No More Learning

This is a better defence of Donne's poems than any which he advances
in his letters, but it is not a complete description of his work.
Rather, he interwove with a rapt and extravagantly conceited laudation
of an ideal woman two topics familiar to his catholic and mediaeval
learning, and developed each in a characteristically subtle and
ingenious strain, a strain whose occasional sceptical, disintegrating
reflections belong as obviously to the seventeenth century as the
general content of the thought is mediaeval.

The burden of the whole is an impassioned and exalted _meditatio
mortis_ based on two themes common enough in mediaeval devotional
literature--a _De Contemptu Mundi_, and a contemplation of the Glories
of Paradise. A very brief analysis of the two poems, omitting the
laudatory portions, may help a reader who cannot at once see the wood
for the trees, and be better than detailed notes.


_The Anatomie of the World. _

_l. 1. _ The world which suffered in her death is now fallen into the
worse lethargy of oblivion. _l. 60. _ I will anatomize the world for
the benefit of those who still, by the influence of her virtue, lead a
kind of glimmering life. _l. 91. _ There is no health in the world. We
are still under the curse of woman. _l. 111. _ How short is our life
compared with that of the patriarchs! _l. 134. _ How small is our
stature compared with that of the giants of old! _l. 147. _ How
shrunken of soul we are, especially since her death! _l. 191. _ And
as man, so is the whole world. The new learning or philosophy has
shattered in fragments that complete scheme of the universe in which
we rested so confidently, and (_l. 211_) in human society the same
disorder prevails. _l. 250. _ There is no beauty in the world, for,
first, the beauty of proportion is lost, alike in the movements of the
heavenly bodies, and (_l. 285_) in the earth with its mountains and
hollows, and (_l. 302_) in the administration of justice in society.
_l. 339. _ So is Beauty's other element, Colour and Lustre. _l. 377. _
Heaven and earth are at variance. We can no longer read terrestrial
fortunes in the stars. But (_l. 435_) an Anatomy can be pushed too
far.

_The Progresse of the Soule. _

_l. 1. _ The world's life is the life that breeds in corruption. Let
me, forgetting the rotten world, meditate on death. _l. 85. _ Think,
my soul, that thou art on thy death-bed, and consider death a release.
_l. 157. _ Think how the body poisoned the soul, tainting it with
original sin. Set free, thou art in Heaven in a moment. _l. 250. _ Here
all our knowledge is ignorance. The new learning has thrown all in
doubt. We sweat to learn trifles. In Heaven we know all we need to
know. _l. 321. _ Here, our converse is evil and corrupting. There our
converse will be with Mary; the Patriarchs; Apostles, Martyrs and
Virgins (compare _A Litany_). Here in the perpetual flux of things is
no essential joy. Essential joy is to see God. And even the accidental
joys of heaven surpass the essential joys of earth, were there such
joys here where all is casual:

Only in Heaven joys strength is never spent,
And accidental things are permanent.

One of the most interesting strands of thought common to the twin
poems is the reflection on the disintegrating effect of the New
Learning. Copernicus' displacement of the earth, and the consequent
disturbance of the accepted mediaeval cosmology with its concentric
arrangement of elements and heavenly bodies, arrests and disturbs
Donne's imagination much as the later geology with its revelation
of vanished species and first suggestion of a doctrine of evolution
absorbed and perturbed Tennyson when he wrote _In Memoriam_ and
throughout his life. No other poet of the seventeenth century known
to me shows the same sensitiveness to the consequences of the new
discoveries of traveller, astronomer, physiologist and physician as
Donne.


TO THE PRAISE OF THE DEAD.

PAGE =231=, l. 43. _What high part thou bearest in those best songs. _
The contraction of 'bearest' to 'bear'st' in the earliest editions
(_1611-25_) led to the insertion of 'of' after 'best' in the later
ones (_1633-69_).


AN ANATOMIE OF THE WORLD.

PAGE =235=, ll. 133-6. Chambers alters the punctuation of these lines
in such a way as to connect them more closely:

So short is life, that every peasant strives,
In a torn house, or field, to have three lives;
And as in lasting, so in length is man,
Contracted to an inch, who was a span.

But the punctuation of _1633_ is careful and correct. A new paragraph
begins with 'And as in lasting, so, &c. ' From length of years Donne
passes to physical stature. The full stop is at 'lives', the semicolon
at 'span'. Grosart and the Grolier Club editor punctuate correctly.

l. 144. _We'are scarce our Fathers shadowes cast at noone_: Compare:

But now the sun is just above our head,
We doe those shadowes tread;
And to brave clearnesse all things are reduc'd.
_A Lecture upon the Shadowe. _

PAGE =236=, l. 160. _And with new Physicke_: i. e. the new mineral
drugs of the Paracelsians.

PAGE =237=, l. 190. _Be more then man, or thou'rt lesse then an Ant. _
Compare _To M^r Rowland Woodward_, p. 185, ll. 16-18 and note.

l. 205. _The new Philosophy calls all in doubt, &c. _ The philosophy
of Galileo and Copernicus has displaced the earth and discredited
the concentric arrangement of the elements,--earth, water, air,
fire. Norton quotes: 'The fire is an element most hot and dry, pure,
subtill, and so clear as it doth not hinder our sight looking through
the same towards the stars, and is placed next to the Spheare of the
Moon, under the which it is turned about like a celestial Spheare'.
_M. Blundeville His Exercises_, 1594.

When the world was formed from Chaos, then--

Earth as the Lees, and heavie dross of All
(After his kinde) did to the bottom fall:
Contrariwise, the light and nimble Fire
Did through the crannies of th'old Heap aspire
Unto the top; and by his nature, light
No less than hot, mounted in sparks upright:
But, lest the Fire (which all the rest imbraces)
Being too near, should burn the Earth to ashes;
As Chosen Umpires, the great All-Creator
Between these Foes placed the Aire and Water:
For, one suffiz'd not their stern strife to end.
Water, as Cozen did the Earth befriend:
Aire for his Kinsman Fire, as firmly deals &c.
Du Bartas, _The second Day of the first Week_
(trans. Joshua Sylvester).

Burton, in the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Part 2, Sect. 2, Mem. 3,
tells how the new Astronomers Tycho, Rotman, Kepler, &c. by their new
doctrine of the heavens are 'exploding in the meantime that element of
fire, those fictitious, first watry movers, those heavens I mean above
the firmament, which Delrio, Lodovicus Imola, Patricius and many of
the fathers affirm'. They have abolished, that is to say, the fire
which surrounded the air, as that air surrounded the water and
the earth (all below the moon); and they have also abolished the
Crystalline Sphere and the Primum Mobile which were supposed to
surround the sphere of the fixed stars, or the firmament.

PAGE =238=, l. 215. _Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne are things
forgot. _ Donne has probably in mind the effect of the religious wars
in Germany, France, the Low Countries, &c.

l. 217. _that then can be. _ This is the reading of all the editions
before _1669_, and there is no reason to change 'then' to 'there':
'Every man thinks he has come to be a Phoenix (preferring private
judgement to authority) and that then comparison ceases, for there
is nothing of the same kind with which to compare himself. There is
nothing left to reverence. '

PAGE =239=, l. 258. _It teares
The Firmament in eight and forty sheires. _

Norton says that in the catalogue of Hipparchus, preserved in
the Almagest of Ptolemy, the stars were divided into forty-eight
constellations.

l. 260. _New starres. _ Norton says: 'It was the apparition of a new
star in 1572, in the constellation of Cassiopeia, that turned Tycho
Brahe to astronomy: and a new bright star in Ophiuchus, in 1604, had
excited general wonder, and afforded Galileo a text for an attack on
the Ptolemaic system'.

At p. 247, l. 70, Donne notes that the 'new starres' went out again.

PAGE =240=, l. 286. _a Tenarif, or higher hill. _ 'Tenarif' is
the _1611_ spelling, 'Tenarus' that of _1633-69_. Donne speaks of
'Tenarus' elsewhere, but it is not the same place.

It is not probable that Donne ever saw the Peak of Teneriffe, although
biographers speak of this line as a descriptive touch drawn from
memory. The Canary Isles are below the 30th degree of latitude.
The fleet that made the Islands Exhibition was never much if at all
further south than 43 degrees. After coasting off Corunna 43? N. 8?
W. , and some leagues south of that port, the fleet struck straight
across to the Azores, 37? N. 25? W. Donne was somewhat nearer in the
previous year when he was at Cadiz, 36? N. 6? W. , but too far off to
descry the Peak. His description, though vivid, is 'metaphysical',
like that of Hell which follows: 'The Pike of Teneriff, how high is
it? 79 miles or 52, as Patricius holds, or 9 as Snellius demonstrates
in his Eratosthenes'. Burton, _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Part 2, Sec. 2,
Mem. 3.

On the other side, Satan, alarm'd,
Collecting all his might, dilated stood,
Like Teneriff or Atlas, unremov'd.
Milton, _Par. Lost_, iv. 985-7.

ll. 295 f. _If under all, a Vault infernall bee, &c. _ Hell, according
to mediaeval philosophy, was in the middle of the earth. 'If this
be true,' says Donne, 'and if at the same time the Sea is in places
bottomless, then the earth is neither solid nor round. We use these
words only approximately. But you may hold, on the other hand, that
the deepest seas we know are but pock-holes, the highest hills but
warts, on the face of the solid earth. Well, even in that case you
must admit that in the moral sphere at any rate the world's proportion
is disfigured by the want of all proportioning of reward and
punishment to conduct. ' The sudden transition from the physical to the
moral sphere is very disconcerting. Compare: 'Or is it the place of
hell, as Virgil in his Aeneides, Plato, Lucian, Dante, and others
poetically describe it, and as many of our divines think. In good
earnest, Antony Rusca, one of the society of that Ambrosian college in
Millan, in his great volume _de Inferno_, lib. i, cap. 47, is stiffe
in this tenent. . . . Whatsoever philosophers write (saith Surius) there
be certaine mouthes of Hell, and places appointed for the punishment
of mens souls, as at Hecla in Island, where the ghosts of dead men are
familiarly seen, and sometimes talk with the living. God would have
such visible places, that mortal men might be certainly informed, that
there be such punishments after death, and learn hence to fear God,'
&c. Burton, _Anat. of Melancholy_, Part 2, Sec. 2, Mem. 3.

ll. 296-8. _Which sure is spacious, &c. _ 'Franciscus Ribera will
have hell a materiall and locall fire in the centre of the earth, 200
Italian miles in diameter, as he defines it out of those words _Exivit
sanguis de terra . . . per stadia mille sexcenta, &c. _ But Lessius
(lib. 13, _de moribus divinis_, cap. 24) will have this locall
hell far less, one Dutch mile in diameter, all filled with fire and
brimstone; because, as he there demonstrates, that space, cubically
multiplied, will make a sphere able to hold eight hundred thousand
millions of damned bodies (allowing each body six foot square); which
will abundantly suffice, '_cum certum sit, inquit, facta subductione,
non futuros centies mille milliones damnandorum_. ' Burton, _Anat. of
Melancholy_, _ut sup.
_ Eschatology was the 'dismal science' of those
days and was studied with astonishing gusto and acumen. 'For as one
Author, who is afraid of admitting too great a hollownesse in the
Earth, lest then the Earth might not be said to be solid, pronounces
that Hell cannot possibly be above three thousand miles in compasse,
(and then one of the torments of Hell will be the throng, for their
bodies must be there in their dimensions, as well as their soules) so
when the Schoole-men come to measure the house in heaven (as they will
measure it, and the Master, God, and all his Attributes, and tell us
how Allmighty, and how Infinite he is) they pronounce that every soule
in that house shall have more roome to it selfe, then all this world
is. ' _Sermons_ 80. 73. 747. The reference in the margin is to Munster.

l. 311. _that Ancient, &c. _ 'Many erroneous opinions are about the
essence and originall of it' (i. e. the rational soul), 'whether it be
fire, as Zeno held; harmony, as Aristoxenus; number, as Xenocrates,'
&c. Burton, _Anat. of Melancholy_, Part i, Sec. 1, Mem. 2, Subsec.
9. Probably Donne has the same 'Ancient' in view. It is from Cicero
(_Tusc. Disp. _ i. 10) that we learn that Aristoxenus held the soul to
be a harmony of the body. Though a Peripatetic, Aristoxenus lived
in close communion with the latest Pythagoreans, and the doctrine is
attributed to Pythagoras as a consequence of his theory of numbers.
Simmias, the disciple of the Pythagorean Philolaus, maintains the
doctrine in Plato's _Phaedo_, and Socrates criticizes it. Aristotle
states and examines it in the _De Anima_, 407b. 30. Two classes of
thinkers, Bouillet says (Plotinus, _Fourth Ennead_, _Seventh Book_,
note), regarded the soul as a harmony, doctors as Hippocrates and
Galen, who considered it a harmony of the four elements--the hot, the
cold, the dry and the moist (as the definition of health Donne refers
to this more than once, e. g. _The good-morrow_, l. 19, and _The
Second Anniversary_, ll. 130 f. ); and musicians like Aristoxenus, who
compared the soul to the harmony of the lyre. Donne leaves the sense
in which he uses the word quite vague; but l. 321 suggests the medical
sense.

l. 312. _at next. _ This common Anglo-Saxon construction is very
rare in later English. The O. E. D. cites no instance later than 1449,
Pecock's _Repression_. The instance cited there is prepositional in
character rather than adverbial: 'Immediatli at next to the now bifore
alleggid text of Peter this proces folewith. ' Donne's use seems to
correspond exactly to the Anglo-Saxon: 'Johannes ? a ofhreow ? a? re
m? den and ? aera licmanna dr? orignysse, and ? strehte his
licaman t? eor? an on langsumum geb? de, and ? a _aet n? xtan_
? ras, and eft upahafenum handum langlice baed. ' Aelfric (Sweet's
_Anglo-Saxon Reader_, 1894, p. 67). But 'at next' in the poem possibly
does not mean simply 'next', but 'immediately', i. e. 'the first thing
he said would have been . . . '

l. 314. _Resultances_: i. e. productions of, or emanations from, her.
'She is the harmony from which proceeds that harmony of our bodies
which is their soul. ' Donne uses the word also in the sense of
'the sum or gist of a thing': 'He speakes out of the strength and
resultance of many lawes and Canons there alleadged. ' _Pseudo-martyr_,
p. 245; and Walton says that Donne 'left the resultance of 1400
Authors, most of them abridged and analysed with his own hand. ' _Life_
(1675), p. 60. He is probably using Donne's own title.

PAGE =241=, l. 318. _That th'Arke to mans proportions was made. _ The
following quotation from St. Augustine will show that the plural
of _1611-12_ is right, and what Donne had in view. St. Augustine is
speaking of the Ark as a type of the Church: 'Procul dubio figura est
peregrinantis in hoc seculo Civitatis Dei, hoc est Ecclesiae, quae fit
salva per lignum in quo pependit Mediator Dei et hominum, homo
Iesus Christus. (1 Tim. ii. 5. ) Nam et mensurae ipsae longitudinis,
altitudinis, latitudinis eius, significant corpus humanum, in cuius
veritate ad homines praenuntiatus est venturus, et venit. Humani
quippe corporis longitudo a vertice usque ad vestigia sexies tantum
habet, quam latitudo, quae est ab uno latere ad alterum latus, et
decies tantum, quam altitudo, cuius altitudinis mensura est in latere
a dorso ad ventrem: velut si iacentem hominem metiaris supinum, seu
pronum, sexies tantum longus est a capite ad pedes, quam latus a
dextra in sinistram, vel a sinistra in dextram, et decies, quam altus
a terra. Unde facta est arca trecentorum in longitudine cubitorum, et
quinquaginta in latitudine, et triginta in altitudine. ' _De Civitate
Dei_, XV. 26.

PAGE =242=, ll. 377-80. _Nor in ought more, &c. _ 'The father' is the
Heavens, i. e. the various heavenly bodies moving in their spheres;
'the mother', the earth:

As the bright Sun shines through the smoothest Glasse
The turning Planets influence doth passe
Without impeachment through the glistering Tent
Of the tralucing (_French_ diafane) Fiery Element,
The Aires triple Regions, the transparent Water;
But not the firm base of this faire Theater.
And therefore rightly may we call those Trines
(Fire, Aire and Water) but Heav'ns Concubines:
For, never Sun, nor Moon, nor Stars injoy
The love of these, but only by the way,
As passing by: whereas incessantly
The lusty Heav'n with Earth doth company;
And with a fruitfull seed which lends All life,
With childes each moment, his own lawfull wife;
And with her lovely Babes, in form and nature
So divers, decks this beautiful Theater.
Sylvester, _Du Bartas, Second Day, First Week. _

PAGE =243=, l. 389. _new wormes_: probably serpents, such as were
described in new books of travels.

l. 394. _Imprisoned in an Hearbe, or Charme, or Tree. _ Compare _A
Valediction: of my name, in the window_, p. 27, ll. 33-6:

As all the vertuous powers which are
Fix'd in the starres, are said to flow
Into such characters, as graved bee
When these starres have supremacie.

l. 409. _But as some Serpents poyson, &c. _ Compare: 'But though all
knowledge be in those Authors already, yet, as some poisons, and some
medicines, hurt not, nor profit, except the creature in which they
reside, contribute their lively activitie and vigor; so, much of the
knowledge buried in Books perisheth, and becomes ineffectuall, if it
be not applied, and refreshed by a companion, or friend. Much of their
goodnesse hath the same period which some Physicians of _Italy_ have
observed to be in the biting of their _Tarentola_, that it affects no
longer, then the flie lives. ' _Letters_, p. 107.

PAGE =245=, l. 460. _As matter fit for Chronicle, not verse. _ Compare
_The Canonization_, p. 15, ll. 31-2:

And if no peece of Chronicle wee prove
We'll build in sonnets pretty roomes . . .

God's 'last, and lasting'st peece, a song' is of course Moses' song in
Deuteronomy xxxii: 'Give ear, O ye heavens, and I will speak,' &c.

l. 467. _Such an opinion (in due measure) made, &c. _ The bracket of
_1611_ makes the sense less ambiguous than the commas of _1633_:

Such an opinion, in due measure, made.

According to the habits of old punctuation, 'in due measure' thus
comma'd off might be an adjunct of 'made me . . . invade'. The bracket
shows that the phrase goes with 'opinion'. 'Such an opinion (with
all due reverence spoken),' &c. Donne finds that he is attributing to
himself the same thoughts as God.


A FUNERALL ELEGIE.

l. 2. _to confine her in a marble chest. _ The 'Funerall Elegie' was
probably the first composed of these poems. Elizabeth Drury's parents
erected over her a very elaborate marble tomb.

PAGE =246=, l. 41. _the Affrique Niger. _ Grosart comments on this: 'A
peculiarity generally given to the Nile; and here perhaps not spoken
of our Niger, but of the Nile before it is so called, when, according
to Pliny (_N. H. _ v. 9), after having twice been underground, and the
second time for twenty days' journey, it issues at the spring Nigris. '
Probably Donne had been reading 'A Geographical Historie of Africa
written in Arabicke by John Leo a More, borne in Granada, and brought
up in Barbarie . . . Translated and collected by Iohn Porie, late of
Gonevill and Caius College in Cambridge, 1600. ' Of the Niger he says:
'This land of Negros hath a mighty river, which taking his name of the
region is called Niger: this river taketh his originall from the east
out of a certain desert called by the foresaide Negros _Sen_ . . . Our
Cosmographers affirme that the said river of Niger is derived out of
Nilus, which they imagine for some certaine space to be swallowed up
of the earth, and yet at last to burst forth into such a lake as
is before mentioned. ' Pory is mentioned occasionally in Donne's
correspondence.

PAGE =247=, l. 50. _An Angell made a Throne, or Cherubin. _ See _Elegy
XI_, ll. 77-8 and note. Donne, like Shakespeare, uses 'Cherubin' as a
singular. There can be no doubt that the lines in _Macbeth_, I. vii.
21-3, should read:

And pity, like a naked new-born babe
Striding the blast, or heavens cherubins horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air, &c.

It is an echo of:

He rode upon the cherubins and did fly;
He came flying upon the wings of the wind.
Psalm xviii. 10.

'Cherubin' is a singular in Shakespeare, and 'cherubim' as a plural he
did not know.

l. 73. _a Lampe of Balsamum_, i. e. burning balsam instead of ordinary
oil: 'And as _Constantine_ ordained, that upon this day' (Christmas
Day), 'the Church should burne no Oyle, but Balsamum in her Lamps, so
let us ever celebrate this day, with a thankfull acknowledgment, that
Christ who is _unctus Domini_, The Anointed of the Lord, hath anointed
us with the Oyle of gladnesse above our fellowes. ' _Sermons_ 80. 7.
72.

ll. 75-7. _Cloath'd in, &c. _ Chambers's arrangement of these lines is
ingenious but, I think, mistaken because it alters the emphasis of the
sentences. The stress is not laid by Donne on her purity, but on her
early death: 'She expir'd while she was still a virgin. She went away
before she was a woman. ' Line 76:

For marriage, though it doe not staine, doth dye.

is a sudden digression. Dryden filches these lines:

All white, a Virgin-Saint, she sought the skies
For Marriage, tho' it sullies not, it dies.

_The Monument of a Faire Maiden Lady. _

PAGE =248=, l. 83. _said History_ is a strange phrase, but it has the
support of all the editions which can be said to have any authority.

l. 92. _and then inferre. _ Compare: 'That this honour might be
inferred on some one of the blood and race of their ancient king. '
Raleigh (O. E. D. ). Donne's sense of 'commit', 'entrust', is not far
from Raleigh's of 'confer', 'bestow', and both are natural extensions
of the common though now obsolete sense, 'bring on, occasion, cause':

Inferre faire Englands peace by this Alliance.
Shakespeare, _Rich.