The dating of Donne's _Divine Poems_ raises some questions that have
not received all the consideration they deserve. They fall into two
groups--those written before and those written after he took orders.
Of the former the majority would seem to belong to the years of his
residence at Mitcham. The poem _On the Annunciation and Passion_ was
written on March 25, 1608/9. _The Litanie_ was written, we gather from
a letter to Sir Henry Goodyere, about the same time. _The Crosse_ we
cannot date, but I should be inclined with Mr. Gosse to connect
it rather with the earlier than the later poems. It is in the same
somewhat tormented, intellectual style. On the other hand the _Holy
Sonnets_ were composed, we know now from Sonnet XVII, first published
by Mr. Gosse, after the death of Donne's wife in 1617; and _The
Lamentations of Jeremy_ appear to have been written at the same
juncture. The first sermon which Donne preached after that event was
on the text (Lam. iii. 1): 'I am the man that hath seen affliction,'
and Walton speaks significantly of his having ended the night and
begun the day in _lamentations_.
The more difficult question is the date of the _La Corona_ group of
sonnets. It is usual to attribute them to the later period of Donne's
ministry. This is not, I think, correct. It seems to me most probable
that they too were composed at Mitcham in or before 1609.
Dr. Grosart first pointed out that one of Donne's short verse-letters,
headed in _1663_ and later editions _To E. of D. with six holy
Sonnets_, must have been sent with a copy of six of these sonnets, the
seventh being held back on account of some imperfection. It appears
with the same heading in _O'F_, but in _W_ it is entitled simply _To
L. of D._, and is placed immediately after the letter _To Mr. T. W._,
'Haste thee harsh verse' (p. 205), and before the next to the same
person, 'Pregnant again' (p. 206). It thus belongs to this group of
letters written apparently between 1597 and 1609-10.
Who is the E. of D.? Dr. Grosart, Mr. Chambers, and Mr. Gosse assume
that it must be Lord Doncaster, though admitting in the same breath
that the latter was not Earl of, but Viscount Doncaster, and that only
between 1618 and 1622, four short years. The title 'L. of D.' might
indicate Doncaster because the title 'my Lord of' is apparently given
to a Viscount. In his letters from Germany Donne speaks of 'my Lord of
Doncaster'. It may, therefore, be a mistake of the printer or editor
of _1633_; which turned 'L. of D.' into 'E. of D.'; but Hay was still
alive in 1633, and the natural thing for the printer to do would have
been to alter the title to 'E. of C.' or 'Earl of Carlisle'. Before
1618 Donne speaks of the 'Lord Hay' or 'the L. Hay' (see _Letters_,
p. 145),[1] and this or 'the L. H.' is the title the poem would have
borne if addressed to him in any of the years to which the other
letters in the Westmoreland MS. (_W_) seem to belong.
Moreover, there is another of Donne's noble friends who might
correctly be described as either E. of D. or L. of D. and that is
Richard Sackville, third Earl of Dorset. Donne generally speaks of him
as 'my Lord of Dorset': 'I lack you here', he writes to Goodyere,
'for my L. of Dorset, he might make a cheap bargain with me now, and
disingage his honour, which in good faith, is a little bound, because
he admitted so many witnesses of his large disposition towards me.'
Born in 1589, the grandson of the great poet of Elizabeth's early
reign, Richard Sackville was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. He
succeeded as third Earl of Dorset on February 27, 1608/9, having two
days previously married Anne, Baroness Clifford in her own right, the
daughter of George Clifford, the buccaneering Earl of Cumberland, and
Margaret, daughter of Francis, second Earl of Bedford. The Countess of
Dorset was therefore a first cousin to Edward, third Earl of Bedford,
the husband of Donne's patroness Lucy, Countess of Bedford.
The earliest date at which the letter could have been addressed to
Dorset as L. of D. or E. of D. is 1609, just after his marriage into
the circle of Donne's friends. Now in Harleian MS. 4955 (_H49_) we
find the heading,
Holy Sonnets: written 20 yeares since.
This is followed at once by 'Deign at my hands', and then the title
_La Corona_ is given to the six sonnets which ensue. Thereafter
follow, without any fresh heading, twelve of the sonnets belonging
to the second group, generally entitled _Holy Sonnets_. It will be
noticed that in the editions this last title is used twice, first for
both groups and then, in italics, for the second alone. The question
is, did the copyist of _H49_ intend that the note should apply to all
the sonnets he transcribed or only to the _La Corona_ group? If to
all, he was certainly wrong as to the second lot, which were written
later; but he was quite possibly right as to the first. Now twenty
years before 1629, which is the date given to some of Andrewes' poems
in the MS., would bring us to 1609, the year of the Earl of Dorset's
accession and marriage, and the period when most of the letters among
which that to L. of D. in _W_ appears were written.
Note, moreover, the content of the letter _To L. of D._ Most of the
letters in this group, to Thomas and Rowland Woodward, to S. B., and
B. B., are poetical replies to poetical epistles. Now that _To L. of
D._ is in the same strain:
See Sir, how as the Suns hot Masculine flame
Begets strange creatures on Niles durty slime,
In me, your fatherly yet lusty Ryme
(For, these songs are their fruits) have wrought the same.
This is in the vein of the letter _To Mr. R. W._, 'Muse not that by
thy mind,' and of the epistle _To J. D._ which I have cited in the
notes (p. 166). We hear nowhere that Lord Hay wrote verses, and it
is very unlikely that he, already when Donne formed his aquaintance a
rising courtier, should have joined with the Woodwards, and Brookes,
and Cornwallis, in the game of exchanging bad verses with Donne. It is
quite likely that the young Lord of Dorset, either in 1609, or earlier
when he was still an Oxford student or had just come up to London, may
have burned his pinch of incense to the honour of the most brilliant
of the wits, now indeed a grave _épistolier_ and moralist, but
still capable of 'kindling squibs about himself and flying into
sportiveness'. We gather from Lord Herbert of Cherbury that the Earl
of Dorset must have been an enthusiastic young man. When Herbert
returned to England after the siege of Julyers (whither Donne had sent
him a verse epistle), 'Richard, Earl of Dorset, to whom otherwise I
was a stranger, one day invited me to Dorset House, where bringing me
into his gallery, and showing me many pictures, he at last brought me
to a frame covered with green taffeta, and asked me who I thought was
there; and therewithal presently drawing the curtain showed me my
own picture; whereupon demanding how his Lordship came to have it, he
answered, that he had heard so many brave things of me, that he got a
copy of a picture which one Larkin a painter drew for me, the original
whereof I intended before my departure to the Low Countries for Sir
Thomas Lucy.' _Autobiography_, ed. Lee. A man so interested in Herbert
may well have been interested in Donne even before his connexion
by marriage with Lucy, Countess of Bedford. He became later one of
Donne's kindest and most practical patrons. The grandson of a great
poet may well have written verses.[2]
But there is another consideration besides that of the letter _To E.
of D._ which seems to connect the _La Corona_ sonnets with the years
1607-9. That is the sonnet _To the Lady Magdalen Herbert: of St. Mary
Magdalen_, which I have prefixed, with that _To E. of D._, to
the group. This was sent with a prose letter which says, 'By this
messenger and on this good day, I commit the inclosed holy hymns and
sonnets (which for the matter not the workmanship, have yet escaped
the fire) to your judgment, and to your protection too, if you think
them worthy of it; and I have appointed this enclosed sonnet to usher
them to your happy hand.' This letter is dated 'July 11, 1607', which
Mr. Gosse thinks must be a mistake, because another letter bears the
same date; but the date is certainly right, for July 11 is, making
allowance for the difference between the Julian and the Gregorian
Calendars, July 22, i.e. St. Mary Magdalen's day, 'this good day.'
What were the 'holy hymns and sonnets', of which Donne says:
and in some recompence
That they did harbour Christ himself, a Guest,
Harbour these Hymns, to his dear name addrest?
Walton says: 'These hymns are now lost; but doubtless they were
such as they two now sing in heaven.' But Walton was writing long
afterwards and was probably misled by the name 'hymns'. By 'hymns
and sonnets' Donne possibly means the same things, as he calls his
love-lyrics 'songs and sonets'. The sonnets are hymns, i.e. songs of
praise. Mr. Chambers suggests--it is only a suggestion--that they are
the second set, the _Holy Sonnets_. But these are not addressed to
Christ. In them Donne addresses The Trinity, the Father, Angels,
Death, his own soul, the Jews--Christ only in one (Sonnet XVIII, first
published by Mr. Gosse). On the other hand, 'Hymns to his dear name
addrest' is an exact description of the _La Corona_ sonnets.
I venture to suggest, then, that the Holy Sonnets sent to Mrs. Herbert
and to the E. of D. were one and the same group, viz. the _La Corona_
sequence. Probably they were sent to Mrs. Herbert first, and later
to the E. of D. Donne admits their imperfection in his letter to Mrs.
Herbert. One of them seems to have been criticized, and in sending the
sequence to the E. of D. he held it back for correction. If the E.
of D. be the Earl of Dorset they may have been sent to him before
he assumed that title. Any later transcript would adopt the title to
which he succeeded in 1609. We need not, however, take too literally
Donne's statement that the E. of D.'s poetical letter was 'the
only-begetter' of his sonnets.
My argument is conjectural, but the assumptions that they were written
about 1617 and sent to Lord Doncaster are equally so. The last is
untenable; the former does not harmonize so well as that of an earlier
date with the obvious fact, which I have emphasized in the essay
on Donne's poetry, that these sonnets are more in the intellectual,
tormented, wire-drawn style of his earlier religious verse (excellent
as that is in many ways) than the passionate and plangent sonnets and
hymns of the years which followed the death of his wife.
[Footnote 1: This letter was written in November or December,
1608, and seems to be the first in which Donne speaks of
Lord Hay as a friend and patron. The kindness he has shown in
forwarding a suit seems to have come somewhat as a surprise to
Donne.]
[Footnote 2: Lord Dorset is thus described by his wife: 'He
was in his own nature of a just mind, of a sweet disposition,
and very valiant in his own person: He had a great advantage
in his breeding by the wisdom and discretion of his
grandfather, Thomas, Earl of Dorset, Lord High Treasurer of
England, who was then held one of the wisest men of that
time; by which means he was so good a scholar in all manner of
learning, that in his youth when he lived in the University
of Oxford, there was none of the young nobility then students
there, that excelled him. He was also a good patriot to his
country ... and so great a lover of scholars and soldiers, as
that with an excessive bounty towards them, or indeed any of
worth that were in distress, he did much diminish his estate;
As also, with excessive prodigality in house-keeping and other
noble ways at Court, as tilting, masking, and the like; Prince
Henry being then alive, who was much addicted to these
noble exercises, and of whom he was much beloved.' Collins's
_Peerage_, ii. 194-5. quoted in Zouch's edition of Walton's
_Lives_, 1817.]