ll. 1-6. The sense of this verse, carefully and correctly printed in
the 1633 edition, was obscured if not corrupted by the insertion of
a semicolon after 'Fortune' in the later editions. The correct
punctuation was restored in 1719, which was followed in subsequent
editions until Grosart returned to that of the 1635-39 editions (which
the Grolier Club editor also adopts), and Chambers completed the
confusion by printing the lines thus,
You have refined me, and to worthiest things--
Virtue, art, beauty, fortune.
Even Mr. Gosse has been misled into quoting this truncated and
enigmatical compliment to Lady Bedford, regarding it, I presume, as of
the same nature as Shakespeare's lines,
Spirits are not finely touch'd,
But to fine issues.
But this has a meaning; what meaning is there in saying that a man is
refined to 'beauty and fortune'? Poor Donne was not likely to boast
of either at this time. What he says is something quite different, and
strikes the key-note of the poem. 'You have refined and sharpened my
judgement, and now I see that the worthiest things owe their value
to rareness or use. Value is nothing intrinsic, but depends on
circumstances.' This, the next two verses add, explains why at Court
it is your virtue which transcends, in the country your beauty. To
Donne the country is always dull and savage; the court the focus of
wit and beauty, though not of virtue. On the relative nature of all
goodness he has touched in the _Progresse of the Soule_, p. 316, ll.
518-20:
There's nothing simply good nor ill alone;
Of every quality Comparison
The only measure is, and judge, Opinion.
With the sentiment regarding Courts compare: 'Beauty, in courts, is
so necessary to the young, that those who are without it, seem to be
there to no other purpose than to wait on the triumphs of the fair; to
attend their motions in obscurity, as the moon and stars do the sun
by day; or at best to be the refuge of those hearts which others have
despised; and by the unworthiness of both to give and take a miserable
comfort.' Dryden, Dedication of the _Indian Emperor_.
ll. 8-9. (_Where a transcendent height, (as lownesse mee)
Makes her not be, or not show_)
I have completed the enclosure of (Where ... show) in brackets which
_1633_ began but forgot to carry out. The statement is parenthetical,
and it is of the essence of Donne's wit to turn aside in one
parenthesis to make another, dart from one distracting thought to
a further, returning at the end to the main track. He has left the
Countess for a moment to explain why the Court 'is not Vertues clime'.
She is too transcendent to be, or at any rate to be seen there, as
I (he adds, quite irrelevantly) am too low. Then taking up again the
thought of the first line he continues: 'all my rhyme is claimed
there by your vertues, for _there_ rareness gives them value. I am the
comment on what _there_ is a dark text; the usher who announces one
that is a stranger.'
For brackets within brackets compare: 'And yet it is imperfect which
is taught by that religion which is most accommodate to sense (I dare
not say to reason (though it have appearance of that too) because
none may doubt but that that religion is certainly best which is
reasonablest) That all mankinde hath one protecting Angel; all
Christians one other, all English one other, all of one Corporation
and every civill coagulation or society one other; and every man one
other.' _Letters_, p. 43.
l. 13. _To this place_: i.e. Twickenham. _O'F_ heads the poem _To the
Countesse of Bedford, Twitnam_. The poem is written to welcome her
home. See l. 70.
The development of Donne's subtle and extravagant conceits is a little
difficult. The Countess is the sun which exhales the sweetness of the
country when she comes thither (13-18). Apparently the Countess
has returned to Twickenham in Autumn, perhaps arriving late in the
evening. When she emerges from her chariot it is the breaking of a new
day, the beginning of a new year or new world. Both the Julian and the
Gregorian computations are thus falsified (19-22). It shows her truth
to nature that she will not suffer a day which begins at a stated
hour, but only one that begins with the actual appearance of the light
(23-4: a momentary digression). Since she, the Sun, has thus come to
Twickenham, the Court is made the Antipodes. While the 'vulgar sun' is
an Autumnal one, this Sun which is in Spring, receives our sacrifices.
Her priests, or instruments, we celebrate her (25-30). Then Donne
draws back from the religious strain into which he is launching. He
will not sing Hymns as to a Deity, but offer petitions as to a King,
that he may view the beauty of this Temple, and not as Temple, but as
Edifice. The rest of the argument is simpler.
l. 60. _The same thinge._ The singular of the MSS. seems to be
required by 'you cannot two'. The 's' of the editions is probably
due to the final 'e'. But 'things' is the reading of _Lec_, the MS.
representing most closely that from which _1633_ was printed.
ll. 71-2. _Who hath seene one, &c._ 'Who hath seen one, e.g.
Twickenham, which your dwelling there makes a Paradise, would fain see
you too, as whoever had been in Paradise would not have failed to seek
out the Cherubim.' The construction is elliptical. Compare:
Wee'had had a Saint, have now a holiday.
P. 286, l. 44.
The Cherubim are specially mentioned (although the Seraphim are the
highest order) because they are traditionally the beautiful angels:
'The Spirit of Chastity ... in the likenesse of a faire beautifull
Cherubine.' Bacon, _New Atlantis_ (1658), 22 (O.E.D.).
PAGE =193=. TO S^r EDWARD HERBERT. AT IULYERS.
Edward Herbert, first Baron of Cherbury (1563-1648), the eldest son of
Donne's friend Mrs. Magdalen Herbert, had not long returned from his
first visit to France when he set out again in 1610 with Lord Chandos
'to pass to the city of Juliers which the Prince of Orange resolved to
besiege. Making all haste thither we found the siege newly begun; the
Low Country army assisted by 4,000 English under the command of
Sir Edward Cecil. We had not long been there when the Marquis de
la Chartre, instead of Henry IV, who was killed by that villain
Ravaillac, came with a brave French army thither'. _Autobiography_,
ed. Sidney Lee. The city was held by the Archduke Leopold for the
Emperor. The Dutch, French, and English were besieging the town in the
interest of the Protestant candidates, the Elector of Brandenburg, and
the Palatine of Neuburg. The siege marked the beginning of the Thirty
Years' War. Herbert was a man of both ability and courage but of
a vanity which outweighed both. Donne's letter humours both his
Philosophical pose and his love of obscurity and harshness in poetry.
His own poems with a few exceptions are intolerably difficult and
unmusical, and Jonson told Drummond that 'Donne said to him he wrote
that Epitaph upon Prince Henry, _Look to me Faith_, to match Sir Ed.
Herbert in obscureness'. (Jonson's _Conversations_, ed. Laing.) The
poems have been reprinted by the late Professor Churton Collins. In
1609 when Herbert was in England he and Donne both wrote Elegies on
Mistress Boulstred.
l. 1. _Man is a lumpe, &c._ The image of the beasts Donne has borrowed
from Plato, _The Republic_, ix. 588 B-E.
PAGE =194=, ll. 23-6. A food which to chickens is harmless poisons
men. Our own nature contributes the factor which makes a food into a
poison either corrosive or killing by intensity of heat or cold:
'Et hic nota quod tantus est ordo naturae, ut quod est venenosum et
inconveniens uni est utile et conveniens alteri; sicut jusquiamus
qui est cibus passeris licet homini sit venenosus; et sicut napellus
interficit hominem solum portatus, et mulierem praegnantem non laesit
manducatus, teste Galieno; et mus qui pascitur napello est tiriaca
contra napellum.' Benvenuto on Dante, _Div. Comm._: _Paradiso_, i. The
plants here mentioned are henbane and aconite. Concerning hemlock the
O.E.D. quotes Swan, _Spec. M._ vi. § 4 (1643), 'Hemlock ... is meat to
storks and poison to men.' Donne probably uses the word 'chickens' as
equivalent to 'young birds', not for the young of the domestic
fowl. For the cold of the hemlock see Persius, _Sat._ v. 145; Ovid,
_Amores_, iii. 7. 13; and Juvenal, _Sat._ vii. 206, a reference to
Socrates' gift from the Athenians of 'gelidas ... cicutas'.
ll. 31-2. _Thus man, that might be'his pleasure, &c._ These lines
are condensed and obscure. The 'his' must mean 'his own'. 'Man who in
virtue of that gift of reason which makes him man might be to himself
a source of joy, becomes instead, by the abuse of reason, his own rod.
Reason which should be the God directing his life becomes the devil
which misleads him.' Chambers prints 'His pleasure', 'His rod',
referring 'his' to God--which seems hardly possible.
ll. 34-8. _wee'are led awry, &c._ Chambers's punctuation of this
passage is clearly erroneous:
we're led awry
By them, who man to us in little show,
Greater than due; no form we can bestow
On him, for man into himself can draw
All;
This must mean that we are led astray by those who, in their
abridgement of man, still show him to us greater than he really is.
But this is the opposite of what Donne says. 'Greater than due' goes
with 'no form'. Compare:
'And therefore the Philosopher draws man into too narrow a table, when
he says he is _Microcosmos_, an Abridgement of the world in little:
_Nazianzen_ gives him but his due, when he calls him _Mundum Magnum_,
a world to which all the rest of the world is but subordinate: For
all the world besides, is but God's Foot-stool; Man sits down upon his
right-hand,' &c. _Sermons_ 26. 25. 370.
'It is too little to call Man a little world; Except God, Man is a
diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than
the world; than the world doth, nay than the world is.' _Devotions
upon Emergent Occasions, &c._ (1624), p. 64.
On the other hand the Grolier Club editor has erroneously followed
_1635-69_ in altering the full stop after 'chaw' to a comma; and has
substituted a semicolon for the comma after 'fill' (l. 39), reading:
for man into himself can draw
All; all his faith can swallow or reason chaw,
All that is filled, and all that which doth fill;
But 'All that is fill'd,' &c. is not _object_ to 'can draw'. It is
_subject_ (in apposition with 'All the round world') to 'is but a
pill'.
PAGE =195=, l. 47. _This makes it credible._ I have changed the comma
after 'credible' to a semicolon to avoid the misapprehension, into
which the Grolier Club editor seems to have fallen, that what is
credible is 'that you have dwelt upon all worthy books'. It is because
Lord Herbert has dwelt upon all worthy books that it is credible that
he knows man.