No More Learning

' In the
former, we have all the bravery of the golden days of the ad-
venturers.
Britans, you stay too long,
Quickly aboard bestow you,
And with a merry Gale
Swell your stretch'd Sayle,
With Vowes as strong,
As the Winds that blow you.
6
And cheerefully at Sea,
Successe you still intice,
To get the Pearle and Gold,
And ours to hold,
Virginia,
Earth's onely Paradise.
And as there Plenty growes
Of Lawrell every where,
Apollo's Sacred tree,
You may it see,
A Poets Browes
To crowne, that may sing there.


## p. 188 (#210) ############################################

188
Michael Drayton
>
a
The other of the two odes referred to is the most famous of
Drayton's poems, the swinging Ballad of Agincourt, dedicated
“To the Cambro-Britans and their Harpe. ' Here, more than
anywhere, is heard the echo of Hewes and his like. Drayton
worked upon the text of it to good purpose between 1606 and
1619, removing snags and obstructions in the course of its rhythm,
and making clearer and clearer the ringing tramp of the marching
army? With its stanzas of eight short, crisp lines, riming aaabcccb,
it is the model for a war-poem; and the brave old song has as
much power to-day to quicken the heart-beats as has the Henry V
of Shakespeare, the success of which, doubtless, helped to inspire
its composition.
To The Legend of Great Cromwel, Drayton's solitary publi-
cation in 1607, reference has been made above. During the next
six years he published nothing but two reprints, with slight
changes, of a collected edition of his poems which he had brought
out in 1605. There was a reason for this. He was now steadily
engaged on what he hoped was to be his real title to fame, his
Poly-Olbion. Of this ‘Herculean labour,' the first eighteen 'Songs'
were published in 16132. The necessary leisure had been secured
to Drayton partly by the patronage of Sir William Aston, partly
by a pension of £10 a year paid him by prince Henry, and continued,
for a period not yet determined, after the death of that prince
in November, 1612.
The magnum opus fell flat. In his preface, the author com-
plains that,
Verses are wholly deduced to chambers, and nothing esteemed in this lunatic
age, but what is kept in cabinets and must pass only by transcription. . . .
The idle humorous world must hear of nothing that either savours of
antiquity, or may awake it to seek after more than dull and slothful ignor-
ance may easily reach unto: these, I say, make much against me.
This, doubtless, was true, in part; nevertheless, it was not wise of
the poet to fling his work at the head of the public in so con-
temptuous a fashion, with such outspoken remarks on the prevalent
'stupidity and dulness. ' But Drayton had not yet recovered the
serenity which he had lost by reason of his 'distressed fortunes'
and his disappointment of instant recognition by James at his
accession, to which he refers in the same preface. The public,
partly, no doubt, through its 'stupidity and dulness,' and partly,
perhaps, frightened away by this mode of introduction, paid little
1 C1. Elton, pp. 104-5.
2 There appears to have been an earlier edition of 1612 (? ). See Elton, p. 192.
6


## p. 189 (#211) ############################################

2
Poly-Olbion
189
heed to the book. The author's grief, however stoutly he may
have prepared himself for failure, must have been great. This
was the work upon which he had been engaged since his thirty-
fifth year at the latest. He was now fifty, overtaken by times
which he, with all other Elizabethans, felt and knew to be evil;
and, therefore, he was all the more anxious, like a true Elizabethan,
to rescue from oblivion the glories of his beloved country by
the only means which he recognised as secure, that is by poetry.
Into Poly-Olbion, he poured all his not inconsiderable learning
and observation, all his patriotism and his fancy. The poem was
his darling, his
Tempe and fields of the Muses, where, through most delightful groves, the
angelic harmony of birds shall steal thee to the top of an easy hill, where in
artificial caves, cut out of the most natural rock, thou shalt see the ancient
people of this isle delivered thee in their lively images; from whose height
thou may'st behold both the old and later times, as in thy prospect, lying far
under thee; then conveying thee down by a soul-pleasing descent through
delicate embroidered meadows, often veined with gentle-gliding brooks, in
which thou may'st fully view the dainty nymphs in their simple naked
beauties, bathing them in crystalline streams; which shall lead thee to most
pleasant downs, where harmless shepherds are, some exercising their pipes,
some singing roundelays to their gazing flocksl.
Thus, with a voice as of an earlier age, he spake to the age of
James, which would not hear him. Worse than that: it seems to
have scoffed.
Some of our outlandish, unnatural, English, (I know not how otherwise to
express them) stick not to say that there is nothing in this Island worth
studying for, and take a great pride to be ignorant in anything thereof; for
these, since they delight in their folly, I wish it may be hereditary from them
to their posterity, that their children may be begg'd for fools to the fifth
generation until it may be beyond the memory of man to know that there
was ever other of their families 2.
He wishes them oblivion--the heaviest lot that a man of his time
and temper could imagine. And so, with a round curse on the
degenerate age, the sturdy old pilgrim grasps his staff and sets out
again on his high mission. The reception of the first eighteen
Songs' could not deter him from carrying on what he held to be
his duty to his country and his great calling. In spite of all odds,
including the very serious difficulty of finding a publishers, he
brought out twelve more 'Songs' in 1622, with a reprint of the
first eighteen, and the statement that the public's neglect and
1 • Epistle to the Generall Reader,' Poly-Olbion, 1613.
2 Preface to Second Part, 1622.
3 See his letters to William Drummond of Hawthornden, with whom he corre-
sponded between 1618 and 1631.


## p. 190 (#212) ############################################

190
Michael Drayton
folly could not 'deter me from going on with Scotland, if means
and time do not hinder me, to perform as much as I have
promised in my First Song. ' Means and time were not forth-
coming, and Poly-Olbion ‘stumbles to rest' with its thirtieth
'Song. '
The course of the itinerary, on the whole, is fairly regular.
From the Channel islands, the pilgrim comes to Cornwall, and
thence, by Devon and part of Somerset, down through the New
Forest to Southampton and Wight. Thence, he goes north-west to
Salisbury, and more or less straight on to the Avon and the Severn.
Round the Severn and in Wales—a country whose inhabitants
he always regarded kindly as the remains of the original Britons-
he lingers long, with a little excursion to Hereford and Malvern ;
gradually working his way north to Chester, where he turns south-
east past the Wrekin to the midlands, to celebrate Warwick,
Coventry and his beloved Ancor. With a circuit through the vale
of Evesham and the Cotswolds, hallowed to him, as were the spots
he had just left, by their association with Anne Goodere, he follows
the river from Oxford to London. Thence, he starts afresh south-
east, down the Medway, through Surrey and Sussex into Kent,
there to turn and work by degrees up the eastern counties, through
Cambridge and Ely, to Lincolnshire and the fens, Trent and the
forest of Sherwood. From there, he crosses England to Lancashire
and Man, thence to work back to Yorkshire, and so to Northumber-
land, to end his pilgrimage in Westmorland.
He has covered practically the whole of England, and little
has escaped him on the way. Perfunctorily, but conscientiously,
he has described the fauna, and especially the flora, the river-
systems and mountain-ranges, making free use of the then old-
fashioned device of personification in order to beguile and lure
on his reader. But the present interests him little compared with
the past. His real object is to preserve whatever history or legend
(both are of equal importance in his eyes, and he draws no clear
distinction between the two) has recorded of great deeds, and
great men, be they heroes of myth like Guy of Warwick, Corineus
of Cornwall, or Elidure the Just, saints like those in the roll he
celebrates at Ely, or historic kings and captains. Leaning chiefly
on Camden's Britannia, he has ransacked also the chroniclers and
poets, the songs of the harpers and minstrels, every source that he
knew of information on that precious past which must be preserved
against time's proud hand. And, to fortify what he records in
rime, he has secured from the learned John Selden a set of notes


## p. 191 (#213) ############################################

Poly-Olbion
191
or 'illustrations' to each song, in which, though the antiquary's
science sometimes smiles at the poet's faith, the general tenor
of the poem is buttressed by a brave show of erudition and
authority.
How much of the ground Drayton had covered in person, it is
impossible to tell from the poem itself. Of the places which it
is certain that he knew, he sings no otherwise than of some which
it is very unlikely that he had ever seen. And, in fact, the point is
unimportant. The purpose of his narrative was not, as was that of
the narratives collected by the 'industrious Hackluit' whom he
celebrates in one of his odes, to make known the unknown present,
but to eternise the known past; and vividness and authenticity of
description are not among the essentials of such a work as his. .
Industry was the chief requisite, and of industry Drayton had as
much as Hakluyt himself.
More industry, it must be admitted, than inspiration went to
the making of Poly-Olbion. Drayton must have worked, like
Wordsworth on The Excursion, in season and out of season,
trusting to the importance of what he had to say to make his
verses worthy of his subject. But Poly-Olbion is at least no
nearer to being dull than is The Excursion. Drayton, in fact,
took more pains than Wordsworth to diversify his poem. His
rivers dispute, relate, or wed; his mountains and plains take on
character and personality ; criticism, as of the poetry of the Welsh
bards ; argument, as in the spirited and remarkably philosophic
protest against historical scepticism in song vi; description, which,
if sometimes lifeless, is sometimes bravely vivid, as in the view
from his boat as it drops down from Windsor to London in
song XVII; and admirable story-telling, as in the account of
Guy of Warwick in song XIII; all take their turn in variegating
the prospect. There are stretches, it must be confessed, of dulness
-long catalogues of princes and events where the desire to record
has clearly been stronger than the power to sing; but the ‘historian
in verse' (to use Drayton's own words of Daniel) seldom leaves us
long without the reward of the dainty nymphs in their simple
naked beauties' or some other of the delights promised in his first
epistle of 1613.
Drayton, whom we have seen from the preface to The Barrons
Wars to have had a philosophy of metre, doubtless chose the
metre of Poly-Olbion with care. It is written in riming couplets
of twelve-syllabled lines : a sober, jogging motion, as easy to main-
tain and as comfortable as the canter of a quiet hack. But it
6


## p. 192 (#214) ############################################

192
Michael Drayton
a
is not exciting; it has no surprises; and the inevitable beat
on the sixth and twelfth syllables, which Drayton spares us
scarcely twice in a 'Song,' is apt to become soporific. Yet it may
well be doubted whether Poly-Olbion would not have been far
less readable than it is, had Drayton adopted the rimed couplet
of decasyllabic lines, or taken a hint from the dramatists and
employed blank verse. No known form of stanza certainly could
have carried the reader on as does this amiable, ambling pace,
never very fast, but never very slow. To quote a delightful phrase,
'it has a kind of heavy dignity like a Lord Mayor's coach? ' At its
best, it is livelier than that; at its worst, it covers the ground
without jolting
The modern reader with a taste for the antique will constantly
meet little touches to interest and charm him. “The wayless
woods of Cardiff'—a phrase chosen at random as we turn the
pages—is eloquent, especially when taken in conjunction with the
poet's repeated complaint that the iron works (the very symbol
to an Elizabethan of the passing of that golden age when metals
were unknown, and men rifled not the womb of their mother
Earth) were leading to the destruction of all the forests which
ha been England's pride. The very importance given to the
river-systems is a reminder that the poem was written in an
England that was all but roadless. But, as the book is laid down,
its chief attraction, after all, is seen to be the pathetic bravery of
the whole scheme—the voice of the dogged old Elizabethan raised
amid an alien world, to sing the old song in the old way, to proclaim
and preserve the glories of his beloved country in the face of a
frivolous, forgetful age.
While Poly-Olbion was being completed, Drayton did little
else. In 1618, a volume of collected Elegies was published, two
of them being the work of Drayton; but, when the weight of his
'Herculean labour' was lifted from his shoulders, he revealed,
in the poetry of his old age, a playfulness, a lightness and delicacy,
which are as charming as they are surprising. This comment does
not apply to all the contents of the new volume of 1627. That
volume opened with one of Drayton's mistakes—a translation into
epic form of the brave Ballad of Agincourt. The new version
of the story, called The Battaile of Agincourt, is written in the
metre which the preface to The Barrons Wars had justified for
poems of this kind. Its faithfulness to Holinshed brings it fre-
quently into touch with Shakespeare's King Henry V; and the
· Elton, p. 119.


## p. 193 (#215) ############################################

a
Nimphidia
193
comparison is all to Drayton's disadvantage. The work lacks
genuine fire and eloquence, and belongs to that part of Drayton's
Jabours in which conscience was stronger than inspiration. The
same metre and the same characteristics are found in the last
of his historical poems, The Miseries of Queene Margarite, wife of
Henry VI.
In Nimphidia, we find a new Drayton, and one not fore-
shadowed even by Idea or the Odes. Some time, as it seems,
between his fifty-ninth and his sixty-fourth year, we hear the
sound of his laughter, and find him playing, and playing lightly
and gaily, with a literary toy. Nimphidia is a mock heroic poem
relating the adventures of jealous Oberon, faithless Titania and
her lover Pigwiggen. The parody of the old heroic ballads is
carried out with the nicest particularity, and with a playful ingenuity
which is surprising in a poet advanced in years and of a grave
and laborious complexion. The lack of the higher imagination,
which Drayton could not take over, with his characters and scene,
from Shakespeare, is atoned for by the consistent humour of the
finely polished verse, the very movement of which is a subtle and
elaborate joke. In these tripping, dancing lines—the metre of the
heroic ballads wonderfully transformed-we are far from the high
heroic note of Elizabeth's days; we have reached the poetical land
of Herrick and of the great Margaret, duchess of Newcastle, who
both borrowed from Drayton's minute lore of fairyland.
Equally dainty and graceful, if not equally humorous, are
other poems in this volume of 1627 : The Quest of Cynthia, and
The Shepheards Sirena, pastorals both. There is a marked
difference between Drayton's earlier Spenserian pastorals, Idea
(though these were not, as we have seen, an extreme example
of their form), and these later essays in the same field. In the
two poems of 1627, there is an airy grace, a frank unreality that
makes no attempt either to approximate to the real world of the
country from which it draws its symbols, or to proclaim its
difference from the world of town and court, the thought of which
used to weigh heavily on earlier singers of the golden age. What
applies to The Quest of Cynthia and The Shepheards Sirena
applies also, in the main, to The Muses Elizium, divided into ten
Nymphalls, which form the chief part of Drayton's last volume,
published in 1630, and dedicated, part to the earl of Dorset, and
part to his countess, who were the patrons of Drayton's last years.
There is a little, but a very little, sad or satirical reflection here.
Throwing back in the songs, with their lightness and spontaneity
13
E. L. IV.
CH. X.


## p. 194 (#216) ############################################

194
Michael Drayton
and the elaborate structure of their long stanzas of short lines,
to the dewy lyrics of the later Elizabethan song-books, they look
forward, also, to a melody that was to be perfected later in the
days of the cavaliers. Gallantry and grace have succeeded the
swelling, heroic tones of the poet's youth. But in nothing does
Drayton show himself so fine a master of words and rhythm as in
these late pastorals; and some of the Nymphalls of The Muses
Elizium, especially the second, the seventh and the eighth, should
alone have sufficed to preserve his fame more steadily than has
been the case.
To return to the volume of 1627: it contained, besides the
pastorals mentioned and The Moone-Calfe discussed above, some
excellent work in the form of Elegies upon sundry occasions.
These have an obvious interest in the biographical information
they provide. The first, entitled Of his Ladies not Comming to
London, is a gallant but sincere compliment to a lady living in
the west, in whom it is probably permissible to find his former
love and present friend, Anne Goodere, now lady Rainsford. In
another, he outpours a glowing tribute of affectionate regret at the
death of her husband. From another, we learn of his friendship
with William Browne, the poet, of Tavistock; and lady Aston, the
wife of his patron, is the recipient of another. Of these Elegies,
some are complimentary and sometimes show a touch of the
'conceited' or metaphysical ; others, like that to Browne, are
satirical. All show once more Drayton's skill in the management
of the couplet. But the most interesting of all, perhaps, is the
well known letter in verse To Henery Reynolds, in which Drayton
tells the story of his boyish resolve to be a poet, and goes on to
give an account of the development of English poetry from Chaucer
to his own friends, John and Francis Beaumont and William
Browne. It is full of sound sense and just criticism ; and, if any
of Drayton's verdicts—his harsh judgment on the Euphuists, for
instance, or his idea of the language at Chaucer's command have
been upset, it has been by the growth of learning and the change
of perspective, and not by any inherent fault.
The only works of Drayton which remain to be considered are
the three ‘divine' poems which formed part of the volume of 1630.
Moses, his Birth and Miracles, the revised version of Moyses in
a Map of his Miracles, of 1604, has been mentioned above. The
other two were Noahs Floud and David and Goliah, both written
in the rimed couplets of decasyllables which Drayton had done
much to beat into shape. It is notable that, in these last of


## p. 195 (#217) ############################################

His Achievement
195
Drayton's poems, we catch once more the Elizabethan note. The
description of David carries us back to the Adonis of Shakespeare's
poem, and there are passages of the same elaborate ornament that
is found in Endimion and Phoebe. It has been noticed, also,
that, in the grand invocation at the beginning of Noahs Floud,
there is 'the presentiment of a greater sacred diction'—that of
Milton.
Drayton's long and busy life closed at the end of 1631, and
his body was buried in Westminster Abbey, under the north wall
of the nave, and not in Poet's Corner where his bust may be seen?
His right to the honour will possibly be more fully conceded by
present and future ages than it has been at any other time since
his own day. We see in him now, not, indeed, a poet of supreme
imagination, nor one who worked a revolution or founded a school, but
a poet with a remarkably varied claim on our attention and respect.
Drayton was not a leader. For the most part he was a follower,
quick to catch, and industrious to reproduce, the feeling and mode
of the moment. So great, however, was his vitality and so fully
was he a master of his craft that, living from the reign of Elizabeth
into that of Charles I, he was able to keep abreast of his swiftly
moving times, and, by reason of his very powers of labour, to bring
something out of the themes and measures he employed which his
predecessors and contemporaries failed to secure, but which after
years owed to his efforts. This is especially the case, as we have
seen, with his management of the rimed couplet and the short-
lined lyric. Sluggish, perhaps, of temper, and very variably
sensitive to inspiration, he lacked the touchstone of perfect poetical
taste, and, like Wordsworth, lacked also the finer virtues of omis-
sion. Yet everything that he wrote has its loftier moments; he is
often 'golden-mouthed,' indeed, in his felicity of diction, whether
in the brave style of his youth or in the daintier manner of his age;
and just as, in his attitude to life, 'out of the strong came forth
sweetness,' so, in his poetry, out of his dogged labour came forth
sweetness of many kinds. In the long period which his work
covered, the many subjects and styles it embraced, the beauty of
its results and its value as a kind of epitome of an important era,
there are few more interesting figures in English literature than
Michael Drayton.
1
By Elton, p. 134.
. For the evidence, see Elton, pp. 145, 146.
13-2


## p. 196 (#218) ############################################

CHAPTER XI
JOHN DONNE
FROM the time of Wyatt, Surrey and their contemporaries of
the court of Henry VIII, English lyrical and amatory poetry
flowed continuously in the Petrarchian channel. The tradition
which these ‘novices newly crept out of the schools of Dante,
Ariosto and Petrarch' brought from Italy, after languishing for
some years, was revived and reinvigorated by the influence of
Ronsard and Desportes. Spenser in The Shepheards Calender,
Watson with his pedantic EKATOMIIAOIA and Sidney with the
gallant and passionate sonnets to Stella, led the way; and, there-
after, till the publication of Davison's Poetical Rapsody, in 1602,
and, subsequently, in the work of such continuers of an older
tradition as Drummond, the poets, in sonnet sequence or pastoral
eclogue and lyric, told the same tale, set to the same tune. Of
the joy of love, the deep contentment of mutual passion, they have
little to say (except in some of the finest of Shakespeare's sonnets
to his unknown friend), but much of its pains and sorrows-the
sorrow of absence, the pain of rejection, the incomparable beauty
of the lady and her unwavering cruelty. And they say it in a
series of constantly recurring images : of rain and wind, of fire
and ice, of storm and warfare ; comparisons
With sun and moon, with earth and sea's rich gems,
With April's first born flowers and all things rare,
That heaven's air in this huge rondure hems;
allusions to Venus and Cupid, Cynthia and Apollo, Diana and
Actaeon; Alexander weeping that he had no more worlds to
conquer, Caesar shedding tears over the head of Pompey; abstrac-
tions, such as Love and Fortune, Beauty and Disdain ; monsters,
like the Phoenix and the Basilisk. Here and there lingers a trace
of the metaphysical strain which, taking its rise in the poetry of
the troubadours, had been most fully elaborated by Guinicelli and


## p. 197 (#219) ############################################

Donne's Relation to Petrarch
197
Dante and Cavalcanti, the analysis of love in relation to, and its
effect on, the heart of man and its capacity for virtue:
The sovereign beauty which I do admire,
Witness the world how worthy to be praised!
The light whereof hath kindled heavenly fire
In my frail spirit by her from baseness raised.
But the most prevalent reflective note derives not from Petrarch
and Dante, but, through Ronsard and his fellow-poets of La
Pléiade, from Catullus and the Latin lyrists: the pagan lament for
the fleetingness of beauty and love-Ronsard's
Ah, love me love! we may be happy yet,
And gather roses while 'tis called to-day,
Shakespeare's
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor bonndless 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 ?
The poet who challenged and broke the supremacy of the
Petrarchian tradition was John Donne. Occasionally, when writing
a purely complimentary lyric to Mrs Herbert or lady Bedford,
Donne can adopt the Petrarchian pose ; but the tone and temper,
the imagery and rhythm, the texture and colour, of the bulk of his
love songs and love elegies are altogether different from those of
the fashionable love poetry of the sixteenth century, from Wyatt
and Surrey to Shakespeare and Drummond. With Donne, begins
a new era in the history of the English love lyric, the full importance
of which is not exhausted when one recognises in Donne the source
of the ‘metaphysical' lyric as it flourished from Carew to Rochester.
Nor was this Donne's only contribution to the history of English
poetry. The spirit of his best love poetry passed into the most
interesting of his elegies and his religious verses, the influence
of which was not less, in the earlier seventeenth century perhaps
even greater, than that of his songs. Of our regular, classically
inspired satirists, he is, whether actually the first in time or not,
the first who deserves attention, the first whose work is in the line
of later development, the only one of the sixteenth century satirists
whose influence is still traceable in Dryden and Pope. Religio
Laici is indebted for some of its most characteristic arguments
to Donne's 'Kind pity checks my spleen’; and Pope found in
Donne a satirist whose style and temper were closer in essential
respects to his own than those of the suave and urbane Horace.


## p. 198 (#220) ############################################

198
John Donne
For evil and for good, Donne is the most shaping and determining
influence that meets us in passing from the sixteenth to the
seventeenth centuries. In certain aspects of mind and training
the most medieval, in temper the most modern, of his contem-
poraries, he is, with the radically more pedantic and neo-classical
Jonson, at once the chief inspirer of his younger contemporaries
and successors, and the most potent herald and pioneer of the
school of poetic argument and eloquence.
The life of Donne-especially that part of it which concerns
the student of his poetry—as well as the canon and text of his
poems present problems which are only in process of solution :
some of them probably never will be solved. A full but concise
statement of all that we know regarding his Lehr- and Wander-
jahre is necessary both for the sake of what it contains, and because
of the clearness with which it defines the questions that await
further investigation.
John Donne (the name was pronounced so as to rime with
'done' and was frequently spelt ‘Dun' or 'Dunne') was the eldest
son of a London ironmonger-probably of Welsh extraction-and
of Elizabeth, the third (not, as hitherto believed, the only? ) daughter
of John Heywood, the famous dramatist of queen Mary's reign, by
his wife Elizabeth Rastell. This Elizabeth was herself the daughter
of John Rastell and Elizabeth the sister of Sir Thomas More.
Donne thus, on his mother's side at any rate, came of a line of
distinguished and devoted adherents of the old faith. He himself
was bred in that faith, and, despite his conversion and later
polemical writing and preaching, his most intimate religious poems
indicate very clearly that he never ceased to feel the influence of
his Catholic upbringing.
According to Walton and Anthony à Wood, Donne proceeded
to Oxford in 1584 at the early age of eleven. Here, he formed a
friendship with Henry Wotton, a friendship which counted for some-
thing in Donne's later life. From Oxford, he passed to Cambridge,
where, Walton tells us, he studied diligently till the age of
seventeen, but, neither here nor at Oxford, endeavoured after
a degree on account of the 'averseness of his friends to some
parts of the oath that is always tendered at those times. ' Never-
theless, in 1610 he was entered in the Oxford registers as already
an M. A. of Cambridge. Of these college years, no contemporary
documentary evidence is extant.
:
i See Bang's article in Englische Studien: Acta Anglo-Lovanensia : 'John Heywood
und sein Kreis. '


## p. 199 (#221) ############################################

His Life
199
Our first scrap of such evidence dates from 1592, the year of
the first unmistakable reference to Shakespeare as a London actor
and playwright. On the 6th of May in that year, Donne was entered
at Lincoln's inn, having been already, the document testifies,
admitted at Thavies's inn. Of his life between that year and his
marriage in 1601, we have very few particulars, but these appear
to indicate a life spent in England; a life similar to that led by
many young members of the inns of court as Donne describes
them,
Of study and play made strange hermaphrodites;
a life, too, of gradually broadening activity, which led him to the
doorway of a public and political career.
In Donne's case, both the study and the play of these years
were more than ordinarily intense. The record of the latter is
songs and elegies and earliest satires, the greater number of which
were written, Donne told Jonson, before his twenty-fifth year. That
he did not neglect law entirely for poetry, we know from his own
statement, and this is corroborated by the poems themselves, in
which legal metaphors abound. But the years 1593 and 1594
were also given to a serious and careful survey of the body of
divinity as it was then controverted betwixt the Reformed and the
Roman Church. ‘About his twentieth year'Walton says, that is,
apparently, in his twenty-first, he showed, to the then dean of
Gloucester, all the works of Bellarmine, 'marked with many weighty
observations under his own hand. ' Bellarmine's Disputationes,
indeed, were not published until 1593, and Rudde, who is the
dean in question, ceased to hold that office in 1594, which gives
but a short time for the study of such an important issue. But it
is quite possible that Bellarmine's work, in which Donne found
the best defence of the Roman cause, may have fallen into his
hands at the end, not (as Walton implies) at the beginning, of
a course of theological and controversial reading. To a mind that
worked with the rapidity of Donne's, the analysis and digestion
of an elaborate argument would not prove a lengthy task. Nor
was his active adherence to the Anglican church precipitate. All
that we can say with confidence is that when he entered the service
of Sir Thomas Egerton, in 1597, he cannot have been a professed
Romanist, and, in 1601, he disclaimed indignantly 'love of a corrupt
religion. '
Donne's first approach to a public career was made by
service as a volunteer in two combined military and naval ex-
peditions. In 1595, Henry Wotton returned from a prolonged
a
a


## p.
200 (#222) ############################################

200
John Donne
residence in Germany and Italy, to become at once an adherent of
Essex, whom he had already served by his correspondence while
abroad. The letters in verse and prose which passed between
Donne and Wotton during the next few years (some of them yet
unpublished) show that the intimacy begun at Oxford was renewed
with ardour; and it is a fair conjecture, though only a conjecture,
that it was Wotton's influence which brought Donne into contact
with Essex, and induced him to join his friend as a volunteer in
the expedition to Cadiz in 1596, and to the Azores in 1597. One
of the letters referred to was written from Plymouth when the
fleet, on the second of these expeditions, was driven back by stress
of weather; and Donne's verse epistles to Christopher Brooke, a
Cambridge friend, The Storm and The Calm, describe, with
extraordinary vividness and characteristic extravagance of 'wit,'
the experiences of his voyage. They were the first of his poems,
apparently, to attract attention outside the circle of his friends.
Another verse epistle, dated 20 July 1598, to Wotton, refers to
their common adventure :
Here's no more newes than vertue,
he cries, writing ‘At Court,'
I may as well
Tell you Cales1 or St Michaels tales for newes, as tell
That vice doth heere habitually dwell.
On the second of these expeditions, Donne and Wotton were
accompanied by another young volunteer, Thomas, eldest son of
Sir Thomas Egerton, lord keeper of the great seal. By this young
man, who was among those knighted for gallantry after the
expedition, Donne was recommended to the lord keeper towards
the close of 1597, and for four years was secretary to that influential
statesman. The door which was thus opened to Donne leading
to preferment, it might be even to wealth and station, was
abruptly closed by his own rash action, a runaway marriage
with Anne More, daughter of Sir George More of Losely and
niece of the lord keeper's second wife. It may be that, in Donne's
complex nature, love was blended with ambitious hopes of securing
6
1 Modern editors have disguised the reference in these lines, by translating the
Calis' of the printed edition into ‘Calais,' and confounding St Michaels' with
the 'guarded Mount' of Cornwall. But some manuscripts read 'Cales,' and there
can be no doubt that the allusion is to the storming of Cadiz, and to the Islands
expedition,' when Essex's hope of capturing the Plate fleet was disappointed in con.
sequence of his unseasonable attack on the island of St Michael. 'I might as well
tell you what we both witnessed ? '


## p. 201 (#223) ############################################

His Residence Abroad
201
his position and strengthening his claims on Sir Thomas Egerton.
If so, he was grievously disappointed. At the instance of Sir George
More, he and his friends Christopher and Samuel Brooke, who
assisted at the marriage, were thrown into prison ; and, although
Donne was soon released, and his father-in-law by degrees and
perforce reconciled to the marriage, the poet's hopes of prefer-
ment were blasted by his dismissal from the service of the lord
keeper.
This sketch of Donne's earlier years would be incomplete
without a reference to the problem of his residence abroad, a
residence the effect of which on his work is palpable. Through
Walton, we have Donne's own authority for the statement that
he visited Italy with the intention of proceeding to the east to
view the Holy Sepulchre; that, prevented from doing so, he passed
over into Spain; that he 'made many useful observations of those
countries, their laws and manner of government, and returned
perfect in their languages. ' Walton assigns this episode to the
years following the Islands expedition’; but this is manifestly
erroneous, for, during these years, Donne was actively employed
as Egerton's secretary. It is almost equally difficult to find a place
for it in the years from 1592 to 1596, when he was studying law,
theology and life in London. It is noteworthy that the earliest
portrait of Donne, dated 1591, shows him in military dress and
bears a Spanish motto. Again, in one of the three earlier satires,
which Harleian MS 5110 assigns to 1593, Donne describes his
library as already lined with
Giddie fantastique poets of each land,
and, long afterwards, he declared that it contained more Spanish
authors than of any other nation, and that in any profession from
the mistress of my youth, Poetry, to the wife of mine age, Divinity. '
The books in a man's library would not, today, be a safe index
to his travels, but, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
it was not usual for a young man to have a considerable collection
of foreign books, unless, like Drummond and Milton, he had himself
brought them home.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the time which Donne
spent abroad must have been in the last years of his earlier
education, when he was still a Catholic and under Catholic
direction. If this were so, it would explain his silence about
the exact circumstances of a voyage probably undertaken without
the permission of the government, and, possibly, with the intention


## p. 202 (#224) ############################################

202
John Donne
on the part of his guardians that he should enter a seminary,
despite the law of 1585, or take service under a foreign ruler?
With more light on this point, we might be able to see in the
singularly emancipated moral tone of Donne's mind and its
complete openness on religious questions during the early years
in London something of a reaction in his nature against a
bent which others would have imposed upon it. Lastly, an early
date fits best the evidence in the poems of foreign influence, which
is not to be found specially in Donne's 'wit,' but in the spirit
of Italian literature and life reflected in the frank sensuality of
some, the virulent satire of others, of his elegies and songs. The
spirit of the renascence in Latin countries, and a wide acquaintance
with Spanish casuists and other religious writers, are the most
palpable indications of foreign influence in Donne's work. His
direct indebtedness to any particular poet, Italian or Spanish, has
not been established. Of all Elizabethan poets, he is, for good or
evil, the most independent.
From 1601 to 1615, Donne's life was one of dependence on,
and humiliating adulation of, actual or possible patrons. He
lived at Pyrford on the charity of his wife's cousin Francis
Wooley; at Mitcham or in the Strand, on his wife's allowance from
her father; at the town house of Sir Robert Drury, whose patronage
he had gained by writing on the death of Elizabeth Drury, a girl
of sixteen whom he had never seen, the most elaborate and exalted
of his Funerall Elegies. He twice went abroad, on the second
.
occasion accompanying Sir Robert Drury to France and Spa. He
assisted Thomas Morton, afterwards dean of Gloucester and
bishop of Durham, in his controversies with Roman Catholics, for,
though by no means yet a devoted adherent of the Anglican church,
he heartily detested the Jesuits. He wrote courtly letters in verse
and prose to the countess of Bedford and other great ladies, or
elegies on the death of their friends and relatives. He found one
patron in the person of lord Hay, later earl of Doncaster, and
he courted another in the king's favourite, Robert Carr, earl of
Somerset, for whose marriage with the divorced countess of Essex
he wrote a splendid epithalamium. Of his writings of this period,
some are in the brilliant, but often coarse, satiric vein of his earlier
satires and satiric elegies ; one, BIAOANATOE, is an erudite, subtle
and strangely mooded excursus into the field of casuistry; and
1 Donne's mother seems to have lived abroad most of her life. In 1602, Donne
mentions service abroad in a way that shows it had been presented to his mind as a
possibility: 'From seeking preferments abroad my love and conscience restrains me. "


## p. 203 (#225) ############################################

His Later Life
203
one, Pseudo-Martyr, published in 1610, is a more restrained and
official contribution to the controversies of the day, a defence of
the oath of allegiance, Donne's first public appearance on the
Anglican side, in which, however, he does not wander far from the
single point at issue, and writes, not to convert Catholics, but to
persuade them that they may take the oath.
Such were Donne's 'steps to the altar. As early as 1607,
Morton, on being appointed dean of Gloucester, had urged upon
his collaborator the advisability of taking orders. But Donne did
not feel that the author of the popular and widely circulated
Satyres and Elegies, the Paradoxes and Problems and The
Progresse of the Soule, could become a 'priest to the temple’
without some scandal to the friends and admirers of the brilliant
and irregular 'Jack Donne,' not yet quite buried in the sage and
serious husband and father, the controversialist and the courtly
friend of Mrs Herbert and lady Bedford. Ignatius his Conclave was
written about this very year, the witty verses prefixed to Coryats
Crudities in 1611, and he was yet to write the Epithalamium
for Somerset. It is easier to respect, than to wonder at, such
a decision, whether in 1607 or 1610. Moreover, it is doubtful, as
Gosse has insisted, if, in his heart of hearts, Donne, by 1607 or 1610,
was a convinced Anglican. As late as 1617, when he had been
nearly three years in orders, he could write:
Show me, dear Christ, Thy Spouse so bright and clear.
What? Is it she who on the other shore
Goes richly painted? or who robb’d and tore
Laments and mourns in Germany and here?
Sleeps she a thousand, then peeps up one year?
This is not the language of one who is walking in the Via Media
with the intellectually untroubled confidence of Herbert.
When Donne at length became a priest in Anglican orders,
it was as one convinced that, for him, every other path to prefer-
ment was closed, not to be opened even by the influence of
Somerset. The king had resolved that Donne should enter the
church, and, on 25 January 1615, he was ordained by bishop King
of London. The period of privation and suitorship was over. In
1616, he became divinity reader at Lincoln's inn, where many
of his sermons were preached. In 1619 and 1620, he was in
Germany as chaplain to his friend the earl of Doncaster, and
preached before the unfortunate queen of Bohemia one of the
noblest and most illuminating of his sermons. In 1621, king James
appointed him dean of St Paul's, where his fame as a preacher


## p. 204 (#226) ############################################

204
John Donne
a
>
attracted large audiences and rose to its height about the beginning
of Charles's reign. For a moment, he fell under suspicion with the
suspicious and imperious Laud. But the cloud soon passed and,
had Donne lived, he would have been made a bishop. But,
often ailing, he was stricken down at his daughter's house in the
late summer of 1630. The strange and characteristic monument
which still stands in St Paul's was prepared by his own directions
while he lay ill. Some of the most intense and striking of his
hymns were written at the same time. Once, he rose from his bed
to preach the sermon entitled Death's Duel. Six weeks later, on
31 March 1631, he died.
However blended the motives may have been which carried
Donne into holy orders, he gave to the ministry a single-hearted
and strenuous devotion. Whatever doubts may, at times, have
agitated his secret thoughts, or found expression in an unpublished
sonnet, they left no reflection in his sermons. He adopted and
defended the doctrines of the church of England, and the policy in
church and state of her rulers, in their entirety and without demur.
His was a nature in which the will commanded, but was always able
to enlist in the service of its final choice a swift and subtle intellect,
an intense and vivid imagination and a vast store of varied
erudition. And, while he made amends for his Catholic up-
bringing, and for a middle period of mental detachment, by the
orthodoxy of his Anglicanism, the memory of the licence of his
earlier life and wit was forgotten in his later asceticism and in
the spiritual exaltation of the Sermons, the Devotions and the
Divine Poems.
Reference is made elsewhere to Donne as a preacher! Here,
we are concerned with him as poet and prose artist. The history
of his poems is involved in the difficulties and obscurities of his
biography. Only three were published in his life time, The
Anatomy of the World (1611, 1612); the satirical lines Upon
Mr Thomas Coryat's Crudities (1611); and the Elegie on Prince
Henry (1613). In 1614, when about to cross the Rubicon, Donne
thought of hurriedly collecting and publishing his poems before
the doing so could be deemed an actual scandal to his office. He
had, apparently, no autograph copies, at least of many of them,
but was driven to apply to his friends, and especially to Sir Henry
Goodere, the Warwickshire friend to whom the larger number
of his letters are addressed. This made me ask to borrow that
old book of you. The edition in question never appeared, but
1 See chap. XI.


## p. 205 (#227) ############################################

History of his Poems
205
when, in 1633, the first collection was issued posthumously, the
source was very probably this same old book' (though Goodere
had died before Donne), for, along with the poems, were printed
eight letters addressed to Goodere and one to the common friend
of Goodere and Donne, the countess of Bedford. In this edition,
the poems were arranged in a rather chaotic sequence of groups.
The volume opened with The Progresse of the Soule and closed
with the paraphrased Lamentations of Jeremy and the Satyres,
the latter edited with a good many cautious dashes. There are
obvious errors in the printing, but the text of such poems as this
edition contains is more correct than in any subsequent one. In
1635, a second edition was issued, in which many fresh poems were
added, and the grouping of the poems was carried out more
systematically, the arrangement being adopted which has been
generally adhered to since, and is useful for reference-Songs and
Sonets, Epigrams, Elegies, Epithalamiums, Satyres, Letters to
Severall Personages, Funerall Elegies, The Progresse of the Soule,
Divine Poems. The editions which followed that of 1635 added
individual poems from various sources, sometimes rightly, some-
times wrongly; and made alterations from time to time in the
text, conjecturally, or with the help of MS copies, which are
sometimes emendations, more often further corruptions. Modern
editors have followed in their wake, printing more carefully,
correcting many errors, but creating not a few fresh ones. The
canon of Donne's poems is far from being settled. Modern editions
contain poems which are demonstrably not his, while there are
genuine poems still unpublished. The text of many of his finest
poems is disfigured by errors and misprints.
The order of the groups in the edition of 1635 corresponds,,
roughly, to the order of composition. Donne's earliest works were
love songs or sonnets (using the word in the wider, freer sense
of the Elizabethans) and elegies (after the manner of the Latin
poets), through many of which runs a vein of pungent and personal
satire, and regular verse satires. Of these last, the editions since
1669 contain seven. We have, however, the explicit testimony
of Sir William Drummond that Donne wrote only five. It is clear,
from MSS such as Harleian 5110 and others which have survived
in whole or in part, that the first five, or some of them, were
copied and circulated by themselves. These alone were included
in the edition of 1633. The so-called sixth, which was added in
1635, if it be Donne's, is much more in the manner of the satirical
elegies than of the regular satires; while the seventh, addressed


## p. 206 (#228) ############################################

206
John Donne
6
To Sir Nicholas Smith, which was first inserted in the edition
of 1669, an edition the text of which abounds in conjectural
emendations, differs radically in style and tone from all the others,
and there can be little doubt that it is the work of Sir John Roe,
to whom it is assigned in more than one MS.
Donne's satires have features in common with the other imita-
tions of Juvenal, Persius and Horace which were produced in
the last decade of the sixteenth century, notably a heightened
emphasis of style and a corresponding vehemence and harshness
of versification. But, in verse and style and thought, Donne's
satires are superior to either Hall's 'dashing, smirking, fluent
imitations of the ancients' or Marston's tedious and tumid
absurdities. The verse of these poets is much less irregular
than Donne's. It approximates more closely to the balanced
couplet movement of Drayton's Heroicall Epistles. Hall's couplets
are neat and pointed, Marston's more irregular and enjambed.
But Donne's satiric verse shows something like a consistent
effort to eschew a couplet structure, and to give to his verse the
freedom and swiftness of movement to which, when he wrote,
even dramatic blank verse had hardly yet attained. He uses
all the devices—the main pause in the middle of the line, weak and
light endings (he even divides one word between two lines) by
which Shakespeare secured the abrupt, rapid effects of the verse
of Macbeth and the later plays:
Gracchus loves all (i. e. religions) as one, and thinks that so
As women do in divers countries go
So doth, so is Religion; and this blind-
Ness too much light breeds; but unmoved thou
Of force must one, and forc'd but one allow;
And the right? ask thy father which is she,
Let him ask his; though truth and falsehood be
Near twins yet truth a little elder is;
Be busy to seek her. Believe me this,
He's not of none, nor worst, that seeks the best.
Such verse is certainly not smooth or melodious. Yet the
effect is studied and is not inappropriate to the theme and spirit
of the poem.
Donne's verse resembles Jonson's much more
closely than either Hall's or Marston's. He had certainly classical
models in view-Martial and Persius and Horace. But imitation
alone will not account for Donne's peculiarities. Of the minor
kallwnlouata of verse, he is always a little careless; but if there
is one thing more distinctive than another of Donne's best work it
is the closeness with which the verse echoes the sense and soul


## p. 207 (#229) ############################################

His Satires
207
of the poem. And so it is in the satires. Their abrupt, harsh
verse reflects the spirit in which they are written. Horace,
quite as much as Persius, is Donne's teacher in satire; and it is
Horace he believes himself to be following in adopting a verse in
harmony with the unpoetic temper of his work:
And this unpolish'd rugged verse I chose,
As fittest for discourse and nearest prose.
The urbane spirit of Horace was not caught at once by those who,
like Donne and Jonson, believed themselves to be following in his
footsteps.
The style of Donne's satires has neither the intentional obscurity
of Hall's more ambitious imitations of Juvenal, nor the vague
bluster of Marston's onslaughts upon vice. If we allow for
corruptions of the text, one might say that Donne is never
obscure. His wit is a succession of disconcerting surprises ;
his thought original and often profound; his expression, though
condensed and harsh, is always perfectly precise. His out-of-the-
way learning, too, which supplies puzzles for modern readers, is
used with a pedantic precision, even when fantastically applied, to
which his editors have not always done justice.
In substance, Donne's satires are not only wittier than those of
his contemporaries, but weightier in their serious criticism of life,
and happier in their portrayal of manners and types. In this
respect, some of them are an interesting pendant to Jonson's
comedies. The first describes a walk through London with a
giddy ape of fashion, who is limned with a lightness and vivacity
wanting to Jonson's more laboured studies of Fastidious Brisk
and his fellows. The second, opening with a skit on the lawyer
turned poet, passes into a trenchant onslaught-obscured by
some corruptions of the text-upon the greedy and unprincipled
exacter of fines from recusant Catholics, and 'purchasour' of men's
lands :
Shortly (as the sea) he'll compass all the land;
From Scots to Wight; from Mount to Dover strand.
He is the lineal descendant of Chaucer's Man of Law, to whom all
was fee-simple in effect, drawn in more angry colours. The third
stands by itself, being a grave and eloquent plea for the serious
pursuit of religious truth, as opposed to capricious or indolent
acquiescence, on the one hand, and contemptuous indifference
on the other. The lines which are quoted above in illustration
of Donne’s verse, and, indeed, the whole poem, were probably


## p. 208 (#230) ############################################

208
John Donne
in Dryden's mind when he wrote his first plea for the careful
quest of religious truth, and concluded that,
'tis the safest way
To learn what unsuspected ancients say.
These three satires are ascribed in a note on one manuscript
collection to the year 1593. Whether this be strictly correct or
not, they seem to reflect what we may take to have been the
mind of Donne during his early years in London, at the inns of
court, when he was familiar with the life of the town, but not
yet an habitué of the court, and in a state of intellectual detach-
ment as regards religion, with a lingering prejudice in favour of
the faith of his fathers. The last two satires were written in 1597,
or the years immediately following, when Donne was in the
service of the lord keeper, and they bear the mark of the budding
statesman. The first is a long and somewhat over-elaborated
satire on the fashions and follies of court-life at the end of queen
Elizabeth's reign. The picture of the bore was doubtless sug-
gested by Horace's Ibam forte via sacra, but, like all Donne's types,
is drawn from the life, and with the same amplification of detail
and satiric point which are to be found in Pope's renderings
from Horace. The last of Donne's genuine satires is a descant
on the familiar theme of Spenser's laments, the miseries of
suitors.
Donne's satires were very popular, and, to judge from the
extant copies or fragments of copies, as well as from contemporary
allusions, appear to have circulated more freely than the songs and
elegies, which were doubtless confined so far as possible, like the
Paradoxes and BIAOANATOE, to the circle of the poet's private
friends. A Roman Catholic controversialist, replying to Pseudo-
Martyr, expresses his regret that Donne has passed beyond his
old occupation of making Satires, wherein he hath some talent and
may play the fool without controll. Such a writer, had he known
them, could hardly have failed to make polemical use of the more
daring and outrageous Elegies and those songs which strike a
similar note. But, though less widely known, the Songs and
Sonets and the Elegies contain the most intimate and vivid
record of his inner soul in these ardent years, as the religious
sonnets and hymns do of his later life. And the influence of
these on English poetry was deeper, and, despite the temporary
eclipse of metaphysical poetry, more enduring, than that of his
pungent satires, or of his witty but often laboured and extravagant
eulogies in verse letter and funeral elegy.


## p. 209 (#231) ############################################

a
Songs and Elegies
209
Of the Songs and Sonets, not one is a sonnet in the regular
sense of the word. Neither in form nor spirit was Donne a
Petrarchian poet. Some were written to previously existing airs;
all, probably, with a more or less definite musical intention. The
greater number of them would seem to have been preserved and
may be found in the first section of Chambers's edition. He has
rightly excluded the song, ‘Dear Love, continue nice and chaste,'
which was included in the edition of 1635, but was written by
Sir John Roe. A fresh editor would have to exclude, also, the
song 'Soul's joy now I am gone' and the Dialogue beginning 'If
her disdain least change in you can move, which, if the collective
evidence of MSS be worth anything, were written by the earl of
Pembroke, collaborating, in the last, with Sir Benjamin Ruddier.
The Burley MS contains a few songs, as well as longer pieces which,
from their accompanying indubitable poems and letters of Donne,
are, presumably, given as his. None of them is specially character-
istic or adds anything of great intrinsic value. It has been not
unusual, since its first publication as by Donne in The Grove
(1721), to ascribe to him the charming song 'Absence, hear thou my
protestation. But, in Drummond's copy of a collection of verses
made by Donne himself, of which only a few are his own com-
position, this particular song is ascribed to J. H. , i. t. (as another
MS proves), John Hoskins. The touch is a shade lighter, the feeling
a shade less intense, than in Donne's most characteristic work.
Of the Elegies, the canon is more difficult to ascertain exactly.
Some of the most audacious, but not least characteristic, were
excluded by the first editor, but crept into subsequent issues.
Of the twenty given in Chambers’s edition, all are Donne's, with
the possible exception of the twelfth, 'Come, Fates, I fear you not’;
and to these should be added that entitled Love's War, in the
appendix, which was first printed by Sir John Simeon. But the
sixteenth, 'To make the doubt clear that no woman 's true,' was
included in Ben Jonson's posthumous Underwoods, and it is not
impossible that the three which there accompany it are also
Donne's. As Swinburne has pointed out, they are more in his
style than in that of Jonson. On the other hand, no MS collection
of Donne's poems includes them, whereas their companion appears
in more than one.
It is not difficult to distinguish three strains in Donne's
love poetry, including both the powerful and enigmatical elegies
and the strange and fascinating songs. The one prevails in
all the elegies (except the famous Autumnal dedicated to
14
6
E. L. IV.
CH. II.


## p. 210 (#232) ############################################

210
John Donne
Mrs Herbert, and the seventeenth, the subject of which may
have been his wife) and in the larger number of the lyrical
pieces, in songs like 'Go and catch a falling star,' 'Send home my
long stray'd eyes to me,' or such lyrics as Woman's Constancy,
The Indifferent, Aire and Angels, The Dreame, The Apparition,
and many others. This is the most distinctive strain in Donne's
early poetry, and that which contrasts it markedly with the
love poetry of his contemporaries, the sonneteers. There is no
echo of Petrarch's woes in Donne's passionate and insolent,
rapturous and angry, songs and elegies. The love which he
portrays is not the impassioned yet intellectual idealism of Dante,
nor the refined and adoring sentiment of Petrarch, nor the epi-
curean but courtly love of Ronsard, nor the passionate, chivalrous
gallantry of Sidney. It is the love of the Latin lyrists and elegiasts,
a feeling which is half rapture and half rage, for one who is never
conceived of for a moment as standing to the poet in the ideal
relationship of Beatrice to Dante or of Laura to Petrarch. Das
ewig Weibliche zieht uns hinan is not Donne's sentiment in these
poems, but rather
Hope not mind in women; at their best
Sweetness and wit, they're but mummy possest.
But if Donne's sentiment is derived rather from Latin than from
Italian and courtly poetry, it was reinforced by his experience,
and it is expressed with a wit and erudition that are all his own.
And, in reading some, both of the elegies and the songs, one must
not forget to make full allowance for the poet's inexhaustible and
astounding wit and fancy. 'I did best,' he said later, 'when I had
‘
least truth for my subject. ' Realistic, Donne's love poetry may
be; it is not safe to accept it as a history of his experiences.
The Elegies are the fullest record of Donne's more cynical
frame of mind and the conflicting moods which it generated.
Some, and not the least brilliant in wit and execution, are frankly
sensual, the model of poems such as Carew's The Rapture; others,
fiercely, almost brutally, cynical and satirical; others, as The
Chain and The Perfume, more simply witty; a few, as The Picture,
strike a purer note. A strain of impassioned paradox runs through
them; they are charged with wit; the verse, though harsh at times,
has more of the couplet cadence than the satires; the phrasing is
full of startling felicities :
I taught my silks their rustlings to forbear,
Even my oppress'd shoes dumb and silent were;


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Love Poetry
2II
and there are not wanting passages of pure and beautiful poetry:
I will not look upon the quickening sun
But straight her beauty to my sense shall run;
The air shall note her soft, the fire most pure,
Waters suggest her clear, and the earth sure.
This turbid, passionate yet cynical, vein is not the only one in
Donne's love poetry. Two others are readily distinguishable, and
include some of his finest lyrics. In one, which is probably the
latest, as that described is the earliest, Donne returns a little
towards the sonneteers, especially the more Platonising among
them. Poems like Twickenham Garden, The Funerall, The
Blossom, The Primrose, were probably addressed neither to the
mistresses of his youth, nor to the wife of his later years, but
to the high-born lady friends, Mrs Herbert and the countess of
Bedford, for whom he composed the ingenious and erudite com-
pliments of his verse letters. Towards them, he adopts the
hopeless and adoring pose of Petrarchian flirtation (of Spenser
towards lady Carew or Drayton towards mistress Anne Goodere)
and, in high Platonic vein, boasts that,
Difference of sex no more we knew
Than our guardian angels do;
Coming and going we
Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals;
Our hands ne'er touched the seals
Which nature, injured by late law, sets free;
These miracles we did; but now alas!
All measure and all language I should pass,
Should I tell what a miracle she was.
Less artificial than this last strain, purer than the first, and
simpler, though not less intense, than either, is the feeling of those
lyrics which, in all probability, were addressed to his wife. To this
class belongs the exquisite song:
|
Sweetest Love, I do not go
For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
A fitter love for me.
In the same vein, and on the same theme, are the Valediction: of
Weeping:
O more than moon,
Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere;
Weep me not dead in thine arms, but forbear
To teach the sea what it may do too soon;
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2 I 2
John Donne
and the more famous Valediction: forbidding Mourning, with its
characteristic, fantastical yet felicitous, conceit of the compasses :
Such wilt thou be to me who must,
Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
The seventeenth elegy, 'By our first strange and fatal inter-
view, may belong to the same group, and so, one would con-,
jecture, do The Canonization, 'For Godsake hold your tongue
and let me love' and The Anniversary. In these, at any rate,
Donne expresses a purer and more elevated strain of the same
feeling as animates The Dream, The Sun-Rising and The Break
of Day; and one not a whit less remote from the tenor of
Petrarchian poetry.