John Donne

“ Dryden had the knack, a knack of great value to a critic, but sometimes productive of sore misguiding to a critic’s readers—of adjusting his comments solely to one point of view, to a single scheme in metric and other things. Now, from the point of view of the scheme which both his authority and his example made popular, Donne was rather formless. But nearly all the eighteenth-century critics and criticasters concentrated their attention on the Satires; and in the Satires Donne certainly takes singular liberties, no matter what scheme be preferred. ”

“ To the praise of the highest poetical art he cannot indeed lay claim. He is of course entitled to the benefit of the pleas that it is uncertain whether he ever prepared definitely for the press a single poetical work of his; that it is certain that his age regarded his youth with too much disapproval to bestow any critical care on his youthful poems. But it may be retorted that no one with the finest sense of poetry as an art, could have left things so formless as he has left, that it would have been intolerable pain and grief to any such till he had got them, even in MS., into shape. ”

“ But if Donne cannot receive the praise due to the accomplished poetical artist, he has that not perhaps higher but certainly rarer, of the inspired poetical creator. No study could have bettered—I hardly know whether any study could have produced—such touches as the best of those which have been quoted, and as many which perforce have been left out. And no study could have given him the idiosyncrasy which he has. Nes passions, says Bossuet, ont quelque chose d’infini. To express infinity no doubt is a contradiction in terms. ”

“ In Dante we can trace something of the presence of slag and dross in the ore; and even in Dante we can perhaps trace faintly also the difficulty of smelting it. Donne, being a lesser poet than Dante, shows it everywhere. It is seldom that even for a few lines, seldomer that for a few stanzas, the power of the furnace is equal to the volumes of ore and fuel that are thrust into it. But the fire is always there—over-tasked, over-mastered for a time, but never choked or extinguished ”

“ And since an hour’s discourse could scarce have made
One answer in thee, and that ill array’d
In broken proverbs, and torn sentences.
20Thou art not by so many duties his—
That from th’ world’s common having sever’d thee,
Inlaid thee, neither to be seen, nor see—
As mine; who have with amorous delicacies
Refined thee into a blissful paradise.
Thy graces and good works my creatures be;
I planted knowledge and life’s tree in thee;
Which O! shall strangers taste? Must I, alas! ”

“ In these perversities Donne is but playing tours de force. His natural and genuine work re-appears in such poems as ‘Canonization,’ or as ‘The Legacy.’ It is the fashion sometimes, and that not always with the worst critics, to dismiss this kind of heroic rapture as an agreeable but conscious exaggeration, partly betrayed and partly condoned by flouting-pieces like those just mentioned. The gloss does not do the critic’s knowledge of human nature or his honesty in acknowledging his knowledge much credit. ”

“ Whom honour’s smokes at once fatten and starve,
Poorly enrich’d with great men’s words or looks;
Nor so write my name in thy loving books
As those idolatrous flatterers, which still
Their princes’ style with many realms fulfil,
Whence they no tribute have, and where no sway.
Such services I offer as shall pay
Themselves; I hate dead names. ”

“ It is perhaps only those who after being familiar for years with Donne’s poems, of which Walton says very little, make subsequent acquaintance with Walton’s presentment of the man, who can appreciate the full awkwardness of the situation. It is the worst possible case of pereant qui ante nos. The human Donne whom Walton depicts is so exactly the poetical Donne whom we knew, that the effect is uncanny. Generally, or at least very frequently, we find the poet other than his form of verse: here we find him quite astoundingly akin to it. ”

“ Broken health, the loss of his wife, the bitterness to a man who must have known himself to be one of the greatest intellects of the age, of hopes delayed till long past middle life, and no doubt also sincere repentance for and reaction from youthful follies, will account for much of the almost unparalleled melancholy which appears in his later works, and seems to have characterized his later life. ”

“ Only Dante perhaps among these greatest of all had such a conflict and ebullition of feeling to express. For, as far as we can judge, in Shakespeare, even in the Sonnets, the poetical power mastered to some extent at the very first the rough material of the poetic instinct, and prepared before expression the things to be expressed. ”

“ Roughly speaking, almost the whole of at least the secular verse belongs to the first division of the life, almost the whole of the prose to the second. Again, by far the greater part of the verse is animated by what may be called a spiritualized worldliness and sensuality, the whole of the prose by a spiritualism which has left worldliness far behind. The conjunction is, I say, not unknown: it was specially prevalent in the age of Donne’s birth and early life. ”

“ Women are all like angels; the fair be
30Like those which fell to worse; but such as she,
Like to good angels, nothing can impair:
’Tis less grief to be foul, than to have been fair.
For one night’s revels, silk and gold we choose,
But, in long journeys, cloth, and leather use.
Beauty is barren oft; best husbands say
There is best land, where there is foulest way. ”

“ After she wiped Christ’s feet, but not till then;
Did he—fit for such penitents as she
And he to use—leave us a Litany,
Which all devout men love, and doubtless shall,
As times grow better, grow more classical? ”

“ In the Divine Poems there is nothing so really divine as the astonishing verse from the ‘Second Anniversary’ quoted above. It must always however seem odd that such a poet as Donne should have taken the trouble to tag the Lamentations of Jeremiah into verse, which is sometimes much more lamentable in form than even in matter. ”

“ Gods, when ye fumed on altars, were pleased well,
Because you were burnt, not that they liked your smell;
You’re loathsome all, being taken simply alone;
Shall we love ill things join’d, and hate each one? ”

“ Women are like the arts, forced unto none,
Open to all searchers, unprized, if unknown. ”

“ Round as the world’s her head, on every side,
Like to the fatal ball which fell on Ide;
Or that whereof God had such jealousy,
As for the ravishing thereof we die.
Thy head is like a rough-hewn statue of jet,
20Where marks for eyes, nose, mouth, are yet scarce set ”

“ But if Donne’s poems were not printed, they had at any rate a wide circulation in MSS. among the wits and literary men of the age. This is evident, firstly, from his letters, many of which accompanied a copy of verses to some friend or patron; secondly, from the frequent and admiring mention of his contemporaries; and, thirdly, from the commonplace-books of the period, in which he figures very prominently. One result of this popularity appears to have been the ascription to him of a number of poems really by other men. ”

“ The Divine Poems, as has been said, come last. The Verse Letters, Funeral Elegies and Epithalamia, both in date and in subject-matter, bridge the gulf between the two. Some of the Verse Letters, such as the Storm and the Calm, belong to the earlier period, but a good many of them belong to 1610 or thereabouts, and in many ways they show Donne’s poetic powers at their ripest.
The first edition of the Poems was entered thus upon the Stationers’ Registers (Arber, vol. iv.) ”

“ Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper’d swells with one blood made of two;
And this, alas! is more than we would do.
10O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are. ”

“ Nature’s lay idiot, I taught thee to love, ”

“ JOHN DONNE.
There is hardly any, perhaps indeed there is not any, English author on whom it is so hard to keep the just mixture of personal appreciation and critical measure as it is on John Donne. It is almost necessary that those who do not like him should not like him at all; should be scarcely able to see how any decent and intelligent human creature can like him. ”

“ To my mind the clear implication of these letters is, not that there were “other things printed” of Donne’s besides the Anniversaries, but that the Anniversaries were in 1612 the only things he had printed. With regard to Dr. Grosart’s three other pieces of evidence, there is nothing to show that they refer to anything but verses circulated in manuscript. It is quite clear that manuscript “books” or collections of Donne’s pieces, as distinguished from scattered poems, were in existence. ”

“ Such cherishing heat her best loved part doth hold.
Thine’s like the dread mouth of a fired gun,
40Or like hot liquid metals newly run
Into clay moulds, or like to that Ætna,
Where round about the grass is burnt away. ”

“ An epigram of Freeman’s published in 1614, of which he says, ‘‘Freeman in 1614, in his Rubbe and a Great Cast, has an epigram to Donne, in which he celebrates his Storme and Calme, and two ‘short’ satires.” As a matter of fact, the epigram is in Runne and a Great Cast, which is the second part, as Rubbe and a Great Cast is the first, of Freeman’s book, and it does not speak of two short Satires, but of Satires which are too short, a very different thing. ”

“ It is almost as necessary that those who do like him should either like him so much as to speak unadvisedly with their lips, or else curb and restrain the expression of their love for fear that it should seem on that side idolatry. ”

“ May catch the same bird; and, as these things be,
10Women are made for men, not him nor me,
Foxes, and goats—all beasts—change when they please.
Shall women, more hot, wily, wild than these,
Be bound to one man, and did nature then
Idly make them apter to endure than men?
They’re our clogs, not their own; if a man be
Chain’d to a galley, yet the galley’s free.
Who hath a plough-land, casts all his seed corn there,
And yet allows his ground more corn should bear ”

“ By Hilyard drawn, is worth a history
By a worse painter made———”
If any man (thinking I speak this to inflame him for the vent of the impression) be of another opinion, I shall as willingly spare his money as his judgment. ”

“ His family were of the old faith, and it is said to have been for this reason that he took no degree at either Oxford or Cambridge, though he was a member of both Universities, entering Hart Hall at Oxford in his eleventh year, and, so Walton tells us, removing to Cambridge in his fourteenth. His father soon died, and he, inheriting no inconsiderable portion, was transferred to Lincoln’s Inn, perhaps after an experience of foreign travel. Walton will have it that before he was twenty, he, having never actually professed the Romish faith, argued himself out of his tendency to it by study. ”

“ The institution of great men’s households, which then prevailed, provided a kind of additional liberal profession for men of parts and gentle but not distinguished birth; and Donne, on his return to England, joined the household of Chancellor Sir Thomas Egerton, afterwards Lord Ellesmere. ”

“ Certain unpublished poems of Donne’s, together with others which are not really his, were collected by Waldron in his Collection of Miscellaneous Poetry (1802) , and by Sir John Simeon in one of the Philobiblon Society’s tracts (1856) . A few others may be gathered from various printed and manuscript sources. These will be found in the appendices to this edition. The eighteenth-century and modern editions are mostly of little value. That by Dr. Grosart, privately printed in the Fuller Worthies Library, 1873, is a work of much zeal, industry and learning. ”

“ I have modernized the spelling and corrected the exceptionally chaotic punctuation of the old editions. And so, though much remains obscure, I trust that I have provided a more intelligible version of the Poems than any that has yet appeared.
It should be understood that a reading attributed to any one of the printed editions in the footnotes is retained in the later editions, unless it is otherwise stated.
My thanks are due for various help to Dr. Grosart, to Mr. J. T. Brown of Edinburgh, and to Mr. A. H. Bullen. Dr. ”

“ I am afraid that Drayton was not allowed to have a copy.
The passage from Walton’s Life which I have quoted above is of service also in helping to determine the date of Donne’s work in the field of poetry. As here too Dr. Grosart has gone wrong, it is worth while to put together some additional testimony of Walton and others on the matter. It all points to the fact that on the whole, although they overlap considerably, the secular are earlier in date than the sacred poems. ”

“ A letter by Donne to his friend George Garrard, dated April 14, 1612, in which, speaking of the Anniversaries, he says: ‘‘Of my Anniversaries, the fault that I acknowledge in myself is to have descended to print anything in verse, which, though it have excuse even in our times, by men who profess and practise much gravity ”

“ With care’s harsh sudden hoariness o’erspread,
My body a sack of bones, broken within,
10And powder’s blue stains scatter’d on my skin;
If rival fools tax thee to have loved a man,
So foul and coarse, as, O! ”

“ But the successive stages of the ‘Anatomy of the World’ present us with the most marvellous poetical exposition of a certain kind of devotional thought yet given. It is indeed possible that the union of the sensual, intellectual, poetical, and religious temperaments is not so very rare ”

“ “Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say her body thought”—
which has been constantly quoted, praised, and imitated. ”