II

Take, O take those lips away.

And strangest of all perhaps is the tenderness which came into Donne's poetry when a sincere passion quickened in his heart, for tenderness, the note of

O wert thou in the cauld blast,

is the last quality one would look for in the poetry of a nature at once so intellectual and with such a capacity for caustic satire. But the beautiful if not flawlessElegy XVI,

By our first strange and fatal interview,

and theValedictionswhich he wrote on different occasions of parting from his wife, combine with the peculiarélanof all Donne's passionate poetry and its intellectual content a tenderness as perfect as anything in Burns or in Browning:

O more than Moone,Draw not up seas to drowne me in thy spheare,Weepe me not dead in thine armes, but forbeareTo teach the sea, what it may doe too soone.Let not thy divining heartForethink me any ill,Destiny may take thy partAnd may thy feares fulfill;But thinke that weAre but turn'd aside to sleep;They who one another keepeAlive, ne'er parted be.Such wilt thou be to mee, who mustLike th' other foot, obliquely runne;Thy firmnes makes my circle just,And makes me end, where I begunne.

O more than Moone,Draw not up seas to drowne me in thy spheare,Weepe me not dead in thine armes, but forbeareTo teach the sea, what it may doe too soone.

O more than Moone,

Draw not up seas to drowne me in thy spheare,

Weepe me not dead in thine armes, but forbeare

To teach the sea, what it may doe too soone.

Let not thy divining heartForethink me any ill,Destiny may take thy partAnd may thy feares fulfill;But thinke that weAre but turn'd aside to sleep;They who one another keepeAlive, ne'er parted be.

Let not thy divining heart

Forethink me any ill,

Destiny may take thy part

And may thy feares fulfill;

But thinke that we

Are but turn'd aside to sleep;

They who one another keepe

Alive, ne'er parted be.

Such wilt thou be to mee, who mustLike th' other foot, obliquely runne;Thy firmnes makes my circle just,And makes me end, where I begunne.

Such wilt thou be to mee, who must

Like th' other foot, obliquely runne;

Thy firmnes makes my circle just,

And makes me end, where I begunne.

The poet who wrote such verses as these did not believe any longer that 'love ... represents the principle of perpetual flux in nature'.

But Donne's poetry is not so simple a thing of the heart and of the senses as that of Burns and Catullus. Even his purer poetry has more complex moods—considerThe Prohibition—and it is metaphysical, not only in the sense of being erudite and witty, but in the proper sense of being reflective and philosophical. Donne is always conscious of the import of his moods; and so it is that there emerges from his poems a philosophy or a suggested philosophy of love to take the place of the idealism which he rejects. Set a song of the joy of love by Burns or by Catullus such as I have cited beside Donne'sAnniversarie,

All Kings, and all their favorites,All glory of honors, beauties, wits,The Sun itselfe, which makes times, as they passe,Is elder by a year, now, than it wasWhen thou and I first one another saw,

All Kings, and all their favorites,

All glory of honors, beauties, wits,

The Sun itselfe, which makes times, as they passe,

Is elder by a year, now, than it was

When thou and I first one another saw,

and the difference is at once apparent. Burns gets no further than the experience, Catullus than the obvious and hedonistic reflection that time is flying, the moment of pleasure short. In Donne's poem one feels the quickening of the brain, the vision extending its range, the passion gathering sweep with the expanding rhythms, and from the mind thus heated and inspired emerges, not a cry that time might stay its course,

Lente, lente currite noctis equi,

but a clearer consciousness of the eternal significance of love, not the love that aspires after the unattainable, but the love that unites contented hearts. The method of the poet is, I suppose, too dialectical to be popular, for the poem is in few Anthologies. It may be that the Pagan and Christian strains which the poet unites are not perfectly blended—if it is possible to do so—but to me it seems that the joy of love has never been expressed at once with such intensity and such elevation.

And it is with sorrow as with joy. There is the same difference of manner in the expression between Donne and these poets, and the deepest thought is the same. TheNocturnall on S. Lucies Dayis at the opposite pole of Donne's thought from theAnniversarie, and compared with

Had we never loved sae kindly

Take, O take those lips away,

both the feeling and its expression are metaphysical. But the passion is felt through the subtle and fantastic web of dialectic; and the thought from which the whole springs is the emptiness of life without love.

What, then, is the philosophy which disengages itself from Donne's love-poetry studied in its whole compass? It seems to me that it is more than a purely negative one, that consciously or unconsciously he sets over against the abstract idealism, the sharp dualism of the Middle Ages, a justification of love as a natural passion in the human heart the meaning and end of which is marriage. The sensuality and exaggerated cynicism of so much of the poetry of theRenaissance was a reaction from courtly idealism and mediaeval asceticism. But a mere reaction could lead no-whither. There are no steps which lead only backward in the history of human thought and feeling. Poems like Donne'sElegies, like Shakespeare'sVenus and Adonis, like Marlowe'sHero and Leandercould only end in penitent outcries like those of Sidney and Spenser and of Donne himself. The true escape from courtly or ascetic idealism was a poetry which should do justice to love as a passion in which body and soul alike have their part, and of which there is no reason to repent.

And this with all its imperfections Donne's love-poetry is. It was not for nothing that Sir Thomas Egerton's secretary made a runaway match for love. For Dante the poet, his wife did not exist. In love of his wife Donne found the meaning and the infinite value of love. In later days he might bewail his 'idolatry of profane mistresses'; he never repented of having loved. Between his most sensual and his most spiritual love-songs there is no cleavage such as separates natural love from Dante's love of Beatrice, who is in the end Theology. The passion that burns in Donne's most outspoken elegies, and wantons in theEpithalamia, is not cast out inThe AnniversarieorThe Canonization, but absorbed. It is purified and enriched by being brought into harmony with his whole nature, spiritual as well as physical. It has lost the exclusive consciousness of itself which is lust, and become merged in an entire affection, as a turbid and discoloured stream is lost in the sea.

This justification of natural love as fullness of joy and life is the deepest thought in Donne's love-poems, far deeper and sincerer than the Platonic conceptions of the affinity and identity of souls with which he plays in some of the verses addressed to Mrs. Herbert. The nearest approach that he makes to anything like a reasoned statement of the thought latent rather than expressed inThe Anniversarieis inThe Extasie, a poem which, like theNocturnall, only Donne could have written. Here with the same intensity of feeling, and inthe same abstract, dialectical, erudite strain he emphasizes the interdependence of soul and body:

As our blood labours to begetSpirits, as like soules as it can,Because such fingers need to knitThat subtile knot, which makes us man:So must pure lovers soules descendT'affections, and to faculties,Which sense may reach and apprehend,Else a great Prince in prison lies.

As our blood labours to beget

Spirits, as like soules as it can,

Because such fingers need to knit

That subtile knot, which makes us man:

So must pure lovers soules descend

T'affections, and to faculties,

Which sense may reach and apprehend,

Else a great Prince in prison lies.

It may be that Donne has not entirely succeeded in what he here attempts. There hangs about the poem just a suspicion of the conventional and unreal Platonism of the seventeenth century. In attempting to state and vindicate the relation of soul and body he falls perhaps inevitably into the appearance, at any rate, of the dualism which he is trying to transcend. He places them over against each other as separate entities and the lower bulks unduly. In love, says Pascal, the body disappears from sight in the intellectual and spiritual passion which it has kindled. That is what happens inThe Anniversarie, not altogether inThe Extasie. Yet no poem makes one realize more fully what Jonson meant by calling Donne 'the first poet in the world for some things'. 'I should never find any fault with metaphysical poems,' is Coleridge's judgement, 'if they were all like this or but half as excellent.'

It was only the force of Donne's personality that could achieve even an approximate harmony of elements so divergent as are united in his love-verses, that could master the lower-natured steed that drew the chariot of his troubled and passionate soul and make it subservient to his yoke-fellow of purer strain who is a lover of honour, and modesty, and temperance, and the follower of true glory. In the work of his followers, who were many, though they owed allegiance to Jonson also, the lower elements predominated. The strain of metaphysical love-poetry in the seventeenth century with its splendidélanand sonorous cadence is in general Epicureanand witty. It is only now and again—in Marvell, perhaps in Herrick's

Bid me to live, and I will live,Thy Protestant to be,

Bid me to live, and I will live,

Thy Protestant to be,

certainly in Rochester's songs, in

An age in her embraces pastWould seem a winter's day,

An age in her embraces past

Would seem a winter's day,

or the unequalled:

When wearied with a world of woeTo thy safe bosom I retire,Where love, and peace, and truth does flow,May I contented there expire,

When wearied with a world of woe

To thy safe bosom I retire,

Where love, and peace, and truth does flow,

May I contented there expire,

that the accents of theheartare clearly audible, that passion prevails over Epicurean fancy or cynical wit. On the other hand, the idealism of seventeenth-century poetry and romances, the Platonism of the Hôtel de Rambouillet that one finds in Habington'sCastara, in Kenelm Digby'sPrivate Memoirs, in the French romances of chivalry and their imitations in English is the silliest, because the emptiest, that ever masqueraded as such in any literature, at any period. A sensual and cynical flippancy on the one hand, a passionless, mannered idealism on the other, led directly to that thinly veiled contempt of women which is so obvious in the satirical essays of Addison and Pope'sRape of the Lock.

But there was one poet who meditated on the same problem as Donne, who felt like him the power and greatness of love, and like him could not accept a doctrine of love which seemed to exclude or depreciate marriage. In 1640, just before his marriage, as rash in its way as Donne's but less happy in the issue, Milton, defending his character against accusations of immorality, traced the development of his thought about love. The passage, inAn Apology against a Pamphlet called 'A Modest Confutation', &c., has been taken as having a reference to theParadise Lost. But Milton rather seems at the time to have been meditating a work like theVita Nuovaor a romance like that of Tasso in which love was to bea motive as well as religion, for the whole theme of his thought is love, true love and its mysterious link with chastity, of which, however, 'marriage is no defilement'. In the arrogance of his youthful purity Milton would doubtless have looked with scorn or loathing on theElegiesand the more careless of Donne's songs. But perhaps pride is a greater enemy of love than such faults of sense as Donne in his passionate youth was guilty of, and from which Dante by his own evidence was not exempt. Whatever be the cause—pride, and the disappointment of his marriage, and political polemic—Milton never wrote any English love-poetry, except it be the one sonnet on the death of the wife who might have opened the sealed wells of his heart; and some want of the experience which love brought to Dante has dimmed the splendour of the great poem in which he undertook to justify the ways of God to men. Donne is not a Milton, but he sounded some notes which touch the soul and quicken the intellect in a way that Milton's magnificent and intense but somewhat hard and objective art fails to achieve.

That the simpler and purer, the more ideal and tender of Donne's love-poems were the expression of his love for Ann More cannot of course be proved in the case of each individual poem, for all Donne's verses have come to us (with a few unimportant exceptions) undated and unarranged. But the general thesis, that it was a great experience which purified and elevated Donne's poetry, receives a striking confirmation from the better-known history of his devotional poetry. Here too wit, often tortured wit, fancy, and the heat which Donne's wit was always able to generate, would have been all his verse had to show but for the great sorrow which struck him down in 1617 and gave to his subsequent sonnets and hymns a sincerer and profounder note, his imagery a more magnificent quality, his rhythms a more sonorous music.

Donne was not by nature a devotional poet in the same way and to the same degree as Giles Fletcher or Herbert or Crashaw. It was a sound enough instinct which, despite his religious upbringing and his wide and serious interest intheological questions, made him hesitate to cross the threshold of the ministry and induced him to seek rather for some such public service as fell to the lot of his friend Wotton. It was not, I think, the transition from the Roman to the Anglican Church which was the obstacle. I have tried to describe what seems to me to have been the path of enlightenment which opened the way for him to a change which on every ground of prudence and ambition was desirable and natural. But to conform, and even to take a part as a free-lance in theological controversy was one thing, to enter the ministry another. When this was pressed upon him by Morton or by the King it brought him into conflict with something deeper and more fundamental than theological doctrines, namely, a temperament which was rather that of the Renaissance than that either of Puritan England or of the Counter-Reformation, whether in Catholic countries or in the Anglican Church—the temperament of Raleigh and Bacon rather than of Milton or Herbert or Crashaw.

The simple way of describing Donne's difficulty is Walton's, according to whom Donne shrank from entering the ministry for fear the notorious irregularities of his early years should bring discredit on the sacred calling. But there was more in Donne's life than a youth of pleasure, an old age of prayers. It is not the case that all which was best and most serious in Donne's nature led him towards Holy Orders. In his earliest satires and even in his 'love-song weeds' there is evidence enough of an earnest, candid soul underneath the extravagances of wit and youthful sensuality. Donne's mind was naturally serious and religious; it was not naturally devout or ascetic, but worldly and ambitious. But to enter the ministry was, for Donne and for all the serious minds of his age, to enter a profession for which the essential qualifications were a devotional and an ascetic life. The country clergy of the Anglican Church were often careless and scandalous livers before Laud took in hand the discipline of the Church; but her bishops and most eminent divines, though they might be courtly and sycophantic, were with few exceptions men of devout andascetic life. When Donne finally crossed the Rubicon, convinced that from the King no promotion was to be hoped for in any other line of life, it was rather with the deliberate resolution that he would make his life a model of devotion and ascetic self-denial than as one drawn by an irresistible attraction or impelled by a controlling sense of duty to such a life. Donne was no St. Augustine whose transition from libertinism to saintliness came entirely from within. The noblest feature of Donne's earlier clerical life was the steadfast spirit in which he set himself to realize the highest ideals of the calling he had chosen, and the candour with which he accepted the contrast between his present position and his earlier life, leaving to whosoever wished to judge while he followed the path of duty and penitence.

But such a spirit will not easily produce great devotional poetry. There are qualities in the religious poetry of simpler and purer souls to which Donne seldom or never attains. The natural love of God which overflows the pages of the great mystics, which dilates the heart and the verses of a poet like the Dutchman Vondel, the ardour and tenderness of Crashaw, the chaste, pure piety and penitence of Herbert, the love from which devotion and ascetic self-denial come unbidden—to these Donne never attained. The high and passionate joy ofThe Anniversaryis not heard in his sonnets or hymns. Effort is the note which predominates—the effort to realize the majesty of God, the heinousness of sin, the terrors of Hell, the mercy of Christ. Some of the very worst traits in Donne's mind are brought out in his religious writing.The Essays on Divinityare an extraordinary revelation of his accumulations of useless Scholastic erudition, and his capacity to perform feats of ingenious deduction from traditional and accepted premises. To compare these freakish deductions from the theory of verbal inspiration with the luminous sense of theTractatus Theologico-Politicusis to realize how much rationalism was doing in the course of the century for the emancipation and healing of the human intellect. Some of the poems, and those the earliest written, before Donne had actually taken Orders,are not much more than exercises in these theological subtleties, poems such as thatOn the Annunciation and Passion falling in the same year(1608),The Litany(1610),Good-Friday(1613), andThe Cross(c.1615) are characteristic examples of Donne's intense and imaginative wit employed on traditional topics of Catholic devotion to which no change of Church ever made him indifferent. Donne never ignored in his sermons the gulf that separated the Anglican from the Roman Church, or the link that bound her to the Protestant Churches of the Continent. 'Our great protestant divines' are one of his courts of appeal, and included Luther and Calvin of whom he never speaks but with the deepest respect. But he was unwilling to sacrifice to a fanatical puritanism any element of Catholic devotion which was capable of an innocent interpretation. His language is guarded and perhaps not always consistent, but it would not be difficult to show from his sermons and prose-writings that many of the most distinctively Catholic tenets were treated by him with the utmost tenderness.

But, as Mr. Gosse has pointed out, the sincerest and profoundest of Donne's devotional poetry dates from the death of his wife. The loss of her who had purified and sweetened his earliest love songs lent a new and deepertimbreto the sonnets and lyrics in which he contemplates the great topics of personal religion,—sin, death, the Judgement, and throws himself on the mercy of God as revealed in Christ. The seven sonnets entitledLa Coronahave been generally attributed to this period, but it is probable that they were composed earlier, and their treatment of the subject of Christ's life and death is more intellectual and theological than spiritual and poetical. It is when the tone becomes personal, as in theHoly Sonnets, when he is alone with his own soul in the prospect of death and the Judgement, that Donne's religious poetry acquires something of the same unique character as his love songs and elegies by a similar combination of qualities, intensity of feeling, subtle turns of thought, and occasional Miltonic splendour of phrase. Here again we meet the magnificent openings of theSongs and Sonets:—

This is my playes last scene; here heavens appointMy pilgrimages last mile; and my raceIdly yet quickly run hath this last space,My spans last inch, my minutes latest point;

This is my playes last scene; here heavens appoint

My pilgrimages last mile; and my race

Idly yet quickly run hath this last space,

My spans last inch, my minutes latest point;

or,

At the round earths imagin'd quarters blowYour trumpets, Angels, and arise, ariseFrom death you numberlesse infinitiesOf soules, and to your scatter'd bodies go:

At the round earths imagin'd quarters blow

Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise

From death you numberlesse infinities

Of soules, and to your scatter'd bodies go:

and again—

What if this present were the worlds last night!Marke in my heart, O Soule, where thou dost dwell,The picture of Christ crucified, and tellWhether that countenance can thee affright,Teares in his eyes quench the amazing light,Blood fills his frownes, which from his pierc'd head fell.

What if this present were the worlds last night!

Marke in my heart, O Soule, where thou dost dwell,

The picture of Christ crucified, and tell

Whether that countenance can thee affright,

Teares in his eyes quench the amazing light,

Blood fills his frownes, which from his pierc'd head fell.

This passionate penitence, this beating as it were against the bars of self in the desire to break through to a fuller apprehension of the mercy and love of God, is the intensely human note of these latest poems. Nothing came easily to his soul that knew so well how to be subtle to plague itself. The vision of divine wrath he can conjure up more easily than the beatific vision of the love that 'moves the sun in heaven and all the stars'. Nevertheless it was that vision which Donne sought. He could never have been content with Milton's heaven of majesty and awe divorced from the quickening spirit of love. And there are moments when he comes as close to that beatific vision as perhaps a self-tormenting mind involved in the web of seventeenth-century theology ever could,—at moments love and ecstasy gain the upper hand of fear and penitence. But it is in the sermons that he reaches these highest levels. There is nothing in the florid eloquence of Jeremy Taylor that can equal the splendour of occasional passages in Donne's sermons, when the lava-like flow of his heated reasoning seems suddenly to burst and flower in such a splendid incandescence of mystical rapture as this:—

'Death and life are in the power of the tongue, says Solomon,in another sense: and in this sense too, If my tongue, suggested by my heart, and by my heart rooted in faith, can say,non moriar, non moriar: If I can say (and my conscience do not tell me that I belie mine own state) if I can say, That the blood of the Saviour runs in my veins, That the breath of his spirit quickens all my purposes, that all my deaths have their Resurrection, all my sins their remorses, all my rebellions their reconciliations, I will hearken no more after this question as it is intendedde morte naturali, of a natural death; I know I must die that death; what care I? norde morte spirituali, the death of sin, I know I doe, and shall die so; why despair I? but I will find out another death,mortem raptus, a death of rapture and of extasy, that death which St. Paul died more than once, the death which St. Gregory speaks of,divina contemplatio quoddam sepulchrum animae, the contemplation of God and heaven is a kind of burial and sepulchre and rest of the soul; and in this death of rapture and extasy, in this death of the Contemplation of my interest in my Saviour, I shall find myself and all my sins enterred, and entombed in his wounds, and like a Lily in Paradise, out of red earth, I shall see my soul rise out of his blade, in a candor, and in an innocence, contracted there, acceptable in the sight of his Father.'

This is the highest level that Donne ever reached in eloquence inspired by the vision of the joy and not the terror of the Christian faith, higher than anything in theSecond Anniversary, but in his last hymns hope and confidence find a simpler and a tenderer note. The noble hymn, 'In what torn ship so ever I embark,' is in somewhat the same anguished tone as theHoly Sonnets; but the highly characteristic

Since I am coming to that Holy roome,Where with thy Quire of Saints for evermore,I shall be made thy Musique;

Since I am coming to that Holy roome,

Where with thy Quire of Saints for evermore,

I shall be made thy Musique;

and theHymn to God the Father, speak of final faith and hope in tones which recall—recall also by their sea-coloured imagery, and by their rhythm—the lines in which another sensitive and tormented poet-soul contemplated the last voyage:

I have a sinne of feare, that when I have spunneMy last thred, I shall perish on the shore;Swear by thy self that at my death thy sunneShall shine as he shines now and heretofore:And having done that, Thou hast done,I feare no more.

I have a sinne of feare, that when I have spunne

My last thred, I shall perish on the shore;

Swear by thy self that at my death thy sunne

Shall shine as he shines now and heretofore:

And having done that, Thou hast done,

I feare no more.

Beside the passion of these lines even Tennyson's grow a little pale:

Twilight and evening bellAnd after that the dark;And may there be no sadness of farewellWhen I embark:For though from out our bourne of Time and PlaceThe flood may bear me far,I hope to see my Pilot face to faceWhen I have crost the bar.

Twilight and evening bell

And after that the dark;

And may there be no sadness of farewell

When I embark:

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.

It has not been the aim of the present editor to attempt to pronounce a final judgement upon Donne. It seems to him idle to compare Donne's poetry with that of other poets or to endeavour to fix its relative worth. Its faults are great and manifest; its beautiessui generis, incommunicable and incomparable. My endeavour here has been by an analysis of some of the different elements in this composite work—poems composed at different times and in different moods; flung together at the end so carelessly that youthful extravagances of witty sensuality and pious aspirations jostle each other cheek by jowl; and presenting a texture so diverse from that of poetry as we usually think of it—to show how many are the strands which run through it, and that one of these is a poetry, not perfect in form, rugged of line and careless in rhyme, a poetry in which intellect and feeling are seldom or never perfectly fused in a work that is of imagination all compact, yet a poetry of an extraordinarily arresting and haunting quality, passionate, thoughtful, and with a deep melody of its own.

1History of English Poetry, iii. 154. Mr. Courthope qualifies this statement somewhat on the next page: 'From this spirit of cynical lawlessness he was perhaps reclaimed by genuine love,' &c. But he has, I think, insufficiently analysed the diverse strains in Donne's love-poetry.

2Gaspary:History of Italian Literature(Oelsner's translation), 1904. Consult also Karl Vossler:Die philosophischen Grundlagen des 'süssen neuen Stils', Heidelberg, 1904, andLa Poesia giovanile &c. di Guido Cavalcanti: Studi di Giulio Salvadori, Roma, 1895.

3Gaspary:Op. Cit.

TEXT

Both the text and the canon of Donne's poems present problems which have never been frankly faced by any of his editors—problems which, considering the greatness of his reputation in the seventeenth century, and the very considerable revival of his reputation which began with Coleridge and De Quincey and has advanced uninterruptedly since, are of a rather surprising character. An attempt to define and, as far as may be, to solve these problems will begin most simply with a brief account of the form in which Donne's poems have come down to us.

Three of Donne's poems were printed in his lifetime—the Anniversaries (i.e.The Anatomy of the WorldwithA Funerall ElegieandThe Progresse of the Soule) in 1611 and 1612, with later editions in 1621 and 1625; theElegie upon the untimely death of the incomparable Prince Henry, in Sylvester'sLachrymae Lachrymarum, 1613; and the lines prefixed toCoryats Cruditiesin 1611. We know nothing of any other poem by Donne being printed prior to 1633. It is noteworthy, as Mr. Gosse has pointed out, that none of theMiscellanieswhich appeared towards the end of the sixteenth century, asEnglands Parnassus1(1600), or at the beginning of the seventeenth century, as Davison'sPoetical Rhapsody,2contained poemsby Donne. The first of these is a collection of witty and elegant passages from different authors on various general themes (Dissimulation, Faith, Learning, &c.) and is just the kind of book for which Donne's poems would have been made abundant use of at a somewhat later period. There are in our libraries manuscript collections of 'Donne's choicest conceits', and extracts long or short from his poems, dating from the second quarter of the seventeenth century.3The editor of the second of the anthologies mentioned, Francis Davison, became later much interested in Donne's poems. In notes which he made at some date after 1608, we find him inquiring for 'Satyres, Elegies, Epigrams etc., by John Don', and querying whether they might be obtained 'from Eleaz. Hodgson and Ben Johnson'. Among the books again which he has lent to his brother at a later date are 'John Duns Satyres'. This interest on the part of Davison in Donne's poems makes it seem to me very unlikely that if he had known them earlier he would not have included some of them in hisRhapsody, or that if he had done so he would not have told us. It has been the custom of late to assign to Donne the authorship of one charming lyric in theRhapsody, 'Absence hear thou my protestation.' I hope to show elsewhere that this is the work, not of Donne, but of another young wit of the day, John Hoskins, whose few extant poems are a not uninteresting link between the manner of Sidney and the Elizabethans and of Donne and the 'Metaphysicals'.

The first collected edition of Donne's poems was issued in 1633, two years after his death. This is a small quarto, the title-page of which is here reproduced.

ByJ. D.

WITH

ELEGIES

ON THE AUTHORS

DEATH.

LONDON.

Printed byM. F.forIohn Marriot,and are to be sold at his shop in St'DunstansChurch-yard inFleet-street. 1633.

Title Page

The first eight pages (Sheet A) are numbered, and contain (1)The Printer to the Understanders,4(2) theHexastichon Bibliopolae, (3) the dedication of, and introductory epistle to,The Progresse of the Soule, with which poem the volume opens. The poems themselves, with some prose letters and theElegies upon the Author, fill pages 1-406. The numbers on some of the pages are misprinted. The order of the poems is generally chaotic, but in batches the poems follow the order preserved in the later editions. Of the significance of this, and of the source and character of this edition, I shall speak later. As regards text and canon it is the most trustworthy of all the old editions. The publisher, John Marriot, was a well-known bookseller at the sign of the Flower de Luce, and issued the poems of Breton, Drayton, Massinger, Quarles, and Wither. The printer was probably Miles Fletcher, or Flesher, a printer of considerable importance in Little Britain from 1611 to 1664. It would almost seem, from the heading of the introductory letter, that the printer was more responsible for the issue than the bookseller Marriot, and it is perhaps noteworthy that when in 1650 the younger Donne succeeded in getting the publication of the poems into his own hand, John Marriot's name remained on the title-page (1650) as publisher, but the printer's initials disappeared, and his prefatory letter made way for a dedication by the younger Donne. (See page4.) It should be added that copies of the 1633 edition differ considerably from one another. In some a portrait has been inserted. OccasionallyThe Printer to the Understandersis omitted, theInfinitati Sacrum &c.following immediately on the title-page. In some poems, notablyThe Progresse of the Soule, and certain of theLettersto noble ladies, the text underwent considerable alteration as the volume passed through the press. Some copies are more correct than others. A few of the errors of the 1635 editionare traceable to the use by the printer of a comparatively imperfect copy of the 1633 edition.

ByJ. D.

WITH

ELEGIES

THE AUTHORS

DEATH.

LONDON.

Printed byM. F.forJohn Marriot,and are to be sold at his Shop in StDunstansChurch-yard inFleet-street.1635.

Title Page

ThePoems by J. D. with Elegies on the Authors Deathwere reprinted by M. F. for John Harriot in 1635 (the title-page is here reproduced), but with very considerablealterations. The introductory material remained unchanged except that to theHexastichon Bibliopolaewas added aHexastichon ad Bibliopolam. Incerti. (See p.3.) To the title-page was prefixed a portrait in an oval frame. Outside the frame is engraved, to the left top,ANNO DNI. 1591. ÆTATIS SVÆ. 18.; to the right top, on a band ending in a coat of arms,ANTES MVERTO QUE MVDADO. Underneath the engraved portrait and background is the following poem:

This was for youth, Strength, Mirth, and wit that TimeMost count their golden Age; but t'was not thine.Thine was thy later yeares, so much refindFrom youths Drosse, Mirth, & wit; as thy pure mindThought (like the Angels) nothing but the PraiseOf thy Creator, in those last, best Dayes.Witnes this Booke, (thy Embleme) which beginsWith Love; but endes, with Sighes, & Teares for sins.IZ: WA:Will: Marshall sculpsit.5

This was for youth, Strength, Mirth, and wit that Time

Most count their golden Age; but t'was not thine.

Thine was thy later yeares, so much refind

From youths Drosse, Mirth, & wit; as thy pure mind

Thought (like the Angels) nothing but the Praise

Of thy Creator, in those last, best Dayes.

Witnes this Booke, (thy Embleme) which begins

With Love; but endes, with Sighes, & Teares for sins.

IZ: WA:

Will: Marshall sculpsit.5

The Printer to the Understandersis still followed immediately by the dedication,Infinitati Sacrum, ofThe Progresse of the Soule, although the poem itself is removed to another part of the volume. The printer noticed this mistake, and at the end of theElegies upon the Authoradds this note:

Errata.6

Cvrteous Reader, know, that that Epistle intituled, Infinitati Sacrum, 16.of August, 1601.which is printed inthe beginning of the Booke, is misplaced; it should have beene printed before the Progresse of the Soule, in Page301.before which it was written by the Author; if any other in the Impression doe fall out, which I know not of, hold me excused for I have endeavoured thy satisfaction.

Thine, I. M.

The closing lines of Walton's poem show that it must have been written for this edition, as they refer to what is the chief feature in the new issue of the poems (pp. 1-388, including some prose letters in Latin and English, pp. 275-300, but not including theElegies upon the Authorwhich in this edition and those of 1639, 1649, 1650, and 1654 are added in unnumbered pages). This new feature is their arrangement in a series of groups:7—

While the poems were thus rearranged, the canon also underwent some alteration. One poem, viz. Basse'sEpitaph on Shakespeare('Renowned Chaucer lie a thought more nigh To rare Beaumont'), which had found its way into1633, was dropped; but quite a number were added, twenty-eight, or twenty-nine if the epitaphOn Himselfebe reckoned (as it appears) twice. Professor Norton, in the bibliographical note in the Grolier Club edition (which I occasionally call Grolier for convenience), has inadvertently given theElegie on the L. C.as one of the poems first printed in1635. This is an error. The poem was included in1633as the sixth ina group ofElegies, the rest of which are love poems. The editor of1635merely transferred it to its proper place among theFunerall Elegies, just as modern editors have transferred theElegie on his Mistris('By our first strange and fatall interview') from the funeral to the loveElegies.

The authenticity of the poems added in1635will be fully discussed later. The conclusion of the present editor is that of the English poems fifteen are certainly Donne's; three or four are probably or possibly his; the remaining eleven are pretty certainlynotby Donne. There is no reason to think that1635is in any way a more authoritative edition than1633. It has fewer signs of competent editing of the text, and it begins the process of sweeping in poems from every quarter, which was continued by Waldron, Simeon, and Grosart.

The third edition of Donne's poems appeared in 1639. This is identical in form, contents, and paging with that of 1635. The dedication and introduction toThe Progresse of the Souleare removed to their right place and theErratadropped, and there are a considerable number of minor alterations of the text.

In the issuing of all these editions of Donne's poems, the younger Donne, who seems to have claimed the right to benefit by his father's literary remains, had apparently no part.9

ByJ. D.

VVITH

ELEGIES

THE AUTHORS

DEATH.

LONDON.

Printed byM. F.forJohn Marriot,and are to be sold at his Shop in StDunstansChurch-yard inFleet-street.1639.

Title Page

What assistance, if any, the printer and publisher had from others of Donne's friends and executors it is impossible now to say, though one can hardly imagine that without some assistance they could have got access to so many poems or been allowed to publish the elegies on his death, some of which refer to the publication of the poems.10Walton, as we have seen, wrote verses to be prefixed to the second edition. At any rate in 1637 the younger John Donne made an effort to arrest the unauthorized issue of his father's works. Dr. Grosart first printed in his edition of the poems (Fuller Worthies' Library, 1873, ii, p. lii) the following petition and response preserved in the Record Office:

To yemost Reverende Father in GodWilliam Lorde Arch-Bisshop ofCanterburie Primate, andMetropolitan of all Eng-lande his Grace.

To yemost Reverende Father in God

William Lorde Arch-Bisshop of

Canterburie Primate, and

Metropolitan of all Eng-

lande his Grace.

The humble petition of John Donne, Clercke.

Doth show unto your Grace that since yedeath of his Father (latly Deane of Pauls) there hath bene manie scandalous Pamflets printed, and published, under his name, which werenone of his, by severall Boocksellers, withoute anie leave or Autoritie; in particuler one entitoled Juvenilia, printed for Henry Seale; another by John Marriott and William Sheares, entitoled Ignatius his Conclave, as allsoe certaine Poems by yesayde John Marriote, of which abuses thay have bene often warned by your Petrand tolde that if thay desisted not, thay should be proceeded against beefore your Grace, which thay seeme soe much to slight, that thay profess soddainly to publish new impressions, verie much to the greife of your Petrand the discredite of yememorie of his Father.

Wherefore your Petrdoth beeseece your Grace that you would bee pleased by your Commaunde, to stopp their farther proceedinge herein, and to cale the forenamed boocksellers beefore you, to giue an account, for what thay haue allreadie done; and your Petrshall pray, &c.

I require yePartyes whom this Petconcernes, not to meddle any farther wthyePrinting or Selling of any yepretended workes of yelate Deane of St. Paules, saue onely such as shall be licensed by publicke authority, and approued by the Peticonr, as they will answere yecontrary at theyr perill. And of this I desire Mr. Deane of yeArches to take care.

Dec: 16, 1637.W. Cant.

Despite this injunction the edition of 1639 was issued, as the previous ones had been, by Marriot and M. F. It was not till ten years later that the younger Donne succeeded in establishing his claim. In 1649 Marriot prepared a new edition, printed as before by M. F. The introductory matter remained unchanged except that the printing being more condensed it occupies three pages instead of five; the use of Roman and Italic type is exactly reversed; and there are some slight changes of spelling. The printing of the poems is also more condensed, so that they occupy pp. 1-368 instead of 1-388 in1635-39. The text underwent some generally unimportant alteration or corruption, and two poems were added, the linesUpon Mr. Thomas Coryats Crudities(p.172. It had been printed withCoryats Cruditiesin 1611) and the short poem calledSonnet. The Token(p.72).

Only a very few copies of this edition were issued. W. C. Hazlitt describes one in hisBibliographical Collections, &c.,Second Series(1882), p. 181. The only copy of whose existence I am aware is in the Library of Harvard College. It was used by Professor Norton in preparing the Grolier Club edition, and I owe my knowledge of it to this and to a careful description made for me by Miss Mary H. Buckingham. The title-page is here reproduced.

ByJ. D.

WITH

ELEGIES

THE AUTHORS

DEATH.

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