or
Take, O take those lips away,
both the feeling and its expression are metaphysical. But the passion
is felt through the subtle and fantastic web of dialectic; and the
thought from which the whole springs is the emptiness of life without
love.
What, then, is the philosophy which disengages itself from Donne's
love-poetry studied in its whole compass? It seems to me that it is
more than a purely negative one, that consciously or unconsciously
he sets over against the abstract idealism, the sharp dualism of the
Middle Ages, a justification of love as a natural passion in the human
heart the meaning and end of which is marriage. The sensuality and
exaggerated cynicism of so much of the poetry of the Renaissance was
a reaction from courtly idealism and mediaeval asceticism. But a mere
reaction could lead no-whither. 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.
And this with all its imperfections Donne's love-poetry is. It was not
for nothing that Sir Thomas Egerton's secretary made a runaway match
for love. For Dante the poet, his wife did not exist. In love of his
wife Donne found the meaning and the infinite value of love. In later
days he might bewail his 'idolatry of profane mistresses'; he never
repented of having loved. Between his most sensual and his most
spiritual love-songs there is no cleavage such as separates natural
love from Dante's love of Beatrice, who is in the end Theology. 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.
This justification of natural love as fullness of joy and life is the
deepest thought in Donne's love-poems, far deeper and sincerer than
the Platonic conceptions of the affinity and identity of souls with
which he plays in some of the verses addressed to Mrs. Herbert. The
nearest approach that he makes to anything like a reasoned statement
of the thought latent rather than expressed in _The Anniversarie_
is in _The Extasie_, a poem which, like the _Nocturnall_, only Donne
could have written. Here with the same intensity of feeling, and
in the same abstract, dialectical, erudite strain he emphasizes the
interdependence of soul and body:
As our blood labours to beget
Spirits, as like soules as it can,
Because such fingers need to knit
That subtile knot, which makes us man:
So must pure lovers soules descend
T'affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
_Else a great Prince in prison lies_.
It may be that Donne has not entirely succeeded in what he here
attempts. There hangs about the poem just a suspicion of the
conventional and unreal Platonism of the seventeenth century. 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'. 'I should never find any fault with
metaphysical poems,' is Coleridge's judgement, 'if they were all like
this or but half as excellent.'
It was only the force of Donne's personality that could achieve even
an approximate harmony of elements so divergent as are united in his
love-verses, that could master the lower-natured steed that drew the
chariot of his troubled and passionate soul and make it subservient to
his yoke-fellow of purer strain who is a lover of honour, and modesty,
and temperance, and the follower of true glory. In the work of his
followers, who were many, though they owed allegiance to Jonson
also, the lower elements predominated. The strain of metaphysical
love-poetry in the seventeenth century with its splendid _élan_ and
sonorous cadence is in general Epicurean and witty. It is only now and
again--in Marvell, perhaps in Herrick's
Bid me to live, and I will live,
Thy Protestant to be,
certainly in Rochester's songs, in
An age in her embraces past
Would seem a winter's day,
or the unequalled:
When wearied with a world of woe
To thy safe bosom I retire,
Where love, and peace, and truth does flow,
May I contented there expire,
that the accents of the _heart_ are clearly audible, that passion
prevails over Epicurean fancy or cynical wit. On the other hand, the
idealism of seventeenth-century poetry and romances, the Platonism of
the Hôtel de Rambouillet that one finds in Habington's _Castara_, in
Kenelm Digby's _Private Memoirs_, in the French romances of chivalry
and their imitations in English is the silliest, because the emptiest,
that ever masqueraded as such in any literature, at any period. A
sensual and cynical flippancy on the one hand, a passionless, mannered
idealism on the other, led directly to that thinly veiled contempt
of women which is so obvious in the satirical essays of Addison and
Pope's _Rape of the Lock_.
But there was one poet who meditated on the same problem as Donne, who
felt like him the power and greatness of love, and like him could
not accept a doctrine of love which seemed to exclude or depreciate
marriage. In 1640, just before his marriage, as rash in its way as
Donne's but less happy in the issue, Milton, defending his character
against accusations of immorality, traced the development of his
thought about love. The passage, in _An Apology against a Pamphlet
called 'A Modest Confutation'_, &c., has been taken as having a
reference to the _Paradise Lost_. But Milton rather seems at the time
to have been meditating a work like the _Vita Nuova_ or a romance like
that of Tasso in which love was to be a motive as well as religion,
for the whole theme of his thought is love, true love and its
mysterious link with chastity, of which, however, 'marriage is no
defilement'. In the arrogance of his youthful purity Milton would
doubtless have looked with scorn or loathing on the _Elegies_ and the
more careless of Donne's songs. But perhaps pride is a greater enemy
of love than such faults of sense as Donne in his passionate youth was
guilty of, and from which Dante by his own evidence was not exempt.
Whatever be the cause--pride, and the disappointment of his marriage,
and political polemic--Milton never wrote any English love-poetry,
except it be the one sonnet on the death of the wife who might have
opened the sealed wells of his heart; and some want of the experience
which love brought to Dante has dimmed the splendour of the great poem
in which he undertook to justify the ways of God to men. Donne is not
a Milton, but he sounded some notes which touch the soul and quicken
the intellect in a way that Milton's magnificent and intense but
somewhat hard and objective art fails to achieve.
That the simpler and purer, the more ideal and tender of Donne's
love-poems were the expression of his love for Ann More cannot of
course be proved in the case of each individual poem, for all Donne's
verses have come to us (with a few unimportant exceptions) undated
and unarranged. But the general thesis, that it was a great experience
which purified and elevated Donne's poetry, receives a striking
confirmation from the better-known history of his devotional poetry.
Here too wit, often tortured wit, fancy, and the heat which Donne's
wit was always able to generate, would have been all his verse had to
show but for the great sorrow which struck him down in 1617 and gave
to his subsequent sonnets and hymns a sincerer and profounder note,
his imagery a more magnificent quality, his rhythms a more sonorous
music.
Donne was not by nature a devotional poet in the same way and to the
same degree as Giles Fletcher or Herbert or Crashaw. It was a sound
enough instinct which, despite his religious upbringing and his wide
and serious interest in theological questions, made him hesitate to
cross the threshold of the ministry and induced him to seek rather for
some such public service as fell to the lot of his friend Wotton. It
was not, I think, the transition from the Roman to the Anglican Church
which was the obstacle. I have tried to describe what seems to me to
have been the path of enlightenment which opened the way for him to
a change which on every ground of prudence and ambition was desirable
and natural. But to conform, and even to take a part as a free-lance
in theological controversy was one thing, to enter the ministry
another. When this was pressed upon him by Morton or by the King it
brought him into conflict with something deeper and more fundamental
than theological doctrines, namely, a temperament which was rather
that of the Renaissance than that either of Puritan England or of the
Counter-Reformation, whether in Catholic countries or in the Anglican
Church--the temperament of Raleigh and Bacon rather than of Milton or
Herbert or Crashaw.
The simple way of describing Donne's difficulty is Walton's, according
to whom Donne shrank from entering the ministry for fear the notorious
irregularities of his early years should bring discredit on the sacred
calling. But there was more in Donne's life than a youth of pleasure,
an old age of prayers. It is not the case that all which was best and
most serious in Donne's nature led him towards Holy Orders. In his
earliest satires and even in his 'love-song weeds' there is evidence
enough of an earnest, candid soul underneath the extravagances of
wit and youthful sensuality. Donne's mind was naturally serious and
religious; it was not naturally devout or ascetic, but worldly and
ambitious. But to enter the ministry was, for Donne and for all
the serious minds of his age, to enter a profession for which the
essential qualifications were a devotional and an ascetic life.
The country clergy of the Anglican Church were often careless and
scandalous livers before Laud took in hand the discipline of the
Church; but her bishops and most eminent divines, though they might
be courtly and sycophantic, were with few exceptions men of devout and
ascetic life. When Donne finally crossed the Rubicon, convinced that
from the King no promotion was to be hoped for in any other line of
life, it was rather with the deliberate resolution that he would make
his life a model of devotion and ascetic self-denial than as one drawn
by an irresistible attraction or impelled by a controlling sense of
duty to such a life. Donne was no St. Augustine whose transition from
libertinism to saintliness came entirely from within. The noblest
feature of Donne's earlier clerical life was the steadfast spirit in
which he set himself to realize the highest ideals of the calling
he had chosen, and the candour with which he accepted the contrast
between his present position and his earlier life, leaving to
whosoever wished to judge while he followed the path of duty and
penitence.
But such a spirit will not easily produce great devotional poetry.
There are qualities in the religious poetry of simpler and purer souls
to which Donne seldom or never attains. The natural love of God which
overflows the pages of the great mystics, which dilates the heart
and the verses of a poet like the Dutchman Vondel, the ardour and
tenderness of Crashaw, the chaste, pure piety and penitence of
Herbert, the love from which devotion and ascetic self-denial come
unbidden--to these Donne never attained. The high and passionate joy
of _The Anniversary_ is not heard in his sonnets or hymns. Effort is
the note which predominates--the effort to realize the majesty of God,
the heinousness of sin, the terrors of Hell, the mercy of Christ.
Some of the very worst traits in Donne's mind are brought out in
his religious writing. _The Essays on Divinity_ are an extraordinary
revelation of his accumulations of useless Scholastic erudition, and
his capacity to perform feats of ingenious deduction from traditional
and accepted premises. To compare these freakish deductions from the
theory of verbal inspiration with the luminous sense of the _Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus_ is to realize how much rationalism was doing
in the course of the century for the emancipation and healing of the
human intellect. Some of the poems, and those the earliest written,
before Donne had actually taken Orders, are not much more than
exercises in these theological subtleties, poems such as that _On
the Annunciation and Passion falling in the same year_ (1608), _The
Litany_ (1610), _Good-Friday_ (1613), and _The Cross_ (_c._ 1615)
are characteristic examples of Donne's intense and imaginative wit
employed on traditional topics of Catholic devotion to which no
change of Church ever made him indifferent. Donne never ignored in his
sermons the gulf that separated the Anglican from the Roman Church, or
the link that bound her to the Protestant Churches of the Continent.
'Our great protestant divines' are one of his courts of appeal,
and included Luther and Calvin of whom he never speaks but with the
deepest respect. But he was unwilling to sacrifice to a fanatical
puritanism any element of Catholic devotion which was capable of
an innocent interpretation. His language is guarded and perhaps not
always consistent, but it would not be difficult to show from his
sermons and prose-writings that many of the most distinctively
Catholic tenets were treated by him with the utmost tenderness.
But, as Mr. Gosse has pointed out, the sincerest and profoundest of
Donne's devotional poetry dates from the death of his wife. The loss
of her who had purified and sweetened his earliest love songs lent
a new and deeper _timbre_ to the sonnets and lyrics in which he
contemplates the great topics of personal religion,--sin, death,
the Judgement, and throws himself on the mercy of God as revealed in
Christ. The seven sonnets entitled _La Corona_ have been generally
attributed to this period, but it is probable that they were composed
earlier, and their treatment of the subject of Christ's life and death
is more intellectual and theological than spiritual and poetical. It
is when the tone becomes personal, as in the _Holy Sonnets_, when he
is alone with his own soul in the prospect of death and the Judgement,
that Donne's religious poetry acquires something of the same unique
character as his love songs and elegies by a similar combination
of qualities, intensity of feeling, subtle turns of thought, and
occasional Miltonic splendour of phrase. Here again we meet the
magnificent openings of the _Songs and Sonets_:--
This is my playes last scene; here heavens appoint
My pilgrimages last mile; and my race
Idly yet quickly run hath this last space,
My spans last inch, my minutes latest point;
or,
At the round earths imagin'd quarters blow
Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise
From death you numberlesse infinities
Of soules, and to your scatter'd bodies go:
and again--
What if this present were the worlds last night!
Marke in my heart, O Soule, where thou dost dwell,
The picture of Christ crucified, and tell
Whether that countenance can thee affright,
Teares in his eyes quench the amazing light,
Blood fills his frownes, which from his pierc'd head fell.
This passionate penitence, this beating as it were against the bars
of self in the desire to break through to a fuller apprehension of
the mercy and love of God, is the intensely human note of these latest
poems. Nothing came easily to his soul that knew so well how to be
subtle to plague itself. The vision of divine wrath he can conjure up
more easily than the beatific vision of the love that 'moves the sun
in heaven and all the stars'. Nevertheless it was that vision which
Donne sought. He could never have been content with Milton's heaven of
majesty and awe divorced from the quickening spirit of love. And there
are moments when he comes as close to that beatific vision as perhaps
a self-tormenting mind involved in the web of seventeenth-century
theology ever could,--at moments love and ecstasy gain the upper hand
of fear and penitence. But it is in the sermons that he reaches these
highest levels. There is nothing in the florid eloquence of Jeremy
Taylor that can equal the splendour of occasional passages in Donne's
sermons, when the lava-like flow of his heated reasoning seems
suddenly to burst and flower in such a splendid incandescence of
mystical rapture as this:--
'Death and life are in the power of the tongue, says Solomon,
in another sense: and in this sense too, If my tongue,
suggested by my heart, and by my heart rooted in faith, can
say, _non moriar, non moriar_: If I can say (and my conscience
do not tell me that I belie mine own state) if I can say, That
the blood of the Saviour runs in my veins, That the breath of
his spirit quickens all my purposes, that all my deaths
have their Resurrection, all my sins their remorses, all my
rebellions their reconciliations, I will hearken no more after
this question as it is intended _de morte naturali_, of a
natural death; I know I must die that death; what care I? nor
_de morte spirituali_, the death of sin, I know I doe, and
shall die so; why despair I? but I will find out another
death, _mortem raptus_, a death of rapture and of extasy, that
death which St. Paul died more than once, the death which St.
Gregory speaks of, _divina contemplatio quoddam sepulchrum
animae_, the contemplation of God and heaven is a kind of
burial and sepulchre and rest of the soul; and in this death
of rapture and extasy, in this death of the Contemplation of
my interest in my Saviour, I shall find myself and all my
sins enterred, and entombed in his wounds, and like a Lily in
Paradise, out of red earth, I shall see my soul rise out of
his blade, in a candor, and in an innocence, contracted there,
acceptable in the sight of his Father.'
This is the highest level that Donne ever reached in eloquence
inspired by the vision of the joy and not the terror of the Christian
faith, higher than anything in the _Second Anniversary_, but in his
last hymns hope and confidence find a simpler and a tenderer note. The
noble hymn, 'In what torn ship so ever I embark,' is in somewhat
the same anguished tone as the _Holy Sonnets_; but the highly
characteristic
Since I am coming to that Holy roome,
Where with thy Quire of Saints for evermore,
I shall be made thy Musique;
and the _Hymn to God the Father_, speak of final faith and hope in
tones which recall--recall also by their sea-coloured imagery, and
by their rhythm--the lines in which another sensitive and tormented
poet-soul contemplated the last voyage:
I have a sinne of feare, that when I have spunne
My last thred, I shall perish on the shore;
Swear by thy self that at my death thy sunne
Shall shine as he shines now and heretofore:
And having done that, Thou hast done,
I feare no more.
Beside the passion of these lines even Tennyson's grow a little pale:
Twilight and evening bell
And after that the dark;
And may there be no sadness of farewell
When I embark:
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
It has not been the aim of the present editor to attempt to pronounce
a final judgement upon Donne. It seems to him idle to compare Donne's
poetry with that of other poets or to endeavour to fix its relative
worth. Its faults are great and manifest; its beauties _sui generis_,
incommunicable and incomparable. My endeavour here has been by
an analysis of some of the different elements in this composite
work--poems composed at different times and in different moods; flung
together at the end so carelessly that youthful extravagances of witty
sensuality and pious aspirations jostle each other cheek by jowl;
and presenting a texture so diverse from that of poetry as we usually
think of it--to show how many are the strands which run through it,
and that one of these is a poetry, not perfect in form, rugged of line
and careless in rhyme, a poetry in which intellect and feeling are
seldom or never perfectly fused in a work that is of imagination all
compact, yet a poetry of an extraordinarily arresting and haunting
quality, passionate, thoughtful, and with a deep melody of its own.
[Footnote 1: _History of English Poetry_, iii. 154. Mr.
Courthope qualifies this statement somewhat on the next
page: 'From this spirit of cynical lawlessness he was
perhaps reclaimed by genuine love,' &c. But he has, I think,
insufficiently analysed the diverse strains in Donne's
love-poetry.]
[Footnote 2: Gaspary: _History of Italian Literature_
(Oelsner's translation), 1904. Consult also Karl Vossler:
_Die philosophischen Grundlagen des 'süssen neuen Stils'_,
Heidelberg, 1904, and _La Poesia giovanile &c. di Guido
Cavalcanti: Studi di Giulio Salvadori_, Roma, 1895.]
[Footnote 3: Gaspary: _Op. Cit._]
* * * * *