Shall not so easily be to change dispos'd,
Nor to the arts of several eyes obeying;
But beauty with true worth securely weighing,
Which, being found assembled in some one,
We'll love her ever, and love her alone.
By the time he writes _The Ecstasy_ the victim of the body has become the
protesting victim of the soul. He cries out against a love that is merely
an ecstatic friendship:
But O alas, so long, so far,
Our bodies why do we forbear?
He pleads for the recognition of the body, contending that it is not the
enemy but the companion of the soul:
Soul into the soul may flow
Though it to body first repair.
The realistic philosophy of love has never been set forth with greater
intellectual vehemence:
So must pure lovers' souls descend
T' affections and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great Prince in prison lies.
To our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love reveal'd may look;
Love's mysteries in souls do grow
But yet the body is the book.
I, for one, find it impossible to believe that all this passionate
verse--verse in which we find the quintessence of Donne's genius--was a
mere utterance of abstract thoughts into the wind. Donne, as has been
pointed out, was more than most writers a poet of personal experience. His
greatest poetry was born of struggle and conflict in the obscure depths of
the soul as surely as was the religion of St. Paul. I doubt if, in the
history of his genius, any event ever happened of equal importance to his
meeting with the lady who first set going in his brain that fevered
dialogue between the body and the soul. Had he been less of a frustrated
lover, less of a martyr, in whom love's
Art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations and lean emptiness,
much of his greatest poetry, it seems to me, would never have been
written.
One cannot, unfortunately, write the history of the progress of Donne's
genius save by inference and guessing. His poems were not, with some
unimportant exceptions, published in his lifetime. He did not arrange them
in chronological or in any sort of order. His poem on the flea that has
bitten both him and his inamorata comes after the triumphant
_Anniversary_, and but a page or two before the _Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's
Day_. Hence there is no means of telling how far we are indebted to the
Platonism of one woman, how much to his marriage with another, for the
enrichment of his genius. Such a poem as _The Canonisation_ can be
interpreted either in a Platonic sense or as a poem written to Anne More,
who was to bring him both imprisonment and the liberty of love. It is, in
either case, written in defence of his love against some who censured him
for it:
For God's sake, hold your tongue, and let me love.
In the last verses of the poem Donne proclaims that his love cannot be
measured by the standards of the vulgar:
We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tombs or hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And, if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns all shall approve
Us canoniz'd by love:
And thus invoke us: "You whom reverend love
Made one another's hermitage;
You to whom love was peace, that now is rage;
Who did the whole world's soul contract and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes
(So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize),
Countries, towns, courts. Beg from above
A pattern of your love!"
According to Walton, it was to his wife that Donne addressed the beautiful
verses beginning:
Sweetest love, I do not go
For weariness of thee;
as well as the series of _Valedictions_. Of many of the other love-poems,
however, we can measure the intensity but not guess the occasion. All that
we can say with confidence when we have read them is that, after we have
followed one tributary on another leading down to the ultimate Thames of
his genius, we know that his progress as a lover was a progress from
infidelity to fidelity, from wandering amorousness to deep and enduring
passion. The image that is finally stamped on his greatest work is not
that of a roving adulterer, but of a monotheist of love. It is true that
there is enough Don-Juanism in the poems to have led even Sir Thomas
Browne to think of Donne's verse rather as a confession of his sins than
as a golden book of love. Browne's quaint poem, _To the deceased Author,
before the Promiscuous printing of his Poems, the Looser Sort, with the
Religious_, is so little known that it may be quoted in full as the
expression of one point of view in regard to Donne's work:
When thy loose raptures, Donne, shall meet with those
That do confine
Tuning unto the duller line,
And sing not but in sanctified prose,
How will they, with sharper eyes,
The foreskin of thy fancy circumcise,
And fear thy wantonness should now begin
Example, that hath ceased to be sin!
And that fear fans their heat; whilst knowing eyes
Will not admire
At this strange fire
That here is mingled with thy sacrifice,
But dare read even thy wanton story
As thy confession, not thy glory;
And will so envy both to future times,
That they would buy thy goodness with thy crimes.
To the modern reader, on the contrary, it will seem that there is as much
divinity in the best of the love-poems as in the best of the religious
ones. Donne's last word as a secular poet may well be regarded as having
been uttered in that great poem in celebration of lasting love, _The
Anniversary_, which closes with so majestic a sweep:
Here upon earth we are kings, and none but we
Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be.
Who is so safe as we, where none can do
Treason to us, except one of us two?
True and false fears let us refrain;
Let us love nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write three-score: this is the second of our reign.
Donne's conversion as a lover was obviously as complete and revolutionary
as his conversion in religion.
It is said, indeed, to have led to his conversion to passionate religion.
When his marriage with Sir George More's sixteen-year-old daughter brought
him at first only imprisonment and poverty, he summed up the sorrows of
the situation in the famous line--a line which has some additional
interest as suggesting the correct pronunciation of his name:
John Donne; Anne Donne; Undone.
His married life, however, in spite of a succession of miseries due to
ill-health, debt and thwarted ambition, seems to have been happy beyond
prophecy; and when at the end of sixteen years his wife died in childbed,
after having borne him twelve children, a religious crisis resulted that
turned his conventional churchmanship into sanctity. His original change
from Catholicism to Protestantism has been already mentioned. Most of the
authorities are agreed, however, that this was a conversion in a formal
rather than in a spiritual sense. Even when he took Holy Orders in 1615,
at the age of forty-two, he appears to have done so less in answer to any
impulse to a religious life from within than because, with the downfall of
Somerset, all hope of advancement through his legal attainments was
brought to an end. Undoubtedly, as far back as 1612, he had thought of
entering the Church. But we find him at the end of 1613 writing an
epithalamium for the murderers of Sir Thomas Overbury. It is a curious
fact that three great poets--Donne, Ben Jonson, and Campion--appear,
though innocently enough, in the story of the Countess of Essex's sordid
crime. Donne's temper at the time is still clearly that of a man of the
world. His jest at the expense of Sir Walter Raleigh, then in the Tower,
is the jest of an ungenerous worldling. Even after his admission into the
Church he reveals himself as ungenerously morose when the Countess of
Bedford, in trouble about her own extravagances, can afford him no more
than £30 to pay his debts. The truth is, to be forty and a failure is an
affliction that might sour even a healthy nature. The effect on a man of
Donne's ambitious and melancholy temperament, together with the memory of
his dissipated health and his dissipated fortune, and the spectacle of a
long family in constant process of increase, must have been disastrous. To
such a man poverty and neglected merit are a prison, as they were to
Swift. One thinks of each of them as a lion in a cage, ever growing less
and less patient of his bars. Shakespeare and Shelley had in them some
volatile element that could, one feels, have escaped through the bars and
sung above the ground. Donne and Swift were morbid men suffering from
claustrophobia. They were pent and imprisoned spirits, hating the walls
that seemed to threaten to close in on them and crush them. In his poems
and letters Donne is haunted especially by three images--the hospital, the
prison, and the grave. Disease, I think, preyed on his mind even more
terrifyingly than warped ambition. "Put all the miseries that man is
subject to together," he exclaims in one of the passages in that luxuriant
anthology that Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith has made from the _Sermons_;
"sickness is more than all .... In poverty I lack but other things; in
banishment I lack but other men; but in sickness I lack myself." Walton
declares that it was from consumption that Donne suffered; but he had
probably the seeds of many diseases. In some of his letters he dwells
miserably on the symptoms of his illnesses. At one time, his sickness
"hath so much of a cramp that it wrests the sinews, so much of tetane that
it withdraws and pulls the mouth, and so much of the gout ... that it is
not like to be cured.... I shall," he adds, "be in this world, like a
porter in a great house, but seldomest abroad; I shall have many things to
make me weary, and yet not get leave to be gone." Even after his
conversion he felt drawn to a morbid insistence on the details of his
ill-health. Those amazing records which he wrote while lying ill in bed in
October, 1623, give us a realistic study of a sick-bed and its
circumstances, the gloom of which is hardly even lightened by his odd
account of the disappearance of his sense of taste: "My taste is not gone
away, but gone up to sit at David's table; my stomach is not gone, but
gone upwards toward the Supper of the Lamb." "I am mine own ghost," he
cries, "and rather affright my beholders than interest them.... Miserable
and inhuman fortune, when I must practise my lying in the grave by lying
still."
It does not surprise one to learn that a man thus assailed by wretchedness
and given to looking in the mirror of his own bodily corruptions was often
tempted, by "a sickly inclination," to commit suicide, and that he even
wrote, though he did not dare to publish, an apology for suicide on
religious grounds, his famous and little-read _Biathanatos_. The family
crest of the Donnes was a sheaf of snakes, and these symbolize well enough
the brood of temptations that twisted about in this unfortunate
Christian's bosom. Donne, in the days of his salvation, abandoned the
family crest for a new one--Christ crucified on an anchor. But he might
well have left the snakes writhing about the anchor. He remained a tempted
man to the end. One wishes that the _Sermons_ threw more light on his
later personal life than they do. But perhaps that is too much to expect
of sermons. There is no form of literature less personal except a leading
article. The preacher usually regards himself as a mouthpiece rather than
a man giving expression to himself. In the circumstances what surprises us
is that the _Sermons_ reveal, not so little, but so much of Donne. Indeed,
they make us feel far more intimate with Donne than do his private
letters, many of which are little more than exercises in composition. As a
preacher, no less than as a poet, he is inflamed by the creative heat. He
shows the same vehemence of fancy in the presence of the divine and
infernal universe--a vehemence that prevents even his most far-sought
extravagances from disgusting us as do the lukewarm follies of the
Euphuists. Undoubtedly the modern reader smiles when Donne, explaining
that man can be an enemy of God as the mouse can be an enemy to the
elephant, goes on to speak of "God who is not only a multiplied elephant,
millions of elephants multiplied into one, but a multiplied world, a
multiplied all, all that can be conceived by us, infinite many times over;
nay (if we may dare to say so) a multiplied God, a God that hath the
millions of the heathens' gods in Himself alone." But at the same time one
finds oneself taking a serious pleasure in the huge sorites of quips and
fancies in which he loves to present the divine argument. Nine out of ten
readers of the _Sermons_, I imagine, will be first attracted to them
through love of the poems. They need not be surprised if they do not
immediately enjoy them. The dust of the pulpit lies on them thickly
enough. As one goes on reading them, however, one becomes suddenly aware
of their florid and exiled beauty. One sees beyond their local theology to
the passion of a great suffering artist. Here are sentences that express
the Paradise, the Purgatory, and the Hell of John Donne's soul. A noble
imagination is at work--a grave-digging imagination, but also an
imagination that is at home among the stars. One can open Mr. Pearsall
Smith's anthology almost at random and be sure of lighting on a passage
which gives us a characteristic movement in the symphony of horror and
hope that was Donne's contribution to the art of prose. Listen to this,
for example, from a sermon preached in St. Paul's in January, 1626:
Let me wither and wear out mine age in a discomfortable, in an
unwholesome, in a penurious prison, and so pay my debts with my
bones, and recompense the wastefulness of my youth with the beggary
of mine age; let me wither in a spittle under sharp, and foul, and
infamous diseases, and so recompense the wantonness of my youth
with that loathsomeness in mine age; yet, if God withdraw not his
spiritual blessings, his grace, his patience, if I can call my
suffering his doing, my passion his action, all this that is
temporal, is but a caterpillar got into one corner of my garden,
but a mildew fallen upon one acre of my corn: the body of all, the
substance of all is safe, so long as the soul is safe.
The self-contempt with which his imagination loved to intoxicate itself
finds more lavish expression in a passage in a sermon delivered on Easter
Sunday two years later:
When I consider what I was in my parents' loins (a substance
unworthy of a word, unworthy of a thought), when I consider what I
am now (a volume of diseases bound up together; a dry cinder, if I
look for natural, for radical moisture; and yet a sponge, a bottle
of overflowing Rheums, if I consider accidental; an aged child, a
grey-headed infant, and but the ghost of mine own youth), when I
consider what I shall be at last, by the hand of death, in my grave
(first, but putrefaction, and, not so much as putrefaction; I shall
not be able to send forth so much as ill air, not any air at all,
but shall be all insipid, tasteless, savourless, dust; for a while,
all worms, and after a while, not so much as worms, sordid,
senseless, nameless dust), when I consider the past, and present,
and future state of this body, in this world, I am able to
conceive, able to express the worst that can befall it in nature,
and the worst that can be inflicted on it by man, or fortune. But
the least degree of glory that God hath prepared for that body in
heaven, I am not able to express, not able to conceive.
Excerpts of great prose seldom give us that rounded and final beauty which
we expect in a work of art; and the reader of Donne's _Sermons_ in their
latest form will be wise if he comes to them expecting to find beauty
piecemeal and tarnished though in profusion. He will be wise, too, not to
expect too many passages of the same intimate kind as that famous
confession in regard to prayer which Mr. Pearsall Smith quotes, and which
no writer on Donne can afford not to quote:
I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite God,
and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and
his Angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach,
for the whining of a door. I talk on, in the same posture of
praying; eyes lifted up; knees bowed down; as though I prayed to
God; and, if God, or his Angels should ask me, when I thought last
of God in that prayer, I cannot tell. Sometimes I find that
I had forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget it, I
cannot tell. A memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of
to-morrow's dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a
light in mine eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my
brain troubles me in my prayer.
If Donne had written much prose in this kind, his _Sermons_ would be as
famous as the writings of any of the saints since the days of the
Apostles.
Even as it is, there is no other Elizabethan man of letters whose
personality is an island with a crooked shore, inviting us into a thousand
bays and creeks and river-mouths, to the same degree as the personality
that expressed itself in the poems, sermons, and life of John Donne. It is
a mysterious and at times repellent island. It lies only intermittently in
the sun. A fog hangs around its coast, and at the base of its most radiant
mountain-tops there is, as a rule, a miasma-infested swamp. There are
jewels to be found scattered among its rocks and over its surface, and by
miners in the dark. It is richer, indeed, in jewels and precious metals
and curious ornaments than in flowers. The shepherd on the hillside seldom
tells his tale uninterrupted. Strange rites in honour of ancient infernal
deities that delight in death are practised in hidden places, and the echo
of these reaches him on the sighs of the wind and makes him shudder even
as he looks at his beloved. It is an island with a cemetery smell. The
chief figure who haunts it is a living man in a winding-sheet. It is, no
doubt, Walton's story of the last days of Donne's life that makes us, as
we read even the sermons and the love-poems, so aware of this ghostly
apparition. Donne, it will be remembered, almost on the eve of his death,
dressed himself in a winding-sheet, "tied with knots at his head and
feet," and stood on a wooden urn with his eyes shut, and "with so much of
the sheet turned aside as might show his lean, pale, and death-like face,"
while a painter made a sketch of him for his funeral monument. He then had
the picture placed at his bedside, to which he summoned his friends and
servants in order to bid them farewell. As he lay awaiting death, he said
characteristically, "I were miserable if I might not die," and then
repeatedly, in a faint voice, "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done." At the
very end he lost his speech, and "as his soul ascended and his last breath
departed from him he closed his eyes, and then disposed his hands and body
into such a posture as required not the least alteration by those that
came to shroud him." It was a strange chance that preserved his spectral
monument almost uninjured when St. Paul's was burned down in the Great
Fire, and no other monument in the cathedral escaped. Among all his
fantasies none remains in the imagination more despotically than this last
fanciful game of dying. Donne, however, remained in all respects a
fantastic to the last, as we may see in that hymn which he wrote eight
days before the end, tricked out with queer geography, and so anciently
egoistic amid its worship, as in the verse:
Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie
Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown
That this is my south-west discovery,
_Per fretum febris_, by these straits to die.
Donne was the poet-geographer of himself, his mistresses, and his God.
Other poets of his time dived deeper and soared to greater altitudes, but
none travelled so far, so curiously, and in such out-of-the-way places,
now hurrying like a nervous fugitive, and now in the exultation of the
first man in a new found land.