l. 2. _Muskats_, i.e. 'Musk-cats.' The 'muskets' of _1669_ is only a
misprint.
ll. 5-6. In these lines as they stand in the editions and most of the
MSS. there is clearly something wrong:
And on her neck her skin such lustre sets,
They seeme no sweat drops but pearle coronets.
A 'coronet' is not an ornament of the neck, but of the head. The
obvious emendation is that of _A25_, _C_, _JC_, and _W_, which Grosart
and Chambers have adopted. A 'carcanet' is a necklace, and carcanets
of pearl were not unusual: see O.E.D., _s. v._ But why then do the
editions and so many MSS. read 'coronets'? Consideration of this
has convinced me that the original error is not here but in the word
'neck'. Article by article, as in an inventory, Donne contrasts his
mistress and his enemy's. But in the next line he goes on:
Ranke sweaty froth thy Mistresse's _brow_ defiles,
contrasting her brow with that of his mistress, where the sweat drops
seem 'no sweat drops but pearle coronets'.
The explanation of the error is, probably, that an early copyist
passed in his mind from breast to neck more easily than to brow.
Another explanation is that Donne altered 'brow' to 'neck' and forgot
to alter 'coronets' to 'carcanets'. I do not think this likely. The
force of the poem lies in its contrasts, and the brow is proverbially
connected with sweat. 'In the sweat of thy brow,' &c. Possibly Donne
himself in the first version, or a copy of it, wrote 'neck', meaning
to write 'brow', misled by the proximity and associations of 'breast'.
Mr. J. C. Smith has shown that Spenser occasionally wrote a word which
association brought into his mind, but which was clearly not the word
he intended to use, as it is destructive of the rhyme-scheme. Oddly
enough the late Francis Thompson used 'carcanet' in the sense of
'coronet':
Who scarfed her with the morning? and who set
Upon her brow the day-fall's carcanet?
_Ode to the Setting Sun._
PAGE =91=, l. 10. _Sanserra's starved men._ 'When I consider what God
did for Goshen in Egypt ... How many Sancerraes he hath delivered from
famines, how many Genevas from plots and machinations.' _Sermons._
The Protestants in Sancerra were besieged by the Catholics for nine
months in 1573, and suffered extreme privations. Norton quotes Henri
Martin, _Histoire de France_, ix. 364: 'On se disputa les débris les
plus immondes de toute substance animale ou végétale; on créa, pour
ainsi dire, des aliments monstrueux, impossibles.'
ll. 13-14. _And like vile lying stones in saffrond tinne,
Or warts, or wheales, they hang upon her skinne._
Following the MSS. I have made 'lying' an epithet attached to 'stones'
and substituted 'they hang' for the superficially more grammatical 'it
hangs'. The readings of _1633_, 'vile stones lying' and 'it hangs',
seem to me just the kind of changes a hasty editor would make, the
kind of changes which characterize the Second Folio of Shakespeare.
The stones are not only 'vile'; they are 'lying', inasmuch as they
pretend to be what they are not, as the 'saffron'd tinne' pretends to
be gold.
l. 19. _Thy head_: i.e. 'the head of thy mistress.' Donne continues
this construction in ll. 25, 32, 39, and I have restored it from the
later editions and MSS. at l. 34, 'thy gouty hand.'
l. 34. _thy gouty hand_: 'thy' is the reading of all the editions
except _1633_ and of all the MSS. except _JC_ and _S_. It is probably
right, corresponding to l. 19 'Thy head' and l. 32 'thy tann'd
skins'. Donne uses 'thy' in a condensed fashion for 'the head of thy
mistress', &c.
PAGE =92=, l. 51. _And such._ The 'such' of the MSS. is doubtless
right, the 'nice' of the editions being repeated from l. 49.