(taken with a similar allusion in one of his letters:
Guyanaes harvest is nip'd in the spring
I feare, &c., p. 210),
refers most probably to Raleigh's expedition in 1595 to discover the
fabulous wealth of Manoa. Had the Elegy been written after the Cadiz
expedition there would certainly have been a more definite reference
to that war. The poem was probably written in the earlier part of
1596, when the expedition was in preparation and Donne contemplated
joining it.
To date one of the poems is not of course to date them all, but their
paradoxical, witty, daring tone is so uniform that one may fairly
conjecture that these thirteen Elegies were written between 1593 and
Donne's first entry upon responsible office as secretary to Egerton in
1598.
The twelfth (_His parting from her_) and fifteenth (_The
Expostulation_) Elegies it is impossible to date, but it is not
_likely_ that they were written after his marriage. _Julia_ is quite
undatable, a witty sally Donne might have written any time before
1615. But the fourteenth (_A Tale of a Citizen and his Wife_) was
certainly written after 1609, probably in 1610.
_The Autumnall_ raises rather an interesting question. Mr. Gosse has
argued that it was most probably composed as late as 1625. Walton's
dating of it is hopelessly confused. He states (_Life of Mr. George
Herbert_, 1670, pp. 14-19) 'that Donne made the acquaintance of Mrs.
Herbert and wrote this poem when she was residing at Oxford with her
son Edward, Donne being then near to (about _First Ed._) the Fortieth
year of his Age'; 'both he and she were then past the Meridian of
man's life.' But according to Lord Herbert his mother left Oxford and
brought him to town about 1600, shortly before the insurrection of
Essex, i.e. when Donne was twenty-seven years old, and secretary
to Sir Thomas Egerton, and Lady Herbert was about thirty-five or
thirty-six. It is, of course, not impossible that Donne visited Oxford
between 1596 and 1600, but he was not then the grave person Walton
portrays. The period which the latter has in view is that in which
Donne was at Mitcham and Mrs. Herbert living in London. 'This day', he
writes in a letter to her, dated July 23, 1607, 'I came to town and to
the best part of it your house.' In 1609 Mrs. Herbert married Sir John
Danvers. We know that in 1607-9 Donne was in correspondence with Mrs.
Herbert and was sending her copies of his religious verses. Walton's
evidence points to its being about the same time that he wrote this
poem.
Mr. Gosse's argument for a later date is, regarded _a priori_, very
persuasive. 'Unless it is taken as describing the venerable and
beautiful old age of a distinguished woman, the piece is an absurdity;
to address such lines to a youthful widow, who was about to become the
bride of a boy of twenty, would have been a monstrous breach of taste
and good manners' (_Life, &c._, ii. 228). It is, however, somewhat
hazardous to fix a standard of taste for the age of James I, and above
all others for John Donne. To the taste of the time and the temper
of Donne such a poem might more becomingly be addressed to a widow
of forty, the mother of ten children, one already an accomplished
courtier, than it might be written by a priest in orders. Donne would
have been startled to hear that in 1625 he had spent any time in such
a vain amusement as composing a secular elegy. The poem he wrote
to Mrs. Herbert before 1609 was probably thought by her and him an
exquisite compliment. He expressly disclaims speaking of the old age
which disfigures. He writes of one whose youthful beauty has flown.
Forty seemed old for a woman, even to Jane Austen, and in Montaigne's
opinion it is old for a man: 'J'estois tel, car je ne me considère pas
à cette heure, que je suis engagé dans les avenues de la vieillesse,
ayant pieça franchy les quarante ans:
Minutatim vires et robur adultum
Frangit, et in partem pejorem liquitur aetas.
Ce que je seray doresnevant ce ne sera plus qu'un demy estre, ce ne
sera plus moy; je m'eschappe les jours et me desrobe a moy mesme:
Singula de nobis anni praedantur euntes.'
_Essais_, ii. 17.
Mrs. Herbert's marriage was due to no 'heyday of the blood'. It was
the gravity of Danvers' temper which attracted her, and he became the
steady friend and adviser of her children.
There are, moreover, some items of evidence which go to support
Walton's testimony. The poem is found in one MS., _S_, dated 1620,
which gives us a downward date; and in 1610 occurs what looks very
like an allusion to Donne's poem in Ben Jonson's _Silent Woman_.
Clerimont and True-wit are speaking of the Collegiate ladies, and the
former asks,
Who is the president?
_True._ The grave and youthful matron, the Lady Haughty.
_Cler._ A pox of her autumnal face, her pieced beauty! there's no
man can be admitted till she be ready now-a-days, till she has
painted and perfumed ... I have made a song (I pray thee
hear it) on the subject
Still to be neat, still to be drest...
The resemblance may be accidental, yet the frequency with which the
poem is dubbed _An Autumnal Face_ or _The Autumnall_ shows that the
phrase had struck home. Jonson's comedies seethe with such allusions,
and I rather suspect that he is poking fun at his friend's paradoxes,
perhaps in a sly way at that 'grave and youthful matron' Lady Danvers.
We cannot _prove_ that the poem was written so early, but the evidence
on the whole is in favour of Walton's statement.