John Donne

“ His earliest sermon before the king at Whitehall carried his audience “to heaven, in holy raptures.” In April, not without much bad grace, the university of Cambridge consented to make the new divine a D.D. In the spring of 1616, Donne was presented to the living of Keyston, in Hunts., and a little later he became rector of Sevenoaks; the latter preferment he held until his death. In October he was appointed reader in divinity to the benchers of Lincoln’s Inn. His anxieties about money now ceased, but in August 1617 his wife died, leaving seven young children in his charge. ”

“ It is in the lighter of his love verses that Donne's laughable wit is most obvious and most agile. Whatever one may think of the choice of subject, and the flame of a young man's lust that burns undisguised in some of the Elegies, it is impossible to ignore the dazzling wit which neither flags nor falters from the first line to the last. And in the more graceful and fanciful, the less heated Songs and Sonets, the same wit, gay and insolent, disports itself in a philosophy of love which must not be taken altogether seriously. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So heavenly sight, as none can greater feign,
Feign what he can, that seems of greatest might:
Could any yet compare with Infinite?
Infinite sure those joys; my words but light;
Light is the palace where she dwells; oh, then, how bright!
[1] The author of 'The Purple Island.'
JOHN DONNE. John Donne was born in London, in the year 1573. He sprung from a Catholic family, and his mother was related to Sir Thomas More and to Heywood the epigrammatist. He was very early distinguished as a prodigy of boyish acquirement, and was entered, when only eleven, of Harthall, now Hertford College. ”

“ So Stephen stood against the piano and defended John Donne, that strange Elizabethan mixture of piety and paganism and poetry and nastiness. He had forgotten Mr. Asquith now; he had forgotten the Choir and Muriel Tarrant, and he was absorbed in the serious pronouncement of an artistic belief. The Reverend Peter said that he was no prig, but some of John Donne was too much for him. He could not believe in the essential greatness of a grown man who could write such stuff. Stephen began to quote a line or two from memory ”

“ 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. ”

“ The first impression of an unbiassed reader who dips into the poems of Donne is unfavourable. He is repulsed by the intolerably harsh and crabbed versification, by the recondite choice of theme and expression, and by the oddity of the thought. In time, however, he perceives that behind the fantastic garb of language there is an earnest and vigorous mind, an imagination that harbours fire within its cloudy folds, and an insight into the mysteries of spiritual life which is often startling. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Izaak Walton’s Life, first published in 1640, and entirely recast in 1659, has been constantly reprinted. The best edition of Donne’s Poems was edited by E. K. Chambers in 1896. His prose works have not been collected. In 1899 Edmund Gosse published in two volumes The Life and Letters of John Donne, for the first time revised and collected. ”

“ Six died without issue, and six now living—two sons and four daughters. John Donne, eldest son, of the age of about twenty-six years; George Donne, second son, aged 25 [he was baptised at Camberwell 9 May 1605] , captain and sergeant-major in the expedition at the isle of Rhé, and chief commander of all the forces in the isle of St. Christopher; Constance, eldest daughter, married to Samuel Harvey of Abrey Hatch in the county of Essex; Bridget, second daughter, Margaret, third, and Elizabeth, youngest daughter, all three unmarried.' Concerning John Donne the younger see infra (s.n.) ”

“ 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. ”

“ Donne's letters generally fall into two groups. The first comprises those addressed to his fellow-students at Cambridge and the Inns of Court, the Woodwards, Brookes, and others, or to his maturer and more fashionable companions in the quest of favour and employment at Court, Wotton, and Goodyere, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. To the other belong the complimentary and elegant epistles in which he delighted and perhaps bewildered his noble lady friends and patronesses with erudite and transcendental flattery. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The poems are ascribed to different authors in a very haphazard and untrustworthy fashion. James I is credited with Jonson's epigram on the Union of the Crowns; Donne's The Baite is given to Wotton; and Wotton's 'O Faithless World' to Robert Wisedom. Probably there is more reliance to be put on the ascriptions of later and Caroline poems, but for the student of Donne and early Jacobean poetry the collection has no value. Some of Donne's poems occur, and it is noteworthy that the version given is often a different one from that occurring in the first part of the volume. ”

“ Donne's first Letters were The Storme and The Calme. These were followed by Letters to Wotton before and after he went to Ireland, and this series continues them during the years of Donne's secretaryship and his subsequent residence at Pyrford and Mitcham. They are written to friends of his youth, some still at college. Clearly too, what we have preserved is Donne's side of a mutual correspondence. Of Letters to Donne I have printed one, probably from Thomas Woodward. Chance has preserved another probably in the form in which it was sent. Mr. Gosse has printed it (Life, &c., i, p. 91) . ”

“ The strange story whick Brantôme tells of Margaret of Navarre summoning a lover to the church under whose flags his mistress lay buried, and talking with him of her, shows, a generation before Donne’s birth, the influence which in his day had made its way across the narrow seas as it had earlier across the Alps, and had at each crossing gathered gloom and force if it had lost lightness and colour. Always in him are the two conflicting forces of intense enjoyment of the present, and intense feeling of the contrast of that present with the future. ”

“ It is true that, as was said above, there are those, and many of them, who can never and will never like Donne. No one who thinks Don Quixote a merely funny book, no one who sees in Aristophanes a dirty-minded fellow with a knack of Greek versification, no one who thinks it impossible not to wish that Shakespeare had not written the Sonnets, no one who wonders what on earth Giordano Bruno meant by Gli eroici Furori, need trouble himself even to attempt to like Donne. ”

“ Donne, John, English poet and divine, born in London; a man of good degree; brought up in the Catholic faith; after weighing the claims of the Romish and Anglican communions, joined the latter; married a young lady of sixteen without consent of her father, which involved him in trouble for a time; was induced to take holy orders by King James; was made his chaplain, and finally became Dean of St. Paul's; wrote sermons, some 200 letters and essays, as well as poems, the latter, amid many defects, revealing a soul instinct with true poetic fire (1573-1631) . See “Professor Saintsbury on Donne.” ”

“ Donne is not a metaphysical poet of the compass of Lucretius and Dante. He sets forth in his poetry no ordered system of the universe. [pg 2] The ordered system which Dante had set forth was breaking in pieces while Donne lived, under the criticism of Copernicus, Galileo, and others, and no poet was so conscious as Donne of the effect on the imagination of that disintegration. In the two Anniversaries mystical religion is made an escape from scientific scepticism. Moreover, Donne's use of metaphysics is often frivolous and flippant, at best simply poetical. ”

“ For the date see XXIV, and note.
LXXXI
To Sir Henry Goodyer, and evidently written just prior to Donne’s appointment as Dean of Saint Paul’s (November 19th, 1621) . “My Cases of Conscience” is, I suppose, the Paradoxes and Problems to which we have had frequent allusions.
LXXXII
The identity of Donne’s “worthy friend F. H.” is unknown to me. The letter evidently belongs to the closing years of Donne’s life. In printing this letter, Mr. Gosse (Life and Letters of John Donne, II, 254) quotes from Walton:
“The latter part of his life may be said to be a continued study ”

“ Donne, who was dean of St. Paul's, and the most fashionable preacher of his day, was also the most fashionable poet—we do not except Shakespeare. He was the rage, in fact, of all admirers of poetry, and was the head of a school of which Cowley was the most extravagant disciple, and of which Crashaw, Withers, Herrick, Herbert, and Quarles, had more or less of the characteristics. In all these poets there was a deep feeling of spirituality, religion, and wit, and in some of them of nature, dashed and marred by a fantastic style, full of quaintnesses and conceits. ”

“ But I neither discern by it that you have received any of mine lately; which [Pg 128] have been many, and large, and too confident to be lost, especially since, (as I remember) they always conveyed others to that good Lady; neither do I know where to finde, by any diligence, your sons lodging. But I hope he will apprehend that impossibility in me, and finde me here, where he shall also finde as much readinesse to serve him, as at Polesworth. This Letter of yours makes me perceive, that that Lady hath expressed her purpose to you in particular, for the next term. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From what we know of the lives of Essex, Raleigh, Southampton, Pembroke, and others it is probable that Donne's Elegies come quite as close to the truth of life as Sidney's Petrarchianism or Spenser's Platonism. The later cantos of The Faerie Queene reflect vividly the unchaste loves and troubled friendships of Elizabeth's Court. Whether we can accept in its entirety the history of Donne's early amours which Mr. Gosse has gathered from the poems or not, there can be no doubt that actual experiences do lie behind these poems as behind Shakespeare's sonnets. ”