[Sidenote: _Metaphysical Poetry._]
Donne is a 'metaphysical' poet. The term was perhaps first applied
by Dryden, from whom Johnson borrowed it: 'He' (Donne) 'affects the
metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where
nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with
the speculations of philosophy, where he should engage their hearts,
and entertain them with the softness of love.' _Essay on Satire_. 'The
metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning
was their whole endeavour.' Johnson, _Life of Cowley_. The parade of
learning, and a philosophical or abstract treatment of love had been
a strain in mediaeval poetry from the outset, manifesting itself
most fully in the Tuscan poets of the 'dolce stil nuovo', but never
altogether absent from mediaeval love-poetry. The Italian poet Testi
(1593-1646), describing his choice of classical in preference to
Italian models (he is thinking specially of Marino), says: 'poichè
lasciando quei concetti metafisici ed ideali di cui sono piene le
poesie italiane, mi sono provato di spiegare cose più domestiche, e
di maneggiarle con effetti più famigliari a imitazione d'Ovidio, di
Tibullo, di Properzio, e degli altri migliori.' Donne's love-poetry is
often classical in spirit; his conceits are the 'concetti metafisici'
of mediaeval poetry given a character due to his own individuality and
the scientific interests of his age.
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.
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.
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. But he is a learned poet, and he is a
philosophical poet, and without some attention to the philosophy
and science underlying his conceits and his graver thought it is
impossible to understand or appreciate either aright. Failure to do so
has led occasionally to the corruption of his text.
[Sidenote: _Donne's Learning._]
Walton tells us that Donne's learning, in his eleventh year when he
went to Oxford, 'made one then give this censure of him, "That this
age had brought forth another Picus Mirandula; of whom story says that
he was rather born than made wise by study."' 'In the most unsettled
days of his youth', the same authority reports, 'his bed was not able
to detain him beyond the hour of four in the morning; and it was no
common business that drew him out of his chamber till past ten; all
which time was employed in study; though he took great liberty after
it.' 'He left the resultances of 1,400 authors, most of them abridged
and analysed with his own hand.' The lists of authors prefixed to
his prose treatises and the allusions and definite references in the
sermons corroborate Walton's statement regarding the range of Donne's
theological and controversial reading.
[Sidenote: _Classical Literature._]
Confining attention here to Donne's poetry, and the spontaneous
evidence of learning which it affords, one would gather that his
reading was less literary and poetic in character than was Milton's
during the years spent at Horton. It is clear that he knew the
classical poets, but there are few specific allusions. Ovid, Horace,
and Juvenal one can trace, not any other with certainty, nor in his
sermons do references to Virgil, Horace, or other poets abound.
[Sidenote: _Italian._]
Like Milton, Donne had doubtless read the Italian romances. One
reference to Angelica and an incident in the _Orlando Furioso_
occur in the _Satyres_, and from the same source as well as from an
unpublished letter we learn that he had read Dante. Aretino is the
only other Italian to whom he makes explicit reference.
[Sidenote: _French._]
One of Régnier's satires opens in a manner resembling the fourth of
Donne's, and in a letter written from France apparently in 1612 he
refers to 'a book of French Satires', which Mr. Gosse conjectures to
be Régnier's. The resemblance may be accidental, for Donne's _Satyres_
were written before the publication of Régnier's (1608, 1613), and
Donne makes no explicit mention of him or any other French poet.
We learn, however, from his letters that he had read Montaigne and
Rabelais; and it is improbable that he did not share the general
interest of his contemporaries in the poetry of the _Pléiade_. The
one poet to whom recent criticism has pointed as the inspiration
of Donne's metaphysical verse is the Protestant poet Du Bartas. Mr.
Alfred Horatio Upham (_The French Influence in English Literature._
New York, 1908), and following him Sir Sidney Lee (_The French
Renaissance in England._ Oxford, 1910), have insisted strongly on the
importance of this influence. The latter goes so far as to say that
'Donne clothed elegies, eclogues, divine poems, epicedes, obsequies,
satires, in a garb barely distinguishable from the style of Du Bartas
and Sylvester', and that the metaphysical style in English poetry is a
heritage from Du Bartas.
I confess this seems to me a somewhat exaggerated statement. When
I turn from Donne's passionate and subtle songs and elegies to
Sylvester's hum-drum and yet 'conceited' work, I find their styles
eminently distinguishable. Mr. Upham indeed allows that Donne's
genius makes 'vital and impressive' what in the original is 'vapid
and commonplace'. He pleads for no more than an 'element of French
suggestion'.
Of the most characteristic features of Du Bartas's rhetoric, his
affected antitheses, his studied alliterative effects, and especially
his double-epithets 'aime-carnage', 'charme-souci', 'blesse-honneur',
Sylvester's 'forbidden-Bit-lost-glory', 'the Act-simply-pure', &c.,
Mr. Upham admits that Donne makes sparing use. Donne uses a fair
number of compounds but the majority of these are nouns and verbs. Of
the epithets only one or two are of the sentence-compressing
character which the French poet cultivated. The most like is
'full-on-both-side-written rolls'. The real link between Du Bartas and
Donne is that they are metaphysical poets. Following Lucretius, whom
he often translates, the Frenchman set himself to give a scientific
account of the creation of the universe as outlined in _Genesis_. He
describes with the utmost minuteness of detail, and necessarily uses
similes better fitted to elucidate and illustrate than to give poetic
pleasure, drawn from the most everyday sources as well as arts and
sciences. It was part of the programme of the _Pléiade_ thus to annex
the vocabulary of learning and the crafts. Now Donne may have read Du
Bartas in the original, or he may have seen some parts of Sylvester's
translation (it did not appear till 1598), as it was in preparation,
though to a Catholic, as Donne was, the poem would not have the
attraction it had for Protestant poets in England, Holland, and
Germany. The bent of his own mind was to metaphysics, to erudition,
and also to figures realistic and surprising rather than beautiful.
It would be rash to deny that he may have found in Du Bartas a style
which he preferred to the Italianate picturesqueness of sonneteers and
idyllists, and been encouraged to follow his bent. That he borrowed
his style from Du Bartas is _non proven_: and there are in his work
strains of feeling, thought, and learning which cannot be traced
to the French poet. Two poets more essentially unlike it would be
difficult to imagine. There are very few passages where one can trace
or conjecture echoes or borrowings (see note, II. p. 193). I agree
indeed with Mr. Upham that the poems which most strongly suggest
that Donne had been reading Du Bartas are the First and Second
_Anniversaries_, which Sir Sidney Lee inadvertently calls early
poems. Here at least he is often dealing with the same themes. One
can illustrate his thought from Du Bartas. Perhaps it was the latter's
poem which suggested the use of marginal notes, giving the argument of
the poem.
[Sidenote: _Spanish._]
We know from Donne's explicit statement that his library was full both
of Spanish poets and Spanish theologians, and there has been some talk
of Spanish influence in his poetry. But no one has adduced evidence.
Gongora is out of the question, for Gongora did not begin to cultivate
the extravagant conceits of his later poetry till he came under the
influence of Carillo's posthumous poems in 1611 (Fitzmaurice Kelly:
_Spanish Literature_, 283-5); nor is there much resemblance between
his high-flown Marinism and Donne's metaphysical subtleties. It is
possible that Spanish mysticism and religious eloquence have left
traces in Donne's _Divine Poems_ and sermons. The subject awaits
investigation.
[Sidenote: _Scholastic Philosophy._]
A commentator on Donne is, therefore, not called on to trace literary
echoes in his poetry as Bishop Newton and others have done in Milton's
poems. It is reading of another kind, though a kind also traceable
in Milton, that he has to note. Donne was steeped in Scholastic
Philosophy and Theology. Often under his most playful conceits lurk
Scholastic definitions and distinctions. The question of the influence
of Plato on the poets of the Renaissance has been discussed of recent
years, but generally without a sufficient preliminary inquiry as
to the Scholastic inheritance of these poets. Doctrines that derive
ultimately, it may be, from Plato and Aristotle were familiar to Donne
and others in the first place from Aquinas and the theology of the
Schools, and, as Professor Picavet has insisted (_Esquisse d'une
histoire générale et comparée des philosophies médiévales._ Paris,
1907), they entered the Scholastic Philosophy through Plotinus and
were modified in the passage.[1] The present editor is in no way a
specialist in Scholasticism, and such notes and extracts as are given
here concern passages where some inquiry was necessary to fix the text
and to elucidate the meaning. They are intended simply to do this
as far as possible, and to suggest the direction which further
investigation must follow. An expert will doubtless note many
allusions that have escaped notice. Whenever possible I have
endeavoured to start from Donne's own sermons and prose works.
[Footnote 1: The influence of Scholastic Philosophy and
Theology in English poetry deserves attention. When Milton
states that
They also serve who only stand and wait,
he has probably in mind the opinion of Dionysius the
Areopagite (adopted by Aquinas), that the four highest
orders of angels (Dominations, Thrones, Cherubs, and
Seraphim) never leave God's presence to bear messages.]
[Sidenote: _The Fathers, &c._]
Donne is as familiar with the Fathers as with the Schoolmen,
especially Tertullian and Augustine, and of them too he makes use
in poems neither serious nor edifying. His work with Morton had
familiarized him with the whole range of Catholic controversy from
Bellarmine to Spanish and German Jesuit pamphleteers and casuists.
_The Progresse of the Soule_ reveals his acquaintance with Jewish
apocryphal legends.
[Sidenote: _Law._]
But Donne's studies were not confined to Divinity. When a Law-student
he was 'diverted by the worst voluptuousness, which is an hydroptic
immoderate desire of humane learning and languages'; but his legal
studies have left their mark in his _Songs and Sonets_. Of Medicine he
had made an extensive study, and the poems abound in allusions to both
the orthodox Galenist doctrines and the new Paracelsian medicine with
its chemical drugs and homoeopathic cures.[2] In Physics he knows,
like Milton, the older doctrines, the elements, their concentric
arrangement, the origin of winds and meteors, &c., and at the same
time is acutely interested in the speculations of the newer science,
of Copernicus and Galileo, and the disintegrating effect of their
doctrines on the traditional views.
[Footnote 2: In the _Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, &c._
(1651, 1654), pp. 14-15, Donne gives a short sketch of the history
of medical doctrines from Hippocrates through Galen to Paracelsus,
but declares that the new principles are attributed to the latter
'too much to his honour'.]
[Sidenote: _Travels._]
A special feature of Donne's imagery is the use of images drawn from
the voyages and discoveries of the age. Sir Walter Raleigh has not
included Donne among the poets whom he discusses in considering the
influence of the Voyages on Poetry and Imagination (_The English
Voyages of the Sixteenth Century._ Glasgow, 1906, iii), but perhaps
none took a more curious interest. His mistress is 'my America,
my Newfoundland', his East and West Indies; he sees, at least in
imagination,
a Tenarif, or higher Hill
Rise so high like a Rocke, that one might thinke
The floating Moone would shipwracke there, and sinke;
he sails to heaven, the Pacific Ocean, the Fortunate Islands, by the
North-West Passage, or through the Straits of Magellan.
In attempting to illustrate these and other aspects of Donne's
erudition as displayed in his poetry it has been my endeavour not so
much to trace them to their remote sources as to discover the form
in which he was familiar with a doctrine or a theory. Next to his own
works, therefore, I have had recourse to contemporary or but slightly
later works, as Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_ and Browne's
_Pseudodoxia Epidemica_. I have made constant use of the _Summa
Theologiae_ of St. Thomas Aquinas, using the edition in Migne's
_Patrologiae Cursus Completus_ (1845). By Professor Picavet my
attention was called to Bouillet's translation of Plotinus's _Enneads_
with ample notes on the analogies to and developments of Neo-Platonic
thought in the Schoolmen. I have also used Zeller's _Philosophie der
Griechen_, on Plotinus, and Harnack's _History of Dogma_. Throughout,
my effort has been rather to justify, elucidate, and suggest, than to
accumulate parallels.
*** In the following notes the _LXXX Sermons &c._ (1640), _Fifty
Sermons &c._ (1649), and _XXVI Sermons &c._ (1669/70) are referred to
thus:--80. 19. 189, i.e. the _LXXX Sermons_, the nineteenth sermon,
page 189. References to page and line simply of the poems are to the
first volume of this edition. References to the second are given thus,
II. p. 249.
THE PRINTER TO &c.
See _Text and Canon of Donne's Poems_, p. lix.
PAGE =1=, ll. 17-18. _it would have come to us from beyond the Seas_:
e.g. from Holland.
ll. 19-20. _My charge and pains in procuring of it_: A significant
statement as to the source of the edition.