TO THE
COUNTESSE
OF BEDFORD.
John Donne
255, l.
127.
ll. 31-2. _The first good Angell, &c. _ 'Our first consideration
is upon the persons; and those we finde to be Angelicall women and
Evangelicall Angels: . . . And to recompense that observation, that
never good Angel appeared in the likenesse of woman, here are good
women made Angels, that is, Messengers, publishers of the greatest
mysteries of our Religion. ' _Sermons_ 80. 25. 242.
ll. 35-6. _Make your returne home gracious; and bestow
This life on that; so make one life of two. _
'Make a present of this life to the next, by living now as you will
live then; and so make this life and the next one'--or, as another
poet puts it:
And so make life, death, and that vast forever
One grand, sweet song.
This I take to be Donne's meaning. The 'This' of _1635-69_ and
the MSS. , which Chambers also has adopted, seems required by the
antithesis. If one recalls that 'this' is very commonly written
'thys', and that final 's' is little more than a tail, it is easy to
account for 'Thy' in _1633_. The meaning too is not clear at a glance,
and 'Thy' might seem to an editor to make it easier. The thought is
much the same as in the _Obsequies to the Lord Harrington_, p. 279.
And I (though with paine)
Lessen our losse, to magnifie thy gaine
Of triumph, when I say, It was more fit,
That all men should lacke thee, then thou lack it.
Compare also: 'Sir, our greatest businesse is more in our power then
the least, and we may be surer to meet in heaven than in any place
upon earth. ' _Letters_, p. 188. And see the quotation in note to p.
112, l. 44, 'this and the next are not two worlds,' &c.
PAGE =191=. TO THE COUNTESSE OF BEDFORD.
ll. 1-6. The sense of this verse, carefully and correctly printed in
the 1633 edition, was obscured if not corrupted by the insertion of
a semicolon after 'Fortune' in the later editions. The correct
punctuation was restored in 1719, which was followed in subsequent
editions until Grosart returned to that of the 1635-39 editions (which
the Grolier Club editor also adopts), and Chambers completed the
confusion by printing the lines thus,
You have refined me, and to worthiest things--
Virtue, art, beauty, fortune.
Even Mr. Gosse has been misled into quoting this truncated and
enigmatical compliment to Lady Bedford, regarding it, I presume, as of
the same nature as Shakespeare's lines,
Spirits are not finely touch'd,
But to fine issues.
But this has a meaning; what meaning is there in saying that a man is
refined to 'beauty and fortune'? Poor Donne was not likely to boast
of either at this time. What he says is something quite different, and
strikes the key-note of the poem. 'You have refined and sharpened my
judgement, and now I see that the worthiest things owe their value
to rareness or use. Value is nothing intrinsic, but depends on
circumstances. ' This, the next two verses add, explains why at Court
it is your virtue which transcends, in the country your beauty. To
Donne the country is always dull and savage; the court the focus of
wit and beauty, though not of virtue. On the relative nature of all
goodness he has touched in the _Progresse of the Soule_, p. 316, ll.
518-20:
There's nothing simply good nor ill alone;
Of every quality Comparison
The only measure is, and judge, Opinion.
With the sentiment regarding Courts compare: 'Beauty, in courts, is
so necessary to the young, that those who are without it, seem to be
there to no other purpose than to wait on the triumphs of the fair; to
attend their motions in obscurity, as the moon and stars do the sun
by day; or at best to be the refuge of those hearts which others have
despised; and by the unworthiness of both to give and take a miserable
comfort. ' Dryden, Dedication of the _Indian Emperor_.
ll. 8-9. (_Where a transcendent height, (as lownesse mee)
Makes her not be, or not show_)
I have completed the enclosure of (Where . . . show) in brackets which
_1633_ began but forgot to carry out. The statement is parenthetical,
and it is of the essence of Donne's wit to turn aside in one
parenthesis to make another, dart from one distracting thought to
a further, returning at the end to the main track. He has left the
Countess for a moment to explain why the Court 'is not Vertues clime'.
She is too transcendent to be, or at any rate to be seen there, as
I (he adds, quite irrelevantly) am too low. Then taking up again the
thought of the first line he continues: 'all my rhyme is claimed
there by your vertues, for _there_ rareness gives them value. I am the
comment on what _there_ is a dark text; the usher who announces one
that is a stranger. '
For brackets within brackets compare: 'And yet it is imperfect which
is taught by that religion which is most accommodate to sense (I dare
not say to reason (though it have appearance of that too) because
none may doubt but that that religion is certainly best which is
reasonablest) That all mankinde hath one protecting Angel; all
Christians one other, all English one other, all of one Corporation
and every civill coagulation or society one other; and every man one
other. ' _Letters_, p. 43.
l. 13. _To this place_: i. e. Twickenham. _O'F_ heads the poem _To the
Countesse of Bedford, Twitnam_. The poem is written to welcome her
home. See l. 70.
The development of Donne's subtle and extravagant conceits is a little
difficult. The Countess is the sun which exhales the sweetness of the
country when she comes thither (13-18). Apparently the Countess
has returned to Twickenham in Autumn, perhaps arriving late in the
evening. When she emerges from her chariot it is the breaking of a new
day, the beginning of a new year or new world. Both the Julian and the
Gregorian computations are thus falsified (19-22). It shows her truth
to nature that she will not suffer a day which begins at a stated
hour, but only one that begins with the actual appearance of the light
(23-4: a momentary digression). Since she, the Sun, has thus come to
Twickenham, the Court is made the Antipodes. While the 'vulgar sun' is
an Autumnal one, this Sun which is in Spring, receives our sacrifices.
Her priests, or instruments, we celebrate her (25-30). Then Donne
draws back from the religious strain into which he is launching. He
will not sing Hymns as to a Deity, but offer petitions as to a King,
that he may view the beauty of this Temple, and not as Temple, but as
Edifice. The rest of the argument is simpler.
l. 60. _The same thinge. _ The singular of the MSS. seems to be
required by 'you cannot two'. The 's' of the editions is probably
due to the final 'e'. But 'things' is the reading of _Lec_, the MS.
representing most closely that from which _1633_ was printed.
ll. 71-2. _Who hath seene one, &c. _ 'Who hath seen one, e. g.
Twickenham, which your dwelling there makes a Paradise, would fain see
you too, as whoever had been in Paradise would not have failed to seek
out the Cherubim. ' The construction is elliptical. Compare:
Wee'had had a Saint, have now a holiday.
P. 286, l. 44.
The Cherubim are specially mentioned (although the Seraphim are the
highest order) because they are traditionally the beautiful angels:
'The Spirit of Chastity . . . in the likenesse of a faire beautifull
Cherubine. ' Bacon, _New Atlantis_ (1658), 22 (O. E. D. ).
PAGE =193=. TO S^r EDWARD HERBERT. AT IULYERS.
Edward Herbert, first Baron of Cherbury (1563-1648), the eldest son of
Donne's friend Mrs. Magdalen Herbert, had not long returned from his
first visit to France when he set out again in 1610 with Lord Chandos
'to pass to the city of Juliers which the Prince of Orange resolved to
besiege. Making all haste thither we found the siege newly begun; the
Low Country army assisted by 4,000 English under the command of
Sir Edward Cecil. We had not long been there when the Marquis de
la Chartre, instead of Henry IV, who was killed by that villain
Ravaillac, came with a brave French army thither'. _Autobiography_,
ed. Sidney Lee. The city was held by the Archduke Leopold for the
Emperor. The Dutch, French, and English were besieging the town in the
interest of the Protestant candidates, the Elector of Brandenburg, and
the Palatine of Neuburg. The siege marked the beginning of the Thirty
Years' War. Herbert was a man of both ability and courage but of
a vanity which outweighed both. Donne's letter humours both his
Philosophical pose and his love of obscurity and harshness in poetry.
His own poems with a few exceptions are intolerably difficult and
unmusical, and Jonson told Drummond that 'Donne said to him he wrote
that Epitaph upon Prince Henry, _Look to me Faith_, to match Sir Ed.
Herbert in obscureness'. (Jonson's _Conversations_, ed. Laing. ) The
poems have been reprinted by the late Professor Churton Collins. In
1609 when Herbert was in England he and Donne both wrote Elegies on
Mistress Boulstred.
l. 1. _Man is a lumpe, &c. _ The image of the beasts Donne has borrowed
from Plato, _The Republic_, ix. 588 B-E.
PAGE =194=, ll. 23-6. A food which to chickens is harmless poisons
men. Our own nature contributes the factor which makes a food into a
poison either corrosive or killing by intensity of heat or cold:
'Et hic nota quod tantus est ordo naturae, ut quod est venenosum et
inconveniens uni est utile et conveniens alteri; sicut jusquiamus
qui est cibus passeris licet homini sit venenosus; et sicut napellus
interficit hominem solum portatus, et mulierem praegnantem non laesit
manducatus, teste Galieno; et mus qui pascitur napello est tiriaca
contra napellum. ' Benvenuto on Dante, _Div. Comm. _: _Paradiso_, i. The
plants here mentioned are henbane and aconite. Concerning hemlock the
O. E. D. quotes Swan, _Spec. M. _ vi. ? 4 (1643), 'Hemlock . . . is meat to
storks and poison to men. ' Donne probably uses the word 'chickens' as
equivalent to 'young birds', not for the young of the domestic
fowl. For the cold of the hemlock see Persius, _Sat. _ v. 145; Ovid,
_Amores_, iii. 7. 13; and Juvenal, _Sat. _ vii. 206, a reference to
Socrates' gift from the Athenians of 'gelidas . . . cicutas'.
ll. 31-2. _Thus man, that might be'his pleasure, &c. _ These lines
are condensed and obscure. The 'his' must mean 'his own'. 'Man who in
virtue of that gift of reason which makes him man might be to himself
a source of joy, becomes instead, by the abuse of reason, his own rod.
Reason which should be the God directing his life becomes the devil
which misleads him. ' Chambers prints 'His pleasure', 'His rod',
referring 'his' to God--which seems hardly possible.
ll. 34-8. _wee'are led awry, &c. _ Chambers's punctuation of this
passage is clearly erroneous:
we're led awry
By them, who man to us in little show,
Greater than due; no form we can bestow
On him, for man into himself can draw
All;
This must mean that we are led astray by those who, in their
abridgement of man, still show him to us greater than he really is.
But this is the opposite of what Donne says. 'Greater than due' goes
with 'no form'. Compare:
'And therefore the Philosopher draws man into too narrow a table, when
he says he is _Microcosmos_, an Abridgement of the world in little:
_Nazianzen_ gives him but his due, when he calls him _Mundum Magnum_,
a world to which all the rest of the world is but subordinate: For
all the world besides, is but God's Foot-stool; Man sits down upon his
right-hand,' &c. _Sermons_ 26. 25. 370.
'It is too little to call Man a little world; Except God, Man is a
diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than
the world; than the world doth, nay than the world is. ' _Devotions
upon Emergent Occasions, &c. _ (1624), p. 64.
On the other hand the Grolier Club editor has erroneously followed
_1635-69_ in altering the full stop after 'chaw' to a comma; and has
substituted a semicolon for the comma after 'fill' (l. 39), reading:
for man into himself can draw
All; all his faith can swallow or reason chaw,
All that is filled, and all that which doth fill;
But 'All that is fill'd,' &c. is not _object_ to 'can draw'. It is
_subject_ (in apposition with 'All the round world') to 'is but a
pill'.
PAGE =195=, l. 47. _This makes it credible. _ I have changed the comma
after 'credible' to a semicolon to avoid the misapprehension, into
which the Grolier Club editor seems to have fallen, that what is
credible is 'that you have dwelt upon all worthy books'. It is because
Lord Herbert has dwelt upon all worthy books that it is credible that
he knows man.
PAGE =195=.
TO THE COUNTESSE OF BEDFORD.
l. 1. _T'have written then, &c. _ This is one of the most difficult of
Donne's poems. With his usual strain of extravagant compliment Donne
has interwoven some of his deepest thought and most out-of-the-way
theological erudition and scientific lore. Moreover the poem is one
of those for which the MS. resembling _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ was not
available. The text of _1633_ was taken from a MS. belonging to the
group _A18_, _N_, _TCC_, _TCD_, and contains several errors. Some of
these were corrected in _1635_ from _O'F_ or a MS. resembling it,
but in the most vital case what was a right but difficult reading in
_1633_ was changed for an apparently easier but erroneous reading.
The emendations which I have accepted from _1635_ are--
l. 5. 'debt' for 'doubt'.
l. 7. '_nothings_' for '_nothing_'.
l. 20. 'or all It; You. ' for 'or all, in you. ' There is not much
to choose between the two, but 'the world's best all' is not a very
logical expression. But the _1633_ reading may mean 'the world's
best part, or the world's all,--you. ' The alteration of _1635_ is not
necessary, but looks to me like the author's own emendation.
l. 4. _Then worst of civill vices, thanklessenesse. _ 'Naturall and
morall men are better acquainted with the duty of gratitude, of
thankesgiving, before they come to the Scriptures, then they are
with the other duty of repentance which belongs to Prayer; for in all
_Solomons_ bookes, you shall not finde halfe so much of the duty of
thankefulnesse, as you shall in _Seneca_ and in _Plutarch_. No book of
Ethicks, of moral doctrine, is come to us, where there is not, almost
in every leafe, some detestation, some Anathema against ingratitude. '
_Sermons_ 80. 55. 550.
PAGE =197=, l. 54. _Wee (but no forraine tyrants could) remove. _
Following the hint of _O'F_, I have bracketed all these words to show
that the verb to 'Wee' is 'remove', not 'could remove'.
ll. 57-8. _For, bodies shall from death redeemed bee,
Soules but preserved, not naturally free. _
Here the later editions change 'not' to 'borne', and the correction
has been accepted by Grosart and Chambers. But _1633_ is right. If
'not' be changed, the force of the antithesis is lost. What is 'borne
free' does not need to be preserved. What Donne expresses is a form
of the doctrine of conditional immortality. In a sermon on the
Penitential Psalms (_Sermons_ 80. 53. 532) he says: 'We have a full
cleerenesse of the state of the soule after this life, not only above
those of the old Law, but above those of the Primitive Christian
Church, which, in some hundreds of years, came not to a cleere
understanding in that point, whether the soule were immortall by
nature, or but by preservation, whether the soule could not die
or only should not die,' &c. Here the antithesis between 'being
preserved' and 'being naturally free' (i. e. immortal) is presented as
sharply as in this line of the verse _Letter_. But Donne states
the doctrine tentatively 'because that perchance may be without any
constant cleerenesse yet'. Elsewhere he seems to accept it: 'And for
the Immortality of the Soule, it is safelier said to be immortall by
preservation, then immortal, by nature; That God keepes it from dying,
then, that it cannot dye. ' _Sermons_ 80. 27. 269. This makes the
correct reading of the line quite certain.
The tenor of Donne's thought seems to me to be as follows: He is
speaking of the soul's eclipse by the body (ll. 40-2), by the body
which should itself be an organ of the soul's life, of prayer as well
as labour (ll. 43-8). He returns in ll. 49-52 to the main theme of the
body's corrupting influence, and this leads him to a new thought. It
is not only the soul which suffers by this absorption in the body, but
the body itself:
What hate could hurt our bodies like our love?
By this descent of the soul into the body we deprive the latter of
its proper dignity, to be the Casket, Temple, Palace of the Soul.
Then Donne turns aside to enforce the dignity of the Body. It will be
redeemed from death, and the Soul is only preserved. No more than
the Body is the Soul naturally immortal. These lines are almost
a parenthesis. The poet returns once more to his main theme, the
degradation of the soul by our exclusive regard for the body.
Thus the deepest thought of Donne's poetry, his love poetry and
his religious poetry, emerges here again. He will not accept the
antithesis between soul and body. The dignity of the body is hardly
less than that of the soul. But we cannot exalt the body at the
expense of the soul. If we immerse the soul in the body it is not the
soul alone which suffers but the body also. In the highest spiritual
life, as in the fullest and most perfect love, body and soul are
complementary, are merged in each other; and after death the life
of the soul is in some measure incomplete, the end for which it was
created is not obtained until it is reunited to the body. 'Yet have
not those Fathers, nor those Expositors, who have in this text,
acknowledged a Resurrection of the soule, mistaken nor miscalled the
matter. Take _Damascens_ owne definition of Resurrection: _Resurrectio
est ejus quod cecidit secunda surrectio_: A Resurrection is a second
rising to that state, from which anything is formerly fallen. Now
though by death, the soule do not fall into any such state, as that it
can complaine, (for what can that lack, which God fils? ) yet by death,
the soule fals from that, for which it was infused, and poured into
man at first; that is to be the forme of that body, the King of that
Kingdome; and therefore, when in the generall Resurrection, the soule
returns to that state, for which it was created, and to which it hath
had an affection, and a desire, even in the fulnesse of the Joyes of
Heaven, then, when the soule returns to her office, to make up
the man, because the whole man hath, therefore the soule hath a
Resurrection: not from death, but from a deprivation of her former
state; that state which she was made for, and is ever enclined to. '
_Sermons_ 80. 19. 189.
Here, as before, Donne is probably following St. Augustine, who
combats the Neo-Platonic view (to which mediaeval thought tended to
recur) that a direct source of evil was the descent of the soul into
the body. The body is not essentially evil. It is not the body as such
that weighs down the soul (aggravat animam), but the body corrupted
by sin: 'Nam corruptio corporis . . . non peccati primi est causa, sed
poena; nec caro corruptibilis animam peccatricem, sed anima peccatrix
fecit esse corruptibilem carnem. ' In the Resurrection we desire not
to escape from the body but to be clothed with a new body,--'nolumus
corpore exspoliari, sed ejus immortalitate vestiri. ' Aug. _De Civ.
Dei_, xiv. 3, 5. He cites St. Paul, 2 Cor. v. 1-4.
l. 59. _As men to our prisons, new soules to us are sent, &c. _: 'new'
is the reading of _1633_ only, 'now' followed or preceded by a comma
of the other editions and the MSS. It is difficult to decide between
them, but Donne speaks of 'new souls' elsewhere: 'The Father creates
new souls every day in the inanimation of Children, and the Sonne
creates them with him. ' _Sermons_ 50. 12. 100. 'Our nature is
Meteorique, we respect (because we partake so) both earth and heaven;
for as our bodies glorified shall be capable of spirituall joy, so
our souls demerged into those bodies, are allowed to partake earthly
pleasure. Our soul is not sent hither, only to go back again; we have
some errand to do here; nor is it sent into prison, because it comes
innocent; and he which sent it, is just. ' _Letters_ (1651), p. 46.
l. 68. _Two new starres. _ See Introductory Note to _Letters_.
PAGE =198=, l. 72. _Stand on two truths_: i. e. the wickedness of the
world and your goodness. You will believe neither.
PAGE =198=. TO THE COUNTESSE OF BEDFORD.
ON NEW-YEARES DAY.
l. 3. _of stuffe and forme perplext_: i. e. whose matter and form are a
perplexed, intricate, difficult question:
Whose _what_, and _where_ in disputation is.
Donne cannot mean that the matter and form are 'intricately
intertwined or intermingled', using the words as in Bacon: 'The
formes of substances (as they are now by compounding and transplanting
multiplied) are so perplexed. ' Bacon, _Adv. Learn. _ ii. 7. ? 5. The
question of meteors in all their forms was one of great interest and
great difficulty to ancient science. Seneca, who gathers up most of
what has been said before him, recurs to the subject again and again.
See the _Quaestiones Naturales_, i. 1, and elsewhere. Aristotle, he
says, attributes them to exhalations from the earth heated by the
sun's rays. They are at any rate not falling stars, or parts of stars,
but 'have their origin below the stars, and--being without solid
foundation or fixed abode--quickly perish'. But there was great
uncertainty as to their _what_ and _where_. Donne compares himself to
them in the uncertainty of his position and worldly affairs. 'Wind is
a mixt Meteor, to the making whereof divers occasions concurre with
exhalations. ' _Sermons_ 80. 31. 305.
PAGE =199=, l. 19. _cherish, us doe wast. _ The punctuation of _1633_
is odd at the first glance, but accurate. If with all the later
editions one prints 'cherish us, doe wast', the suggestion is that
'wast' is intransitive--'in cherishing us they waste themselves,'
which is not Donne's meaning. It is us they waste.
PAGE =200=, l. 44. _Some pitty. _ I was tempted to think that Lowell's
conjecture of 'piety' for 'pitty' must be right, the more so that the
spelling of the two words was not always differentiated. But it is
improbable that Donne would say that 'piety' in the sense of piety
to God could ever be out of place. What he means is probably that at
Court pity, which elsewhere is a virtue, may not be so if it induces a
lady to lend a relenting ear to the complaint of a lover.
Beware faire maides of musky courtiers oathes
Take heed what giftes and favors you receive,
. . . . . . . . .
Beleeve not oathes or much protesting men,
Credit no vowes nor no bewayling songs.
Joshua Sylvester (_attributed to_ Donne).
What follows is ambiguous. As punctuated in _1633_ the lines run:
some vaine disport,
On this side, sinne: with that place may comport.
This must mean, practically repeating what has been said: 'Some vain
amusements which, on this side of the line separating the cloister
from the Court, would be sin; are on that side, in the Court,
becoming--amusements, sinful in the cloister, are permissible at
Court. ' The last line thus contains a sharp antithesis. But can 'on
this side' mean 'in the cloister'? Donne is not writing from the
cloister, and if he had been would say 'In this place'. 'Faith',
he says elsewhere, 'is not on this side Knowledge but beyond it. '
_Sermons_ 50. 36. 325. This is what he means here, and I have so
punctuated it, following _1719_ and subsequent editions: 'Some vain
disport, so long as it falls short of actual sin, is permissible at
Court. '
l. 48. _what none else lost_: i. e. innocence. Others never had it.
PAGE =201=. TO THE COUNTESSE OF HUNTINGDON.
Elizabeth Stanley, daughter of Ferdinando, fifth Earl of Derby,
married Henry Hastings, fifth Earl of Huntingdon, in 1603. Her
mother's second husband was Sir Thomas Egerton, whom Lady Derby
married in 1600. Donne was then Egerton's secretary, and in lines
57-60 he refers to his early acquaintance with her, then Lady Alice
Stanley. If the letter in _Appendix A_, p. 417, 'That unripe side',
&c. , be also by Donne, and addressed to the Countess of Huntingdon,
it must have been written earlier than this letter, which belongs
probably to the period immediately before Donne's ordination.
l. 13. _the Magi. _ The MSS. give _Magis_, and in _The First
Anniversary_ (l. 390) Donne writes, 'The Aegyptian Mages'.
ll. 31-2. _The first good Angell, &c. _ 'Our first consideration
is upon the persons; and those we finde to be Angelicall women and
Evangelicall Angels: . . . And to recompense that observation, that
never good Angel appeared in the likenesse of woman, here are good
women made Angels, that is, Messengers, publishers of the greatest
mysteries of our Religion. ' _Sermons_ 80. 25. 242.
ll. 35-6. _Make your returne home gracious; and bestow
This life on that; so make one life of two. _
'Make a present of this life to the next, by living now as you will
live then; and so make this life and the next one'--or, as another
poet puts it:
And so make life, death, and that vast forever
One grand, sweet song.
This I take to be Donne's meaning. The 'This' of _1635-69_ and
the MSS. , which Chambers also has adopted, seems required by the
antithesis. If one recalls that 'this' is very commonly written
'thys', and that final 's' is little more than a tail, it is easy to
account for 'Thy' in _1633_. The meaning too is not clear at a glance,
and 'Thy' might seem to an editor to make it easier. The thought is
much the same as in the _Obsequies to the Lord Harrington_, p. 279.
And I (though with paine)
Lessen our losse, to magnifie thy gaine
Of triumph, when I say, It was more fit,
That all men should lacke thee, then thou lack it.
Compare also: 'Sir, our greatest businesse is more in our power then
the least, and we may be surer to meet in heaven than in any place
upon earth. ' _Letters_, p. 188. And see the quotation in note to p.
112, l. 44, 'this and the next are not two worlds,' &c.
PAGE =191=. TO THE COUNTESSE OF BEDFORD.
ll. 1-6. The sense of this verse, carefully and correctly printed in
the 1633 edition, was obscured if not corrupted by the insertion of
a semicolon after 'Fortune' in the later editions. The correct
punctuation was restored in 1719, which was followed in subsequent
editions until Grosart returned to that of the 1635-39 editions (which
the Grolier Club editor also adopts), and Chambers completed the
confusion by printing the lines thus,
You have refined me, and to worthiest things--
Virtue, art, beauty, fortune.
Even Mr. Gosse has been misled into quoting this truncated and
enigmatical compliment to Lady Bedford, regarding it, I presume, as of
the same nature as Shakespeare's lines,
Spirits are not finely touch'd,
But to fine issues.
But this has a meaning; what meaning is there in saying that a man is
refined to 'beauty and fortune'? Poor Donne was not likely to boast
of either at this time. What he says is something quite different, and
strikes the key-note of the poem. 'You have refined and sharpened my
judgement, and now I see that the worthiest things owe their value
to rareness or use. Value is nothing intrinsic, but depends on
circumstances. ' This, the next two verses add, explains why at Court
it is your virtue which transcends, in the country your beauty. To
Donne the country is always dull and savage; the court the focus of
wit and beauty, though not of virtue. On the relative nature of all
goodness he has touched in the _Progresse of the Soule_, p. 316, ll.
518-20:
There's nothing simply good nor ill alone;
Of every quality Comparison
The only measure is, and judge, Opinion.
With the sentiment regarding Courts compare: 'Beauty, in courts, is
so necessary to the young, that those who are without it, seem to be
there to no other purpose than to wait on the triumphs of the fair; to
attend their motions in obscurity, as the moon and stars do the sun
by day; or at best to be the refuge of those hearts which others have
despised; and by the unworthiness of both to give and take a miserable
comfort. ' Dryden, Dedication of the _Indian Emperor_.
ll. 8-9. (_Where a transcendent height, (as lownesse mee)
Makes her not be, or not show_)
I have completed the enclosure of (Where . . . show) in brackets which
_1633_ began but forgot to carry out. The statement is parenthetical,
and it is of the essence of Donne's wit to turn aside in one
parenthesis to make another, dart from one distracting thought to
a further, returning at the end to the main track. He has left the
Countess for a moment to explain why the Court 'is not Vertues clime'.
She is too transcendent to be, or at any rate to be seen there, as
I (he adds, quite irrelevantly) am too low. Then taking up again the
thought of the first line he continues: 'all my rhyme is claimed
there by your vertues, for _there_ rareness gives them value. I am the
comment on what _there_ is a dark text; the usher who announces one
that is a stranger. '
For brackets within brackets compare: 'And yet it is imperfect which
is taught by that religion which is most accommodate to sense (I dare
not say to reason (though it have appearance of that too) because
none may doubt but that that religion is certainly best which is
reasonablest) That all mankinde hath one protecting Angel; all
Christians one other, all English one other, all of one Corporation
and every civill coagulation or society one other; and every man one
other. ' _Letters_, p. 43.
l. 13. _To this place_: i. e. Twickenham. _O'F_ heads the poem _To the
Countesse of Bedford, Twitnam_. The poem is written to welcome her
home. See l. 70.
The development of Donne's subtle and extravagant conceits is a little
difficult. The Countess is the sun which exhales the sweetness of the
country when she comes thither (13-18). Apparently the Countess
has returned to Twickenham in Autumn, perhaps arriving late in the
evening. When she emerges from her chariot it is the breaking of a new
day, the beginning of a new year or new world. Both the Julian and the
Gregorian computations are thus falsified (19-22). It shows her truth
to nature that she will not suffer a day which begins at a stated
hour, but only one that begins with the actual appearance of the light
(23-4: a momentary digression). Since she, the Sun, has thus come to
Twickenham, the Court is made the Antipodes. While the 'vulgar sun' is
an Autumnal one, this Sun which is in Spring, receives our sacrifices.
Her priests, or instruments, we celebrate her (25-30). Then Donne
draws back from the religious strain into which he is launching. He
will not sing Hymns as to a Deity, but offer petitions as to a King,
that he may view the beauty of this Temple, and not as Temple, but as
Edifice. The rest of the argument is simpler.
l. 60. _The same thinge. _ The singular of the MSS. seems to be
required by 'you cannot two'. The 's' of the editions is probably
due to the final 'e'. But 'things' is the reading of _Lec_, the MS.
representing most closely that from which _1633_ was printed.
ll. 71-2. _Who hath seene one, &c. _ 'Who hath seen one, e. g.
Twickenham, which your dwelling there makes a Paradise, would fain see
you too, as whoever had been in Paradise would not have failed to seek
out the Cherubim. ' The construction is elliptical. Compare:
Wee'had had a Saint, have now a holiday.
P. 286, l. 44.
The Cherubim are specially mentioned (although the Seraphim are the
highest order) because they are traditionally the beautiful angels:
'The Spirit of Chastity . . . in the likenesse of a faire beautifull
Cherubine. ' Bacon, _New Atlantis_ (1658), 22 (O. E. D. ).
PAGE =193=. TO S^r EDWARD HERBERT. AT IULYERS.
Edward Herbert, first Baron of Cherbury (1563-1648), the eldest son of
Donne's friend Mrs. Magdalen Herbert, had not long returned from his
first visit to France when he set out again in 1610 with Lord Chandos
'to pass to the city of Juliers which the Prince of Orange resolved to
besiege. Making all haste thither we found the siege newly begun; the
Low Country army assisted by 4,000 English under the command of
Sir Edward Cecil. We had not long been there when the Marquis de
la Chartre, instead of Henry IV, who was killed by that villain
Ravaillac, came with a brave French army thither'. _Autobiography_,
ed. Sidney Lee. The city was held by the Archduke Leopold for the
Emperor. The Dutch, French, and English were besieging the town in the
interest of the Protestant candidates, the Elector of Brandenburg, and
the Palatine of Neuburg. The siege marked the beginning of the Thirty
Years' War. Herbert was a man of both ability and courage but of
a vanity which outweighed both. Donne's letter humours both his
Philosophical pose and his love of obscurity and harshness in poetry.
His own poems with a few exceptions are intolerably difficult and
unmusical, and Jonson told Drummond that 'Donne said to him he wrote
that Epitaph upon Prince Henry, _Look to me Faith_, to match Sir Ed.
Herbert in obscureness'. (Jonson's _Conversations_, ed. Laing. ) The
poems have been reprinted by the late Professor Churton Collins. In
1609 when Herbert was in England he and Donne both wrote Elegies on
Mistress Boulstred.
l. 1. _Man is a lumpe, &c. _ The image of the beasts Donne has borrowed
from Plato, _The Republic_, ix. 588 B-E.
PAGE =194=, ll. 23-6. A food which to chickens is harmless poisons
men. Our own nature contributes the factor which makes a food into a
poison either corrosive or killing by intensity of heat or cold:
'Et hic nota quod tantus est ordo naturae, ut quod est venenosum et
inconveniens uni est utile et conveniens alteri; sicut jusquiamus
qui est cibus passeris licet homini sit venenosus; et sicut napellus
interficit hominem solum portatus, et mulierem praegnantem non laesit
manducatus, teste Galieno; et mus qui pascitur napello est tiriaca
contra napellum. ' Benvenuto on Dante, _Div. Comm. _: _Paradiso_, i. The
plants here mentioned are henbane and aconite. Concerning hemlock the
O. E. D. quotes Swan, _Spec. M. _ vi. ? 4 (1643), 'Hemlock . . . is meat to
storks and poison to men. ' Donne probably uses the word 'chickens' as
equivalent to 'young birds', not for the young of the domestic
fowl. For the cold of the hemlock see Persius, _Sat. _ v. 145; Ovid,
_Amores_, iii. 7. 13; and Juvenal, _Sat. _ vii. 206, a reference to
Socrates' gift from the Athenians of 'gelidas . . . cicutas'.
ll. 31-2. _Thus man, that might be'his pleasure, &c. _ These lines
are condensed and obscure. The 'his' must mean 'his own'. 'Man who in
virtue of that gift of reason which makes him man might be to himself
a source of joy, becomes instead, by the abuse of reason, his own rod.
Reason which should be the God directing his life becomes the devil
which misleads him. ' Chambers prints 'His pleasure', 'His rod',
referring 'his' to God--which seems hardly possible.
ll. 34-8. _wee'are led awry, &c. _ Chambers's punctuation of this
passage is clearly erroneous:
we're led awry
By them, who man to us in little show,
Greater than due; no form we can bestow
On him, for man into himself can draw
All;
This must mean that we are led astray by those who, in their
abridgement of man, still show him to us greater than he really is.
But this is the opposite of what Donne says. 'Greater than due' goes
with 'no form'. Compare:
'And therefore the Philosopher draws man into too narrow a table, when
he says he is _Microcosmos_, an Abridgement of the world in little:
_Nazianzen_ gives him but his due, when he calls him _Mundum Magnum_,
a world to which all the rest of the world is but subordinate: For
all the world besides, is but God's Foot-stool; Man sits down upon his
right-hand,' &c. _Sermons_ 26. 25. 370.
'It is too little to call Man a little world; Except God, Man is a
diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than
the world; than the world doth, nay than the world is. ' _Devotions
upon Emergent Occasions, &c. _ (1624), p. 64.
On the other hand the Grolier Club editor has erroneously followed
_1635-69_ in altering the full stop after 'chaw' to a comma; and has
substituted a semicolon for the comma after 'fill' (l. 39), reading:
for man into himself can draw
All; all his faith can swallow or reason chaw,
All that is filled, and all that which doth fill;
But 'All that is fill'd,' &c. is not _object_ to 'can draw'. It is
_subject_ (in apposition with 'All the round world') to 'is but a
pill'.
PAGE =195=, l. 47. _This makes it credible. _ I have changed the comma
after 'credible' to a semicolon to avoid the misapprehension, into
which the Grolier Club editor seems to have fallen, that what is
credible is 'that you have dwelt upon all worthy books'. It is because
Lord Herbert has dwelt upon all worthy books that it is credible that
he knows man.
PAGE =195=.
TO THE COUNTESSE OF BEDFORD.
l. 1. _T'have written then, &c. _ This is one of the most difficult of
Donne's poems. With his usual strain of extravagant compliment Donne
has interwoven some of his deepest thought and most out-of-the-way
theological erudition and scientific lore. Moreover the poem is one
of those for which the MS. resembling _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ was not
available. The text of _1633_ was taken from a MS. belonging to the
group _A18_, _N_, _TCC_, _TCD_, and contains several errors. Some of
these were corrected in _1635_ from _O'F_ or a MS. resembling it,
but in the most vital case what was a right but difficult reading in
_1633_ was changed for an apparently easier but erroneous reading.
The emendations which I have accepted from _1635_ are--
l. 5. 'debt' for 'doubt'.
l. 7. '_nothings_' for '_nothing_'.
l. 20. 'or all It; You. ' for 'or all, in you. ' There is not much
to choose between the two, but 'the world's best all' is not a very
logical expression. But the _1633_ reading may mean 'the world's
best part, or the world's all,--you. ' The alteration of _1635_ is not
necessary, but looks to me like the author's own emendation.
l. 4. _Then worst of civill vices, thanklessenesse. _ 'Naturall and
morall men are better acquainted with the duty of gratitude, of
thankesgiving, before they come to the Scriptures, then they are
with the other duty of repentance which belongs to Prayer; for in all
_Solomons_ bookes, you shall not finde halfe so much of the duty of
thankefulnesse, as you shall in _Seneca_ and in _Plutarch_. No book of
Ethicks, of moral doctrine, is come to us, where there is not, almost
in every leafe, some detestation, some Anathema against ingratitude. '
_Sermons_ 80. 55. 550.
PAGE =197=, l. 54. _Wee (but no forraine tyrants could) remove. _
Following the hint of _O'F_, I have bracketed all these words to show
that the verb to 'Wee' is 'remove', not 'could remove'.
ll. 57-8. _For, bodies shall from death redeemed bee,
Soules but preserved, not naturally free. _
Here the later editions change 'not' to 'borne', and the correction
has been accepted by Grosart and Chambers. But _1633_ is right. If
'not' be changed, the force of the antithesis is lost. What is 'borne
free' does not need to be preserved. What Donne expresses is a form
of the doctrine of conditional immortality. In a sermon on the
Penitential Psalms (_Sermons_ 80. 53. 532) he says: 'We have a full
cleerenesse of the state of the soule after this life, not only above
those of the old Law, but above those of the Primitive Christian
Church, which, in some hundreds of years, came not to a cleere
understanding in that point, whether the soule were immortall by
nature, or but by preservation, whether the soule could not die
or only should not die,' &c. Here the antithesis between 'being
preserved' and 'being naturally free' (i. e. immortal) is presented as
sharply as in this line of the verse _Letter_. But Donne states
the doctrine tentatively 'because that perchance may be without any
constant cleerenesse yet'. Elsewhere he seems to accept it: 'And for
the Immortality of the Soule, it is safelier said to be immortall by
preservation, then immortal, by nature; That God keepes it from dying,
then, that it cannot dye. ' _Sermons_ 80. 27. 269. This makes the
correct reading of the line quite certain.
The tenor of Donne's thought seems to me to be as follows: He is
speaking of the soul's eclipse by the body (ll. 40-2), by the body
which should itself be an organ of the soul's life, of prayer as well
as labour (ll. 43-8). He returns in ll. 49-52 to the main theme of the
body's corrupting influence, and this leads him to a new thought. It
is not only the soul which suffers by this absorption in the body, but
the body itself:
What hate could hurt our bodies like our love?
By this descent of the soul into the body we deprive the latter of
its proper dignity, to be the Casket, Temple, Palace of the Soul.
Then Donne turns aside to enforce the dignity of the Body. It will be
redeemed from death, and the Soul is only preserved. No more than
the Body is the Soul naturally immortal. These lines are almost
a parenthesis. The poet returns once more to his main theme, the
degradation of the soul by our exclusive regard for the body.
Thus the deepest thought of Donne's poetry, his love poetry and
his religious poetry, emerges here again. He will not accept the
antithesis between soul and body. The dignity of the body is hardly
less than that of the soul. But we cannot exalt the body at the
expense of the soul. If we immerse the soul in the body it is not the
soul alone which suffers but the body also. In the highest spiritual
life, as in the fullest and most perfect love, body and soul are
complementary, are merged in each other; and after death the life
of the soul is in some measure incomplete, the end for which it was
created is not obtained until it is reunited to the body. 'Yet have
not those Fathers, nor those Expositors, who have in this text,
acknowledged a Resurrection of the soule, mistaken nor miscalled the
matter. Take _Damascens_ owne definition of Resurrection: _Resurrectio
est ejus quod cecidit secunda surrectio_: A Resurrection is a second
rising to that state, from which anything is formerly fallen. Now
though by death, the soule do not fall into any such state, as that it
can complaine, (for what can that lack, which God fils? ) yet by death,
the soule fals from that, for which it was infused, and poured into
man at first; that is to be the forme of that body, the King of that
Kingdome; and therefore, when in the generall Resurrection, the soule
returns to that state, for which it was created, and to which it hath
had an affection, and a desire, even in the fulnesse of the Joyes of
Heaven, then, when the soule returns to her office, to make up
the man, because the whole man hath, therefore the soule hath a
Resurrection: not from death, but from a deprivation of her former
state; that state which she was made for, and is ever enclined to. '
_Sermons_ 80. 19. 189.
Here, as before, Donne is probably following St. Augustine, who
combats the Neo-Platonic view (to which mediaeval thought tended to
recur) that a direct source of evil was the descent of the soul into
the body. The body is not essentially evil. It is not the body as such
that weighs down the soul (aggravat animam), but the body corrupted
by sin: 'Nam corruptio corporis . . . non peccati primi est causa, sed
poena; nec caro corruptibilis animam peccatricem, sed anima peccatrix
fecit esse corruptibilem carnem. ' In the Resurrection we desire not
to escape from the body but to be clothed with a new body,--'nolumus
corpore exspoliari, sed ejus immortalitate vestiri. ' Aug. _De Civ.
Dei_, xiv. 3, 5. He cites St. Paul, 2 Cor. v. 1-4.
l. 59. _As men to our prisons, new soules to us are sent, &c. _: 'new'
is the reading of _1633_ only, 'now' followed or preceded by a comma
of the other editions and the MSS. It is difficult to decide between
them, but Donne speaks of 'new souls' elsewhere: 'The Father creates
new souls every day in the inanimation of Children, and the Sonne
creates them with him. ' _Sermons_ 50. 12. 100. 'Our nature is
Meteorique, we respect (because we partake so) both earth and heaven;
for as our bodies glorified shall be capable of spirituall joy, so
our souls demerged into those bodies, are allowed to partake earthly
pleasure. Our soul is not sent hither, only to go back again; we have
some errand to do here; nor is it sent into prison, because it comes
innocent; and he which sent it, is just. ' _Letters_ (1651), p. 46.
l. 68. _Two new starres. _ See Introductory Note to _Letters_.
PAGE =198=, l. 72. _Stand on two truths_: i. e. the wickedness of the
world and your goodness. You will believe neither.
PAGE =198=. TO THE COUNTESSE OF BEDFORD.
ON NEW-YEARES DAY.
l. 3. _of stuffe and forme perplext_: i. e. whose matter and form are a
perplexed, intricate, difficult question:
Whose _what_, and _where_ in disputation is.
Donne cannot mean that the matter and form are 'intricately
intertwined or intermingled', using the words as in Bacon: 'The
formes of substances (as they are now by compounding and transplanting
multiplied) are so perplexed. ' Bacon, _Adv. Learn. _ ii. 7. ? 5. The
question of meteors in all their forms was one of great interest and
great difficulty to ancient science. Seneca, who gathers up most of
what has been said before him, recurs to the subject again and again.
See the _Quaestiones Naturales_, i. 1, and elsewhere. Aristotle, he
says, attributes them to exhalations from the earth heated by the
sun's rays. They are at any rate not falling stars, or parts of stars,
but 'have their origin below the stars, and--being without solid
foundation or fixed abode--quickly perish'. But there was great
uncertainty as to their _what_ and _where_. Donne compares himself to
them in the uncertainty of his position and worldly affairs. 'Wind is
a mixt Meteor, to the making whereof divers occasions concurre with
exhalations. ' _Sermons_ 80. 31. 305.
PAGE =199=, l. 19. _cherish, us doe wast. _ The punctuation of _1633_
is odd at the first glance, but accurate. If with all the later
editions one prints 'cherish us, doe wast', the suggestion is that
'wast' is intransitive--'in cherishing us they waste themselves,'
which is not Donne's meaning. It is us they waste.
PAGE =200=, l. 44. _Some pitty. _ I was tempted to think that Lowell's
conjecture of 'piety' for 'pitty' must be right, the more so that the
spelling of the two words was not always differentiated. But it is
improbable that Donne would say that 'piety' in the sense of piety
to God could ever be out of place. What he means is probably that at
Court pity, which elsewhere is a virtue, may not be so if it induces a
lady to lend a relenting ear to the complaint of a lover.
Beware faire maides of musky courtiers oathes
Take heed what giftes and favors you receive,
. . . . . . . . .
Beleeve not oathes or much protesting men,
Credit no vowes nor no bewayling songs.
Joshua Sylvester (_attributed to_ Donne).
What follows is ambiguous. As punctuated in _1633_ the lines run:
some vaine disport,
On this side, sinne: with that place may comport.
This must mean, practically repeating what has been said: 'Some vain
amusements which, on this side of the line separating the cloister
from the Court, would be sin; are on that side, in the Court,
becoming--amusements, sinful in the cloister, are permissible at
Court. ' The last line thus contains a sharp antithesis. But can 'on
this side' mean 'in the cloister'? Donne is not writing from the
cloister, and if he had been would say 'In this place'. 'Faith',
he says elsewhere, 'is not on this side Knowledge but beyond it. '
_Sermons_ 50. 36. 325. This is what he means here, and I have so
punctuated it, following _1719_ and subsequent editions: 'Some vain
disport, so long as it falls short of actual sin, is permissible at
Court. '
l. 48. _what none else lost_: i. e. innocence. Others never had it.
PAGE =201=. TO THE COUNTESSE OF HUNTINGDON.
Elizabeth Stanley, daughter of Ferdinando, fifth Earl of Derby,
married Henry Hastings, fifth Earl of Huntingdon, in 1603. Her
mother's second husband was Sir Thomas Egerton, whom Lady Derby
married in 1600. Donne was then Egerton's secretary, and in lines
57-60 he refers to his early acquaintance with her, then Lady Alice
Stanley. If the letter in _Appendix A_, p. 417, 'That unripe side',
&c. , be also by Donne, and addressed to the Countess of Huntingdon,
it must have been written earlier than this letter, which belongs
probably to the period immediately before Donne's ordination.
l. 13. _the Magi. _ The MSS. give _Magis_, and in _The First
Anniversary_ (l. 390) Donne writes, 'The Aegyptian Mages'.
