Arthur Donn

“ Come, my Arthur," said lady O'Donnel, “I have good news for you; your father has procured for you a situation in the castle, which I trust will be the first step towards that distinction I am convinced your talents and perseverance will acquire."
Had a clap of thunder rolled over the head of Arthur, be could not have been more alarmed than at this communication. "What!" said he to himself, "to leave my Maria, to quit all those innocent pleasures which I have so long enjoyed, and to embark in the troubled scenes of the political world! Oh God! how wretched is my fate!" ”

“ Donne shows women themselves, in delight, anger, or despair; they know that he finds nothing in the world more interesting, and they much more than forgive him for all the ill he says of them. If women most conscious of their sex were ever to read Donne, they would say, He was a great lover; he understood.
And, in the poems of divine love, there is the same quality of mental emotion as in the poems of human love. Donne adores God reasonably, knowing why he adores Him. ”

“ But the personal or human reality and the imaginative or divine reality must be perfectly interfused, or the art will be at fault. Donne is too proud to abandon himself to his own inspiration, to his inspiration as a poet; he would be something more than a voice for deeper yet speechless powers; he would make poetry speak straight. Well, [Pg 106] poetry will not speak straight, in the way Donne wished it to, and under the goading that his restless intellect gave it. ”

“ In 1610 he wrote for the king the Pseudo-Martyr, and in 1612 he published a philosophical poem, The Progress of the Soul. By the desire of King James, Donne took orders, and, settling in London, was made preacher of Lincoln's Inn. In 1621 he was appointed Dean of St. Paul's. He was chosen prolocutor to the Convocation from 1623-4. He died in March, 1631, and was interred in St. Paul's. As a poet, Donne stands extremely high, and may be deemed the founder of what Dr. Johnson calls the metaphysical class of poets. ”

“ And, in his unwise insistence that every metaphor shall be absolutely new, he drags medical and alchemical and legal properties into verse really full of personal passion, producing at times poetry which is a kind of disease of the intellect, a sick offshoot of science. Like most poets of powerful [Pg 97] individuality, Donne lost precisely where he gained. ”

“ Yet it is the same lover, and very evidently [Pg 100] the same, who winnows all this earthly passion to a fine, fruitful dust, fit to make bread for angels. Ecstatic reason, passion justifying its intoxication by revealing the mysteries that it has come thus to apprehend, speak in the quintessence of Donne's verse with an exalted simplicity which seems to make a new language for love. It is the simplicity of a perfectly abstract geometrical problem, solved by one to whom the rapture of solution is the blossoming of pure reason. ”

“ The Drurys and Donne left Paris for Spa in May 1612, and travelled in the Low Countries and Germany until September, when they returned to London. In 1613 Donne contributed to the Lachrymae lachrymarum an obscure and frigid elegy on the death of the prince of Wales, and wrote his famous Marriage Song for St Valentine’s Day to celebrate the nuptials of the elector palatine with the princess Elizabeth. About this time Donne became intimate with Robert Ker, then Viscount Rochester and afterwards the infamous earl of Somerset, from whom he had hopes of preferment at court. ”

“ Bartlet, I can say nothing, nor of the plague, though your Letter bid me: but that he diminishes, the other increases, but in what proportion I am not clear. To them at Hammersmith, and Mris Herbert I will do your command. If I have been good in hope, or can promise any little offices in the future probably, it is comfortable, for I am the worst present man in the world; yet the instant, though it be nothing, joynes times together, and therefore this unprofitableness, since I have been, and will still indevour to be so, shall not interrupt me now from being
Your servant and lover
J. Donne. ”

“ Gosse has pointed out, with a self-evident truth which has apparently waited for him to say it, Donne's real position in regard to the poetry of his time was that of a realistic writer, who makes a clean sweep of tradition, and puts everything down in the most modern words and with the help of the most trivial actual images.
To what a cumbersome unwieldiness,
And burdensome corpulence my love hath grown,
he will begin a poem on Love's Diet. Of love, as the master of hearts, he declares seriously:
He swallows us and never chaws ”

“ Of course Donn in his connection with that spot in the sea was the subject of another story of a different kind: he was, it is said, the king and leader of the Milesians when they arrived to invade Ireland, but he happened to be drowned near the spot, which the peasants are still said to call Donn's House. That the cropped king of darkness should be the father of the solar hero Diarmait is in no way surprising, as it amounts probably to not much more than another way of saying that the darkness of night precedes the light of day ”

“ Compare Donne, for instance, with Herrick. Herrick has little enough of the intellect, the passion, the weight and the magnificence of Donne; but, setting out with so much less to carry, he certainly gets first to the goal, and partly by running always in the right direction. The most limited poet in the language, he is the surest. He knows the airs that weave themselves into songs, as he knows the flowers that twine best into garlands. Words come to him in an order which no one will ever alter, and no one will ever forget. Whether they come easily or not is no matter ”

“ He makes "yet" rhyme to "spirit.". The excuse made for such things is that Donne thought Elizabethan poetry too dulcet.
He is a poet by flashes, which are very brilliant with strange coloured fires. He is not really so obscure as he is reckoned: he can be understood, though Ben Jonson, who "esteemed him the first poet in the world in some things," added that "Donne from not being understood would perish".
Donne died on March 31, 1631. His poetry, styled by Dr. Johnson "metaphysical," exercised an influence not wholly favourable on his successors; happily it did not affect Lovelace and Herrick. ”

“ During the whole night, Arthur conld not divest himself of the idea of Maria, whose bewitching figure was constantly in his mind. He rose with the lark, and impatiently awaited the rising of his mother. He was soon called to breakfast, at which he scarcely eat a mouthful, and at eight o'clock the carriage was ordered, and lady O'Donnell, accompanied by her son, were driven to the foot of the hill on which the cottage of Farrell stood, where they alighted and walked up the path which Arthur had taken the preceding night. ”

“ Donne, as he suffers all the colds and fevers of love, is as much the sufferer and the physician of his disease as we have seen him to be in cases of actual physical sickness. Always detached from himself, even when he is most helplessly the slave of circumstances, he has that frightful faculty of seeing through his own illusions ”

“ He procured the committal to prison of his son-in-law and the two Brookes, who were present at the marriage. Donne was soon set at liberty, but his career was spoilt. Nothing less would satisfy Sir George More than that the lord keeper should dismiss his secretary from his honourable and lucrative office, and Donne found himself a disgraced and needy man with a scanty fortune and no ostensible means of livelihood. ”

“ Donne seems to have been recommended to Lady Bedford by Sir Henry Goodyere, who was attached to her household. He mentions the death of her son in a letter to Goodyere as early as 1602, but his intimacy with the Countess probably began in 1608, and most of his verse letters were written between that date and 1614. Donne praises her beauty and it may be that in some of his lyrics he plays the part of the courtly lover, but what his poems chiefly emphasize is the religious side of her character. ”

“ These verses of Donne's disturbed and adventurous youth, poems ingenious, conceited, passionate, mystical, or cynical, have not the music as of birds' songs which rings in the lyrists of that age: nor have the Epithalamia the charm of Spenser's. Donne in youth was not at ease with himself: he speculates too curiously. He may try to play the sensualist, but there is a dark backward in his genius; there are chords not in tune with mirth and pleasure. He is as unique as Browning, as little like other poets. ”

“ Donne, wrote of him at the time that 'his birth and youth and interest in great favours at court, and legal proximity to great possessions in the world, might justly have promised him acceptance in what family soever, or upon what person soever he had directed and placed his affections.' But Donne saw much of their married life, and insists that the inequality of their years was reduced to an evenness by the staid sobriety of their temperaments, and that they lived happily together till the lady's death in 1627. ”

“ We seem to get nearer to the man himself in Donne's letters to Goodyere and Wotton than in Daniel's weighty, but also heavy, moralizing epistles to the Countess of Cumberland or Sir Thomas Egerton; and the personality whose voice sounds so distinct and human in our ear is a more attractive one than the harsh, censorious, burly [pg xv] but a little blustering Jonson of the epistles on country life and generous givers. Donne's style is less clumsy, his verse less stiff. ”

“ Fausset sees him, John Donne was physically a genius; intellectually “possessed”; one who ranged almost every scale of experience, and upon each struck some note: harsh, cunning, arrogant or poignant, which reverberates down the roof of time; a poet who was at times near a monster, full-blooded, [Pg 128] cynical and gross; a thinker, curious, ingenious and mathematical; a seer brooding morbidly over the dark flux of things; a saint aspiring to the celestial harmony. He served the flesh with the same ardour with which he sought the ideal. ”

“ Donne's quality of passion is unique in English poetry. It is a rapture in which the mind is supreme, a reasonable rapture, and yet carried to a pitch of actual violence. The words themselves rarely count for much, as they do in Crashaw, for instance, where words turn giddy at the height of their ascension. ”

“ Written apparently before Donne had entered the church, and probably in 1614, while Donne was still living in Drury House. George Gerrard was at court. His “hopeful [Pg 313] designs upon worthy widows” seem to have been the cause of much pleasantry. (See XIX.)
CIX
There is no certain indication of the date of this letter. Mr. Gosse assigns it conjecturally to 1622. It seems to me more likely that it belongs to the period of Donne’s residence at Mitcham, and is of 1609, or earlier date. “My house” would then be Donne’s lodgings in the Strand. ”

“ The use of 'businesse' as a trisyllable with plural meaning is quite legitimate: 'Idle and discoursing men, that were not much affected, how businesse went, so they might talke of them.' Sermon, Judges XX. 15. p. 7.
[pg 170]
Page 211. To Mr S. B.
Probably Samuel Brooke, the brother of Christopher. He officiated at Donne's marriage and was imprisoned. He was later Chaplain to Prince Henry, to James I, and to Charles I; professor of Divinity at Gresham College (1612-29) and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, 1629. He wrote Latin plays, poems, and religious treatises. ”

“ Instead of enjoying his new comforts, Donne grew more ascetic and intellectual in his tastes. He refused also the nattering offer of entering the Church of England and of receiving a comfortable "living." By his "Pseudo Martyr" he attracted the favor of James I, who persuaded him to be ordained, yet left him without any place or employment. When his wife died her allowance ceased, and Donne was left with seven children in extreme poverty. Then he became a preacher, rose rapidly by sheer intellectual force and genius, and in four years was the greatest of English preachers and Dean of St. ”

“ In some of them these were so tempered as to give them an original and piquant air, as in Herrick, Herbert, and Quarles; in others, as in Donne and Cowley, they degenerated into disfigurement and absurdity. But Donne (b., 1573; d., 1631) had great and shining qualities, keen, bold satire, profound and intellectual thoughts, and a most sparkling fancy, embedding rich touches of passion and pathos, yet so marred by uncouth and strange conceits, that one scarcely knows how to estimate his compositions. ”

“ Donn, son of Milé, who was drowned before ever he set foot on Irish soil, lives at “Donn’s House”, a line of sand-hills in the Dingle Peninsula of Kerry, and, as late as the eighteenth century, we find him invoked by a local poet, half in jest, no doubt, but still, perhaps also a little in earnest. ”

“ Gosse in his Life of John Donne, 1899. There can be no doubt of their genuineness. They enlarge a series of Letters and a series of Sonnets which appear in 1633 and in all the best manuscript collections. In their arrangement I have followed W in preference to 1633, which is based on A18, N, TC. Of the letter taken from the Burley MS. there may be greater doubt in some minds. To me it seems unquestionably Donne's (aut Donne aut Diabolus) , an addition to the series of letters which he wrote to Sir Henry Wotton between the return of the Islands Expedition and Essex's return from Ireland. ”