Chapter 2

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.

And so it was, one fancies, with Mrs. Herbert. She too found in Donne a rare and comprehending spirit, and he in her a gracious and delicate friend. His relation to her, indeed, was probably simpler than to Lady Bedford, their friendship more equal. The letter and the elegy referred to already are instinct with affection and tender reverence. To her Donne sent some of his earliest religious sonnets, with a sonnet on her beautiful name. And to her also it would seem that at some period in the history of their friendship, the beginning of which is very difficult to date, he wrote songs in the tone of hopeless, impatient passion, of Petrarch writing to Laura, and others which celebrate their mutual affection as a love that rose superior to earthly and physical passion. The clue here is the title prefixed to that strange poemThe Primrose, being at Montgomery Castle upon the hill on which it is situate. It is true that the title is found for the first time in the edition of 1635 and is in none of the manuscripts. But it is easier to explain the occasional suppression of a revealing title than to conceive a motive for inventing such a gloss. The poem is doubtless, as Mr. Gosse says, 'a mystical celebration of the beauty, dignity and intelligence of Magdalen Herbert'—a celebration, however, which takes the form (as it might with Petrarch) of a reproach, a reproach which Donne's passionate temper and caustic wit seem even to touch with scorn. He appears to hint to Mrs. Herbert that to wish to be more than a woman, to claim worship in place of love, is to be a worse monster than a coquette:

Since there must resideFalshood in woman, I could more abideShe were by Art, than Nature falsifi'd.

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.

In exactly the same mood asThe PrimroseisThe Blossome, possibly written in the same place and on the same day, for the poet is preparing to return to London.The Dampeis in an even more scornful tone, and one hesitates to connect it with Mrs. Herbert. But all these poems recur so repeatedly together in the manuscripts as to suggest that they have a common origin.And with them go the beautiful poemsThe FunerallandThe Relique. In the former the cruelty of the lady has killed her lover, but in the second the tone changes entirely, the relation between Donne and Mrs. Herbert (note the lines

Thou shalt be a MaryMagdalenand IA something else thereby)

Thou shalt be a MaryMagdalenand I

A something else thereby)

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, weePerchance 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.

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.

Without some touch of passion, some vibration of the heart, Donne is only too apt to accumulate 'monstrous and disgusting hyperboles'. This is very obvious in theEpicedes—his complimentary laments for the young Lord Harington, Miss Boulstred, Lady Markham, Elizabeth Drury and the Marquis of Hamilton, poems in which it is difficult to find a line that moves. Indeed, seventeenth-century elegies are not as a rulepathetic. A poem in the simple, piercing strain and the Wordsworthian plainness of style of the Dutch poet Vondel's lament for his little daughter is hardly to be found in English. An occasional epitaph like Browne's

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

May! be thou never grac'd with birds that sing,

Nor Flora's pride!

In thee all flowers and roses spring,

Mine only died,

comes near it, but in general seventeenth-century elegy is apt to spend itself on three not easily reconcilable themes—extravagant eulogy of the dead, which is the characteristically Renaissance strain, the Mediaeval meditation on death and its horrors, the more simply Christian mood of hope rising at times to the rapt vision of a higher life. In the pastoral elegy, such asLycidas, the poet was able to escape from a too literal treatment of the first into a sequence of charming conventions. The second was alien to Milton's thought, and with his genius for turning everything to beauty Milton extracts from the reference to the circumstances of King's death the only touch of pathos in the poem:

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

Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding Seas

Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld,

and some of his loveliest allusions:

Where the great vision of the guarded MountLooks towardsNamancosandBayona'shold;Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.And, O yeDolphins, waft the hapless youth.

Where the great vision of the guarded Mount

Looks towardsNamancosandBayona'shold;

Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.

And, O yeDolphins, waft the hapless youth.

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 poetsets 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.

Even theSecond Anniversary, the greatest of Donne's epicedes, is marred throughout by these faults. There is no stranger poem in the English language in its combination of excellences and faults, splendid audacities and execrable extravagances. 'Fervour of inspiration, depth and force and glow of thought and emotion and expression'—it has something of all these high qualities which Swinburne claimed; but the fervour is in great part misdirected, the emotion only half sincere, the thought more subtle than profound, the expression heated indeed but with a heat which only in passages kindles to the glow of poetry.

Such are the passages in which the poet contemplates the joys of heaven. There is nothing more instinct with beautiful feeling inLycidasthan some of the lines of Apocalyptic imagery at the close:

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

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 eareShall in the Angels songs no discord heere, &c.

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 ofspiritual eloquence that Donne was to attain to in his sermons and last hymns.

Another aspect of Donne's poetry in theAnniversaries, of hiscontemptus mundiand ecstatic vision, connects them more closely with Tennyson'sIn Memoriamthan Milton'sLycidas. Like Tennyson, Donne is much concerned with the progress of science, the revolution which was going on in men's knowledge of the universe, and its disintegrating effect on accepted beliefs. To him the new astronomy is as bewildering in its displacement of the earth and disturbance of a concentric universe as the new geology was to be to Tennyson with the vistas which it opened into the infinities of time, the origin and the destiny of man:

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 witCan well direct him where to look for it.And freely men confesse that this world's spent,When in the Planets, and the FirmamentThey seeke so many new; they see that thisIs crumbled out againe to his Atomies.

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.

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:

Poore soule, in this thy flesh what dost thou know?Thou know'st thy selfe so little, as thou know'st not,How thou didst die, nor how thou wast begot.. . . . . . . . .Have not all soules thoughtFor many ages, that our body is wroughtOf Ayre, and Fire, and other Elements?And now they thinke of new ingredients;And one Soule thinkes one, and another wayAnother thinkes, and 'tis an even lay.. . . . . . . . .Wee see in Authors, too stiffe to recant,A hundred controversies of an Ant;And yet one watches, starves, freeses, and sweats,To know but Catechismes and AlphabetsOf unconcerning things, matters of fact;How others on our stage their parts did Act;WhatCæsardid, yea, and whatCicerosaid.

Poore soule, in this thy flesh what dost thou know?

Thou know'st thy selfe so little, as thou know'st not,

How thou didst die, nor how thou wast begot.

. . . . . . . . .

Have not all soules thought

For many ages, that our body is wrought

Of Ayre, and Fire, and other Elements?

And now they thinke of new ingredients;

And one Soule thinkes one, and another way

Another thinkes, and 'tis an even lay.

. . . . . . . . .

Wee see in Authors, too stiffe to recant,

A hundred controversies of an Ant;

And yet one watches, starves, freeses, and sweats,

To know but Catechismes and Alphabets

Of unconcerning things, matters of fact;

How others on our stage their parts did Act;

WhatCæsardid, yea, and whatCicerosaid.

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

In this low forme, poore soule, what wilt thou doe?When wilt thou shake off this Pedantery,Of being taught by sense, and Fantasie?Thou look'st through spectacles; small things seeme greatBelow; But up unto the watch-towre get,And see all things despoyl'd of fallacies:Thou shalt not peepe through lattices of eyes,Nor heare through Labyrinths of eares, nor learneBy circuit, or collections, to discerne.In heaven thou straight know'st all concerning it,And what concernes it not, shalt straight forget.

In this low forme, poore soule, what wilt thou doe?

When wilt thou shake off this Pedantery,

Of being taught by sense, and Fantasie?

Thou look'st through spectacles; small things seeme great

Below; But up unto the watch-towre get,

And see all things despoyl'd of fallacies:

Thou shalt not peepe through lattices of eyes,

Nor heare through Labyrinths of eares, nor learne

By circuit, or collections, to discerne.

In heaven thou straight know'st all concerning it,

And what concernes it not, shalt straight forget.

It will seem to some readers hardly fair to compare a poem likeIn Memoriam, which, if in places the staple of its feeling and thought wears a little thin, is entirely serious throughout, with poems which have so much the character of an intellectualtour de forceas Donne'sAnniversaries, but it is easy to be unjust to the sincerity of Donne in these poems. Their extravagant eulogy did not argue any insincerity to Sir Robert and Lady Drury. It was in the manner of the time, and doubtless seemed to them as natural an expression of grief as the elaborate marble and alabaster tomb which they erected to the memory of their daughter. TheSecond Anniversariewas written in France when Donne was resident there with the Drurys. And it was on this occasion that Donne had the vision of his absent wife which Walton has related so graphically.The spiritual sense in Donne was as real a thing as the restless and unruly wit, or the sensual, passionate temperament. The main thesis of the poem, the comparative worthlessness of this life, the transcendence of the spiritual, was as sincere in Donne's case as was in Tennyson the conviction of the futility of life if death closes all. It was to be the theme of the finest passages in his eloquent sermons, the burden of all that is most truly religious in the verse and prose of a passionate, intellectual, self-tormenting soul to whom the pure ecstasy of love of a Vondel, the tender raptures of a Crashaw, the chastened piety of a Herbert, the mystical perceptions of a Vaughan could never be quite congenial.

I have dwelt at some length on those aspects of Donne's 'wit' which are of interest and value even to a reader who may feel doubtful as to the beauty and interest of his poetry as such, because they too have been obscured by the criticism which with Dr. Johnson and Mr. Courthope represents his wit as a monster of misapplied ingenuity, his interest as historical and historical only. Apart from poetry there is in Donne's 'wit' a great deal that is still fresh and vivid, wit as we understand wit; satire pungent and vivid; reflection on religion and on life, rugged at times in form but never really unmusical as Jonson's verse is unmusical, and, despite frequent carelessness, singularly lucid and felicitous in expression; elegant compliment, extravagant and grotesque at times but often subtle and piquant; and in theAnniversaries, amid much that is both puerile and extravagant, a loftier strain of impassioned reflection and vision. It is not of course that these things are not, or may not be constituents of poetry, made poetic by their handling. To me it seems that in Donne they generally are. It is the poet in Donne which flavours them all, touching his wit with fancy, his reflection with imagination, his vision with passion. But if we wish to estimate the poet simply in Donne, we must examine his love-poetry and his religious poetry. It is here that every one who cares for his unique and arresting genius will admit that he must stand or fall as a great poet.

For it is here that we find the full effect of what De Quincey points to as Donne's peculiarity, the combination of dialectical subtlety with weight and force of passion. Objections to admit the poetic worth and interest of Donne's love-poetry come from two sides—from those who are indisposed to admit that passion, and especially the passion of love, can ever speak so ingeniously (this was the eighteenth-century criticism); and from those, and these are his more modern critics, who deny that Donne is a great poet because with rare exceptions, exceptions rather of occasional lines and phrases than of whole poems, his songs and elegies lack beauty. Can poetry be at once passionate and ingenious, sincere in feeling and witty,—packed with thought, and that subtle and abstract thought, Scholastic dialectic? Can love-poetry speak a language which is impassioned and expressive but lacks beauty, is quite different from the language of Dante and Petrarch, the loveliest language that lovers ever spoke, or the picturesque hyperboles ofRomeo and Juliet? Must not the imagery and the cadences of love poetry reflect 'l'infinita, ineffabile bellezza' which is its inspiration?

The first criticism is put very clearly by Steele, who goes so far as to exemplify what the style of love-poetry should be; and certainly it is something entirely different from that ofThe Extasieor theNocturnall upon S. Lucies Day. Nothing could illustrate better the 'return to nature' of our Augustan literature than Steele's words:

'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 thework 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.

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.'

It is not possible to find so distinct a statement of the other view to which I have referred, but I could imagine it coming from Mr. Robert Bridges, or (since I have no authority to quote Mr. Bridges in this connexion) from an admirer of his beautiful poetry. Mr. Bridges' love-poetry is far indeed from the vapid naturalness which Steele commended inThe Guardian. It is as instinct with thought, and subtle thought, as Donne's own poetry; but the final effect of his poetry is beauty, emotion recollected in tranquillity, and recollected especially in order to fix its delicate beauty in appropriate and musical words:

Awake, my heart, to be loved, awake, awake!The darkness silvers away, the morn doth break,It leaps in the sky: unrisen lustres slakeThe 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!'

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

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!

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!

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!

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!'

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.

But it is not true either that the thought and imagery of love-poetry must be of the simple, obvious kind which Steele supposes, that any display of dialectical subtlety, any scintillation of wit, must be fatal to the impression of sincerity and feeling, or on the other hand that love is always a beautiful emotion naturally expressing itself in delicate and beautiful language. To some natures love comes as above all things a force quickening the mind, intensifying its purely intellectual energy, opening new vistas of thought abstract and subtle, making the soul 'intensely, wondrously alive'. Of such were Donne and Browning. A love-poem like 'Come into the garden, Maud' suspends thought and fills the mind with a succession of picturesque and voluptuous images in harmony with the dominant mood. A poem such asThe AnniversarieorThe Extasie,The Last Ride TogetherorToo Late, is a record of intense, rapid thinking, expressed in the simplest, most appropriate language—and it is a no whit less natural utterance of passion. Even the abstractness of the thought, on which Mr. Courthope lays so much stress in speaking of Donne and the 'metaphysicals' generally, is no necessary implication of want of feeling. It has been said of St. Augustine 'that his most profound thoughts regarding the first and last things arose out of prayer ... concentration of his whole being in prayer led to the most abstract observation'. So it may be with love-poetry—so it was with Dante in theVita Nuova, and so, on a lower scale, and allowing for the time that the passionis a more earthly and sensual one, the thought more capricious and unruly, with Donne. TheNocturnall upon S. Lucies Dayis not less passionate because that passion finds expression in abstract and subtle thought. Nor is it true that all love-poetry is beautiful. Of none of the four poems I have mentioned in the last paragraph is pure beauty, beauty such as is the note of Mr. Bridges' song, the distinctive quality. It is rather vivid realism:

And alive I shall keep and long, you will see!I knew a man, was kicked like a dogFrom gutter to cesspool; what cared heSo 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.

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 artusflamma demanat, sonitu suoptetintinant aures geminae, tegunturlumina nocte.

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.

Donne's love-poetry is a very complex phenomenon, but the two dominant strains in it are just these: the strain of dialectic, subtle play of argument and wit, erudite and fantastic; and the strain of vivid realism, the record of a passion which is not ideal nor conventional, neither recollected in tranquillity nor a pure product of literary fashion, but love as an actual, immediate experience in all its moods, gay and angry, scornful and rapturous with joy, touched with tenderness and darkened with sorrow—though these last two moods, the commonest in love-poetry,are with Donne the rarest. The first of these strains comes to Donne from the Middle Ages, the dialectic of the Schools, which passed into mediaeval love-poetry almost from its inception; the second is the expression of the new temper of the Renaissance as Donne had assimilated it in Latin countries. Donne uses the method, the dialectic of the mediaeval love-poets, the poets of thedolce stil nuovo, Guinicelli, Cavalcanti, Dante, and their successors, the intellectual, argumentative evolution of theircanzoni, but he uses it to express a temper of mind and a conception of love which are at the opposite pole from their lofty idealism. The result, however, is not so entirely disintegrating as Mr. Courthope seems to think: 'This fine Platonic edifice is ruthlessly demolished in the poetry of Donne. To him love, in its infinite variety and inconsistency, represented the principle of perpetual flux in nature.'1The truth is rather that, owing to the fullness of Donne's experience as a lover, the accident that made of the earlier libertine a devoted lover and husband, and from the play of his restless and subtle mind on the phenomenon of love conceived and realized in this less ideal fashion, there emerged in his poetry the suggestion of a new philosophy of love which, if less transcendental than that of Dante, rests on a juster, because a less dualistic and ascetic, conception of the nature of the love of man and woman.

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 thehuman 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.

In the high philosophy of the Tuscan poets of the 'sweet new style' that dualism was apparently transcended, but it was by making love identical with religion, by emptying it of earthly passion, making woman an Angel, a pure Intelligence, love of whom is the first awakening of the love of God. 'For Dante and the poets of the learned school love and virtue were one and the same thing; lovewasreligion, the lady beloved the way to heaven, symbol of philosophy and finally of theology.'2The culminating moment in Dante's love for Beatrice arrives when he has overcome even the desire that she should return his salutation and he finds his full beatitude in 'those words that do praise my lady'. The love that begins in theVita Nuovais completed in theParadiso.

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.'3Laura 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 lyricalstrains in Petrarch's poetry, as the fine canzone 'I'vo pensando', where he cries:

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

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,

Più si disdice a chi più pregio brama.

Elizabethan love-poetry is descended from Petrarch by way of Cardinal Bembo and the French poets of thePléiade, notably Ronsard and Desportes. Of all the Elizabethan sonneteers the most finely Petrarchian are Sidney and Spenser, especially the former. For Sidney, Stella is the school of virtue and nobility. He too writes at times in the impatient strain of Petrarch:

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.

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 (Ah! woe is me the more)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.

Many lewd lays (Ah! woe is me the more)

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 realisticdescription 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 luxNox est perpetua una dormienda.Vivez si m'en croyez, n'attendez à demain;Cueillez dès 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 pleaWhose action is no stronger than a flower?

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

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 à demain;Cueillez dès aujourd'hui les roses de la vie.

Vivez si m'en croyez, n'attendez à demain;

Cueillez dès 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 pleaWhose action is no stronger than a flower?

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?

Now if we turn from Elizabethan love-poetry to theSongs and Sonetsand theElegiesof Donne, we find at once two distinguishing features. In the first place his poetry is in one respect less classical than theirs. There is far less in it of the superficial evidence of classical learning with which the poetry of the 'University Wits' abounds, pastoral and mythological imagery. The texture of his poetry is more mediaeval than theirs in as far as it is more dialectical, though a dialectical evolution is not infrequent in the Elizabethan sonnet, and the imagery is less picturesque, more scientific, philosophic, realistic, and homely. The place of the

goodly exiled trainOf gods and goddesses

goodly exiled train

Of gods and goddesses

is taken by images drawn from all the sciences of the day, from the definitions and distinctions of the Schoolmen, from the travels and speculations of the new age, and (as in Shakespeare's tragedies or Browning's poems) from the experiences of everyday life. Maps and sea discoveries, latitude and longitude, the phoenix and the mandrake's root, the Scholastic theories of Angelic bodies and Angelic knowledge, Alchemyand Astrology, legal contracts andnon obstantes, 'late schoolboys and sour prentices,' 'the king's real and his stamped face'—these are the kind of images, erudite, fanciful, and homely, which give to Donne's poems a texture so different at a first glance from the florid and diffuse Elizabethan poetry, whether romantic epic, mythological idyll, sonnet, or song; while by their presence and their abundance they distinguish it equally (as Mr. Gosse has justly insisted) from the studiously moderate and plain style of 'well-languaged Daniel'.

But if the imagery of Donne's poetry be less classical than that of Marlowe or the younger Shakespeare there is no poet the spirit of whose love-poetry is so classical, so penetrated with the sensual, realistic, scornful tone of the Latin lyric and elegiac poets. If one reads rapidly through the three books of Ovid'sAmores, and then in the same continuous rapid fashion theSongsand theElegiesof Donne, one will note striking differences of style and treatment. Ovid develops his theme simply and concretely, Donne dialectically and abstractly. There is little of the ease and grace of Ovid's verses in the rough and vehement lines of Donne'sElegies. Compare the song,

Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,

with the famous thirteenth Elegy of the first book,

Iam super oceanum venit a seniore marito,Flava pruinoso quae vehit axe diem.

Iam super oceanum venit a seniore marito,

Flava pruinoso quae vehit axe diem.

Ovid passes from one natural and simple thought to another, from one aspect of dawn to another equally objective. Donne just touches one or two of the same features, borrowing them doubtless from Ovid, but the greater part of the song is devoted to the subtle and extravagant, if you like, but not the less passionate development of the thought that for him the woman he loves is the whole world.

But if the difference between Donne's metaphysical conceits and Ovid's naturalness and simplicity is palpable it is not less clear that the emotions which they express, with some importantexceptions to which I shall recur, are identical. The love which is the main burden of their song is something very different from the ideal passion of Dante or of Petrarch, of Sidney or Spenser. It is a more sensual passion. The same tone of witty depravity runs through the work of the two poets. There is in Donne a purer strain which, we shall see directly, is of the greatest importance, but such a rapid reader as I am contemplating might be forgiven if for the moment he overlooked it, and declared that the modern poet was as sensual and depraved as the ancient, that there was little to choose between the social morality reflected in the Elizabethan and in the Augustan poet.

And yet even in these more cynical and sensual poems a careful reader will soon detect a difference between Donne and Ovid. He will begin to suspect that the English poet is imitating the Roman, and that the depravity is in part a reflected depravity. In revolt from one convention the young poet is cultivating another, a cynicism and sensuality which is just as little to be takenau pied de la lettreas the idealizing worship, the anguish and adoration of the sonneteers. There is, as has been said already, a gaiety in the poems elaborating the thesis that love is a perpetual flux, fickleness the law of its being, which warns us against taking them too seriously; and even thoseElegieswhich seem to our taste most reprehensible are aerated by a wit which makes us almost forget their indecency. In the last resort there is all the difference in the world between the untroubled, heartless sensuality of the Roman poet and the gay wit, the paradoxical and passionate audacities and sensualities of the young Elizabethan law-student impatient of an unreal convention, and eager to startle and delight his fellow students by the fertility and audacity of his wit.

It is not of course my intention to represent Donne's love-poetry as purely an 'evaporation' of wit, to suggest that there is in it no reflection either of his own life as a young man or the moral atmosphere of Elizabethan London. It would be a much less interesting poetry if this were so. Donne has pleaded guilty to a careless and passionate youth:

In mine Idolatry what showres of raineMine eyes did waste? what griefs my heart did rent?That sufferance was my sinne; now I repent;Cause I did suffer I must suffer pain.

In mine Idolatry what showres of raine

Mine eyes did waste? what griefs my heart did rent?

That sufferance was my sinne; now I repent;

Cause I did suffer I must suffer pain.

From what we know of the lives of Essex, Raleigh, Southampton, Pembroke, and others it is probable that Donne'sElegiescome quite as close to the truth of life as Sidney's Petrarchianism or Spenser's Platonism. The later cantos ofThe Faerie Queenereflect vividly the unchaste loves and troubled friendships of Elizabeth's Court. Whether we can accept in its entirety the history of Donne's early amours which Mr. Gosse has gathered from the poems or not, there can be no doubt that actual experiences do lie behind these poems as behind Shakespeare's sonnets. In the one case as in the other, to recognize a literary model is not to exclude the probability of a source in actual experience.

But however we may explain or palliate the tone of these poems it is impossible to deny their power, the vivid and packed force with which they portray a variously mooded passion working through a swift and subtle brain. If there is little of the elegant and accomplished art which Milton admired in the Latin Elegiasts while he 'deplored' their immorality, there is more strength and sincerity both of thought and imagination. The brutal cynicism of

Fond woman which would have thy husband die,

the witty anger ofThe Apparition, the mordant and paradoxical wit ofThe PerfumeandThe Bracelet, the passionate dignity and strength ofHis Picture,

My body a sack of bones broken within,And powders blew stains scatter'd on my skin,

My body a sack of bones broken within,

And powders blew stains scatter'd on my skin,

the passion that rises superior to sensuality and wit, and takes wing into a more spiritual and ideal atmosphere, ofHis parting from her,

I will not look upon the quick'ning Sun,But straight her beauty to my sense shall run;The ayre shall note her soft, the fire most pure;Water suggest her clear, and the earth sure—

I will not look upon the quick'ning Sun,

But straight her beauty to my sense shall run;

The ayre shall note her soft, the fire most pure;

Water suggest her clear, and the earth sure—

compare these with Ovid and the difference is apparent between an artistic, witty voluptuary and a poet whose passionate force redeems many errors of taste and art. Compare them with the sonnets and mythological idylls andHeroicall Epistlesof the Elizabethans and it is they, not Donne, who are revealed as witty and 'fantastic' poets content to adorn a conventional sentiment with mythological fancies and verbal conceits. Donne's interest is his theme, love and woman, and he uses words not for their own sake but to communicate his consciousness of these surprising phenomena in all their varying and conflicting aspects. The only contemporary poems that have the same dramatic quality are Shakespeare's sonnets and some of Drayton's later sonnets. In Shakespeare this dramatic intensity and variety is of course united with a rarer poetic charm. Charm is a quality which Donne's poetry possesses in a few single lines. But to the passion which animates these sensual, witty, troubled poems the closest parallel is to be sought in Shakespeare's sonnets to a dark lady and in some of the verses written by Catullus to or of Lesbia:

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.

But neither sensual passion, nor gay and cynical wit, nor scorn and anger, is the dominant note in Donne's love-poetry. Of the last quality there is, despite the sardonic emphasis of some of the poems, less than in either Shakespeare or Catullus. There is nothing in his poetry which speaks so poignantly of an outraged heart, a love lavished upon one who was worthless, as some of Shakespeare's sonnets and of Catullus's poems. The finest note in Donne's love-poetry is the note of joy, the joy of mutual and contented passion. His heart might be subtle to plague itself; its capacity for joy is even more obvious. Other poets have done many things which Donne could not do. They have invested their feelings with a garb of richer and sweeter poetry. They have felt more deeply and finely the reverence which is in the heart of love. But it is only in the fragments of Sappho, the lyrics of Catullus, andthe songs of Burns that one will find the sheer joy of loving and being loved expressed in the same direct and simple language as in some of Donne's songs, only in Browning that one will find the same simplicity of feeling combined with a like swift and subtle dialectic.

I wonder by my troth what thou and IDid till we loved.For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love.If yet I have not all thy love,Deare, I shall never have it all.

I wonder by my troth what thou and IDid till we loved.

I wonder by my troth what thou and I

Did till we loved.

For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love.

If yet I have not all thy love,Deare, I shall never have it all.

If yet I have not all thy love,

Deare, I shall never have it all.

Lines like these have the same direct, passionate quality as

φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισινἔμμεν ὤνηρ

φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν

ἔμμεν ὤνηρ

O my love's like a red, red roseThat's newly sprung in June.

O my love's like a red, red rose

That's newly sprung in June.

The joy is as intense though it is of a more spiritual and intellectual quality. And in the other notes of this simple passionate love-poetry, sorrow which is the shadow of joy, and tenderness, Donne does not fall far short of Burns in intensity of feeling and directness of expression. These notes are not so often heard in Donne, but

So, so break off this last lamenting kiss

is of the same quality as

Had we never lov'd sae kindly

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