John Donne

“ But it is not true either that the thought and imagery of love-poetry must be of the simple, obvious kind which Steele supposes, that any display of dialectical subtlety, any scintillation of wit, must be fatal to the impression of sincerity and feeling, or on the other hand that love is always a beautiful emotion naturally expressing itself in delicate and beautiful language. To some natures love comes as above all things a force quickening the mind, intensifying its purely intellectual energy, opening new vistas of thought abstract and subtle, making the soul 'intensely, wondrously alive'. ”

“ There are no steps which lead only backward in the history of human thought and feeling. Poems like Donne's Elegies, like Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, like Marlowe's Hero and Leander could only end in penitent outcries like those of Sidney and Spenser and of Donne himself. The true escape from courtly or ascetic idealism was a poetry which should do justice to love as a passion in which body and soul alike have their part, and of which there is no reason to repent. ”

“ The main thesis of the poem, the comparative worthlessness of this life, the transcendence of the spiritual, was as sincere in Donne's case as was in Tennyson the conviction of the futility of life if death closes all. It was to be the theme of the finest passages in his eloquent sermons, the burden of all that is most truly religious in the verse and prose of a passionate, intellectual, self-tormenting soul to whom the pure ecstasy of love of a Vondel, the tender raptures of a Crashaw, the chastened piety of a Herbert, the mystical perceptions of a Vaughan could never be quite congenial. ”

“ What is to-day the value and interest of this wit which has arrested the attention of so many generations? How far does it seem to us compatible with poetry in the full and generally accepted sense of the word, with poetry which quickens the imagination and touches the heart, which satisfies and delights, which is the verbal and rhythmical medium whereby a gifted soul communicates to those who have ears to hear the content of impassioned moments? ”

“ Burns gets no further than the experience, Catullus than the obvious and hedonistic reflection that time is flying, the moment of pleasure short. In Donne's poem one feels the quickening of the brain, the vision extending its range, the passion gathering sweep with the expanding rhythms, and from the mind thus heated and inspired emerges, not a cry that time might stay its course,
Lente, lente currite noctis equi,
but a clearer consciousness of the eternal significance of love, not the love that aspires after the unattainable, but the love that unites contented hearts. ”

“ Whatever we may think of Donne's poetry, it is impossible not to recognize the extraordinary interest of his mind and character. In an age of great and fascinating men he is not the least so. The immortal and transcendent genius of Shakespeare leaves Donne, as every other contemporary, lost in the shadows and cross-lights of an age that is no longer ours, but from which Shakespeare emerges into the clear sunlight. ”

“ There is nothing in his poetry which speaks so poignantly of an outraged heart, a love lavished upon one who was worthless, as some of Shakespeare's sonnets and of Catullus's poems. The finest note in Donne's love-poetry is the note of joy, the joy of mutual and contented passion. His heart might be subtle to plague itself; its capacity for joy is even more obvious. Other poets have done many things which Donne could not do. They have invested their feelings with a garb of richer and sweeter poetry. They have felt more deeply and finely the reverence which is in the heart of love. ”

“ A spirit of scepticism and paradox plays through and disturbs almost everything he wrote, except at moments when an intense mood of feeling, whether love or devotion, begets faith, and silences the sceptical and destructive wit by the power of vision rather than of intellectual conviction. Poles apart as the two poets seem at a first glance to lie in feeling and in art, there is yet something of Tennyson in the conflict which wages perpetually in Donne's poetry between feeling and intellect. ”

“ It is not of course that these things are not, or may not be constituents of poetry, made poetic by their handling. To me it seems that in Donne they generally are. It is the poet in Donne which flavours them all, touching his wit with fancy, his reflection with imagination, his vision with passion. But if we wish to estimate the poet simply in Donne, we must examine his love-poetry and his religious poetry. It is here that every one who cares for his unique and arresting genius will admit that he must stand or fall as a great poet. ”

“ Of Lady Bedford's feeling for Donne we know only what his letters reveal, and that is no more than that she was his warm friend and generous patroness. It is clear, however, from their enduring friendship and from the tone of that correspondence that she found in him a friend of a rarer and finer calibre than in the other poets whom she patronized in turn, Daniel and Drayton and Jonson—some one whose sensitive, complex, fascinating personality could hardly fail to touch a woman's imagination and heart. Friendship between man and woman is love in some degree. ”

“ They are witty, but not with the subtle, brilliant, metaphysical wit of Donne; they are obscure at times, but not as Donne's poetry is, by too swift and subtle transitions, and ingeniously applied erudition; there are in them none of Donne's peculiar scholastic doctrines of angelic knowledge, of the microcosm, of soul and body, or of his chemical and medical allusions; they are coarse and licentious, but not as Donne's poems are, with a kind of witty depravity, Italian in origin, and reminding one of Ovid and Aretino, but like Jonson's poetry with the coarseness of the tavern and the camp. ”

“ I can love any so she be not true.
It is not often that the reckless and wilful gaiety of youth masking as cynicism has been expressed with such ebullient wit as in these and companion songs. And when he adopts for a time the pose of the faithful lover bewailing the cruelty of his mistress the sarcastic wit is no less fertile. It would be difficult to find in the language a more sustained succession of witty surprises than The Will. ”

“ No one who knows the fashion of the day will read into them more than they were intended to convey. No one who knows human nature will read them as merely frigid and conventional compliments. Any uncertainty one may feel about the subject arises not from their being love-poems, but from the difficulty which Donne has in adjusting himself to the Petrarchian convention, the tendency of his passionate heart and satiric wit to break through the prescribed tone of worship and complaint. ”

“ The passion that burns in Donne's most outspoken elegies, and wantons in the Epithalamia, is not cast out in The Anniversarie or The Canonization, but absorbed. It is purified and enriched by being brought into harmony with his whole nature, spiritual as well as physical. It has lost the exclusive consciousness of itself which is lust, and become merged in an entire affection, as a turbid and discoloured stream is lost in the sea. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Can poetry be at once passionate and ingenious, sincere in feeling and witty,—packed with thought, and that subtle and abstract thought, Scholastic dialectic? Can love-poetry speak a language which is impassioned and expressive but lacks beauty, is quite different from the language of Dante and Petrarch, the loveliest language that lovers ever spoke, or the picturesque hyperboles of Romeo and Juliet? ”

“ Donne had clearly no thought of his songs being an exception to this rule:
But when I have done so,
Some man his art and voice to show
Doth set and sing my paine.
Yet it is difficult to think of some, perhaps the majority, of Donne's Songs and Sonets as being written to be sung. Their sonorous and rhetorical rhythm, the elaborate stanzas which, like the prolonged periods of the Elegies, seem to give us a foretaste of the Miltonic verse-paragraph, suggest speech,—impassioned, rhythmical speech rather than the melody of song. ”

“ But if fanciful and at times even boyish, Donne's wit is still amusing, the quickest and most fertile wit of the century till we come to the author of Hudibras.
It is not in the Satyres that this wit is to us most obvious. Nothing grows so soon out of date as contemporary satire. [pg xi] Even the brilliance and polish of Pope's satire—and Pope's art is nowhere more perfect than in The Dunciad and the Imitations of Horace—cannot interest us in Lord Hervey, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and the forgotten poets of an unpoetic age. ”

“ Courthope represents his wit as a monster of misapplied ingenuity, his interest as historical and historical only. Apart from poetry there is in Donne's 'wit' a great deal that is still fresh and vivid, wit as we understand wit; satire pungent and vivid; reflection on religion and on life, rugged at times in form but never really unmusical as Jonson's verse is unmusical, and, despite frequent carelessness, singularly lucid and felicitous in expression ”

“ The reflective, philosophic, somewhat melancholy strain of the poems I have been touching on reappears in the letters addressed to noble ladies. Here, however, it is softened, less sardonic in tone, while it blends with or gives place to another strain, that of absurd and extravagant but fanciful and subtle compliment. Donne cannot write to a lady without his heart and fancy taking wing in their own passionate and erudite fashion. Scholastic theology is made the instrument of courtly compliment and pious flirtation. ”

“ 'mee thinks I have the keyes of my prison in mine owne hand, and no remedy presents it selfe so soone to my heart, as mine own sword.'
[pg 271]
After describing the circumstances attending the execution of the last portrait of Donne, Walton adds in the 1675 edition of the Lives (the passage is not in the earlier editions of the Life of Donne) : 'And now, having brought him through the many labyrinths and perplexities of a various life: even to the gates of death and the grave; ”

“ In revolt from one convention the young poet is cultivating another, a cynicism and sensuality which is just as little to be taken au pied de la lettre as the idealizing worship, the anguish and adoration of the sonneteers. There is, as has been said already, a gaiety in the poems elaborating the thesis that love is a perpetual flux, fickleness the law of its being, which warns us against taking them too seriously; and even those Elegies which seem to our taste most reprehensible are aerated by a wit which makes us almost forget their indecency. ”

“ A metaphysical poet in the full sense of the word is a poet who finds his inspiration in learning; not in the world as his own and common sense reveal it, but in the world as science and philosophy report of it. The two greatest metaphysical poets of Europe are Lucretius and Dante. What the philosophy of Epicurus was to Lucretius, that of Thomas Aquinas was to Dante. Their poetry is the product of their learning, transfigured by the imagination, and it is not to be understood without some study of their thought and knowledge. ”

“ In attempting to state and vindicate the relation of soul and body he falls perhaps inevitably into the appearance, at any rate, of the dualism which he is trying to transcend. He places them over against each other as separate entities and the lower bulks unduly. In love, says Pascal, the body disappears from sight in the intellectual and spiritual passion which it has kindled. That is what happens in The Anniversarie, not altogether in The Extasie. Yet no poem makes one realize more fully what Jonson meant by calling Donne 'the first poet in the world for some things'. ”

“ The same life has clothed itself in different garbs; the same passions have spoken in different images; the same art has adapted itself to different circumstances. To the historian these old clothes are in themselves a subject of interest. His enjoyment of Shakespeare is heightened by finding the explanation of Falstaff's hose, Pistol's hyperboles, and the poet's neglect of the Unities. ”

“ On a huge hill
Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will
Reach her, about must, and about must goe;
And what the hills suddenes resists win so.
Yet strive so, that before age, deaths twilight,
Thy Soule rest, for none can work in that night. ”

“ Literary history has for the historian a quite distinct interest from that which it possesses for the student and lover of literature. For the historian it is a matter of positive interest to connect Donne's wit with the general disintegration of mediaeval thought, to recognize the influence on the Elizabethan drama of the doctrines of Machiavelli, or to find in Pope's achievement in poetry a counterpart to Walpole's in politics. ”