, there are lines in Donne's poem that seem to me superior to anything in Milton if not in purity of Christian feeling, yet in the passionate, mystical sense of the infinite as something other than the finite, something which no suggestion of illimitable extent and superhuman power can ever in any degree communicate.

Think then my soule that death is but a Groome, Which brings a Taper to the outward roome, Whence thou spiest first a little glimmering light, And after brings it nearer to thy sight: For such approaches does heaven make in death. . . . . . . . Up, up my drowsie Soule, where thy new eare Shall in the Angels songs no discord heere, &c.

In passages like these there is an earnest of the highest note of spiritual eloquence that Donne was to attain to in his sermons and last hymns.

The new philosophy calls all in doubt, The Element of fire is quite put out; The Sun is lost, and th' earth, and no mans wit Can well direct him where to look for it. And freely men confesse that this world's spent, When in the Planets, and the Firmament They seeke so many new; they see that this Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies.

On Tennyson the effect of a similar dislocation of thought, the revelation of a Nature which seemed to bring to death and bring to life through endless ages, careless alike of individual and type, was religious doubt tending to despair:

O life as futile, then, as frail! . . . . . What hope of answer, or redress? Behind the veil, behind the veil.

On Donne the effect was quite the opposite. It was not of religion he doubted but of science, of human knowledge with its uncertainties, its shifting theories, its concern about the unimportant:

With this welter of shifting theories and worthless facts he contrasts the vision of which religious faith is the earnest here:

'I will suppose an author to be really possessed with the passion which he writes upon and then we shall see how he would acquit himself. This I take to be the safest way to form a judgement upon him: since if he be not truly moved, he must at least work up his imagination as near as possible to resemble reality. I choose to instance in love, which is observed to have produced the most finished performances in this kind. A lover will be full of sincerity, that he may be believed by his mistress; he will therefore think simply; he will express himself perspicuously, that he may not perplex her; he will therefore write unaffectedly. Deep reflections are made by a head undisturbed; and points of wit and fancy are the work of a heart at ease; these two dangers then into which poets are apt to run, are effectually removed out of the lover's way. The selecting proper circumstances, and placing them in agreeable lights, are the finest secrets of all poetry; but the recollection of little circumstances is the lover's sole meditation, and relating them pleasantly, the business of his life. Accordingly we find that the most celebrated authors of this rank excel in love-verses. Out of ten thousand instances I shall name one which I think the most delicate and tender I ever saw.

To myself I sigh often, without knowing why; And when absent from Phyllis methinks I could die.

A man who hath ever been in love will be touched by the reading of these lines; and everyone who now feels that passion, actually feels that they are true.'

Awake, my heart, to be loved, awake, awake! The darkness silvers away, the morn doth break, It leaps in the sky: unrisen lustres slake The o'ertaken moon. Awake, O heart, awake!

She too that loveth awaketh and hopes for thee; Her eyes already have sped the shades that flee, Already they watch the path thy feet shall take: Awake, O heart, to be loved, awake, awake!

And if thou tarry from her,--if this could be,-- She cometh herself, O heart, to be loved, to thee; For thee would unashamed herself forsake: Awake to be loved, my heart, awake, awake!

Awake, the land is scattered with light, and see, Uncanopied sleep is flying from field and tree: And blossoming boughs of April in laughter shake; Awake, O heart, to be loved, awake, awake!

Lo all things wake and tarry and look for thee: She looketh and saith, 'O sun, now bring him to me. Come more adored, O adored, for his coming's sake, And awake my heart to be loved: awake, awake!'

Donne has written nothing at once so subtle and so pure and lovely as this, nothing the end and aim of which is so entirely to leave an untroubled impression of beauty.

And alive I shall keep and long, you will see! I knew a man, was kicked like a dog From gutter to cesspool; what cared he So long as he picked from the filth his prog? He saw youth, beauty and genius die, And jollily lived to his hundredth year. But I will live otherwise: none of such life! At once I begin as I mean to end.

But this sacrifice of beauty to dramatic vividness is a characteristic of passionate poetry. Beauty is not precisely the quality we should predicate of the burning lines of Sappho translated by Catullus:

lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus flamma demanat, sonitu suopte tintinant aures geminae, teguntur lumina nocte.

Beauty is the quality of poetry which records an ideal passion recollected in tranquillity, rather than of poetry either dramatic or lyric which utters the very movement and moment of passion itself.

The fundamental weakness of the mediaeval doctrine of love, despite its refining influence and its exaltation of woman, was that it proved unable to justify love ethically against the claims of the counter-ideal of asceticism. Taking its rise in a relationship which excluded the thought of marriage as the end and justification of love, which presumed in theory that the relation of the 'servant' to his lady must always be one of reverent and unrewarded service, this poetry found itself involved from the beginning in a dualism from which there was no escape. On the one hand the love of woman is the great ennobler of the human heart, the influence which elicits its latent virtue as the sun converts clay to gold and precious stones. On the other hand, love is a passion which in the end is to be repented of in sackcloth and ashes. Lancelot is the knight whom love has made perfect in all the virtues of manhood and chivalry; but the vision of the Holy Grail is not for him, but for the virgin and stainless Sir Galahad.

The dualism thus in appearance transcended by Dante reappears sharply and distinctly in Petrarch. 'Petrarch', says Gaspary, 'adores not the idea but the person of his lady; he feels that in his affections there is an earthly element, he cannot separate it from the desire of the senses; this is the earthly tegument which draws us down. If not as, according to the ascetic doctrine, sin, if he could not be ashamed of his passion, yet he could repent of it as a vain and frivolous thing, regret his wasted hopes and griefs.' Laura is for Petrarch the flower of all perfection herself and the source of every virtue in her lover. Yet his love for Laura is a long and weary aberration of the soul from her true goal, which is the love of God. This is the contradiction from which flow some of the most lyrical strains in Petrarch's poetry, as the fine canzone 'I'vo pensando', where he cries:

E sento ad ora ad or venirmi in core Un leggiadro disdegno, aspro e severo, Ch'ogni occulto pensero Tira in mezzo la fronte, ov' altri 'l vede; Che mortal cosa amar con tanta fede, Quanta a Dio sol per debito convensi, Pi? si disdice a chi pi? pregio brama.

But ah! Desire still cries, give me some food.

And in the end both Sidney and Spenser turn from earthly to heavenly love:

Leave me, O love, which reachest but to dust, And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things: Grow rich in that which never taketh rust, Whatever fades but fading pleasure brings.

And so Spenser:

Many lewd lays In praise of that mad fit, which fools call love, I have in the heat of youth made heretofore; That in light wits affection loose did move, But all these follies now I do reprove.

But two things had come over this idealist and courtly love-poetry by the end of the sixteenth century. It had become a literary artifice, a refining upon outworn and extravagant conceits, losing itself at times in the fantastic and absurd. A more important fact was that this poetry had begun to absorb a new warmth and spirit, not from Petrarch and mediaeval chivalry, but from classical love-poetry with its simpler, less metaphysical strain, its equally intense but more realistic description of passion, its radically different conception of the relation between the lovers and of the influence of love in a man's life. The courtly, idealistic strain was crossed by an Epicurean and sensuous one that tends to treat with scorn the worship of woman, and echoes again and again the Pagan cry, never heard in Dante or Petrarch, of the fleetingness of beauty and love:

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus! Soles occidere et redire possunt: Nobis quum semel occidit brevis lux Nox est perpetua una dormienda.

Vivez si m'en croyez, n'attendez ? demain; Cueillez d?s aujourd'hui les roses de la vie.

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, But sad mortality o'er-sways their power, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

goodly exiled train Of gods and goddesses

Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet