The Poems of John Donne, Volume 2 (of 2)
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Title: The Poems of John Donne, Volume 2 (of 2)
Author: John Donne
Editor: Sir Herbert John Clifford Grierson
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THE POEMS OF JOHN DONNE
Edited from the Old Editions and Numerous Manuscripts
with Introductions & Commentary
by
HERBERT J. C. GRIERSON M.A.
Chalmers Professor of English Literature
in the University Of Aberdeen
VOL. II
Introduction and Commentary
Oxford
At the Clarendon Press
1912
Henry Frowde, M.A.
Publisher to the University of Oxford
London, Edinburgh, New York
Toronto and Melbourne
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION v
I. THE POETRY OF DONNE v
II. THE TEXT AND CANON OF DONNE'S POEMS lvi
COMMENTARY 1
INDEX OF FIRST LINES 276
INTRODUCTION
I
THE POETRY OF DONNE
Donne's position among English poets, regarded from the historical and
what we like to call scientific point of view, has been defined
with learning and discrimination by Mr. Courthope in his _History of
English Poetry_. As a phenomenon of curious interest for the student
of the history of thought and literary fashions, there it is. Mr.
Courthope is far too well-informed and judicious a critic to explain
Donne's subtle thought and erudite conceits by a reference to 'Marini
and his followers'. Gongora and Du Bartas are alike passed over in
silence. What we are shown is the connexion of 'metaphysical wit' with
the complex and far-reaching changes in men's conception of Nature
which make the seventeenth century perhaps the greatest epoch in human
thought since human thinking began.
The only thing that such a criticism leaves unexplained and undefined
is the interest which Donne's poetry still has for us, not as an
historical phenomenon, but as poetry. Literary history has for the
historian a quite distinct interest from that which it possesses for
the student and lover of literature. For the historian it is a
matter of positive interest to connect Donne's wit with the general
disintegration of mediaeval thought, to recognize the influence on
the Elizabethan drama of the doctrines of Machiavelli, or to find in
Pope's achievement in poetry a counterpart to Walpole's in politics.
For the lover of literature none of these facts has any positive
interest whatsoever. Donne's wit attracts or repels him equally
whatever be its source; Tamburlaine and Iago lose none of their
interest for us though we know nothing of Machiavelli; Pope's poetry
is not a whit more or less poetical by being a strange by-product of
the Whig spirit in English life. For the lover of literature, literary
history has an indirect value. He studies history that he may discount
it. What he relishes in a poet of the past is exactly the same
essential qualities as he enjoys in a poet of his own day--life and
passion and art. But between us and every poet or thinker of the past
hangs a thinner or thicker veil of outworn fashions and conventions.
The same life has clothed itself in different garbs; the same passions
have spoken in different images; the same art has adapted itself to
different circumstances. To the historian these old clothes are in
themselves a subject of interest. His enjoyment of Shakespeare is
heightened by finding the explanation of Falstaff's hose, Pistol's
hyperboles, and the poet's neglect of the Unities. To the lover of
literature they are, until by understanding he can discount them,
a disadvantage because they invest the work of the poet with an
irrelevant air of strangeness. He studies them that he may grow
familiar with them and forget them, that he may clear and intensify
his sense of what alone has permanent value, the poet's individuality
and the art in which it is expressed.
Donne's conceits, of which so much has been made and on whose
historical significance Mr. Courthope has probably said the last word,
are just like other examples of these old clothes. The question for
literature is not whence they came, but how he used them. Is he a
poet in virtue or in spite of them, or both? Are they fit only to be
gathered into a museum of antiquated fashions such as Johnson prefixed
to his study of the last poet who wore them in quite the old way
(for Dryden, who pilfered more freely from Donne than from any of his
predecessors, cut them to a new fashion), or are they the individual
and still expressive dress of a true and great poet, commanding
admiration in their own manner and degree as freshly and enduringly as
the stiff and brocaded magnificence of Milton's no less individual, no
less artificial style?
Donne's reputation as a poet has passed through many vicissitudes in
the course of the last three centuries. With regard to his 'wit',
its range and character, erudition and ingenuity, all generations of
critics have been at one. It is as to the relation of this 'wit' to,
and its effect on, his poetry that they have been at variance. To his
contemporaries the 'wit' was identical with the poetry. Donne's 'wit'
gave him the same supremacy among poets that learning and humour and
art gave to Jonson among dramatists. To certain of his Dutch admirers
the wit of _The Flea_ seemed superhuman, and the epitaph with which
Carew closes his _Elegy_ expresses the almost universal English
opinion of the seventeenth century:
Here lies a king that ruled as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit;
Here lies two flamens, and both those the best,
Apollo's first, at last the true God's priest.
It may be doubted if Milton shared this opinion. He never mentions
Donne, but it was probably of him or his imitators he was thinking
when in his verses at Cambridge he spoke of
those new-fangled toys and trimmings slight
Which take our late fantastics with delight.
Certainly the growing taste for 'correctness' led after the
Restoration to a discrimination between Donne's wit and his poetry.
'The greatest wit,' Dryden calls him, 'though not the greatest poet of
our nation.' What he wanted as a poet were just the two essentials
of 'classical' poetry--smoothness of verse and dignity of expression.
This point of view is stated with clearness and piquancy in the
sentences of outrageous flattery which Dryden addressed to the Earl of
Dorset in the opening paragraphs of his delightful _Essay on Satire_:
'There is more of salt in all your verses, than I have seen in
any of the moderns, or even of the ancients; but you have
been sparing of the gall, by which means you have pleased
all readers, and offended none. Donne alone, of all our
countrymen, had your talent; but was not happy enough to
arrive at your versification; and were he translated into
numbers, and English, he would yet be wanting in the dignity
of expression. That which is the prime virtue, and chief
ornament, of Virgil, which distinguishes him from the rest
of writers, is so conspicuous in your verses, that it casts a
shadow on all your contemporaries; we cannot be seen, or
but obscurely, while you are present. You equal Donne in the
variety, multiplicity, and choice of thoughts; you excel him
in the manner and the words. I read you both with the same
admiration, but not with the same delight.
He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but
in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and
perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of
philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain
them with the softnesses of love. In this (if I may be
pardoned for so bold a truth) Mr. Cowley has copied him to
a fault; so great a one, in my opinion, that it throws
his Mistress infinitely below his Pindarics and his latter
compositions, which are undoubtedly the best of his poems and
the most correct.'
Dryden's estimate of Donne, as well as his application to his poetry
of the epithet 'metaphysical', was transmitted through the eighteenth
century. Johnson's famous paragraphs in the _Life of Cowley_ do little
more than echo and expand Dryden's pronouncement, with a rather vaguer
use of the word 'metaphysical'. In Dryden's application it means
correctly 'philosophical'; in Johnson's, no more than 'learned'. 'The
metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning
was their whole endeavour; but unluckily resolving to show it in
rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they only wrote verses, and very
often such verses as stood the trial of the fingers better than of
the ear.' They 'drew their conceits from recesses of learning not very
much frequented by common readers of poetry'. Waller is exempted
from being a metaphysical poet because 'he seldom fetches an amorous
sentiment from the depths of science; his thoughts are for the most
part easily understood, and his images such as the superficies of
nature readily supplies'.
Even to those critics with whom began a revived appreciation of
Donne as a poet and preacher, his 'wit' still bulks largely. It
is impossible to escape from it. 'Wonder-exciting vigour,' writes
Coleridge, 'intenseness and peculiarity, using at will the almost
boundless stores of a capacious memory, and exercised on subjects
where we have no right to expect it--this is the wit of Donne.' And
lastly De Quincey, who alone of these critics recognizes the essential
quality which may, and in his best work does, make Donne's wit the
instrument of a mind which is not only subtle and ingenious but
profoundly poetical: 'Few writers have shown a more extraordinary
compass of powers than Donne; for he combined what no other man has
ever done--the last sublimation of dialectical subtlety and address
with the most impassioned majesty. Massy diamonds compose the very
substance of his poem on the Metempsychosis, thoughts and descriptions
which have the fervent and gloomy sublimity of Ezekiel or Aeschylus,
whilst a diamond dust of rhetorical brilliancies is strewed over the
whole of his occasional verses and his prose.'
What is to-day the value and interest of this wit which has arrested
the attention of so many generations? How far does it seem to us
compatible with poetry in the full and generally accepted sense of
the word, with poetry which quickens the imagination and touches
the heart, which satisfies and delights, which is the verbal and
rhythmical medium whereby a gifted soul communicates to those who have
ears to hear the content of impassioned moments?
Before coming to close quarters with this difficult and debated
question one may in the first place insist that there is in Donne's
verse a great deal which, whether it be poetry in the full sense
of the word or not, is arresting and of worth both historically
and intrinsically. Whatever we may think of Donne's poetry, it is
impossible not to recognize the extraordinary interest of his mind and
character. In an age of great and fascinating men he is not the least
so. The immortal and transcendent genius of Shakespeare leaves Donne,
as every other contemporary, lost in the shadows and cross-lights of
an age that is no longer ours, but from which Shakespeare emerges
into the clear sunlight. Of Bacon's mind, 'deep and slow, exhausting
thought,' and divining as none other the direction in which the road
led through the débris of outworn learning to a renovated science and
a new philosophy, Donne could not boast. Alike in his poetry and in
his soberest prose, treatise or sermon, Donne's mind seems to want the
high seriousness which comes from a conviction that truth is, and
is to be found. A spirit of scepticism and paradox plays through and
disturbs almost everything he wrote, except at moments when an intense
mood of feeling, whether love or devotion, begets faith, and silences
the sceptical and destructive wit by the power of vision rather than
of intellectual conviction. Poles apart as the two poets seem at a
first glance to lie in feeling and in art, there is yet something of
Tennyson in the conflict which wages perpetually in Donne's poetry
between feeling and intellect.
But short of the highest gifts of serene imagination or serene wisdom
Donne's mind has every power it well could, wit, insight, imagination;
and these move in such a strange medium of feeling and learning,
mediaeval, renaissance and modern, that every imprint becomes of
interest. To do full justice to that interest one's study of
Donne must include his prose as well as his verse, his paradoxical
_Pseudomartyr_, and equally paradoxical, more strangely mooded
_Biathanatos_, the intense and subtle eloquence of his sermons,
the tormented passion and wit of his devotions, and the gaiety
and melancholy, wit and wisdom, of his letters. But most of these
qualities have left their mark on his poetry, and given it interests
over and above its worth simply as poetry.
One quality of his verse, which has been somewhat overlooked by
critics intent upon the definition and sources of metaphysical wit, is
wit in our sense of the word, wit like the wit of Swift and Sheridan.
The habit in which this wit masquerades is doubtless old-fashioned. It
is not always the worse for that, for the wit of the Elizabethans
is delightfully blended with fancy and feeling. There is a little
of Jaques in all of them. But if fanciful and at times even boyish,
Donne's wit is still amusing, the quickest and most fertile wit of the
century till we come to the author of _Hudibras_.
It is not in the _Satyres_ that this wit is to us most obvious.
Nothing grows so soon out of date as contemporary satire. Even the
brilliance and polish of Pope's satire--and Pope's art is nowhere more
perfect than in _The Dunciad_ and the _Imitations of Horace_--cannot
interest us in Lord Hervey, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and
the forgotten poets of an unpoetic age. How then should we be
interested in Elizabeth's fantastic 'Presence', the streets of
sixteenth-century London, and the knavery of pursuivants, presented
with a satiric art which is wonderfully vivid and caustic but still
tentative,--over-emphatic, rough in style and verse, though with a
roughness which is obviously a studied and in a measure successful
effect. The verses upon _Coryats Crudities_ are in their way a
masterpiece of insult veiled as compliment, but it is a rather boyish
and barbarous way.
It is in the lighter of his love verses that Donne's laughable wit is
most obvious and most agile. Whatever one may think of the choice of
subject, and the flame of a young man's lust that burns undisguised
in some of the _Elegies_, it is impossible to ignore the dazzling wit
which neither flags nor falters from the first line to the last. And
in the more graceful and fanciful, the less heated _Songs and Sonets_,
the same wit, gay and insolent, disports itself in a philosophy of
love which must not be taken altogether seriously. Donne at least,
as we shall see, outgrew it. His attitude is very much that of
Shakespeare in the early comedies. But the Petrarchian love, which
Shakespeare treats with light and charming irony, the vows and tears
of Romeo and Proteus, Donne openly scoffs. He is one of Shakespeare's
young men as these were in the flesh and the Inns of Court, and he
tells us frankly what in their youthful cynicism (which is often even
more of a pose than their idealism) they think of love, and constancy,
and women.
Of all miracles, Donne cries, a constant woman is the greatest, of all
strange sights the strangest:
If thou findst one, let mee know,
Such a Pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet doe not, I would not goe,
Though at next doore wee might meet,
Though shee were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet shee
Will bee
False, ere I come, to two, or three.
But is it true that we desire to find her? Donne's answer is _Woman's
Constancy_:
Now thou hast lov'd me one whole day,
To-morrow when thou leav'st what wilt thou say?
She will, like Proteus in the _Two Gentlemen of Verona_, have no
dearth of sophistries--but why elaborate them?
Vain lunatique, against these scapes I could
Dispute, and conquer, if I would,
Which I abstaine to doe,
For by to-morrow, I may think so too.
Why ask for constancy when change is the life and law of love?
I can love both fair and brown;
Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays;
Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays.
. . . . . . .
I can love her and her, and you and you,
I can love any so she be not true.
It is not often that the reckless and wilful gaiety of youth masking
as cynicism has been expressed with such ebullient wit as in these
and companion songs. And when he adopts for a time the pose of the
faithful lover bewailing the cruelty of his mistress the sarcastic wit
is no less fertile. It would be difficult to find in the language a
more sustained succession of witty surprises than _The Will_. Others
were to catch these notes from Donne, and Suckling later flutes them
gaily in his lighter fashion, never with the same fullness of wit and
fancy, never with the same ardour of passion divinable through the
audacious extravagances.
But to amuse was by no means the sole aim of Donne's 'wit'; gay humour
touched with fancy and feeling is not its only quality. Donne's 'wit'
has many strands, his humour many moods, and before considering how
these are woven together into an effect that is entirely poetical,
we may note one or two of the soberer strands which run through his
_Letters_, _Epicedes_, and similar poems--descriptive, reflective, and
complimentary.
Not much of Donne's poetry is given to description. Of the feeling
for nature of the Elizabethans, their pastoral and ideal pictures of
meadow and wood and stream, which delighted the heart of Izaak Walton,
there is nothing in Donne. A greater contrast than that between
Marlowe's _Come live with me_ and Donne's imitation _The Baite_ it
would be hard to conceive. But in _The Storme_ and _The Calme_ Donne
used his wit to achieve an effect of realism which was something new
in English poetry, and was not reproduced till Swift wrote _The City
Shower_. From the first lines, which describe how
The South and West winds join'd, and as they blew,
Waves like a rolling trench before them threw,
to the close of _The Storme_ the noise of the contending elements is
deafening:
Thousands our noises were, yet we 'mongst all
Could none by his right name, but thunder call:
Lightning was all our light, and it rain'd more
Than if the Sunne had drunke the sea before.
. . . . . . . . .
Hearing hath deaf'd our sailors, and if they
Knew how to hear, there's none knowes what to say:
Compared to these stormes, death is but a qualme,
Hell somewhat lightsome, and the Bermuda calme.
The sense of tropical heat and calm in the companion poem is hardly
less oppressive, and, if the whole is not quite so happy as the
first, it contains two lines whose vivid and unexpected felicity is
as delightful to-day as when Ben Jonson recited them to Drummond at
Hawthornden:
No use of lanthorns; and in one place lay
Feathers and dust, to-day and yesterday.
Donne's letters generally fall into two groups. The first comprises
those addressed to his fellow-students at Cambridge and the Inns of
Court, the Woodwards, Brookes, and others, or to his maturer and more
fashionable companions in the quest of favour and employment at Court,
Wotton, and Goodyere, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. To the other
belong the complimentary and elegant epistles in which he delighted
and perhaps bewildered his noble lady friends and patronesses with
erudite and transcendental flattery.
In the first class, and the same is true of some of the _Satyres_,
notably the third, and of the satirical _Progresse of the Soule_,
especially at the beginning and the end, the reflective, moralizing
strain predominates. Donne's 'wit' becomes the instrument of a
criticism of life, grave or satiric, melancholy or stoical. Despite
Matthew Arnold's definition, verse of this kind seldom is poetry in
the full sense of the word; but, as Stevenson says in speaking of his
own Scotch verses, talk not song. The first of English poets was a
master of the art. Neither Horace nor Martial, whom Stevenson cites,
is a more delightful talker in verse than Geoffrey Chaucer, and the
archaism of his style seems only to lend the additional charm of a
lisp to his babble. Since Donne's day English poetry has been rich
in such verse talkers--Butler and Dryden, Pope and Swift, Cowper and
Burns, Byron and Shelley, Browning and Landor. It did not come easy to
the Elizabethans, whose natural accent was song. Donne's chief rivals
were Daniel and Jonson, and I venture to think that he excels them
both in the clear and pointed yet easy and conversational development
of his thought, in the play of wit and wisdom, and, despite the
pedantic cast of Elizabethan erudite moralizing, in the power to
leave on the reader the impression of a potent and yet a winning
personality. We seem to get nearer to the man himself in Donne's
letters to Goodyere and Wotton than in Daniel's weighty, but also
heavy, moralizing epistles to the Countess of Cumberland or Sir Thomas
Egerton; and the personality whose voice sounds so distinct and human
in our ear is a more attractive one than the harsh, censorious, burly
but a little blustering Jonson of the epistles on country life and
generous givers. Donne's style is less clumsy, his verse less stiff.
His wit brings to a clear point whatever he has to say, while from
his verse as from his prose letters there disengages itself a very
distinct sense of what it was in the man, underlying his brilliant
intellect, his almost superhuman cleverness, which won for him the
devotion of friends like Wotton and Goodyere and Walton and King, the
admiration of a stranger like Huyghens, who heard him talk as well as
preach:--a serious and melancholy, a generous and chivalrous spirit.
However, keepe the lively tast you hold
Of God, love him as now, but feare him more,
And in your afternoones thinke what you told
And promis'd him, at morning prayer before.
Let falshood like a discord anger you,
Else be not froward. But why doe I touch
Things, of which none is in your practise new,
And Tables, or fruit-trenchers teach as much;
But thus I make you keepe your promise Sir,
Riding I had you, though you still staid there,
And in these thoughts, although you never stirre,
You came with mee to Micham, and are here.
So he writes to Goodyere, but the letter to Wotton going Ambassador to
Venice is Donne's masterpiece in this simpler style, and it seems to
me that neither Daniel nor Jonson nor Drayton ever catches this note
at once sensitive and courtly. To find a like courtliness we must go
to Wotton; witness the reply to Donne's earlier epistle which I have
printed in the notes. But neither Wotton nor any other of the courtly
poets in Hannah's collection adds to this dignity so poignant a
personal accent.
This personal interest is very marked in the two satires which are
connected by tone and temper with the letters, the third of the
early, classical _Satyres_ and the opening and closing stanzas of
the _Progresse of the Soule_. Each is a vivid picture of the inner
workings of Donne's soul at a critical period in his life. The first
was doubtless written at the moment that he was passing from the Roman
to the Anglican Church. It is one of the earliest and most thoughtful
appeals for toleration, for the candid scrutiny of religious
differences, which was written perhaps in any country--one of the
most striking symptoms of the new eddies produced in the stream of
religious feeling by the meeting currents of the Reformation and the
Counter-Reformation.
It was a difficult and dangerous process through which Donne was
passing, this conversion from the Church of his fathers to conformity
with the Church of England as by law established. It would be as
absurd, in the face of a poem like this and of all that we know of
Donne's subsequent life, to call it a conversion in the full sense of
the term, a changed conviction, as to dub it an apostasy prompted
by purely political considerations. Yet doubtless the latter
predominated. The position of a Catholic in the reign of Elizabeth
was that of a man cut off rigorously from the main life of the nation,
with every avenue of honourable ambition closed to him. He had to live
the starved, suspected life of a recusant or to seek service under a
foreign power. Some of the most pathetic documents in Strype's _Annals
of the Reformation_ are those in which we hear the cry of young men of
secure station and means driven by conscientious conviction to abandon
home and country. It is possible that before 1592 Donne himself had
been sent abroad by relatives with a view to his entering a seminary
or the service of a foreign power. His mother spent a great part of
her life abroad, and his own relatives were among those who suffered
most severely under Walsingham's persecution. 'I had', Donne says, 'my
first breeding and conversation with men of suppressed and afflicted
Religion, accustomed to the despite of death, and hungry of an
imagined Martyrdome.' To a young man of ambition, and as yet certainly
with no bent to devotion or martyrdom, it was only common sense to
conform if he might.
From this dilemma Donne escaped, not by any opportune change of
conviction, or by any insincere profession, but by the way of
intellectual emancipation. He looks round in this satire and sees that
whichever be the true Church it is not by any painful quest of truth,
and through the attainment of conviction, that most people have
accepted the Church to which they may belong. Circumstances and
whim have had more to do with their choice than reason and serious
conviction. Yet it is only by search that truth is to be found:
On a huge hill
Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will
Reach her, about must, and about must goe;
And what the hills suddenes resists win so.
Yet strive so, that before age, deaths twilight,
Thy Soule rest, for none can work in that night.
It was not often in the sixteenth or seventeenth century that a
completely emancipated and critical attitude on religious, not
philosophical, questions was expressed with such entire frankness and
seriousness. From this position, Walton would have us believe, Donne
advanced through the study of Bellarmine and other controversialists
to a convinced acceptance of Anglican doctrine. The evidence points to
a rather different conclusion on Donne's part. He came to think that
all the Churches were 'virtual beams of one sun', 'connatural pieces
of one circle', a position from which the next step was to the
conclusion that for an Englishman the Anglican Church was the right
choice (Cujus regio, ejus religio); but Donne had not reached this
conclusion when he wrote the _Satyre_, and doubtless did not till he
had satisfied himself that the Church of England offered a reasonable
_via media_. But changes of creed made on purely intellectual grounds,
and prompted by practical motives, are not unattended with danger to
a man's moral and spiritual life. Donne had doubtless outwardly
conformed before he entered Egerton's service in 1598, but long
afterwards, when he is already in Orders, he utters a cry which
betrays how real the dilemma still was:
Show me, deare Christ, thy spouse, so bright and clear;
and the first result of his 'conversion' was apparently to deepen the
sceptical vein in his mind.
Scepticism and melancholy, bitter and sardonic, are certainly the
dominant notes in the sombre fragment of satire _The Progresse of the
Soule_, which he composed in 1601, when he was Sir Thomas Egerton's
secretary, four months before his marriage and six months after the
death of the Earl of Essex. There can be little doubt, as I have
ventured to suggest elsewhere, that it was the latter event which
provoked this strange and sombre explosion of spleen, a satire of the
same order as the _Tale of a Tub_ or the _Vision of Judgment_. The
account of the poem which Jonson gave to Drummond does not seem to be
quite accurate, though it was probably derived from Donne himself. It
was, one suspects from several circumstances, a little Donne's way in
later years to disguise the footprints of his earlier indiscretions.
According to this tradition the final _habitat_ of the soul which
'inanimated' the apple
Whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe,
was to be John Calvin. The tradition is interesting as marking how far
Donne was in 1601 from his later orthodox Protestantism, for Calvin is
never mentioned but with respect in the _Sermons_. A few months
later he wrote to Egerton disclaiming warmly all 'love of a corrupt
religion'. But, though sceptical in tone, the poem is written from a
Catholic standpoint; its theme is the progress of the soul of heresy.
And, as the seventh stanza clearly indicates, the great heretic in
whom the line closed was to be not Calvin but Queen Elizabeth:
the great soule which here among us now
Doth dwell, and moves that hand, and tongue, and brow
Which, as the Moone the sea, moves us.
Donne can hardly have thought of publishing such a poem, or
circulating it in the Queen's lifetime. It was an expression of the
mood which begot the 'black and envious slanders breath'd against
Diana for her divine justice on Actaeon' to which Jonson refers in
_Cynthia's Revels_ the same year. That some copies were circulated in
manuscript later is probably due to the reaction which brought
into favour at James's Court the Earl of Southampton and the former
adherents of Essex generally.
The tone, moreover, of the stanza quoted above suggests that it was
no vulgar libel on Elizabeth which Donne contemplated. Elizabeth, the
cruel persecutor of his Catholic kinsfolk, now stained with the blood
of her favourite, appeared to him somewhat as she did to Pope Sixtus,
a heretic but a great woman. He felt to her as Burke did to the 'whole
race of Guises, Condés and Colignis'--'the hand that like a destroying
angel smote the country communicated to it the force and energy under
which it suffered.' In a mood of bitter admiration, of sceptical and
sardonic wonder, he contemplates the great bad souls who had troubled
the world and served it too, for the idea on which the poem was to
rest is the disconcerting reflection that we owe many good things to
heretics and bad men:
Who ere thou beest that read'st this sullen Writ,
Which just so much courts thee, as thou dost it,
Let me arrest thy thoughts; wonder with mee,
Why plowing, building, ruling and the rest,
Or most of those arts, whence our lives are blest,
By cursed _Cains_ race invented be,
And blest _Seth_ vext us with Astronomie.
Ther's nothing simply good, nor ill alone,
Of every quality comparison,
The onely measure is, and judge, opinion.
It would have been interesting to read Donne's history of the great
souls that troubled and yet quickened the world from Cain to Arius and
from Mahomet to Elizabeth, but unfortunately Donne never got beyond
the introduction, a couple of cantos which describe the progress of
the soul while it is still passing through the vegetable and animal
planes, the motive of which, so far as it can be disentangled, is to
describe the pre-human education of a woman's soul:
keeping some quality
Of every past shape, she knew treachery,
Rapine, deceit, and lust, and ills enow
To be a woman.
The fragment has some of the sombre power which De Quincey attributes
to it, but on the whole one must confess it is a failure. The 'wit' of
Donne did not apparently include invention, for many of the episodes
seem pointless as well as disgusting, and indeed in no poem is the
least attractive side of Donne's mind so clearly revealed, that aspect
of his wit which to some readers is more repellent, more fatal to
his claim to be a poet, than too subtle ingenuity or misplaced
erudition--the vein of sheer ugliness which runs through his work,
presenting details that seem merely and wantonly repulsive. The same
vein is apparent in the work of Chapman, of Jonson, and even in places
of Spenser, and the imagery of _Hamlet_ and the tragedies owes some of
its dramatic vividness and power to the same quality. The ugly has its
place in art, and it would not be difficult to find it in every phase
of Renaissance art, marked like the beautiful in that art by the
same evidence of power. Decadence brought with it not ugliness but
prettiness.
The reflective, philosophic, somewhat melancholy strain of the poems
I have been touching on reappears in the letters addressed to noble
ladies. Here, however, it is softened, less sardonic in tone, while
it blends with or gives place to another strain, that of absurd and
extravagant but fanciful and subtle compliment. Donne cannot write to
a lady without his heart and fancy taking wing in their own passionate
and erudite fashion. Scholastic theology is made the instrument
of courtly compliment and pious flirtation. He blends in the
same disturbing fashion as in some of the songs and elegies that
depreciation of woman in general, which he owes less to classical
poetry than to his over-acquaintance with the Fathers, with an
adoration of her charms in the individual which passes into the
transcendental. He tells the Countess of Huntingdon that active
goodness in a woman is a miracle; but it is clear that she and the
Countess of Bedford and Mrs. Herbert and Lady Carey and the Countess
of Salisbury are all examples of such miracle--ladies whose beauty
itself is virtue, while their virtues are a mystery revealable only to
the initiated.
The highest place is held by Lady Bedford and Mrs. Herbert. Nothing
could surpass the strain of intellectual and etherealized compliment
in which he addresses the Countess. If lines like the following are
not pure poetry, they haunt some quaint borderland of poetry to which
the polished felicities of Pope's compliments are a stranger. If not
pure fancy, they are not mere ingenuity, being too intellectual and
argumentative for the one, too winged and ardent for the other:
Should I say I liv'd darker then were true,
Your radiation can all clouds subdue;
But one, 'tis best light to contemplate you.
You, for whose body God made better clay,
Or tooke Soules stuffe such as shall late decay,
Or such as needs small change at the last day.
This, as an Amber drop enwraps a Bee,
Covering discovers your quicke Soule; that we
May in your through-shine front your hearts thoughts see.
You teach (though wee learne not) a thing unknowne
To our late times, the use of specular stone,
Through which all things within without were shown.
Of such were Temples; so and such you are;
_Beeing_ and _seeming_ is your equall care,
And _vertues_ whole _summe_ is but _know_ and _dare_.
The long poem dedicated to the same lady's beauty,
You have refin'd me
is in a like dazzling and subtle vein. Those addressed to Mrs.
Herbert, notably the letter
Mad paper stay,
and the beautiful _Elegie_
No Spring, nor Summer Beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one Autumnall face,
are less transcendental in tone but bespeak an even warmer admiration.
Indeed it is clear to any careful reader that in the poems addressed
to both these ladies there is blended with the respectful flattery of
the dependant not a little of the tone of warmer feeling permitted to
the 'servant' by Troubadour convention. And I suspect that some poems,
the tone of which is still more frankly and ardently lover-like, were
addressed to Lady Bedford and Mrs. Herbert, though they have come to
us without positive indication.
The title of the subtle, passionate, sonorous lyric _Twicknam Garden_,
Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with teares,
points to the person addressed, for Twickenham Park was the residence
of Lady Bedford from 1607 to 1618, and Donne's intimacy with her seems
to have begun in or about 1608. There can, I think, be little doubt
that it is to her, and neither to his wife nor the mistresses of his
earlier, wandering fancy, that these lines, conventional in theme
but given an amazing _timbre_ by the impulse of Donne's subtle and
passionate mind, were addressed. But if _Twicknam Garden_ was written
to Lady Bedford, so also, one is tempted to think, must have been _A
Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day_, for Lucy was the Countess's name,
and the thought, feeling, and rhythm of the two poems are strikingly
similar.
But the _Nocturnall_ is a sincerer and profounder poem than _Twicknam
Garden_, and it is more difficult to imagine it the expression of a
conventional sentiment. Mr. Gosse, and there is no higher authority
when it comes to the interpretation of Donne's character and mind,
rightly, I think, suggests that the death of the lady addressed is
assumed, not actual, but he connects the poem with Donne's earlier and
troubled loves. 'So also in a most curious ode, the _Nocturnal_ ...,
amid fireworks of conceit, he calls his mistress dead and protests
that his hatred has grown cold at last.' But I can find no note of
bitterness, active or spent, in the song. It _might_ have been written
to Ann More. It is a highly metaphysical yet sombre and sincere
description of the emptiness of life without love. The critics have,
I think, failed somewhat to reckon with this stratum in Donne's songs,
of poems Petrarchian in convention but with a Petrarchianism coloured
by Donne's realistic temper and impatient wit. Any interpretation of
so enigmatical a poem must be conjectural, but before one denied too
positively that its subject was Lady Bedford--perhaps her illness
in 1612--one would need to answer two questions, how far could a
conventional passion inspire a strain so sincere, and what was Donne's
feeling for Lady Bedford and hers for him?
Poetry is the language of passion, but the passion which moves the
poet most constantly is the delight of making poetry, and very little
is sufficient to quicken the imagination to its congenial task.
Our soberer minds are apt to think that there must be an actual,
particular experience behind every sincere poem. But history refutes
the idea of such a simple relation between experience and art. No
poet will sing of love convincingly who has never loved, but that
experience will suffice him for many and diverse webs of song and
drama. Without pursuing the theme, it is sufficient for the moment to
recall that in the fashion of the day Spenser's sonnets were addressed
to Lady Carey, not to his wife; that it was to Idea or to Anne Goodere
that Drayton wrote so passionate a poem as
Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part;
and that we know very little of what really lies behind Shakespeare's
profound and plangent sonnets, weave what web of fancy we will.
Of Lady Bedford's feeling for Donne we know only what his letters
reveal, and that is no more than that she was his warm friend
and generous patroness. It is clear, however, from their enduring
friendship and from the tone of that correspondence that she found in
him a friend of a rarer and finer calibre than in the other poets whom
she patronized in turn, Daniel and Drayton and Jonson--some one whose
sensitive, complex, fascinating personality could hardly fail to touch
a woman's imagination and heart. Friendship between man and woman is
love in some degree. There is no need to exaggerate the situation, or
to reflect on either her loyalty or his to other claims, to recognize
that their mutual feeling was of the kind for which the Petrarchian
convention afforded a ready and recognized vehicle of expression.
And so it was, one fancies, with Mrs. Herbert. She too found in Donne
a rare and comprehending spirit, and he in her a gracious and delicate
friend. His relation to her, indeed, was probably simpler than to
Lady Bedford, their friendship more equal. The letter and the elegy
referred to already are instinct with affection and tender reverence.
To her Donne sent some of his earliest religious sonnets, with a
sonnet on her beautiful name. And to her also it would seem that at
some period in the history of their friendship, the beginning of which
is very difficult to date, he wrote songs in the tone of hopeless,
impatient passion, of Petrarch writing to Laura, and others which
celebrate their mutual affection as a love that rose superior to
earthly and physical passion. The clue here is the title prefixed to
that strange poem _The Primrose, being at Montgomery Castle upon the
hill on which it is situate_. It is true that the title is found
for the first time in the edition of 1635 and is in none of the
manuscripts. But it is easier to explain the occasional suppression
of a revealing title than to conceive a motive for inventing such
a gloss. The poem is doubtless, as Mr. Gosse says, 'a mystical
celebration of the beauty, dignity and intelligence of Magdalen
Herbert'--a celebration, however, which takes the form (as it might
with Petrarch) of a reproach, a reproach which Donne's passionate
temper and caustic wit seem even to touch with scorn. He appears to
hint to Mrs. Herbert that to wish to be more than a woman, to claim
worship in place of love, is to be a worse monster than a coquette:
Since there must reside
Falshood in woman, I could more abide
She were by Art, than Nature falsifi'd.
Woman needs no advantages to arbitrate the fate of man.
In exactly the same mood as _The Primrose_ is _The Blossome_, possibly
written in the same place and on the same day, for the poet is
preparing to return to London. _The Dampe_ is in an even more scornful
tone, and one hesitates to connect it with Mrs. Herbert. But all these
poems recur so repeatedly together in the manuscripts as to suggest
that they have a common origin. And with them go the beautiful poems
_The Funerall_ and _The Relique_. In the former the cruelty of
the lady has killed her lover, but in the second the tone changes
entirely, the relation between Donne and Mrs. Herbert (note the lines
Thou shalt be a Mary _Magdalen_ and I
A something else thereby)
has ceased to be Petrarchian and become Platonic, their love a thing
pure and of the spirit, but none the less passionate for that:
First, we lov'd well and faithfully,
Yet knew not what wee lov'd, nor why,
Difference of sex no more wee knew,
Then our Guardian Angells doe;
Comming and going, wee
Perchance might kisse, but not between those meales;
Our hands ne'r toucht the seales,
Which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free:
These miracles wee did; but now alas,
All measure, and all language, I should passe,
Should I tell what a miracle shee was.
Such were the notes that a poet in the seventeenth century might still
sing to a high-born lady his patroness and his friend. No one who
knows the fashion of the day will read into them more than they were
intended to convey. No one who knows human nature will read them as
merely frigid and conventional compliments. Any uncertainty one may
feel about the subject arises not from their being love-poems, but
from the difficulty which Donne has in adjusting himself to the
Petrarchian convention, the tendency of his passionate heart and
satiric wit to break through the prescribed tone of worship and
complaint.
Without some touch of passion, some vibration of the heart, Donne is
only too apt to accumulate 'monstrous and disgusting hyperboles'. This
is very obvious in the _Epicedes_--his complimentary laments for the
young Lord Harington, Miss Boulstred, Lady Markham, Elizabeth Drury
and the Marquis of Hamilton, poems in which it is difficult to find a
line that moves. Indeed, seventeenth-century elegies are not as a rule
pathetic. A poem in the simple, piercing strain and the Wordsworthian
plainness of style of the Dutch poet Vondel's lament for his little
daughter is hardly to be found in English. An occasional epitaph like
Browne's
May! be thou never grac'd with birds that sing,
Nor Flora's pride!
In thee all flowers and roses spring,
Mine only died,
comes near it, but in general seventeenth-century elegy is apt to
spend itself on three not easily reconcilable themes--extravagant
eulogy of the dead, which is the characteristically Renaissance
strain, the Mediaeval meditation on death and its horrors, the more
simply Christian mood of hope rising at times to the rapt vision of
a higher life. In the pastoral elegy, such as _Lycidas_, the poet
was able to escape from a too literal treatment of the first into a
sequence of charming conventions. The second was alien to Milton's
thought, and with his genius for turning everything to beauty Milton
extracts from the reference to the circumstances of King's death the
only touch of pathos in the poem:
Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding Seas
Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld,
and some of his loveliest allusions:
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks towards _Namancos_ and _Bayona's_ hold;
Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.
And, O ye _Dolphins_, waft the hapless youth.
In the metaphysical elegy as cultivated by Donne, Beaumont, and others
there was no escape from extravagant eulogy and sorrow by way of
pastoral convention and mythological embroidery, and this class of
poetry includes some of the worst verses ever written. In Donne all
three of the strains referred to are present, but only in the third
does he achieve what can be truly called poetry. In the elegies on
Lord Harington and Miss Boulstred and Lady Markham it is difficult to
say which is more repellent--the images in which the poet sets forth
the vanity of human life and the humiliations of death or the frigid
and blasphemous hyperboles in which the virtues of the dead are
eulogized.
Even the _Second Anniversary_, the greatest of Donne's epicedes, is
marred throughout by these faults. There is no stranger poem in
the English language in its combination of excellences and faults,
splendid audacities and execrable extravagances. 'Fervour of
inspiration, depth and force and glow of thought and emotion and
expression'--it has something of all these high qualities which
Swinburne claimed; but the fervour is in great part misdirected, the
emotion only half sincere, the thought more subtle than profound,
the expression heated indeed but with a heat which only in passages
kindles to the glow of poetry.
Such are the passages in which the poet contemplates the joys of
heaven. There is nothing more instinct with beautiful feeling in
_Lycidas_ than some of the lines of Apocalyptic imagery at the close:
There entertain him all the Saints above,
In solemn troops, and sweet Societies
That sing, and singing in their glory move,
And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.
But in spiritual sense, in passionate awareness of the transcendent,
there are lines in Donne's poem that seem to me superior to
anything in Milton if not in purity of Christian feeling, yet in the
passionate, mystical sense of the infinite as something other than
the finite, something which no suggestion of illimitable extent and
superhuman power can ever in any degree communicate.
Think then my soule that death is but a Groome,
Which brings a Taper to the outward roome,
Whence thou spiest first a little glimmering light,
And after brings it nearer to thy sight:
For such approaches does heaven make in death.
. . . . . . .
Up, up my drowsie Soule, where thy new eare
Shall in the Angels songs no discord heere, &c.
In passages like these there is an earnest of the highest note of
spiritual eloquence that Donne was to attain to in his sermons and
last hymns.
Another aspect of Donne's poetry in the _Anniversaries_, of his
_contemptus mundi_ and ecstatic vision, connects them more closely
with Tennyson's _In Memoriam_ than Milton's _Lycidas_. Like Tennyson,
Donne is much concerned with the progress of science, the revolution
which was going on in men's knowledge of the universe, and its
disintegrating effect on accepted beliefs. To him the new astronomy is
as bewildering in its displacement of the earth and disturbance of a
concentric universe as the new geology was to be to Tennyson with the
vistas which it opened into the infinities of time, the origin and the
destiny of man:
The new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The Element of fire is quite put out;
The Sun is lost, and th' earth, and no mans wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confesse that this world's spent,
When in the Planets, and the Firmament
They seeke so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies.
On Tennyson the effect of a similar dislocation of thought, the
revelation of a Nature which seemed to bring to death and bring to
life through endless ages, careless alike of individual and type, was
religious doubt tending to despair:
O life as futile, then, as frail!
. . . . .
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.
On Donne the effect was quite the opposite. It was not of religion he
doubted but of science, of human knowledge with its uncertainties, its
shifting theories, its concern about the unimportant:
Poore soule, in this thy flesh what dost thou know?
Thou know'st thy selfe so little, as thou know'st not,
How thou didst die, nor how thou wast begot.
. . . . . . . . .
Have not all soules thought
For many ages, that our body is wrought
Of Ayre, and Fire, and other Elements?
And now they thinke of new ingredients;
And one Soule thinkes one, and another way
Another thinkes, and 'tis an even lay.
. . . . . . . . .
Wee see in Authors, too stiffe to recant,
A hundred controversies of an Ant;
And yet one watches, starves, freeses, and sweats,
To know but Catechismes and Alphabets
Of unconcerning things, matters of fact;
How others on our stage their parts did Act;
What _Cæsar_ did, yea, and what _Cicero_ said.
With this welter of shifting theories and worthless facts he contrasts
the vision of which religious faith is the earnest here:
In this low forme, poore soule, what wilt thou doe?
When wilt thou shake off this Pedantery,
Of being taught by sense, and Fantasie?
Thou look'st through spectacles; small things seeme great
Below; But up unto the watch-towre get,
And see all things despoyl'd of fallacies:
Thou shalt not peepe through lattices of eyes,
Nor heare through Labyrinths of eares, nor learne
By circuit, or collections, to discerne.
In heaven thou straight know'st all concerning it,
And what concernes it not, shalt straight forget.
It will seem to some readers hardly fair to compare a poem like _In
Memoriam_, which, if in places the staple of its feeling and thought
wears a little thin, is entirely serious throughout, with poems which
have so much the character of an intellectual _tour de force_ as
Donne's _Anniversaries_, but it is easy to be unjust to the sincerity
of Donne in these poems. Their extravagant eulogy did not argue any
insincerity to Sir Robert and Lady Drury. It was in the manner of the
time, and doubtless seemed to them as natural an expression of grief
as the elaborate marble and alabaster tomb which they erected to the
memory of their daughter. The _Second Anniversarie_ was written in
France when Donne was resident there with the Drurys. And it was
on this occasion that Donne had the vision of his absent wife which
Walton has related so graphically. The spiritual sense in Donne was
as real a thing as the restless and unruly wit, or the sensual,
passionate temperament. The main thesis of the poem, the comparative
worthlessness of this life, the transcendence of the spiritual, was
as sincere in Donne's case as was in Tennyson the conviction of the
futility of life if death closes all. It was to be the theme of the
finest passages in his eloquent sermons, the burden of all that
is most truly religious in the verse and prose of a passionate,
intellectual, self-tormenting soul to whom the pure ecstasy of love of
a Vondel, the tender raptures of a Crashaw, the chastened piety of a
Herbert, the mystical perceptions of a Vaughan could never be quite
congenial.
I have dwelt at some length on those aspects of Donne's 'wit' which
are of interest and value even to a reader who may feel doubtful as to
the beauty and interest of his poetry as such, because they too
have been obscured by the criticism which with Dr. Johnson and Mr.
Courthope represents his wit as a monster of misapplied ingenuity, his
interest as historical and historical only. Apart from poetry there is
in Donne's 'wit' a great deal that is still fresh and vivid, wit as we
understand wit; satire pungent and vivid; reflection on religion
and on life, rugged at times in form but never really unmusical as
Jonson's verse is unmusical, and, despite frequent carelessness,
singularly lucid and felicitous in expression; elegant compliment,
extravagant and grotesque at times but often subtle and piquant;
and in the _Anniversaries_, amid much that is both puerile and
extravagant, a loftier strain of impassioned reflection and vision. It
is not of course that these things are not, or may not be constituents
of poetry, made poetic by their handling. To me it seems that in Donne
they generally are. It is the poet in Donne which flavours them all,
touching his wit with fancy, his reflection with imagination, his
vision with passion. But if we wish to estimate the poet simply in
Donne, we must examine his love-poetry and his religious poetry. It is
here that every one who cares for his unique and arresting genius will
admit that he must stand or fall as a great poet.
For it is here that we find the full effect of what De Quincey points
to as Donne's peculiarity, the combination of dialectical subtlety
with weight and force of passion. Objections to admit the poetic worth
and interest of Donne's love-poetry come from two sides--from those
who are indisposed to admit that passion, and especially the
passion of love, can ever speak so ingeniously (this was the
eighteenth-century criticism); and from those, and these are his more
modern critics, who deny that Donne is a great poet because with rare
exceptions, exceptions rather of occasional lines and phrases than of
whole poems, his songs and elegies lack beauty. Can poetry be at once
passionate and ingenious, sincere in feeling and witty,--packed with
thought, and that subtle and abstract thought, Scholastic dialectic?
Can love-poetry speak a language which is impassioned and expressive
but lacks beauty, is quite different from the language of Dante
and Petrarch, the loveliest language that lovers ever spoke, or the
picturesque hyperboles of _Romeo and Juliet_? Must not the imagery and
the cadences of love poetry reflect 'l'infinita, ineffabile bellezza'
which is its inspiration?
The first criticism is put very clearly by Steele, who goes so far as
to exemplify what the style of love-poetry should be; and certainly
it is something entirely different from that of _The Extasie_ or the
_Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day_. Nothing could illustrate better the
'return to nature' of our Augustan literature than Steele's words:
'I will suppose an author to be really possessed with the
passion which he writes upon and then we shall see how he
would acquit himself. This I take to be the safest way to form
a judgement upon him: since if he be not truly moved, he
must at least work up his imagination as near as possible
to resemble reality. I choose to instance in love, which is
observed to have produced the most finished performances in
this kind. A lover will be full of sincerity, that he may be
believed by his mistress; he will therefore think simply; he
will express himself perspicuously, that he may not perplex
her; he will therefore write unaffectedly. Deep reflections
are made by a head undisturbed; and points of wit and fancy
are the work of a heart at ease; these two dangers then into
which poets are apt to run, are effectually removed out of the
lover's way. The selecting proper circumstances, and placing
them in agreeable lights, are the finest secrets of all
poetry; but the recollection of little circumstances is the
lover's sole meditation, and relating them pleasantly, the
business of his life. Accordingly we find that the most
celebrated authors of this rank excel in love-verses. Out of
ten thousand instances I shall name one which I think the most
delicate and tender I ever saw.
To myself I sigh often, without knowing why;
And when absent from Phyllis methinks I could die.
A man who hath ever been in love will be touched by the
reading of these lines; and everyone who now feels that
passion, actually feels that they are true.'
It is not possible to find so distinct a statement of the other view
to which I have referred, but I could imagine it coming from Mr.
Robert Bridges, or (since I have no authority to quote Mr. Bridges in
this connexion) from an admirer of his beautiful poetry. Mr. Bridges'
love-poetry is far indeed from the vapid naturalness which Steele
commended in _The Guardian_. It is as instinct with thought, and
subtle thought, as Donne's own poetry; but the final effect of his
poetry is beauty, emotion recollected in tranquillity, and recollected
especially in order to fix its delicate beauty in appropriate and
musical words:
Awake, my heart, to be loved, awake, awake!
The darkness silvers away, the morn doth break,
It leaps in the sky: unrisen lustres slake
The o'ertaken moon. Awake, O heart, awake!
She too that loveth awaketh and hopes for thee;
Her eyes already have sped the shades that flee,
Already they watch the path thy feet shall take:
Awake, O heart, to be loved, awake, awake!
And if thou tarry from her,--if this could be,--
She cometh herself, O heart, to be loved, to thee;
For thee would unashamed herself forsake:
Awake to be loved, my heart, awake, awake!
Awake, the land is scattered with light, and see,
Uncanopied sleep is flying from field and tree:
And blossoming boughs of April in laughter shake;
Awake, O heart, to be loved, awake, awake!
Lo all things wake and tarry and look for thee:
She looketh and saith, 'O sun, now bring him to me.
Come more adored, O adored, for his coming's sake,
And awake my heart to be loved: awake, awake!'
Donne has written nothing at once so subtle and so pure and lovely
as this, nothing the end and aim of which is so entirely to leave an
untroubled impression of beauty.
But it is not true either that the thought and imagery of love-poetry
must be of the simple, obvious kind which Steele supposes, that any
display of dialectical subtlety, any scintillation of wit, must be
fatal to the impression of sincerity and feeling, or on the other hand
that love is always a beautiful emotion naturally expressing itself in
delicate and beautiful language. To some natures love comes as above
all things a force quickening the mind, intensifying its purely
intellectual energy, opening new vistas of thought abstract and
subtle, making the soul 'intensely, wondrously alive'. Of such were
Donne and Browning. A love-poem like 'Come into the garden, Maud'
suspends thought and fills the mind with a succession of picturesque
and voluptuous images in harmony with the dominant mood. A poem such
as _The Anniversarie_ or _The Extasie_, _The Last Ride Together_ or
_Too Late_, is a record of intense, rapid thinking, expressed in the
simplest, most appropriate language--and it is a no whit less natural
utterance of passion. Even the abstractness of the thought, on
which Mr. Courthope lays so much stress in speaking of Donne and the
'metaphysicals' generally, is no necessary implication of want of
feeling. It has been said of St. Augustine 'that his most profound
thoughts regarding the first and last things arose out of prayer ...
concentration of his whole being in prayer led to the most abstract
observation'. So it may be with love-poetry--so it was with Dante in
the _Vita Nuova_, and so, on a lower scale, and allowing for the time
that the passion is a more earthly and sensual one, the thought more
capricious and unruly, with Donne. The _Nocturnall upon S. Lucies
Day_ is not less passionate because that passion finds expression in
abstract and subtle thought. Nor is it true that all love-poetry is
beautiful. Of none of the four poems I have mentioned in the last
paragraph is pure beauty, beauty such as is the note of Mr. Bridges'
song, the distinctive quality. It is rather vivid realism:
And alive I shall keep and long, you will see!
I knew a man, was kicked like a dog
From gutter to cesspool; what cared he
So long as he picked from the filth his prog?
He saw youth, beauty and genius die,
And jollily lived to his hundredth year.
But I will live otherwise: none of such life!
At once I begin as I mean to end.
But this sacrifice of beauty to dramatic vividness is a characteristic
of passionate poetry. Beauty is not precisely the quality we should
predicate of the burning lines of Sappho translated by Catullus:
lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinant aures geminae, teguntur
lumina nocte.
Beauty is the quality of poetry which records an ideal passion
recollected in tranquillity, rather than of poetry either dramatic or
lyric which utters the very movement and moment of passion itself.
Donne's love-poetry is a very complex phenomenon, but the two dominant
strains in it are just these: the strain of dialectic, subtle play
of argument and wit, erudite and fantastic; and the strain of vivid
realism, the record of a passion which is not ideal nor conventional,
neither recollected in tranquillity nor a pure product of literary
fashion, but love as an actual, immediate experience in all its
moods, gay and angry, scornful and rapturous with joy, touched with
tenderness and darkened with sorrow--though these last two moods,
the commonest in love-poetry, are with Donne the rarest. The first of
these strains comes to Donne from the Middle Ages, the dialectic of
the Schools, which passed into mediaeval love-poetry almost from
its inception; the second is the expression of the new temper of the
Renaissance as Donne had assimilated it in Latin countries. Donne uses
the method, the dialectic of the mediaeval love-poets, the poets
of the _dolce stil nuovo_, Guinicelli, Cavalcanti, Dante, and their
successors, the intellectual, argumentative evolution of their
_canzoni_, but he uses it to express a temper of mind and a conception
of love which are at the opposite pole from their lofty idealism. The
result, however, is not so entirely disintegrating as Mr. Courthope
seems to think: 'This fine Platonic edifice is ruthlessly demolished
in the poetry of Donne. To him love, in its infinite variety and
inconsistency, represented the principle of perpetual flux in
nature.'[1] The truth is rather that, owing to the fullness of Donne's
experience as a lover, the accident that made of the earlier libertine
a devoted lover and husband, and from the play of his restless and
subtle mind on the phenomenon of love conceived and realized in this
less ideal fashion, there emerged in his poetry the suggestion of
a new philosophy of love which, if less transcendental than that
of Dante, rests on a juster, because a less dualistic and ascetic,
conception of the nature of the love of man and woman.
The fundamental weakness of the mediaeval doctrine of love, despite
its refining influence and its exaltation of woman, was that it
proved unable to justify love ethically against the claims of the
counter-ideal of asceticism. Taking its rise in a relationship which
excluded the thought of marriage as the end and justification of love,
which presumed in theory that the relation of the 'servant' to his
lady must always be one of reverent and unrewarded service, this
poetry found itself involved from the beginning in a dualism from
which there was no escape. On the one hand the love of woman is the
great ennobler of the human heart, the influence which elicits its
latent virtue as the sun converts clay to gold and precious stones. On
the other hand, love is a passion which in the end is to be repented
of in sackcloth and ashes. Lancelot is the knight whom love has made
perfect in all the virtues of manhood and chivalry; but the vision of
the Holy Grail is not for him, but for the virgin and stainless Sir
Galahad.
In the high philosophy of the Tuscan poets of the 'sweet new style'
that dualism was apparently transcended, but it was by making love
identical with religion, by emptying it of earthly passion, making
woman an Angel, a pure Intelligence, love of whom is the first
awakening of the love of God. 'For Dante and the poets of the learned
school love and virtue were one and the same thing; love _was_
religion, the lady beloved the way to heaven, symbol of philosophy and
finally of theology.'[2] The culminating moment in Dante's love for
Beatrice arrives when he has overcome even the desire that she should
return his salutation and he finds his full beatitude in 'those words
that do praise my lady'. The love that begins in the _Vita Nuova_ is
completed in the _Paradiso_.
The dualism thus in appearance transcended by Dante reappears sharply
and distinctly in Petrarch. 'Petrarch', says Gaspary, 'adores not the
idea but the person of his lady; he feels that in his affections there
is an earthly element, he cannot separate it from the desire of the
senses; this is the earthly tegument which draws us down. If not as,
according to the ascetic doctrine, sin, if he could not be ashamed of
his passion, yet he could repent of it as a vain and frivolous thing,
regret his wasted hopes and griefs.'[3] Laura is for Petrarch the
flower of all perfection herself and the source of every virtue in her
lover. Yet his love for Laura is a long and weary aberration of
the soul from her true goal, which is the love of God. This is the
contradiction from which flow some of the most lyrical strains in
Petrarch's poetry, as the fine canzone 'I'vo pensando', where he
cries:
E sento ad ora ad or venirmi in core
Un leggiadro disdegno, aspro e severo,
Ch'ogni occulto pensero
Tira in mezzo la fronte, ov' altri 'l vede;
Che mortal cosa amar con tanta fede,
Quanta a Dio sol per debito convensi,
Più si disdice a chi più pregio brama.
Elizabethan love-poetry is descended from Petrarch by way of Cardinal
Bembo and the French poets of the _Pléiade_, notably Ronsard
and Desportes. Of all the Elizabethan sonneteers the most finely
Petrarchian are Sidney and Spenser, especially the former. For Sidney,
Stella is the school of virtue and nobility. He too writes at times in
the impatient strain of Petrarch:
But ah! Desire still cries, give me some food.
And in the end both Sidney and Spenser turn from earthly to heavenly
love:
Leave me, O love, which reachest but to dust,
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things:
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust,
Whatever fades but fading pleasure brings.
And so Spenser:
Many lewd lays (Ah! woe is me the more)
In praise of that mad fit, which fools call love,
I have in the heat of youth made heretofore;
That in light wits affection loose did move,
But all these follies now I do reprove.
But two things had come over this idealist and courtly love-poetry by
the end of the sixteenth century. It had become a literary artifice, a
refining upon outworn and extravagant conceits, losing itself at
times in the fantastic and absurd. A more important fact was that this
poetry had begun to absorb a new warmth and spirit, not from Petrarch
and mediaeval chivalry, but from classical love-poetry with its
simpler, less metaphysical strain, its equally intense but more
realistic description of passion, its radically different conception
of the relation between the lovers and of the influence of love in a
man's life. The courtly, idealistic strain was crossed by an Epicurean
and sensuous one that tends to treat with scorn the worship of woman,
and echoes again and again the Pagan cry, never heard in Dante or
Petrarch, of the fleetingness of beauty and love:
Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus!
Soles occidere et redire possunt:
Nobis quum semel occidit brevis lux
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.
Vivez si m'en croyez, n'attendez à demain;
Cueillez dès aujourd'hui les roses de la vie.
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
Now if we turn from Elizabethan love-poetry to the _Songs and Sonets_
and the _Elegies_ of Donne, we find at once two distinguishing
features. In the first place his poetry is in one respect less
classical than theirs. There is far less in it of the superficial
evidence of classical learning with which the poetry of the
'University Wits' abounds, pastoral and mythological imagery. The
texture of his poetry is more mediaeval than theirs in as far as it is
more dialectical, though a dialectical evolution is not infrequent
in the Elizabethan sonnet, and the imagery is less picturesque, more
scientific, philosophic, realistic, and homely. The place of the
goodly exiled train
Of gods and goddesses
is taken by images drawn from all the sciences of the day, from the
definitions and distinctions of the Schoolmen, from the travels and
speculations of the new age, and (as in Shakespeare's tragedies or
Browning's poems) from the experiences of everyday life. Maps and sea
discoveries, latitude and longitude, the phoenix and the mandrake's
root, the Scholastic theories of Angelic bodies and Angelic knowledge,
Alchemy and Astrology, legal contracts and _non obstantes_, 'late
schoolboys and sour prentices,' 'the king's real and his stamped
face'--these are the kind of images, erudite, fanciful, and homely,
which give to Donne's poems a texture so different at a first glance
from the florid and diffuse Elizabethan poetry, whether romantic epic,
mythological idyll, sonnet, or song; while by their presence and
their abundance they distinguish it equally (as Mr. Gosse has
justly insisted) from the studiously moderate and plain style of
'well-languaged Daniel'.
But if the imagery of Donne's poetry be less classical than that of
Marlowe or the younger Shakespeare there is no poet the spirit of
whose love-poetry is so classical, so penetrated with the sensual,
realistic, scornful tone of the Latin lyric and elegiac poets. If one
reads rapidly through the three books of Ovid's _Amores_, and then
in the same continuous rapid fashion the _Songs_ and the _Elegies_ of
Donne, one will note striking differences of style and treatment.
Ovid develops his theme simply and concretely, Donne dialectically and
abstractly. There is little of the ease and grace of Ovid's verses in
the rough and vehement lines of Donne's _Elegies_. Compare the song,
Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,
with the famous thirteenth Elegy of the first book,
Iam super oceanum venit a seniore marito,
Flava pruinoso quae vehit axe diem.
Ovid passes from one natural and simple thought to another, from one
aspect of dawn to another equally objective. Donne just touches one or
two of the same features, borrowing them doubtless from Ovid, but the
greater part of the song is devoted to the subtle and extravagant, if
you like, but not the less passionate development of the thought that
for him the woman he loves is the whole world.
But if the difference between Donne's metaphysical conceits and Ovid's
naturalness and simplicity is palpable it is not less clear that the
emotions which they express, with some important exceptions to which I
shall recur, are identical. The love which is the main burden of their
song is something very different from the ideal passion of Dante or of
Petrarch, of Sidney or Spenser. It is a more sensual passion. The same
tone of witty depravity runs through the work of the two poets. There
is in Donne a purer strain which, we shall see directly, is of the
greatest importance, but such a rapid reader as I am contemplating
might be forgiven if for the moment he overlooked it, and declared
that the modern poet was as sensual and depraved as the ancient, that
there was little to choose between the social morality reflected in
the Elizabethan and in the Augustan poet.
And yet even in these more cynical and sensual poems a careful reader
will soon detect a difference between Donne and Ovid. He will begin
to suspect that the English poet is imitating the Roman, and that
the depravity is in part a reflected depravity. In revolt from one
convention the young poet is cultivating another, a cynicism and
sensuality which is just as little to be taken _au pied de la
lettre_ as the idealizing worship, the anguish and adoration of the
sonneteers. There is, as has been said already, a gaiety in the poems
elaborating the thesis that love is a perpetual flux, fickleness the
law of its being, which warns us against taking them too seriously;
and even those _Elegies_ which seem to our taste most reprehensible
are aerated by a wit which makes us almost forget their indecency. In
the last resort there is all the difference in the world between the
untroubled, heartless sensuality of the Roman poet and the gay wit,
the paradoxical and passionate audacities and sensualities of the
young Elizabethan law-student impatient of an unreal convention, and
eager to startle and delight his fellow students by the fertility and
audacity of his wit.
It is not of course my intention to represent Donne's love-poetry
as purely an 'evaporation' of wit, to suggest that there is in it
no reflection either of his own life as a young man or the moral
atmosphere of Elizabethan London. It would be a much less interesting
poetry if this were so. Donne has pleaded guilty to a careless and
passionate youth:
In mine Idolatry what showres of raine
Mine eyes did waste? what griefs my heart did rent?
That sufferance was my sinne; now I repent;
Cause I did suffer I must suffer pain.
From what we know of the lives of Essex, Raleigh, Southampton,
Pembroke, and others it is probable that Donne's _Elegies_ come quite
as close to the truth of life as Sidney's Petrarchianism or Spenser's
Platonism. The later cantos of _The Faerie Queene_ reflect vividly the
unchaste loves and troubled friendships of Elizabeth's Court. Whether
we can accept in its entirety the history of Donne's early amours
which Mr. Gosse has gathered from the poems or not, there can be no
doubt that actual experiences do lie behind these poems as behind
Shakespeare's sonnets. In the one case as in the other, to recognize a
literary model is not to exclude the probability of a source in actual
experience.
But however we may explain or palliate the tone of these poems it is
impossible to deny their power, the vivid and packed force with which
they portray a variously mooded passion working through a swift and
subtle brain. If there is little of the elegant and accomplished art
which Milton admired in the Latin Elegiasts while he 'deplored' their
immorality, there is more strength and sincerity both of thought and
imagination. The brutal cynicism of
Fond woman which would have thy husband die,
the witty anger of _The Apparition_, the mordant and paradoxical
wit of _The Perfume_ and _The Bracelet_, the passionate dignity and
strength of _His Picture_,
My body a sack of bones broken within,
And powders blew stains scatter'd on my skin,
the passion that rises superior to sensuality and wit, and takes wing
into a more spiritual and ideal atmosphere, of _His parting from her_,
I will not look upon the quick'ning Sun,
But straight her beauty to my sense shall run;
The ayre shall note her soft, the fire most pure;
Water suggest her clear, and the earth sure--
compare these with Ovid and the difference is apparent between an
artistic, witty voluptuary and a poet whose passionate force redeems
many errors of taste and art. Compare them with the sonnets and
mythological idylls and _Heroicall Epistles_ of the Elizabethans and
it is they, not Donne, who are revealed as witty and 'fantastic' poets
content to adorn a conventional sentiment with mythological fancies
and verbal conceits. Donne's interest is his theme, love and woman,
and he uses words not for their own sake but to communicate his
consciousness of these surprising phenomena in all their varying and
conflicting aspects. The only contemporary poems that have the same
dramatic quality are Shakespeare's sonnets and some of Drayton's later
sonnets. In Shakespeare this dramatic intensity and variety is of
course united with a rarer poetic charm. Charm is a quality which
Donne's poetry possesses in a few single lines. But to the passion
which animates these sensual, witty, troubled poems the closest
parallel is to be sought in Shakespeare's sonnets to a dark lady and
in some of the verses written by Catullus to or of Lesbia:
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.
But neither sensual passion, nor gay and cynical wit, nor scorn
and anger, is the dominant note in Donne's love-poetry. Of the last
quality there is, despite the sardonic emphasis of some of the poems,
less than in either Shakespeare or Catullus. There is nothing in
his poetry which speaks so poignantly of an outraged heart, a love
lavished upon one who was worthless, as some of Shakespeare's sonnets
and of Catullus's poems. The finest note in Donne's love-poetry is the
note of joy, the joy of mutual and contented passion. His heart might
be subtle to plague itself; its capacity for joy is even more obvious.
Other poets have done many things which Donne could not do. They have
invested their feelings with a garb of richer and sweeter poetry. They
have felt more deeply and finely the reverence which is in the heart
of love. But it is only in the fragments of Sappho, the lyrics of
Catullus, and the songs of Burns that one will find the sheer joy
of loving and being loved expressed in the same direct and simple
language as in some of Donne's songs, only in Browning that one will
find the same simplicity of feeling combined with a like swift and
subtle dialectic.
I wonder by my troth what thou and I
Did till we loved.
For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love.
If yet I have not all thy love,
Deare, I shall never have it all.
Lines like these have the same direct, passionate quality as
[Greek: phainetai moi kênos isos theoisin emmen ônêr]
or
O my love's like a red, red rose
That's newly sprung in June.
The joy is as intense though it is of a more spiritual and
intellectual quality. And in the other notes of this simple passionate
love-poetry, sorrow which is the shadow of joy, and tenderness,
Donne does not fall far short of Burns in intensity of feeling and
directness of expression. These notes are not so often heard in Donne,
but
So, so break off this last lamenting kiss
is of the same quality as
Had we never lov'd sae kindly
or
Take, O take those lips away.
And strangest of all perhaps is the tenderness which came into Donne's
poetry when a sincere passion quickened in his heart, for tenderness,
the note of
O wert thou in the cauld blast,
is the last quality one would look for in the poetry of a nature at
once so intellectual and with such a capacity for caustic satire. But
the beautiful if not flawless _Elegy XVI_,
By our first strange and fatal interview,
and the _Valedictions_ which he wrote on different occasions of
parting from his wife, combine with the peculiar _élan_ of all Donne's
passionate poetry and its intellectual content a tenderness as perfect
as anything in Burns or in Browning:
O more than Moone,
Draw not up seas to drowne me in thy spheare,
Weepe me not dead in thine armes, but forbeare
To teach the sea, what it may doe too soone.
Let not thy divining heart
Forethink me any ill,
Destiny may take thy part
And may thy feares fulfill;
But thinke that we
Are but turn'd aside to sleep;
They who one another keepe
Alive, ne'er parted be.
Such wilt thou be to mee, who must
Like th' other foot, obliquely runne;
Thy firmnes makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begunne.
The poet who wrote such verses as these did not believe any longer
that 'love ... represents the principle of perpetual flux in nature'.
But Donne's poetry is not so simple a thing of the heart and of the
senses as that of Burns and Catullus. Even his purer poetry has more
complex moods--consider _The Prohibition_--and it is metaphysical, not
only in the sense of being erudite and witty, but in the proper sense
of being reflective and philosophical. Donne is always conscious of
the import of his moods; and so it is that there emerges from his
poems a philosophy or a suggested philosophy of love to take the place
of the idealism which he rejects. Set a song of the joy of love
by Burns or by Catullus such as I have cited beside Donne's
_Anniversarie_,
All Kings, and all their favorites,
All glory of honors, beauties, wits,
The Sun itselfe, which makes times, as they passe,
Is elder by a year, now, than it was
When thou and I first one another saw,
and the difference is at once apparent. Burns gets no further than the
experience, Catullus than the obvious and hedonistic reflection that
time is flying, the moment of pleasure short. In Donne's poem one
feels the quickening of the brain, the vision extending its range, the
passion gathering sweep with the expanding rhythms, and from the mind
thus heated and inspired emerges, not a cry that time might stay its
course,
Lente, lente currite noctis equi,
but a clearer consciousness of the eternal significance of love, not
the love that aspires after the unattainable, but the love that
unites contented hearts. The method of the poet is, I suppose, too
dialectical to be popular, for the poem is in few Anthologies. It may
be that the Pagan and Christian strains which the poet unites are not
perfectly blended--if it is possible to do so--but to me it seems that
the joy of love has never been expressed at once with such intensity
and such elevation.
And it is with sorrow as with joy. There is the same difference
of manner in the expression between Donne and these poets, and the
deepest thought is the same. The _Nocturnall on S. Lucies Day_ is
at the opposite pole of Donne's thought from the _Anniversarie_, and
compared with
Had we never loved sae kindly
or
Take, O take those lips away,
both the feeling and its expression are metaphysical. But the passion
is felt through the subtle and fantastic web of dialectic; and the
thought from which the whole springs is the emptiness of life without
love.
What, then, is the philosophy which disengages itself from Donne's
love-poetry studied in its whole compass? It seems to me that it is
more than a purely negative one, that consciously or unconsciously
he sets over against the abstract idealism, the sharp dualism of the
Middle Ages, a justification of love as a natural passion in the human
heart the meaning and end of which is marriage. The sensuality and
exaggerated cynicism of so much of the poetry of the Renaissance was
a reaction from courtly idealism and mediaeval asceticism. But a mere
reaction could lead no-whither. There are no steps which lead only
backward in the history of human thought and feeling. Poems like
Donne's _Elegies_, like Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_, like
Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_ could only end in penitent outcries like
those of Sidney and Spenser and of Donne himself. The true escape from
courtly or ascetic idealism was a poetry which should do justice to
love as a passion in which body and soul alike have their part, and of
which there is no reason to repent.
And this with all its imperfections Donne's love-poetry is. It was not
for nothing that Sir Thomas Egerton's secretary made a runaway match
for love. For Dante the poet, his wife did not exist. In love of his
wife Donne found the meaning and the infinite value of love. In later
days he might bewail his 'idolatry of profane mistresses'; he never
repented of having loved. Between his most sensual and his most
spiritual love-songs there is no cleavage such as separates natural
love from Dante's love of Beatrice, who is in the end Theology. The
passion that burns in Donne's most outspoken elegies, and wantons
in the _Epithalamia_, is not cast out in _The Anniversarie_ or _The
Canonization_, but absorbed. It is purified and enriched by being
brought into harmony with his whole nature, spiritual as well as
physical. It has lost the exclusive consciousness of itself which
is lust, and become merged in an entire affection, as a turbid and
discoloured stream is lost in the sea.
This justification of natural love as fullness of joy and life is the
deepest thought in Donne's love-poems, far deeper and sincerer than
the Platonic conceptions of the affinity and identity of souls with
which he plays in some of the verses addressed to Mrs. Herbert. The
nearest approach that he makes to anything like a reasoned statement
of the thought latent rather than expressed in _The Anniversarie_
is in _The Extasie_, a poem which, like the _Nocturnall_, only Donne
could have written. Here with the same intensity of feeling, and
in the same abstract, dialectical, erudite strain he emphasizes the
interdependence of soul and body:
As our blood labours to beget
Spirits, as like soules as it can,
Because such fingers need to knit
That subtile knot, which makes us man:
So must pure lovers soules descend
T'affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
_Else a great Prince in prison lies_.
It may be that Donne has not entirely succeeded in what he here
attempts. There hangs about the poem just a suspicion of the
conventional and unreal Platonism of the seventeenth century. In
attempting to state and vindicate the relation of soul and body he
falls perhaps inevitably into the appearance, at any rate, of the
dualism which he is trying to transcend. He places them over against
each other as separate entities and the lower bulks unduly. In love,
says Pascal, the body disappears from sight in the intellectual and
spiritual passion which it has kindled. That is what happens in _The
Anniversarie_, not altogether in _The Extasie_. Yet no poem makes one
realize more fully what Jonson meant by calling Donne 'the first poet
in the world for some things'. 'I should never find any fault with
metaphysical poems,' is Coleridge's judgement, 'if they were all like
this or but half as excellent.'
It was only the force of Donne's personality that could achieve even
an approximate harmony of elements so divergent as are united in his
love-verses, that could master the lower-natured steed that drew the
chariot of his troubled and passionate soul and make it subservient to
his yoke-fellow of purer strain who is a lover of honour, and modesty,
and temperance, and the follower of true glory. In the work of his
followers, who were many, though they owed allegiance to Jonson
also, the lower elements predominated. The strain of metaphysical
love-poetry in the seventeenth century with its splendid _élan_ and
sonorous cadence is in general Epicurean and witty. It is only now and
again--in Marvell, perhaps in Herrick's
Bid me to live, and I will live,
Thy Protestant to be,
certainly in Rochester's songs, in
An age in her embraces past
Would seem a winter's day,
or the unequalled:
When wearied with a world of woe
To thy safe bosom I retire,
Where love, and peace, and truth does flow,
May I contented there expire,
that the accents of the _heart_ are clearly audible, that passion
prevails over Epicurean fancy or cynical wit. On the other hand, the
idealism of seventeenth-century poetry and romances, the Platonism of
the Hôtel de Rambouillet that one finds in Habington's _Castara_, in
Kenelm Digby's _Private Memoirs_, in the French romances of chivalry
and their imitations in English is the silliest, because the emptiest,
that ever masqueraded as such in any literature, at any period. A
sensual and cynical flippancy on the one hand, a passionless, mannered
idealism on the other, led directly to that thinly veiled contempt
of women which is so obvious in the satirical essays of Addison and
Pope's _Rape of the Lock_.
But there was one poet who meditated on the same problem as Donne, who
felt like him the power and greatness of love, and like him could
not accept a doctrine of love which seemed to exclude or depreciate
marriage. In 1640, just before his marriage, as rash in its way as
Donne's but less happy in the issue, Milton, defending his character
against accusations of immorality, traced the development of his
thought about love. The passage, in _An Apology against a Pamphlet
called 'A Modest Confutation'_, &c., has been taken as having a
reference to the _Paradise Lost_. But Milton rather seems at the time
to have been meditating a work like the _Vita Nuova_ or a romance like
that of Tasso in which love was to be a motive as well as religion,
for the whole theme of his thought is love, true love and its
mysterious link with chastity, of which, however, 'marriage is no
defilement'. In the arrogance of his youthful purity Milton would
doubtless have looked with scorn or loathing on the _Elegies_ and the
more careless of Donne's songs. But perhaps pride is a greater enemy
of love than such faults of sense as Donne in his passionate youth was
guilty of, and from which Dante by his own evidence was not exempt.
Whatever be the cause--pride, and the disappointment of his marriage,
and political polemic--Milton never wrote any English love-poetry,
except it be the one sonnet on the death of the wife who might have
opened the sealed wells of his heart; and some want of the experience
which love brought to Dante has dimmed the splendour of the great poem
in which he undertook to justify the ways of God to men. Donne is not
a Milton, but he sounded some notes which touch the soul and quicken
the intellect in a way that Milton's magnificent and intense but
somewhat hard and objective art fails to achieve.
That the simpler and purer, the more ideal and tender of Donne's
love-poems were the expression of his love for Ann More cannot of
course be proved in the case of each individual poem, for all Donne's
verses have come to us (with a few unimportant exceptions) undated
and unarranged. But the general thesis, that it was a great experience
which purified and elevated Donne's poetry, receives a striking
confirmation from the better-known history of his devotional poetry.
Here too wit, often tortured wit, fancy, and the heat which Donne's
wit was always able to generate, would have been all his verse had to
show but for the great sorrow which struck him down in 1617 and gave
to his subsequent sonnets and hymns a sincerer and profounder note,
his imagery a more magnificent quality, his rhythms a more sonorous
music.
Donne was not by nature a devotional poet in the same way and to the
same degree as Giles Fletcher or Herbert or Crashaw. It was a sound
enough instinct which, despite his religious upbringing and his wide
and serious interest in theological questions, made him hesitate to
cross the threshold of the ministry and induced him to seek rather for
some such public service as fell to the lot of his friend Wotton. It
was not, I think, the transition from the Roman to the Anglican Church
which was the obstacle. I have tried to describe what seems to me to
have been the path of enlightenment which opened the way for him to
a change which on every ground of prudence and ambition was desirable
and natural. But to conform, and even to take a part as a free-lance
in theological controversy was one thing, to enter the ministry
another. When this was pressed upon him by Morton or by the King it
brought him into conflict with something deeper and more fundamental
than theological doctrines, namely, a temperament which was rather
that of the Renaissance than that either of Puritan England or of the
Counter-Reformation, whether in Catholic countries or in the Anglican
Church--the temperament of Raleigh and Bacon rather than of Milton or
Herbert or Crashaw.
The simple way of describing Donne's difficulty is Walton's, according
to whom Donne shrank from entering the ministry for fear the notorious
irregularities of his early years should bring discredit on the sacred
calling. But there was more in Donne's life than a youth of pleasure,
an old age of prayers. It is not the case that all which was best and
most serious in Donne's nature led him towards Holy Orders. In his
earliest satires and even in his 'love-song weeds' there is evidence
enough of an earnest, candid soul underneath the extravagances of
wit and youthful sensuality. Donne's mind was naturally serious and
religious; it was not naturally devout or ascetic, but worldly and
ambitious. But to enter the ministry was, for Donne and for all
the serious minds of his age, to enter a profession for which the
essential qualifications were a devotional and an ascetic life.
The country clergy of the Anglican Church were often careless and
scandalous livers before Laud took in hand the discipline of the
Church; but her bishops and most eminent divines, though they might
be courtly and sycophantic, were with few exceptions men of devout and
ascetic life. When Donne finally crossed the Rubicon, convinced that
from the King no promotion was to be hoped for in any other line of
life, it was rather with the deliberate resolution that he would make
his life a model of devotion and ascetic self-denial than as one drawn
by an irresistible attraction or impelled by a controlling sense of
duty to such a life. Donne was no St. Augustine whose transition from
libertinism to saintliness came entirely from within. The noblest
feature of Donne's earlier clerical life was the steadfast spirit in
which he set himself to realize the highest ideals of the calling
he had chosen, and the candour with which he accepted the contrast
between his present position and his earlier life, leaving to
whosoever wished to judge while he followed the path of duty and
penitence.
But such a spirit will not easily produce great devotional poetry.
There are qualities in the religious poetry of simpler and purer souls
to which Donne seldom or never attains. The natural love of God which
overflows the pages of the great mystics, which dilates the heart
and the verses of a poet like the Dutchman Vondel, the ardour and
tenderness of Crashaw, the chaste, pure piety and penitence of
Herbert, the love from which devotion and ascetic self-denial come
unbidden--to these Donne never attained. The high and passionate joy
of _The Anniversary_ is not heard in his sonnets or hymns. Effort is
the note which predominates--the effort to realize the majesty of God,
the heinousness of sin, the terrors of Hell, the mercy of Christ.
Some of the very worst traits in Donne's mind are brought out in
his religious writing. _The Essays on Divinity_ are an extraordinary
revelation of his accumulations of useless Scholastic erudition, and
his capacity to perform feats of ingenious deduction from traditional
and accepted premises. To compare these freakish deductions from the
theory of verbal inspiration with the luminous sense of the _Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus_ is to realize how much rationalism was doing
in the course of the century for the emancipation and healing of the
human intellect. Some of the poems, and those the earliest written,
before Donne had actually taken Orders, are not much more than
exercises in these theological subtleties, poems such as that _On
the Annunciation and Passion falling in the same year_ (1608), _The
Litany_ (1610), _Good-Friday_ (1613), and _The Cross_ (_c._ 1615)
are characteristic examples of Donne's intense and imaginative wit
employed on traditional topics of Catholic devotion to which no
change of Church ever made him indifferent. Donne never ignored in his
sermons the gulf that separated the Anglican from the Roman Church, or
the link that bound her to the Protestant Churches of the Continent.
'Our great protestant divines' are one of his courts of appeal,
and included Luther and Calvin of whom he never speaks but with the
deepest respect. But he was unwilling to sacrifice to a fanatical
puritanism any element of Catholic devotion which was capable of
an innocent interpretation. His language is guarded and perhaps not
always consistent, but it would not be difficult to show from his
sermons and prose-writings that many of the most distinctively
Catholic tenets were treated by him with the utmost tenderness.
But, as Mr. Gosse has pointed out, the sincerest and profoundest of
Donne's devotional poetry dates from the death of his wife. The loss
of her who had purified and sweetened his earliest love songs lent
a new and deeper _timbre_ to the sonnets and lyrics in which he
contemplates the great topics of personal religion,--sin, death,
the Judgement, and throws himself on the mercy of God as revealed in
Christ. The seven sonnets entitled _La Corona_ have been generally
attributed to this period, but it is probable that they were composed
earlier, and their treatment of the subject of Christ's life and death
is more intellectual and theological than spiritual and poetical. It
is when the tone becomes personal, as in the _Holy Sonnets_, when he
is alone with his own soul in the prospect of death and the Judgement,
that Donne's religious poetry acquires something of the same unique
character as his love songs and elegies by a similar combination
of qualities, intensity of feeling, subtle turns of thought, and
occasional Miltonic splendour of phrase. Here again we meet the
magnificent openings of the _Songs and Sonets_:--
This is my playes last scene; here heavens appoint
My pilgrimages last mile; and my race
Idly yet quickly run hath this last space,
My spans last inch, my minutes latest point;
or,
At the round earths imagin'd quarters blow
Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise
From death you numberlesse infinities
Of soules, and to your scatter'd bodies go:
and again--
What if this present were the worlds last night!
Marke in my heart, O Soule, where thou dost dwell,
The picture of Christ crucified, and tell
Whether that countenance can thee affright,
Teares in his eyes quench the amazing light,
Blood fills his frownes, which from his pierc'd head fell.
This passionate penitence, this beating as it were against the bars
of self in the desire to break through to a fuller apprehension of
the mercy and love of God, is the intensely human note of these latest
poems. Nothing came easily to his soul that knew so well how to be
subtle to plague itself. The vision of divine wrath he can conjure up
more easily than the beatific vision of the love that 'moves the sun
in heaven and all the stars'. Nevertheless it was that vision which
Donne sought. He could never have been content with Milton's heaven of
majesty and awe divorced from the quickening spirit of love. And there
are moments when he comes as close to that beatific vision as perhaps
a self-tormenting mind involved in the web of seventeenth-century
theology ever could,--at moments love and ecstasy gain the upper hand
of fear and penitence. But it is in the sermons that he reaches these
highest levels. There is nothing in the florid eloquence of Jeremy
Taylor that can equal the splendour of occasional passages in Donne's
sermons, when the lava-like flow of his heated reasoning seems
suddenly to burst and flower in such a splendid incandescence of
mystical rapture as this:--
'Death and life are in the power of the tongue, says Solomon,
in another sense: and in this sense too, If my tongue,
suggested by my heart, and by my heart rooted in faith, can
say, _non moriar, non moriar_: If I can say (and my conscience
do not tell me that I belie mine own state) if I can say, That
the blood of the Saviour runs in my veins, That the breath of
his spirit quickens all my purposes, that all my deaths
have their Resurrection, all my sins their remorses, all my
rebellions their reconciliations, I will hearken no more after
this question as it is intended _de morte naturali_, of a
natural death; I know I must die that death; what care I? nor
_de morte spirituali_, the death of sin, I know I doe, and
shall die so; why despair I? but I will find out another
death, _mortem raptus_, a death of rapture and of extasy, that
death which St. Paul died more than once, the death which St.
Gregory speaks of, _divina contemplatio quoddam sepulchrum
animae_, the contemplation of God and heaven is a kind of
burial and sepulchre and rest of the soul; and in this death
of rapture and extasy, in this death of the Contemplation of
my interest in my Saviour, I shall find myself and all my
sins enterred, and entombed in his wounds, and like a Lily in
Paradise, out of red earth, I shall see my soul rise out of
his blade, in a candor, and in an innocence, contracted there,
acceptable in the sight of his Father.'
This is the highest level that Donne ever reached in eloquence
inspired by the vision of the joy and not the terror of the Christian
faith, higher than anything in the _Second Anniversary_, but in his
last hymns hope and confidence find a simpler and a tenderer note. The
noble hymn, 'In what torn ship so ever I embark,' is in somewhat
the same anguished tone as the _Holy Sonnets_; but the highly
characteristic
Since I am coming to that Holy roome,
Where with thy Quire of Saints for evermore,
I shall be made thy Musique;
and the _Hymn to God the Father_, speak of final faith and hope in
tones which recall--recall also by their sea-coloured imagery, and
by their rhythm--the lines in which another sensitive and tormented
poet-soul contemplated the last voyage:
I have a sinne of feare, that when I have spunne
My last thred, I shall perish on the shore;
Swear by thy self that at my death thy sunne
Shall shine as he shines now and heretofore:
And having done that, Thou hast done,
I feare no more.
Beside the passion of these lines even Tennyson's grow a little pale:
Twilight and evening bell
And after that the dark;
And may there be no sadness of farewell
When I embark:
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
It has not been the aim of the present editor to attempt to pronounce
a final judgement upon Donne. It seems to him idle to compare Donne's
poetry with that of other poets or to endeavour to fix its relative
worth. Its faults are great and manifest; its beauties _sui generis_,
incommunicable and incomparable. My endeavour here has been by
an analysis of some of the different elements in this composite
work--poems composed at different times and in different moods; flung
together at the end so carelessly that youthful extravagances of witty
sensuality and pious aspirations jostle each other cheek by jowl;
and presenting a texture so diverse from that of poetry as we usually
think of it--to show how many are the strands which run through it,
and that one of these is a poetry, not perfect in form, rugged of line
and careless in rhyme, a poetry in which intellect and feeling are
seldom or never perfectly fused in a work that is of imagination all
compact, yet a poetry of an extraordinarily arresting and haunting
quality, passionate, thoughtful, and with a deep melody of its own.
[Footnote 1: _History of English Poetry_, iii. 154. Mr.
Courthope qualifies this statement somewhat on the next
page: 'From this spirit of cynical lawlessness he was
perhaps reclaimed by genuine love,' &c. But he has, I think,
insufficiently analysed the diverse strains in Donne's
love-poetry.]
[Footnote 2: Gaspary: _History of Italian Literature_
(Oelsner's translation), 1904. Consult also Karl Vossler:
_Die philosophischen Grundlagen des 'süssen neuen Stils'_,
Heidelberg, 1904, and _La Poesia giovanile &c. di Guido
Cavalcanti: Studi di Giulio Salvadori_, Roma, 1895.]
[Footnote 3: Gaspary: _Op. Cit._]
* * * * *
II
THE TEXT AND CANON OF DONNE'S POEMS
TEXT
Both the text and the canon of Donne's poems present problems which
have never been frankly faced by any of his editors--problems which,
considering the greatness of his reputation in the seventeenth
century, and the very considerable revival of his reputation which
began with Coleridge and De Quincey and has advanced uninterruptedly
since, are of a rather surprising character. An attempt to define and,
as far as may be, to solve these problems will begin most simply with
a brief account of the form in which Donne's poems have come down to
us.
Three of Donne's poems were printed in his lifetime--the Anniversaries
(i.e. _The Anatomy of the World_ with _A Funerall Elegie_ and _The
Progresse of the Soule_) in 1611 and 1612, with later editions in
1621 and 1625; the _Elegie upon the untimely death of the incomparable
Prince Henry_, in Sylvester's _Lachrymae Lachrymarum_, 1613; and the
lines prefixed to _Coryats Crudities_ in 1611. We know nothing of any
other poem by Donne being printed prior to 1633. It is noteworthy,
as Mr. Gosse has pointed out, that none of the _Miscellanies_ which
appeared towards the end of the sixteenth century, as _Englands
Parnassus_[1] (1600), or at the beginning of the seventeenth century,
as Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody_,[2] contained poems by Donne. The
first of these is a collection of witty and elegant passages from
different authors on various general themes (Dissimulation, Faith,
Learning, &c.) and is just the kind of book for which Donne's poems
would have been made abundant use of at a somewhat later period.
There are in our libraries manuscript collections of 'Donne's choicest
conceits', and extracts long or short from his poems, dating from the
second quarter of the seventeenth century.[3] The editor of the second
of the anthologies mentioned, Francis Davison, became later much
interested in Donne's poems. In notes which he made at some date after
1608, we find him inquiring for 'Satyres, Elegies, Epigrams etc., by
John Don', and querying whether they might be obtained 'from Eleaz.
Hodgson and Ben Johnson'. Among the books again which he has lent to
his brother at a later date are 'John Duns Satyres'. This interest on
the part of Davison in Donne's poems makes it seem to me very unlikely
that if he had known them earlier he would not have included some of
them in his _Rhapsody_, or that if he had done so he would not
have told us. It has been the custom of late to assign to Donne the
authorship of one charming lyric in the _Rhapsody_, 'Absence hear thou
my protestation.' I hope to show elsewhere that this is the work, not
of Donne, but of another young wit of the day, John Hoskins, whose few
extant poems are a not uninteresting link between the manner of Sidney
and the Elizabethans and of Donne and the 'Metaphysicals'.
The first collected edition of Donne's poems was issued in 1633, two
years after his death. This is a small quarto, the title-page of which
is here reproduced.
POEMS,
_By_ J. D.
WITH
ELEGIES
ON THE AUTHORS
DEATH.
LONDON.
Printed by _M. F._ for IOHN MARRIOT,
and are to be sold at his shop in S^t '_Dunstans_
Church-yard in _Fleet-street_. 1633.
The first eight pages (Sheet A) are numbered, and contain (1) _The
Printer to the Understanders_,[4] (2) the _Hexastichon Bibliopolae_,
(3) the dedication of, and introductory epistle to, _The Progresse of
the Soule_, with which poem the volume opens. The poems themselves,
with some prose letters and the _Elegies upon the Author_, fill pages
1-406. The numbers on some of the pages are misprinted. The order of
the poems is generally chaotic, but in batches the poems follow the
order preserved in the later editions. Of the significance of this,
and of the source and character of this edition, I shall speak later.
As regards text and canon it is the most trustworthy of all the old
editions. The publisher, John Marriot, was a well-known bookseller
at the sign of the Flower de Luce, and issued the poems of Breton,
Drayton, Massinger, Quarles, and Wither. The printer was probably
Miles Fletcher, or Flesher, a printer of considerable importance
in Little Britain from 1611 to 1664. It would almost seem, from
the heading of the introductory letter, that the printer was more
responsible for the issue than the bookseller Marriot, and it is
perhaps noteworthy that when in 1650 the younger Donne succeeded in
getting the publication of the poems into his own hand, John Marriot's
name remained on the title-page (1650) as publisher, but the printer's
initials disappeared, and his prefatory letter made way for a
dedication by the younger Donne. (See page 4.) It should be added that
copies of the 1633 edition differ considerably from one another. In
some a portrait has been inserted. Occasionally _The Printer to the
Understanders_ is omitted, the _Infinitati Sacrum &c._ following
immediately on the title-page. In some poems, notably _The Progresse
of the Soule_, and certain of the _Letters_ to noble ladies, the text
underwent considerable alteration as the volume passed through the
press. Some copies are more correct than others. A few of the errors
of the 1635 edition are traceable to the use by the printer of a
comparatively imperfect copy of the 1633 edition.
POEMS,
_By_ J. D.
WITH
ELEGIES
ON
THE AUTHORS
DEATH.
_LONDON_
Printed by _M. F._ for JOHN MARRIOT,
and are to be sold at his Shop in S^t _Dunstans_
Church-yard in _Fleet-street_.
1635.
The _Poems by J. D. with Elegies on the Authors Death_ were reprinted
by M. F. for John Harriot in 1635 (the title-page is here reproduced),
but with very considerable alterations. The introductory material
remained unchanged except that to the _Hexastichon Bibliopolae_ was
added a _Hexastichon ad Bibliopolam. Incerti_. (See p. 3.) To the
title-page was prefixed a portrait in an oval frame. Outside the frame
is engraved, to the left top, ANNO DNI. 1591. ÆTATIS SVÆ. 18.; to
the right top, on a band ending in a coat of arms, ANTES MVERTO
QUE MVDADO. Underneath the engraved portrait and background is the
following poem:
_This was for youth, Strength, Mirth, and wit that Time
Most count their golden Age; but t'was not thine.
Thine was thy later yeares, so much refind
From youths Drosse, Mirth, & wit; as thy pure mind
Thought (like the Angels) nothing but the Praise
Of thy Creator, in those last, best Dayes.
Witnes this Booke, (thy Embleme) which begins
With Love; but endes, with Sighes, & Teares for sins._
IZ: WA:
_Will: Marshall sculpsit_.[5]
_The Printer to the Understanders_ is still followed immediately by
the dedication, _Infinitati Sacrum_, of _The Progresse of the Soule_,
although the poem itself is removed to another part of the volume. The
printer noticed this mistake, and at the end of the _Elegies upon the
Author_ adds this note:
_Errata_.[6]
_Cvrteous Reader, know, that that Epistle intituled, Infinitati
Sacrum, 16. of August, 1601. which is printed in the
beginning of the Booke, is misplaced; it should have beene
printed before the Progresse of the Soule, in Page 301.
before which it was written by the Author; if any other in the
Impression doe fall out, which I know not of, hold me excused
for I have endeavoured thy satisfaction._
Thine, I. M.
The closing lines of Walton's poem show that it must have been written
for this edition, as they refer to what is the chief feature in the
new issue of the poems (pp. 1-388, including some prose letters in
Latin and English, pp. 275-300, but not including the _Elegies upon
the Author_ which in this edition and those of 1639, 1649, 1650,
and 1654 are added in unnumbered pages). This new feature is their
arrangement in a series of groups:[7]--
Songs and Sonets.
Epigrams.
Elegies.
Epithalamions, _or_, Marriage Songs.
Satyres.
Letters to Severall Personages.
Funerall Elegies, (including _An Anatomie of the
World_ with _A Funerall Elegie_, _Of the Progresse of
the Soule_, and _Epicedes and Obsequies upon the
deaths of sundry Personages_.)
(Letters in Prose).[8]
The Progresse of the Soule.
Divine Poems.
While the poems were thus rearranged, the canon also underwent some
alteration. One poem, viz. Basse's _Epitaph on Shakespeare_ ('Renowned
Chaucer lie a thought more nigh To rare Beaumont'), which had found
its way into _1633_, was dropped; but quite a number were added,
twenty-eight, or twenty-nine if the epitaph _On Himselfe_ be reckoned
(as it appears) twice. Professor Norton, in the bibliographical note
in the Grolier Club edition (which I occasionally call Grolier for
convenience), has inadvertently given the _Elegie on the L. C._ as one
of the poems first printed in _1635_. This is an error. The poem was
included in _1633_ as the sixth in a group of _Elegies_, the rest of
which are love poems. The editor of _1635_ merely transferred it to
its proper place among the _Funerall Elegies_, just as modern editors
have transferred the _Elegie on his Mistris_ ('By our first strange
and fatall interview') from the funeral to the love _Elegies_.
The authenticity of the poems added in _1635_ will be fully discussed
later. The conclusion of the present editor is that of the English
poems fifteen are certainly Donne's; three or four are probably or
possibly his; the remaining eleven are pretty certainly _not_ by
Donne. There is no reason to think that _1635_ is in any way a more
authoritative edition than _1633_. It has fewer signs of competent
editing of the text, and it begins the process of sweeping in poems
from every quarter, which was continued by Waldron, Simeon, and
Grosart.
The third edition of Donne's poems appeared in 1639. This is identical
in form, contents, and paging with that of 1635. The dedication and
introduction to _The Progresse of the Soule_ are removed to their
right place and the _Errata_ dropped, and there are a considerable
number of minor alterations of the text.
POEMS,
_By_ J. D.
VVITH
ELEGIES
ON
THE AUTHORS
DEATH.
[Illustration]
_LONDON_,
Printed by _M. F._ for JOHN MARRIOT,
and are to be sold at his Shop in S^t _Dunstans_
Church-yard in _Fleet-street_.
1639.
In the issuing of all these editions of Donne's poems, the younger
Donne, who seems to have claimed the right to benefit by his father's
literary remains, had apparently no part.[9] What assistance, if
any, the printer and publisher had from others of Donne's friends and
executors it is impossible now to say, though one can hardly imagine
that without some assistance they could have got access to so many
poems or been allowed to publish the elegies on his death, some of
which refer to the publication of the poems.[10] Walton, as we have
seen, wrote verses to be prefixed to the second edition. At any
rate in 1637 the younger John Donne made an effort to arrest the
unauthorized issue of his father's works. Dr. Grosart first printed
in his edition of the poems (_Fuller Worthies' Library_, 1873, ii,
p. lii) the following petition and response preserved in the Record
Office:
To y^e most Reverende Father in God
William Lorde Arch-Bisshop of
Canterburie Primate, and
Metropolitan of all Eng-
lande his Grace.
The humble petition of John Donne, Clercke. Doth show unto
your Grace that since y^e death of his Father (latly Deane of
Pauls) there hath bene manie scandalous Pamflets printed, and
published, under his name, which were none of his, by severall
Boocksellers, withoute anie leave or Autoritie; in particuler
one entitoled Juvenilia, printed for Henry Seale; another
by John Marriott and William Sheares, entitoled Ignatius his
Conclave, as allsoe certaine Poems by y^e sayde John Marriote,
of which abuses thay have bene often warned by your Pe^tr
and tolde that if thay desisted not, thay should be proceeded
against beefore your Grace, which thay seeme soe much
to slight, that thay profess soddainly to publish new
impressions, verie much to the greife of your Pe^tr and the
discredite of y^e memorie of his Father.
Wherefore your Pe^tr doth beeseece your Grace that you
would bee pleased by your Commaunde, to stopp their farther
proceedinge herein, and to cale the forenamed boocksellers
beefore you, to giue an account, for what thay haue allreadie
done; and your Pe^tr shall pray, &c.
I require y^e Partyes whom this Pe^t concernes, not to meddle
any farther w^th y^e Printing or Selling of any y^e pretended
workes of y^e late Deane of St. Paules, saue onely such as
shall be licensed by publicke authority, and approued by the
Peticon^r, as they will answere y^e contrary at theyr perill.
And of this I desire Mr. Deane of y^e Arches to take care.
Dec: 16, 1637. W. Cant.
Despite this injunction the edition of 1639 was issued, as the
previous ones had been, by Marriot and M. F. It was not till ten years
later that the younger Donne succeeded in establishing his claim. In
1649 Marriot prepared a new edition, printed as before by M. F. The
introductory matter remained unchanged except that the printing being
more condensed it occupies three pages instead of five; the use of
Roman and Italic type is exactly reversed; and there are some slight
changes of spelling. The printing of the poems is also more condensed,
so that they occupy pp. 1-368 instead of 1-388 in _1635-39_. The text
underwent some generally unimportant alteration or corruption, and two
poems were added, the lines _Upon Mr. Thomas Coryats Crudities_ (p.
172. It had been printed with _Coryats Crudities_ in 1611) and the
short poem called _Sonnet. The Token_ (p. 72).
Only a very few copies of this edition were issued. W. C. Hazlitt
describes one in his _Bibliographical Collections, &c._, _Second
Series_ (1882), p. 181. The only copy of whose existence I am aware is
in the Library of Harvard College. It was used by Professor Norton in
preparing the Grolier Club edition, and I owe my knowledge of it
to this and to a careful description made for me by Miss Mary H.
Buckingham. The title-page is here reproduced.
POEMS,
_By_ J. D.
WITH
ELEGIES
ON
THE AUTHORS
DEATH.
[Illustration]
_LONDON_
Printed by _M. F._ for JOHN MARRIOT,
and are to be sold at his shop in S^t _Dunstans_
Church-yard in _Fleet-Street_.
1649.
What happened seems to have been this. The younger Donne intervened
before the edition was issued, and either by authority or agreement
took it over. Marriot remained the publisher. The title-page which in
_1649_ was identical with that of _1635-39_, except for the change of
date and the 'W' in 'WITH', now appeared as follows:
POEMS,
_By_ J. D.
WITH
ELEGIES
ON THE
AUTHORS DEATH.
TO WHICH
_Is added divers Copies under his own hand
never before in print._
_LONDON_,
Printed for _John Marriot_, and are
to be sold by _Richard Marriot_ at his shop
by _Chancery_ lane end over against the Inner
Temple gate. 1650.
The initials of the printer, M. F., disappear, and the name of John
Marriot's son, partner, and successor, Richard, appears along with his
own. There is no great distance between St. Dunstan's Churchyard and
the end of Chancery Lane. With M. F. went the introductory _Printer
to the Understanders_, its place being taken by a dedicatory letter
in young Donne's most courtly style to William, Lord Craven, Baron of
Hamsted-Marsham.
In the body of the volume as prepared in 1649 no alteration was made.
The 'divers Copies ... never before in print', of which the new editor
boasts, were inserted in a couple of sheets (or a sheet and a half,
aa, bb incomplete) at the end. These are variously bound up in
different copies, being sometimes before, sometimes at the end of
the _Elegies upon the Author_, sometimes before and among them. They
contain a quite miscellaneous assortment of writings, verse and
prose, Latin and English, by, or presumably by, Donne, with a few
complimentary verses on Donne taken from Jonson's _Epigrams_.
The text of Donne's own writings is carelessly printed. In short,
Donne's son did nothing to fix either the text or the canon of his
father's poems. The former, as it stands in the body of the volume
in the editions of 1650-54, he took over from Marriot and M. F. As
regards the latter, he speaks of the 'kindnesse of the Printer, ...
adding something too much, lest any spark of this sacred fire might
perish undiscerned'; but he does not condescend to tell us, if he
knew, what these unauthentic poems are. He withdrew nothing.
In 1654 the poems were published once more, but printed from the same
types as in 1650. The text of the poems (pp. 1-368) is identical in
_1649_, _1650_, _1654_; of the additional matter (pp. 369-392) in
_1650_, _1654_. The only change made in the last is on the title-page,
where a new publisher's name appears,[11] as in the following
facsimile:
POEMS,
_By_ J. D.
WITH
ELEGIES
ON THE
AUTHORS DEATH.
TO WHICH
_Is added divers Copies under his own hand
never before in Print._
_LONDON_,
Printed by _J. Flesher_, and are to be sold
by _John Sweeting_ at the Angel in
Popeshead-Alley. 1654.
James Flesher was the son of Miles Flesher, or Fletcher, who is
probably the M. F. of the earlier editions. John Sweeting was an
active bookseller and publisher, first at the Crown in Cornhill, and
subsequently at the Angel as above (1639-1661). He was the publisher
of many plays and poems, and in 1657 the publication of Donne's
_Letters to Severall Persons of Honour_ was transferred to him from
Richard Marriot, who issued them in 1651.
POEMS, &c.
BY
JOHN DONNE,
_late Dean of St._ Pauls.
WITH
ELEGIES
ON THE
AUTHORS DEATH.
To which is added
_Divers Copies under his own hand_,
+Never before Printed.+
_In the SAVOY_,
Printed by _T. N._ for _Henry Herringman_, at the sign of
the _Anchor_, in the lower-walk of the
_New-Exchange._ 1669.
The last edition of Donne's poems which bears evidence of recourse
to manuscript sources, and which enlarged the canon of the poems, was
that of 1669. The younger Donne died in 1662, and this edition was
purely a printer's venture. Its title-page runs as opposite.
This edition added two elegies which a sense of propriety had hitherto
excluded from Donne's printed works, though they are in almost all
the manuscript collections, and a satire which most of the manuscripts
assign not to Donne but to Sir John Roe. The introductory material
remains as in _1650-54_ and unpaged; but the _Elegies to the Author_
are now paged, and the poems with the prose letters inserted in _1633_
and added to in _1635_ (see above, p. lxiii, note 8), the _Elegies to
the Author_, and the additional sheets inserted in _1650_, occupy pp.
1-414. The love _Elegies_ were numbered as in earlier editions, but
the titles which some had borne were all dropped. _Elegie XIIII_ (XII
in this edition) was enlarged. Two new Elegies were added, one (_Loves
Progress_) as _Elegie XVIII_, the second (_Going to Bed_) unnumbered
and simply headed _To his Mistress going to bed_. The text of the
poems underwent considerable alteration, some of the changes showing
a reversion to the text of _1633_, others a reference to manuscript
sources, many editorial conjecture.
The edition of 1669 is the last edition of Donne's poems which can
be regarded as in any degree an authority for the text of the poems,
because it is the last which affords evidence of access to independent
manuscript sources. All subsequent editions, till we come to those of
Grosart and Chambers, were based on these. If the editor preferred one
reading to another it was on purely internal evidence, a result of
his own decision as to which was the more correct or the preferable
reading. In 1719, for example, a new edition was brought out by the
well-known publisher Jacob Tonson. The title-page runs as over.
POEMS
ON SEVERAL
OCCASIONS.
Written by the Reverend
_JOHN DONNE_, D.D.
Late Dean of St. PAUL'S.
WITH
ELEGIES on the Author's Death.
To this Edition is added,
Some ACCOUNT of the LIFE
of the AUTHOR.
_LONDON_:
Printed for J. TONSON, and Sold by
W. TAYLOR at the _Ship_ in
_Pater-noster-Row_. 1719.
This edition opens with the Epistle Dedicatory as in _1650-69_,
which is followed by an abridgement of Walton's _Life_ of Donne. An
examination of the text of the poems shows clearly that this
edition was printed from that of 1669, but is by no means a slavish
reproduction. The editor has consulted earlier editions and corrected
mistakes, but I have found no evidence either that he knew the
editions of 1633 and 1635, or had access to manuscript collections. He
very wisely dropped the Satire 'Sleep next Society', inserted for the
first time by the editor of _1669_, and certainly not by Donne. It was
reinserted by Chalmers in 1810.[12]
These, then, are the early editions of Donne's poems. But the printed
editions are not the only form in which the poems, or the great
majority of the poems, have come down to us. None of these editions,
we have seen, was issued before the poet's death. None, so far as
we can discover (I shall discuss this point more fully later), was
printed from sources carefully prepared for the press by the author,
as were for example the _LXXX Sermons_ issued in 1640. But Donne's
poems were well known to many readers before 1633. One of the earliest
published references to them occurs in 1614, in a collection of
Epigrams by Thomas Freeman, called _Runne_ | _And a great Cast_ |
_The_ | _Second Book_.
Epigram 84.
To Iohn Dunne.
The _Storme_ describ'd hath set thy name afloate,
Thy _Calme_ a gale of famous winde hath got:
Thy _Satyres_ short, too soone we them o'relooke,
I prethee Persius write a bigger booke.
In 1616 Ben Jonson's _Epigrammes_ were published in the first (folio)
edition of his works, and they contain the Epigram, printed in this
edition, _To Lucy, Countesse of Bedford, with Mr. Donnes Satyres_. In
these and similar cases the 'bookes' referred to are not printed but
manuscript works. Mr. Chambers has pointed out (_Poems of John Donne_,
i, pp. xxxviii-ix) an interesting reference in Drayton's _Epistle to
Reynolds_ to poems circulating thus 'by transcription'; and Anthony
Wood speaks of Hoskins having left a 'book of poems neatly written'.
In Donne's own letters we find references to his poems, his paradoxes
and problems, and even a long treatise like the [Greek: BIATHANATOS],
being sent to his friends with injunctions of secrecy, and in the case
of the last with an express statement that it had not been, and was
not to be, printed. Sometimes the manuscript collection seems to have
been made by Donne himself, or on his instruction, for a special
friend and patron like Lord Ancrum; but after he had become a
distinguished Churchman who, as Jonson told Drummond, 'repenteth
highlie and seeketh to destroy all his poems,' it was his friends and
admirers who collected and copied them. An instructive reference to
the interest awakened in Donne's early poems by his fame as a preacher
comes to us from Holland. Constantine Huyghens, the Dutch poet, and
father of the more famous scientist, Christian, was a member of the
Dutch embassy in 1618, 1621-23, and again in 1624. He moved in the
best circles, and made the acquaintance of Donne ('great preacher and
great conversationalist', he calls him) at the house probably of Sir
Robert Killigrew. Writing to his friend and fellow-poet Hooft, in
1630, he says:[13]
'I think I have often entertained you with reminiscences of
Dr. Donne, now Dean of St. Pauls in London, and on account
of this remunerative post (such is the custom of the English)
held in high esteem, in still higher for the wealth of his
unequalled wit, and yet more incomparable eloquence in the
pulpit. Educated early at Court in the service of the great;
experienced in the ways of the world; sharpened by study; in
poetry, he is more famous than anyone. Many rich fruits from
the green branches of his wit[14] have lain mellowing among
the lovers of art, which now, when _nearly rotten with age_,
they _are distributing_. Into my hands have fallen, by the
help of my special friends among the gentlemen of that nation,
some five and twenty of the best sort of medlars. Among
our people, I cannot select anyone to whom they ought to be
communicated sooner than to you,[15] as this poets manner of
conceit and expression are exactly yours, Sir.'
This is a very interesting piece of evidence as to the manner in which
Donne's poems had been preserved by his friends, and the form in which
they were being distributed. There is no reference to publication. It
is doubtless due to this activity in collecting and transcribing the
poems of the now famous preacher that we owe the number of manuscript
collections dating from the years before and immediately after 1630.
Had Donne undertaken the publication of his own poems, such of these
manuscript collections as have been preserved--none of which
are autograph, and few or none of which have a now traceable
history--would have little importance for a modern editor. The most
that they could do would be to show us occasionally what changes a
poem had undergone between its earliest and its latest appearance.
But Donne's poems were not published in this way, and the manuscripts
cannot be ignored. They must have for his editor at least the
same interest and importance as the Quartos have for the editor
of Shakespeare. Whatever opinion he may hold, on _a priori_ or _a
posteriori_ grounds, regarding the superior authority of the First
Folio of Shakespeare's plays, no editor, not 'thirled to' a theory,
will deny that a right reading has been preserved for us often by the
Quartos and the Quartos only. No wise man will neglect the assistance
even of the more imperfect of them. Before therefore discussing the
relative value of the different editions, and the use that may be made
of the manuscripts, it will be well to give a short description of the
manuscripts which the present editor has consulted and used, of their
relation to one another, their comparative value, and the relation of
_some_ of them to the editions. It is, of course, possible that there
are manuscripts of Donne's poems which have not yet come to light; and
among them may be some more correctly transcribed than any which
has come into the present editor's hands. He has, however, examined
between twenty and thirty, and with the feeling recently of moving
in a circle--that new manuscripts were in part or whole duplicates of
those which had been already examined, and confirmed readings already
noted but did not suggest anything fresh.
I will divide the manuscripts into four classes, of which the first
two, it will be seen at a glance, are likely to be the most important
for the textual critic.
(1) Manuscript collections of portions of Donne's poems, e.g. the
_Satyres_. The 'booke' to which Freeman refers in the epigram quoted
above was probably a small collection of this kind, and we have seen
that Jonson sent the _Satyres_ to Lady Bedford, and Francis Davison
lent them to his brother. Of such collections I have examined the
following:
_Q._ This is a small quarto manuscript, bound up with a number of
other manuscripts, in a volume (MS. 216) in the library of Queen's
College, Oxford. It is headed _Mr. John Dunnes Satires_, and contains
the five Satires (which alone I have accepted as Donne's own) followed
by _A Storme_, _A Calme_, and one song, _The Curse_ (see p. 41), here
headed _Dirae_. As Mr. Chambers says (_Poems of John Donne_, i, p.
xxxvi), this is probably just the kind of 'booke' which Freeman read.
The poems it contains are probably those of Donne's poems which were
first known outside the circle of his intimate friends.
What seems to be a duplicate of _Q_ is preserved among the Dyce MSS.
in the South Kensington Museum. This contains the five _Satyres_, and
the _Storme_ and _Calme_. The MSS. are evidently transcribed from the
same source, but one is not a copy of the other. They agree in such
exceptional readings as e.g. _Satyres_, I. 58 'Infanta of London'; 94
'goes in the way' &c.; II. 86 'In wringing each acre'; 88 'Assurances
as bigge as glossie civill lawes'. The last suggests that the one is
a copy of the other, but again they diverge in such cases as III. 49
'Crants' _Dyce MS._; 'Crates' _Q_; and IV. 215-16 'a Topclief would
have ravisht him quite away' _Q_, where the _Dyce MS._ preserves the
normal 'a Pursevant would have ravisht him quite away'.
If manuscripts like _Q_ and the _Dyce MS._ carry us back, as they seem
to do, to the form in which the _Satyres_ circulated before any of the
later collections of Donne's poems were made (between 1620 and 1630),
they are clearly of great importance for the editor. The text of the
_Satyres_ in _1633_ and the later editions, which closely resembles
that of one of the later MS. collections, presents many variants from
the older tradition. It is a difficult matter to decide how far these
may be the corrections of the author himself, or of the collector and
editor.
_W._ This, the Westmoreland MS., belonging to Mr. Edmund Gosse, is
one of the most interesting and valuable manuscripts of Donne's poems
which have come down to us. It is bound in its original vellum, and
was written, Mr. Warner, late Egerton Librarian, British Museum,
conjectured from the handwriting, 'a little later than 1625'. This
date agrees with what one would gather from the contents, for the
manuscript contains sonnets which must have been written after 1617,
but does not contain any of the hymns written just at the close of
Donne's life.
_W_ is a much larger 'book' than _Q_. It begins with the five
_Satyres_, as that does. Leaving one page blank, it then continues
with a collection of the _Elegies_ numbered, thirteen in all, of which
twelve are Love Elegies, and one, the last, a Funeral Elegy, 'Sorrow
who to this house.'[16] These are followed by an _Epithalamion_ (that
generally called 'made at Lincolns Inn') and a number of verse letters
to different friends, some of which are not contained in any of the
old editions. So many of them are addressed to Rowland Woodward, or
members of his family, that Mr. Gosse conjectures that the manuscript
was prepared for him, but this cannot be proved.[17] The letters are
followed by the _Holy Sonnets_, these by _La Corona_, and the book
closes (as many collections of the poems do) with a bundle of prose
_Paradoxes_, followed in this case by the _Epigrams_. Both the _Holy
Sonnets_ and the _Epigrams_ contain poems not printed in any of the
old editions.
It should be noted that though _W_ as a whole may have been
transcribed as late as 1625, it clearly goes back in portions to an
earlier date. The letters are headed e.g. To Mr. H. W., To Mr. C.
B., &c. Now the custom in manuscripts and editions is to bring these
headings up to date, changing 'To Mr. H. W.' into 'To S^r Henry
Wotton'. That they bear headings which were correct at the date when
the poems were written points to their fairly direct descent from the
original copies.
If _Q_ probably represents the kind of manuscript which circulated
pretty widely, _W_ is a good representative of the kind which
circulated only among Donne's friends. Some of the poems escaped being
transcribed into larger collections and were not published till our
own day. The value of _W_ for the text of Donne's poems must stand
high. For some of the letters and religious poems it is our sole
authority. Though a unique manuscript now, it was probably not so
always, for Addl. MS. 23229 in the British Museum contains a single
folio which must have been torn from a manuscript identical with _W_.
The handwriting is slightly different, but the order of the poems and
their text prove the identity.
_A23._ This same manuscript (Addl. MS. 23229), which is a very
miscellaneous collection of fragments, presented to the Museum by John
Wilson Croker, contains two other portions of what seem to have been
similar small 'books' of Donne's poems. The one is a fragment of what
seems to have been a carefully written copy of the _Epithalamion_,
with introductory _Eclogue_, written for the marriage of the Earl of
Somerset. Probably it was one of those prepared and circulated at
the time. The other consists of some leaves from a collection of the
_Satyres_ finely written on large quarto sheets.
_G._ This is a manuscript containing only the _Metempsychosis_, or
_Progresse of the Soule_, now in the possession of Mr. Gosse, who
(_Life &c. of John Donne_, i. 141) states that it 'belonged to a
certain Bradon, and passed into the Phillipps Collection'. It is not
without errors, but its text is, on the whole, more correct than that
of the manuscript source from which the version of 1633 was set up in
the first instance.
(2) In the second class I place manuscripts which are, or aim at
being, complete collections of Donne's poems. Most of these belong to
the years between 1620 and 1633. They vary considerably in accuracy of
text, and in the care which has been taken to include only poems that
are authentic. They were made probably by professional copyists,
and some of those whose calligraphy is most attractive show that the
scribe must have paid the smallest attention to the meaning of what he
was writing.
Of those which I have examined, two groups of manuscripts seem to me
especially noteworthy, because both show that their collectors had a
clear idea of what were, and what were not, Donne's poems, and because
of the general accuracy with which the poems in one of them are
transcribed. Taken with the edition of 1633 they form an invaluable
starting-point for the determination of the canon of Donne's poems.
The first of these is represented by three manuscripts which I
have examined, _D_ (Dowden), _H49_ (Harleian MS. 4955), and _Lec_
(Leconfield).
_D_ is a small quarto manuscript, neatly written in a thin, clear hand
and in ordinary script. It was formerly in the Haslewood collection,
and is now in the possession of Professor Edward Dowden, Trinity
College, Dublin, by whose kindness I have had it by me almost all the
time that I have been at work on my edition.
_H49_ is a collection of Donne's poems, in the British Museum, bound
up with some by Ben Jonson and others. It is a large folio written
throughout apparently in the same hand. It opens with some poems and
masques by Jonson. A certain Doctor Andrewes' poems occupy folios
57-87. They are signed _Franc: Andrilla. London August 14. 1629_.
Donne's poems follow, filling folios 88 to 144_b_. Thereafter follow
more poems by Andrewes, Jonson, and others, with some prose letters by
Jonson.
_Lec._ This is a large quarto manuscript, beautifully transcribed,
belonging to Lord Leconfield and preserved at Petworth House. Many of
the manuscripts in this collection were the property of Henry, ninth
Earl of Northumberland (1564-1632), the friend who communicated the
news of Donne's marriage to his father-in-law.
These three manuscripts are obviously derived from one common source.
They contain the same poems, except that _D_ has one more than _H49_,
and both of these have some which are not in _Lec_. The order of the
poems is the same, except that _D_ and _Lec_ show more signs of
an attempt to group the poems than _H49_. The text, with some
divergences, especially on the part of _Lec_, is identical. One
instance seems to point to one of them being the source of the others.
In the long _Obsequies to the Ld. Harrington, Brother to the Countess
of Bedford_, the original copyist, after beginning l. 159 'Vertue
whose flood', had inadvertently finished with the second half of l.
161, 'were [_sic_] blowne in, by thy first breath.' This error is
found in all the three manuscripts. It may, however, have come from
the common source of this poem, and there are divergences in order and
text which make me think that they are thus derived from one common
source.
A special interest attaches to this collection, apart from the
relative excellence of its text and soundness of its canon, from the
probability that a manuscript of this kind was used for a large, and
that textually the best, part of the edition of 1633. This becomes
manifest on a close examination of the order of the poems and of their
text. Mr. Gosse has said, in speaking of the edition of 1633: 'The
poems are thrown together without any attempt at intelligent order;
neither date, nor subject, nor relation is in the least regarded.'
This is not entirely the case. Satires, Elegies, Epigrams, Songs are
grouped to some extent. The disorder which prevails is due to two
causes: (1) to the fact that the printer set up from a variety
of sources. There was no previous collected edition to guide him.
Different friends supplied collections, and of a few poems there were
earlier editions. He seems to have passed from one of these to another
as was most convenient at the moment. Perhaps some were lent him only
for a time. The differences between copies of _1633_ show that it was
prepared carefully, but emended from time to time while the printing
was actually going on. (2) The second source of the order of the poems
is their order in the manuscripts from which they were copied. Now
a comparison of the order in _1633_ with that in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_
reveals a close connexion between them, and throws light on the
composition of _1633_.
It is necessary, before instituting this comparison with _1633_, to
say a word on the order of the poems in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ themselves,
as it is not quite the same in all three. _H49_ is the most irregular,
perhaps therefore the earliest, each of the others showing efforts
to obtain a better grouping of the poems. All three begin with the
_Satyres_, of which _D_ and _Lec_ have five, _H49_ only four; but
the text of _Lec_ differs from that of the other two, agreeing
more closely with the version of _1633_ and of another group of
manuscripts. They have all, then, thirteen _Elegies_ in the same
order. After these _H49_ continues with a number of letters (_The
Storme_, _The Calme_, _To S^r Henry Wotton_, _To S^r Henry Goodyere_,
_To the Countesse of Bedford_, _To S^r Edward Herbert_, and others)
intermingled with Funeral Elegies (_Lady Markham_, _Mris Boulstred_)
and religious poems (_The Crosse_, _The Annuntiation_, _Good Friday_).
Then follows a long series of lyrical pieces, broken after _The
Funerall_ by _A Letter to the Lady Carey, and Mrs. Essex Rich_, the
_Epithalamion_ on the Palatine marriage, and an _Old Letter_ ('At once
from hence', p. 206). The lyrical pieces are then resumed, and the
collection ends with the Somerset _Eclogue_ and _Epithalamion_, the
_Letanye_, both sets of _Holy Sonnets_, a letter (_To the Countesse of
Salisbury_), and the long _Obsequies to the Ld. Harrington_.
_D_ makes an effort to arrange the poems following the _Elegies_ in
groups. The _Funeral Elegies_ come first, and two blank pages are
headed _An Elegye on Prince Henry_. The letters are then brought
together, and are followed by the religious poems dispersed in _H49_.
The lyrical poems follow piece by piece as in _H49_, and the whole
closes with the two epithalamia and the _Obsequies to the Ld.
Harrington_.
The order in _Lec_ resembles that of _H49_ more closely than that of
_D_. The mixed letters, funeral elegies, and religious poems follow
the _Elegies_ as in _H49_, but _Lec_ adds to them the two letters
(_Lady Carey_ and _The Countess of Salisbury_) and the _Letanie_ which
in _H49_ are dispersed through the lyrical pieces. _Lec_ does not
contain any of the _Holy Sonnets_, but after _The Letanie_ ten pages
are left blank, evidently intended to receive them. Thereafter, the
lyrical poems follow piece by piece as in _D_, _H49_, except that _The
Prohibition_ ('Take heed of loving mee') is omitted--a fact of some
interest when we come to consider _1633_. _Lec_ closes, like _D_, with
the epithalamia and the _Obsequies to the Lo: Harrington_.
Turning now to _1633_, we shall see that, whatever other sources the
editor of that edition used, one was a collection identical with, or
closely resembling, _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, especially _Lec_. That edition
begins with the _Progresse of the Soule_, which was _not_ derived from
this manuscript. Thereafter follow the two sets of _Holy Sonnets_, the
second set containing exactly the same number of sonnets, and in the
same order, as in _D_, _H49_, whereas other manuscripts, e.g. _B_,
_O'F_, _S_, _S96_, which will be described later, have more sonnets
and in a different order; and _W_, which agrees otherwise with _B_,
_O'F_, _S_, _S96_, adds three that are found nowhere else. The sonnets
are followed in _1633_ by the _Epigrams_, which are not in _D_, _H49_,
_Lec_, but after that the resemblance of _1633_ to _D_, _H49_, _Lec_
becomes quite striking. These manuscripts, we have seen, begin
with the _Satyres_. The edition, however, passes on at once to the
_Elegies_. Of the thirteen given in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, _1633_ prints
eight, omitting the first (_The Bracelet_), the second (_Going to
Bed_), the tenth (_Loves Warr_), the eleventh (_On his Mistris_),
and the thirteenth (_Loves Progresse_). That the editor, however,
had before him, and intended to print, the _Satyres_ and the thirteen
_Elegies_ as he found them in _his_ copy of _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, is
proved by the following extract which Mr. Chambers quotes from the
Stationers' Register:
13^o September, 1632
John Marriot. Entered for his copy under the hands of Sir
Henry Herbert and both the Wardens, a book
of verse and poems (the five Satires, the first,
second, tenth, eleventh and thirteenth Elegies
being excepted) and these before excepted to
be his, when he brings lawful authority.
vi_d._
written by Doctor John Dunn
This note is intelligible only when compared with this particular
group of manuscripts. In others the order is quite different.
This bar--which was probably dictated by reasons of propriety, though
it is difficult to see why the first and the eleventh _Elegies_ should
have been singled out--was got over later as far as the _Satyres_ were
concerned. They are printed after all the other poems, just before
the prose letters. But by this time the copy of _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ had
perhaps passed out of Marriot's hands, for the text of the _Satyres_
seems to show that they were printed, not from this manuscript, but
from one represented by another group, which I shall describe later.
This is, however, not quite certain, for in _Lec_ the version of the
_Satyres_ given is not the same as in _D_, _H49_, but is that of this
second group of manuscripts. Several little details show that of
the three manuscripts _D_, _H49_, and _Lec_ the last most closely
resembles _1633_.
Following the _Elegies_ in _1633_ come a group of letters, epicedes,
and religious poems, just as in _H49_, _Lec_ (_D_ re-groups
them)--_The Storme_, _The Calme_, _To Sir Henry Wotton_, ('Sir, more
than kisses'), _The Crosse_, _Elegie on the Lady Marckham_, _Elegie
on Mris Boulstred_ ('Death I recant'), _To Sr Henry Goodyere_, _To Mr.
Rowland Woodward_, _To Sr Henry Wootton_ ('Here's no more newes'), _To
the Countesse of Bedford_ ('Reason is our Soules left hand'), _To
the Countesse of Bedford_ ('Madam, you have refin'd'), _To Sr Edward
Herbert, at Julyers_. Here _1633_ diverges. Having got into letters
to noble and other people the editor was anxious to continue them,
and accordingly from another source (which I shall discuss later)
he prints a long series of letters to the Countess of Bedford, the
Countess of Huntingdon, Mr. T. W., and other more intimate friends
(they are 'thou', the Countesses 'you'), and Mrs. Herbert. He perhaps
returns to _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ in those to _The Lady Carey and Mrs.
Essex Riche, from Amyens_, and _To the Countesse of Salisbury_; and,
as in that manuscript, the Palatine and Essex epithalamia (to which,
however, _1633_ adds that written at Lincoln's Inn) are followed
immediately by the long _Obsequies to Lord Harrington_. Three odd
_Elegies_ follow, two of which (_The Autumnall_ and _The Picture_,
'Image of her') occur in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ in the same detached
fashion. Other manuscripts include them among the numbered _Elegies_.
_The Elegie on Prince Henry_, _Psalme 137_ (probably not by Donne),
_Resurrection, imperfect_, _An hymne to the Saints, and to Marquesse
Hamilton_, _An Epitaph upon Shakespeare_ (certainly not by Donne),
_Sapho to Philaenis_, follow in _1633_--a queerly consorted lot. The
_Elegie on Prince Henry_ is taken from the _Lachrymae Lachrymarum_ of
Joshua Sylvester (1612); the rest were possibly taken from some small
commonplace-book. This would account for the doubtful poems, the only
doubtful poems in _1633_. These past, the close connexion with our
manuscript is resumed. _The Annuntiation_ is followed, as in _H49_,
_Lec_, by _The Litanie_. Thereafter the lyrical pieces begin, as in
these manuscripts, with the song, 'Send home my long strayd eyes
to me.' This is followed by two pieces which are not in _D_, _H49_,
_Lec_,--the impressive, difficult, and in manuscripts comparatively
rare _Nocturnall upon S. Lucies day_, and the much commoner
_Witchcraft by a picture_. Thereafter the poems follow piece by piece
the order in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_[18] until _The Curse_ is reached.[19]
Then, in what seems to have been the editor's or printer's regular
method of proceeding in this edition, he laid aside the manuscript
from which he was printing the _Songs and Sonets_ to take up another
piece of work that had come to hand, viz. _An Anatomie of the World_
with _A Funerall Elegie_ and _Of the Progresse of the Soule_, which
he prints from the edition of 1625. Without apparent rhyme or reason
these long poems are packed in between _The Curse_ and _The Extasie_.
With the latter poem _1633_ resumes the songs and (with the exception
of _The Undertaking_) follows the order in _Lec_ to _The Dampe_, with
which the series in the manuscripts closes. It has been noted that in
_Lec_, _The Prohibition_ (which in _D_, _H49_ follows _Breake of day_
and precedes _The Anniversarie_) is omitted. This must have been the
case in the manuscript used for _1633_, for it is omitted at this
place and though printed later was probably not derived from this
source.
With _The Dampe_ the manuscript which I am supposing the editor to
have followed in the main probably came to an end. The poems which
follow in _1633_ are of a miscellaneous character and strangely
conjoined. _The Dissolution_ (p. 64), _A Ieat Ring sent_ (p. 65),
_Negative Love_ (p. 66), _The Prohibition_ (p. 67), _The Expiration_
(p. 68), _The Computation_ (p. 69), complete the tale of lyrics. A few
odd elegies follow ('Language thou art,' 'You that are she,' 'To
make the doubt clear') with _The Paradox_. _A Hymne to Christ, at the
Authors last going into Germany_ is given a page to itself, and is
followed by _The Lamentations of Jeremy_, _The Satyres_, and _A Hymne
to God the Father_. Thereafter come the prose letters and the _Elegies
upon the Author_.
What this comparison of the order of the poems points to is borne out
by an examination of the text. The critical notes afford the materials
for a further verification, and I need not tabulate the resemblances
at length. In _Elegie IV_, for example, ll. 7, 8, which occur in all
the other manuscripts and editions, are omitted by _1633_ and by
_D_, _H49_, _Lec_. Again, when a song has no title in _1633_ it
has frequently none in the manuscript. When there are evidently two
versions of a poem, as e.g. in _The Good-morrow_ and _The Flea_, the
version given in _1633_ is generally that of _D_, _H49_, _Lec_. Later
editions often contaminate this with another version of the poem. At
the same time there are ever and again divergences between the edition
and the manuscript which are not to be ignored, and cannot always be
explained. Some are due to error in one or the other, but some point
either to divergence between the text of the editor's manuscript and
ours, or to the use by the editor of other sources as well as this.
In the fifth elegy (_The Picture_), for example, _1633_ twice seems
to follow, not _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, but another source, another group of
manuscripts which has been preserved; and in _The Aniversarie_ ll. 23,
24, the version of _1633_ is not that of _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ but of
the same second group, which will be described later. On the whole,
however, it is clear that a manuscript closely resembling that now
represented by these three manuscripts supplied the editor of _1633_
with the bulk of the shorter poems, especially the older and more
privately circulated poems, the _Songs and Sonets_ and _Elegies_. When
he is not following this manuscript he draws from miscellaneous and
occasionally inferior sources.
It would be interesting if we could tell whence this manuscript was
obtained, and whether it was _a priori_ likely to be a good one. On
this point we can only conjecture, but it seems to me a fairly tenable
conjecture (though not to be built on in any way) that the nucleus of
the collection, at any rate, may have been a commonplace-book which
had belonged to Sir Henry Goodyere. The ground for this conjecture is
the inclusion in the edition of some prose letters addressed to this
friend, one in Latin and seven in English. There is indeed also one
addressed to the Countess of Bedford; but in the preceding letter to
Goodyere Donne says, 'I send you, with this, a letter which I sent to
the Countesse. It is not my use nor duty to do so. But for your having
it, there were but two consents, and I am sure you have mine, and you
are sure you have hers.' He goes on to refer to some verses which are
the subject of the letter to the Countesse. There can be no doubt that
the letter printed is the letter sent to Goodyere. The Burley MS. (see
Pearsall-Smith's _Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton_, Oxford, 1907)
gives us a good example of how a gentleman in the seventeenth century
dealt with his correspondence. That contains, besides various letters,
as of Sidney to Queen Elizabeth on the Anjou marriage, and other
matter which recurs in commonplace-books, a number of poems and
letters, sent to Wotton by his friends, including Donne, and
transcribed by one or other of Wotton's secretaries. The letters have
no signatures appended, which is the case with the letters in the
1633 edition of Donne's poems. Wotton and Goodyere did not need to be
reminded of the authors, and perhaps did not wish others to know. The
reason then for the rather odd inclusion of nine prose letters in a
collection of poems is probably, that the principal manuscript used
by the printer was an 'old book'[20] which had belonged to Sir Henry
Goodyere and in which his secretaries had transcribed poems and
letters by Donne. Goodyere's collection of Donne's poems would not
necessarily be exhaustive, but it would be full; it would not like the
collections of others include poems that were none of Donne's; and its
text would be accurate, allowing for the carelessness, indifference,
and misunderstandings of secretaries and copyists.
After _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, the most carefully made collection of Donne's
poems is one represented now by four distinct manuscripts:
_A18._ Additional MS. 18646, in the British Museum.
_N._ The Norton MS. in Harvard College Library, Boston, of which an
account is given by Professor Norton in a note appended to the Grolier
Club edition.
_TCC._ A manuscript in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge.
_TCD._ A large manuscript in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin,
containing two apparently quite independent collections of poems--the
first a collection of Donne's poems with one or two additional poems
by Sir John Roe, Francis Beaumont, Sir Thomas Overbury, and Corbet;
the second a quite miscellaneous collection, put together some time in
the thirties of the seventeenth century, and including some of Donne's
poems. It is only the first of these which belongs to the group in
question.
These four manuscripts are closely connected with one another, but a
still more intimate relation exists between _A18_ and _TCC_ on the
one hand, _N_ and _TCD_ on the other. _N_ and _TCD_ are the larger
collections; _A18_ and _TCC_ contain each a smaller selection from the
same body of poems. Indeed it would seem that _N_ is a copy of _TCD,
A18_ of _TCC_.
_TCD_, to start with it, is a beautifully written collection
of Donne's poems beginning with the _Satyres_, passing on to an
irregularly arranged series of elegies, letters, lyrics and epicedes,
and closing with the _Metempsychosis_ or _Progresse of the Soule_ and
the _Divine Poems_, which include the hymns written in the last years
of the poet's life. _N_ has the same poems, arranged in the same
order, and its readings are nearly always identical with those of
_TCD_, so far as I can judge from the collation made for me. The
handwriting, unlike that of _TCD_, is in what is known as secretary
hand and is somewhat difficult to read. What points to the one
manuscript being a copy of the other is that in 'Sweetest Love, I do
not go' the scribe has accidentally dropped stanza 4, by giving its
last line to stanza 3, and passing at once to the fifth stanza. Both
manuscripts make this mistake, whereas _A18_ and _TCC_ contain the
complete poem. In other places _N_ and _TCD_ agree in their readings
where _A18_ and _TCC_ diverge. If the one is a copy of the other,
_TCD_ is probably the more authoritative, as it contains some marginal
indications of authorship which _N_ omits.
_TCC_ is a smaller manuscript than _TCD_, but seems to be written
in the same clear, fine hand. It does not contain the _Satyres_, the
Elegy (XI. in this edition) _The Bracelet_, and the epistles _The
Storme_ and _The Calme_, with which _N_ and _TCD_ open. It looks,
however, as though the sheets containing these poems had been torn
out. Besides these, however, _TCC_ omits, without any indication
of their being lost, an _Elegie to the Lady Bedford_ ('You that are
she'), the Palatine Epithalamion, a long series of letters[21]
which in _N_, _TCD_ follow that _To M.M.H._ and precede _Sapho to
Philaenis_, the elegies on Prince Henry and on Lord Harington, and
_The Lamentations of Jeremy_. There are occasional differences in
the grouping of the poems; and _TCC_ does not contain some poems by
Beaumont, Corbet, Sir John Roe, and Sir Thomas Overbury which are
found in _N_ and _TCD_. In _TCD_ these, with the exception of that
by Beaumont, are carefully initialled, and therefore not ascribed to
Donne. In _N_ these initials are in some cases omitted; and some of
the poems have found their way into editions of Donne's poems.
Presumably _TCC_ is the earlier collection, and when _TCD_ was made,
the copyist was able to add fresh poems. It is clear, however, that
in the case of even those poems which the two have in common, the
one manuscript is not simply a copy of the others. There are several
divergences, and the mistake referred to above, in 'Sweetest Love, I
do not go', is not made in _TCC_. Strangely enough, a similar mistake
is made by _TCC_ in transcribing _Loves Deitie_ and is reproduced in
_A18_.
_A18_, indeed, would seem to be a copy of _TCC_. It is not in the same
handwriting, but in secretary hand. It omits the opening _Satyres_,
&c., as does _TCC_, but there is no sign of excision. Presumably,
then, the copy was made after these poems were, if they ever were,
torn out of _TCC_. Wherever _TCC_ diverges from _TCD_, _A18_ follows
_TCC_.[22]
Whoever was responsible for this collection of Donne's poems, it was
evidently made with care, at least as regards the canon. Very few
poems that are not certainly by Donne are included, and they are
correctly initialled. The only uninitialled doubtful poems are _A
Paradox_, 'Whoso terms Love a fire,' which in all the four manuscripts
follows 'No Lover saith, I love', and Beaumont's letter to the
Countess of Bedford, which begins, 'Soe may my verses pleasing be.' In
_N_, _TCD_ this follows Donne's letter to the same lady, 'You that are
she and you.' It is regrettable that the text of the poems is not
so good as the canon is pure. The punctuation is careless. There are
numerous stupid blunders, and there are evidences of editing in the
interest of more regular metre or a more obvious meaning. At times,
however, it would seem that the copyist is following a different
version of a poem or poems (e.g. the _Satyres_) from that given
in _D_, _H49_, and other manuscripts, and is embodying corrections
perhaps made by the author himself. It is quite credible that Donne,
in sending copies of his poems at different times to different people,
may have revised and amended them. It is quite clear, as my notes will
show, that of certain poems more than one version (each correct in
itself) was in circulation.
Was _A18_, _N_, _TC_, or a manuscript resembling it one of the sources
of the edition of _1633_? In part, I think, it was. The most probable
case at first sight is that of the _Satyres_. These, we have seen,
Marriot was at first prohibited from printing. Otherwise they would
have followed the _Epigrams_, and immediately preceded the _Elegies_.
As it is, they come after all the other poems; they are edited with
some cautious dashes; and their text is almost identical with that of
_N_, _TCD_. In the first satire the only difference between _1633_
and _N_, _TCD_ occurs in l. 70, where _N_, _TCD_, with all the other
manuscripts read--
Sells for a little state his libertie;
_1633_,
Sells for a little state high libertie;
'high' is either a slip or an editorial emendation. There are other
cases of similar editing, not all of which it is possible to correct
with confidence; but a study of the textual notes will show that in
general _1633_ follows the version preserved in _N_, _TCD_, and also
in _L74_ (of which later), when the rest of the manuscripts present an
interestingly different text. But strangely enough this version of
the _Satyres_ is also in _Lec_. This is the feature in which that
manuscript diverges most strikingly from _D_ and _H49_. Moreover in
some details in which _1633_ differs from _A18_, _N_, _TC_ it agrees
with _Lec_. It is possible therefore that the _Satyres_ were printed
from the same manuscript as the majority of the poems.
Again in the _Letters_ not found in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ there is a close
but not invariable agreement between the text of _1633_ and that of
this group of manuscripts. Those letters, which follow that _To Sir
Edward Herbert_, are printed in _1633_ in the same order as in
this edition (pp. 195-226), except that the group of short letters
beginning at p. 203 ('All haile sweete Poet') is here amplified and
rearranged from _W_. Now in _A18_, _N_, _TC_ these letters are also
brought together (_N_, _TCD_ adding some which are not in _A18_,
_TCC_), and the special group referred to, of letters to intimate
friends, are arranged in exactly the same order as in _1633_; have the
same headings, the same omissions, and the same accidental linking
of two poems. In the other letters, to the Countesses of Bedford,
Huntingdon, Salisbury, &c., the textual notes will show some striking
resemblances between the edition and the manuscripts. In the difficult
letter, 'T'have written then' (p. 195), _1633_ follows _N_, _TCD_
where _O'F_ gives a different and in some details more correct text.
In 'This twilight of two yeares' (p. 198) the strange reading of
l. 35, 'a prayer prayes,' is obviously due to _N_, _TCD_, where 'a
praiser prayes' has accidentally but explicably been written 'a prayer
praise'. In the letter _To the Countesse of Huntingdon_ (p. 201) the
_1633_ version of ll. 25, 26 is a correct rendering of what _N_, _TCD_
give wrongly:
Shee guilded us, But you are Gold; and shee
Vs inform'd, but transubstantiates you.
On the other hand there are some differences, as e.g. in the placing
of ll. 40-2 in 'Honour is so sublime' (p. 218), which make it
impossible to affirm that these poems were taken direct from
this group of manuscripts as we know them, without alteration or
emendation. The _Progresse of the Soule_ or _Metempsychosis_, as
printed in _1633_, must have been taken in the first instance from
this manuscript. In both the manuscripts and the edition, at l. 83 of
the poem a blank space is left after 'did'; in both, l. 137 reads,
'To see the Prince, and soe fill'd the waye'; in both, 'kinde' is
substituted for 'kindle' at l. 150; in l. 180 the 'uncloth'd child' of
1633 is explicable as an emendation of the 'encloth'd' of _A18_,
_N_, _TC_; and similarly the 'leagues o'rpast', l. 296 of _1633_, is
probably due to the omission of 'many' before 'leagues' in _A18_, _N_,
_TC_--'o'rpast' supplies the lost foot. It is clear, however, from a
comparison of different copies that as _1633_ passed through the press
this poem underwent considerable correction and alteration; and in
its final printed form there are errors which I have been enabled to
correct from _G_.
The paraphrase of _Lamentations_, and the _Epithalamion made at
Lincolns Inn_ (which is not in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_) are other poems
which show, in passages where there are divergent readings, a tendency
to follow the readings of _A18_, _N_, _TC_, though in neither of
these poems is the identity complete. It is further noteworthy that
to several poems unnamed in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ the editor of _1633_ has
given the title which these bear in _A18_, _N_, _TCC_, and _TCD_, as
though he had access to both the collections at the same time.
These two groups of manuscripts, which have come down to us, thus seem
to represent the two principal sources of the edition of _1633_. What
other poems that edition contains were derived either from previously
printed editions (The _Anniversaries_ and the _Elegy on Prince Henry_)
or were got from more miscellaneous and less trustworthy sources.
A third manuscript collection of Donne's poems is of interest because
it seems very probable that it or a similar collection came into the
hands of the printer before the second edition of 1635 was issued. A
considerable number of the errors, or inferior readings, of the
later editions seem to be traceable to its influence. At least it is
remarkable how often when _1635_ and the subsequent editions depart
from _1633_ and the general tradition of the manuscripts they have
the support of this manuscript and this manuscript alone. This is the
manuscript which I have called
_O'F_, because it was at one time in the possession of the Rev. T. R.
O'Flaherty, of Capel, near Dorking, a great student of Donne, and
a collector. He contributed several notes on Donne to _Notes and
Queries_. I do not know of any more extensive work by him on the
subject.
This manuscript has been already described by Mr. R. Warwick Bond in
the Catalogue of Ellis and Elvey, 1903. It is a large but somewhat
indiscriminate collection, made apparently with a view to publication.
The title-page states that it contains 'The Poems of D. J. Donne (not
yet imprinted) consisting of
Divine Poems, beginning Pag. 1
Satyres 57
Elegies 113
Epicedes and Obsequies 161
Letters to severall personages 189
Songs and Sonnets 245
Epithalamions 317
Epigrams 337
With his paradoxes and problems 421
finished this 12 of October 1632.'
The reader will notice how far this arrangement agrees with, how far
it differs from, that adopted in 1635.
Of the twenty-eight new poems, genuine, doubtful, and spurious, added
in _1635_, this manuscript contains twenty, a larger number than I
have found in any other single manuscript. An examination of the text
of these does not, however, make it certain that all of them were
derived from this source or from this source only. The text, for
example, of the _Elegie XI. The Bracelet_, in _1635_, is evidently
taken from a manuscript differing in important respects from _O'F_ and
resembling closely _Cy_ and _P_. _Elegie XII_, also, _His parting
from her_, can hardly have been derived from _O'F_, as _1635_ gives
an incomplete, _O'F_ has an entire, version of the poem. In others,
however, e.g. _Elegie XIII. Julia_; _Elegie XVI. On his Mistris_;
_Satyre_, 'Men write that love and reason disagree,' it will be seen
that the text of 1635 agrees more closely with _O'F_ than with any of
the other manuscripts cited. The second of these, _On his Mistris_, is
a notable case, and so are the four _Divine Sonnets_ added in _1635_.
Most striking of all is the case of the _Song_, probably not by Donne,
'Soules joy now I am gone,' where the absurd readings 'Words'
for 'Wounds' and 'hopes joyning' for 'lipp-joyning' (or perhaps
'lipps-joyning') must have come from this source. One can hardly
believe that two independent manuscripts would perpetrate two such
blunders. Taken with the many changes from the text of _1633_ in which
_1635_ has the support of _O'F_, one can hardly doubt that among the
fresh manuscript collections which came into the hands of the printer
of _1635_ (often only to mislead him) _O'F_ was one.
Besides the twenty poems which passed into _1635_, _O'F_ attributes
some eighteen other poems to Donne, of which few are probably
genuine.[23] Of the other manuscript collections I must speak more
shortly. There is no evidence that any of them was used by the
seventeenth-century editors.
_B_ is a handsome, vellum-bound manuscript belonging to the Earl of
Ellesmere's library at Bridgewater House. I am, I think, the first
editor who has examined it. The volume bears on the fly-leaf
the autograph signature ('J. Bridgewater') of the first Earl of
Bridgewater, the son of Donne's early patron, Elizabeth's Lord Keeper
and later Lord Chancellor. On the title-page 'Dr Donne' is written in
the same hand. John Egerton, it will be remembered, was, like Donne, a
volunteer in Essex's expedition to the Azores in 1597. In 1599 he and
his elder brother Thomas were in Ireland, where the latter was killed,
leaving John to be his father's heir. The book-number, inscribed
on the second leaf, is in the handwriting of the second Earl of
Bridgewater, the Elder Brother of Milton's _Comus_. The manuscript has
thus interesting associations, and links with Donne's earliest patron.
I had hoped that it might prove, being made for those who had known
Donne all his life, an exceptionally good manuscript, but can hardly
say that my expectations were fulfilled. It was probably put together
in the twenties, because though it contains the _Holy Sonnets_ it
does not contain the hymns written at the close of the poet's life. It
resembles _O'F_, _S_, _S96_, and _P_, rather than either of the first
two collections which I have described, _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ and _A18_,
_N_, _TC_, in that it includes with Donne's poems a number of poems
not by Donne,[24] but most of them apparently by his contemporaries,
Sir John Roe, Francis Beaumont, Jonson, and other of the wits of the
first decade of the seventeenth century, the men who collaborated in
writing witty poems on Coryat, or _Characters_ in the style of Sir
Thomas Overbury. In the case of some of these initials are added, and
a later, but not modern, hand has gone over the manuscript and denied
or queried Donne's authorship of others. Textually also _B_ tends to
range itself, especially in certain groups of poems, as the _Satyres_
and _Holy Sonnets_, with _O'F_, _S96_, _W_ when these differ from _D_,
_H49_, _Lec_ and _A18_, _N_, _TC_. In such cases the tradition which
it represents is most correctly preserved in _W_. In a few poems the
text of _B_ is identical with that of _S96_. On the whole _B_ cannot
be accepted in any degree as an independent authority for the text.
It is important only for its agreements with other manuscripts, as
helping to establish what I may call the manuscript tradition, in
various passages, as against the text of the editions.
Still less valuable as an independent textual authority is
_P_. This manuscript is a striking example of the kind of collections
of poems, circulating in manuscript, which gentlemen in the
seventeenth century caused to be prepared, and one cannot help
wondering how they managed to understand the poems, so full is the
text of gross and palpable errors. _P_ is a small octavo manuscript,
once in the Phillipps collection, now in the possession of Captain C.
Shirley Harris, Oxford. On the cover of brown leather is stamped the
royal arms of James I. On p. 1 is written, '1623 me possidet Hen.
Champernowne de Dartington in Devonia, generosus.' Two other members
of this old, and still extant, Devonshire family have owned the
volume, as also Sir Edward Seymour (Knight Baronett) and Bridgett
Brookbrige. The poems are written in a small, clear hand, and in
Elizabethan character. Captain Harris has had a careful transcript of
the poems made, and he allowed me after collating the original with
the transcript to keep the latter by me for a long time.
The collection is in the nature of a commonplace-book, and includes
a prose letter to Raleigh, and a good many poems by other poets than
Donne, but the bulk of the volume is occupied with his poems,[25] and
most of the poems are signed 'J. D. Finis.' The date of the collection
is between 1619, when the poem _When he went with the Lo Doncaster_
was written, and 1623, the date on the title-page. Neither for text
nor for canon is _P_ an authority, but the very carelessness
with which it is written makes its testimony to certain readings
indisputable. It makes no suggestion of conscious editing. In certain
poems its text is identical with that of _Cy_, even to absurd errors.
It sometimes, however, supports readings which are otherwise confined
to _O'F_ and the later editions of the poem, showing that these may be
older than 1632-5.
_Cy._ The Carnaby MS. consists of one hundred folio pages bound in
flexible vellum, and is now in the Harvard College Library, Boston.
It is by no means an exhaustive collection; the poems are chaotically
arranged; the text seems to be careless, and the spelling unusually
erratic; but most of the poems it contains are genuine.[26] This
manuscript is not as a whole identical with _P_, but some of the poems
it contains must have come from that or from a common source.
_JC._ The John Cave MS. is a small collection of Donne's poems now
in the possession of Mr. Elkin Matthews, who has kindly allowed me
to collate it. It was formerly in Mr. O'Flaherty's possession. The
original possessor had been a certain John Cave, and the volume opens
with the following poem, written, it will be seen, while Donne was
still alive:
Oh how it joys me that this quick brain'd Age
can nere reach thee (Donn) though it should engage
at once all its whole stock of witt to finde
out of thy well plac'd words thy more pure minde.
Noe, wee are bastard Aeglets all; our eyes
could not endure the splendor that would rise
from hence like rays from out a cloud. That Man
who first found out the Perspective which can
make starrs at midday plainly seen, did more
then could the whole Chaos of Arte<s> before
or since; If I might have my wish 't shuld bee
That Man might be reviv'd againe to see
If hee could such another frame, whereby
the minde might bee made see as farr as th' eye.
Then might we hope to finde thy sense, till then
The Age of Ignorance I'le still condemn.
IO. CA.
Jun. 3. 1620.
The manuscript is divided into three parts, the first containing the
five _Satyres_, the _Litany_ and the _Storme_ and _Calme_. The second
consists of _Elegies_ and _Epigrammes_ and the third of _Miscellanea,
Poems, Elegies, Sonnets by the same Author_. The elegies in the second
part are, as in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, and _W_, thirteen in number.
Their arrangement is that of _W_, and, like _W_, _JC_ gives _The
Comparison_, which, _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ do not, but drops _Loves
Progress_, which the latter group contains. The text of these poems is
generally that of _W_, but here and throughout _JC_ abounds in errors
and emendations. It contains one or two poems which were published
in the edition of 1650, and which I have found in no other manuscript
except _O'F_. In these _JC_ supplies some obvious emendations. The
poems in the third part are very irregularly arranged. This is the
only manuscript, professing to be of Donne's poems, which contains the
elegy, 'The heavens rejoice in motion,' which the younger Donne
added to the edition of 1650. It is not a very correct, but is an
interesting manuscript, with very few spurious poems. At the other end
of the manuscript from Donne's, are poems by Corbet.
What seems to be practically a duplicate of _JC_ is preserved in the
Dyce Collection at the South Kensington Museum. It belonged originally
to a certain 'Johannes Nedlam e Collegio Lincolniense' and is dated
1625. Cave's poem 'Upon Doctor Donne's Satyres' is inscribed and the
contents and arrangement of the volume are identical with those of
_JC_ except that one poem, _The Dampe_, is omitted, probably by an
oversight, in the Dyce MS. After my experience of _JC_ I did not think
it necessary to collate this manuscript. It was from it that Waldron
printed some of the unpublished poems of Donne and Corbet in _A
Collection of Miscellaneous Poetry_ (1802).
_H40_ and _RP31_, i.e. Harleian MS. 4064 in the British Museum,
and Rawlinson Poetical MS. 31, in the Bodleian Library, are two
manuscripts containing a fairly large number of Donne's poems
intermingled with poems by other and contemporary authors. A note on
the fly-leaf of _RP31_ declares that the manuscript contains 'Sir John
Harringtons poems written in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth', which is
certainly not an accurate description.[27] Some of the poems must have
been written as late as 1610, and they are by various authors,
Wotton, Jonson, Sir Edward Herbert, Sir John Roe, Donne, Beaumont,
and probably others, but names of authors are only occasionally given.
Each manuscript starts with the words 'Prolegomena Quaedam', and the
poem, 'Paynter while there thou sit'st.' The poems follow the same
order in the two manuscripts, but of poems not by Donne _RP31_
contains several which are not in _H40_, and, on the other hand,
of poems by Donne _H40_ inserts at various places quite a number,
especially of songs, which are not in _RP31_. The latter is, in short,
a miscellaneous collection of Elizabethan and early Jacobean poems,
including several of Donne's; the former, the same collection in which
Donne's poems have become by insertion the principal feature. I have
cited the readings of _H40_ throughout; those of _RP31_ only when
they differ from _H40_, or when I wish to emphasize their agreement.
Wherever derived from, the poems are generally carefully and
intelligently transcribed. They contain some unpublished poems of
Jonson, Sir Edward Herbert, and probably Daniel.
_L74._ The Lansdowne MS. 740, in the British Museum, is an interesting
collection of Donne's mainly earlier and secular poems, along with
several by contemporaries.[28] The text of the _Satyres_ connects
this collection with _A18_, _N_, _TC_, but it is probably older, as
it contains none of the _Divine Poems_ and no poem written later
than 1610. Its interest, apart from the support which it lends to the
readings of other manuscripts, centres in the evidence it affords as
to the authorship of some of the unauthentic poems which have been
ascribed to Donne.
_S._ The Stephens MS., now in the Harvard College Library, Boston, is
the manuscript on which Dr. Grosart based his edition (though he does
not reproduce it either consistently or with invariable accuracy) in
1873--an unhappy choice even were it legitimate to adopt any
single manuscript in preference to the edition of 1633. Of all the
manuscripts I have examined (I know it only through the collation
made for me and from Dr. Grosart's citations) it is, I think, without
exception the worst, the fullest of obvious and absurd blunders. There
are too in it more evidences of stupid editing than in _P_, whose
blunders are due to careless copying by eye or to dictation, and
therefore more easy to correct.
The manuscript is dated, at the end, '19th July 1620,' and contains
no poems which are demonstrably later than this date, or indeed
than 1610. As, however, it contains several of the _Divine Poems_,
including _La Corona_, but _not_ the _Holy Sonnets_, it affords a
valuable clue to the date of these poems,--of which more elsewhere.
The collection is an ambitious one, and an attempt has been made at
classification. Six Satires are followed by twenty-seven Elegies (one
is torn out) under which head love and funeral elegies are included,
and these by a long series of songs with the _Divine Poems_
interspersed. Some of the songs, as of the elegies, are not by
Donne.[29]
_S96._ Stowe MS. 961 is a small folio volume in the British Museum,
containing a collection of Donne's poems very neatly and prettily
transcribed. It cannot have been made before 1630 as it contains all
the three hymns written during the poet's last illnesses. Indeed it is
the only manuscript which I have found containing a copy of the _Hymne
to God, my God in my Sicknes_. It is a very miscellaneous collection.
Three satires are followed by the long obsequies to the Lord
Harington, and these by a sequence of Letters, Funeral Elegies,
Elegies, and Songs intermingled. It is regrettable that so
well-written a manuscript is not more reliable, but its text is poor,
its titles sometimes erroneous, and its ascriptions inaccurate.[30]
(3) In the third class I place manuscripts which are not primarily
collections of Donne's poems but collections of seventeenth-century
poems among which Donne's are included. It is not easy to draw a hard
and fast line between this class and the last because, as has been
seen, most of the manuscripts at the end of the last list contain
poems which are not, or probably are not, by Donne. Still, in these
collections Donne's work predominates, and the tendency of the
collector is to bring the other poems under his aegis. Initials like
J. R., F. B., J. H. disappear, or J. D. takes their place. In the case
of these last collections this is not so. Poems by Donne are included
with poems which the collector assigns to other wits. Obviously this
class could be made to include many different kinds of collections,
ranging from those in which Donne is a prominent figure to those
which include only one or two of his poems. But such manuscripts have
comparatively little value and no authority for the textual critic,
though they are not without importance for the student of the canon
of Donne's poetry. I shall mention only one or two, though I have
examined a good many more.
_A25._ Additional MS. 25707, in the British Museum, is a large and
interesting collection, written in several different hands, of early
seventeenth-century poems, Jacobean and Caroline. It contains an
_Elegie_ by Henry Skipwith on the death of King Charles I, but most
of the poems are early Jacobean, and either the bulk of the collection
was made before this and some other poems were inserted, or it is
derived from older collections. Indeed, most of the poems by Donne
were probably got from some older collection or collections not
unlike some of those already described. They consist of twelve elegies
arranged in the same order as in _JC_, _W_, and to some extent _O'F_,
which is not the order of _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ and _1633_; a number of
_Songs_ with some _Letters_ and _Obsequies_ following one another
sometimes in batches, at times interspersed with poems by other
writers; the five _Satyres_, separated from the other poems and
showing some evidences in the text of deriving from a collection like
_Q_ or its duplicate in the Dyce collection.[31] The only one of the
_Divine Poems_ which _A25_ contains is _The Crosse_. No poem which can
be proved to have been written later than 1610 is included.
The poems by Donne in this manuscript are generally, but not always,
initialled J. D., and are thus distinguished from others by F. B., H.
K., N. H., H. W., Sr H. G., T. P., T. G., G. Lucy., No. B., &c. The
care with which this has been done lends interest to those poems which
are here ascribed to Donne but are not elsewhere assigned to him.
_A25_ (with its partial duplicate _C_) is the only manuscript which
attributes to 'J. D.' the Psalm, 'By Euphrates flowery side,' that was
printed in _1633_ and all the subsequent editions.[32]
_C._ A strange duplicate of certain parts of _A25_ is a small
manuscript in the Cambridge University Library belonging to the
Baumgartner collection. It is a thin folio, much damaged by damp, and
scribbled over. A long poem, _In cladem Rheensen_ ('Verses upon the
slaughter at the Isle of Rhees'), has been used by the cataloguer to
date the manuscript, but as this has evidently been inserted when the
whole was bound, the rest of the contents may be older or younger. The
collection opens with three of the _Elegies_ contained in _A25_. It
then omits eleven poems which are in _A25_, and continues with twenty
_Songs_ and _Obsequies_, following the order of _A25_ but omitting the
intervening poems. Some nine more poems are given, following the order
of _A25_, but many are omitted in _C_ which are found in _A25_, and
the poems in _C_ are often only fragments of the whole poems in _A25_.
Evidently _C_ is a selection of poems either made directly from _A25_,
or from the collection of Donne's poems (with one or two by Beaumont
and others) which _A25_ itself drew from.
_A10._ Additional MS. 10309, in the British Museum, is a little octavo
volume which was once the property of Margaret Bellasis, probably
the eldest daughter of Thomas, first Lord Fauconberg. It is a very
miscellaneous collection of prose (Hall's _Characterismes of Vice_)
and verse. Of Donne's undoubted poems there are very few, but there
is an interesting group of poems by Roe or others (the authors are not
named in the manuscript) which are frequently found with Donne's, and
some of which have been printed as his.[33]
_M._ This is a manuscript bought by Lord Houghton and now in the
library of the Marquis of Crewe. It is entitled
A Collection of
Original Poetry
written about the time of
Ben: Jonson
qui ob. 1637
A later hand, probably Sir John Simeon's, has added 'Chiefly in
the Autograph of Dr. Donne Dean of St. Pauls', but this is quite
erroneous. It is a miscellaneous collection of poems by Donne, Jonson,
Pembroke, Shirley, and others, with short extracts from Fletcher and
Shakespeare. Donne's are the most numerous, and their text generally
good, but such a collection can have no authority. It is important
only as supporting readings and ascriptions of other manuscripts. I
cite it seldom.
_TCD_ (_Second Collection_).[34] The large manuscript volume in
Trinity College, Dublin, contains two collections of poems (though
editors have spoken of them as one) of very different character and
value. The first I have already described. It occupies folios 1 to
292. On folio 293 a new hand begins with the song, 'Victorious Beauty
though your eyes,' and from that folio to folio 565 (but some folios
are torn out) follows a long and miscellaneous series of early
seventeenth-century poems. There are numerous references to
Buckingham, but none to the Long Parliament or the events which
followed, so that the collection was probably put together before
1640. The poems are ascribed to different authors in a very haphazard
and untrustworthy fashion. James I is credited with Jonson's epigram
on the Union of the Crowns; Donne's _The Baite_ is given to Wotton;
and Wotton's 'O Faithless World' to Robert Wisedom. Probably there
is more reliance to be put on the ascriptions of later and Caroline
poems, but for the student of Donne and early Jacobean poetry the
collection has no value. Some of Donne's poems occur, and it is
noteworthy that the version given is often a different one from that
occurring in the first part of the volume. Probably two distinct
collections have been bound up together.
Another collection frequently cited by Grosart, but of little
value for the editor of Donne, is the _Farmer-Chetham MS._, a
commonplace-book in the Chetham Library, Manchester, which has been
published by Grosart. It contains one or two of Donne's poems, but
its most interesting contents are the 'Gulling Sonnets' of Sir John
Davies, and some poems by Raleigh, Hoskins, and others. Nothing could
be more unsafe than to ascribe poems to Donne, as Grosart did, because
they occur here in conjunction with some that are certainly his.
A similar collection, which I have not seen, is the
_Hazlewood-Kingsborough MS._, as Dr. Grosart called it. To judge from
the analysis in Thorpe's Catalogue, 1831, this too is a miscellaneous
anthology of poems written by, or at any rate ascribed to,
Shakespeare, Jonson, Bacon, Raleigh, Donne, and others. There is no
end to the number of such collections, and it is absurd to base a text
upon them.
The _Burley MS._, to which I refer once or twice, and which is a
manuscript of great importance for the editor of Donne's letters,
is not a collection of poems. It is a commonplace-book of Sir Henry
Wotton's in the handwriting of his secretaries. Amid its varied
contents are some letters, unsigned but indubitably by Donne; ten of
his _Paradoxes_ with a covering letter; and a few poems of Donne's
with other poems. Of the last, one is certainly by Donne (_H. W. in
Hibernia belligeranti_), and I have incorporated it. The others seem
to me exceedingly doubtful. They are probably the work of other
wits among Wotton's friends. I have printed a selection from them in
Appendix C.[35]
Of the manuscripts of the first two classes, which alone could put
forward any claim to be treated as independent sources of the text
of an edition of Donne's poems, it would be impossible, I think, to
construct a complete genealogy. Different poems, or different groups
of poems in the same manuscript, come from different sources, and
to trace each stream to its fountain-head would be a difficult task,
perhaps impossible without further material, and would in the end
hardly repay the trouble, for the difficulties in Donne's text are
not of so insoluble a character as to demand such heroic methods.
The interval between the composition of the poems and their first
publication ranges from about forty years at the most to a year or
two. There is no case here of groping one's way back through centuries
of transmission. The surprising fact is rather that so many of the
common errors of a text preserved and transmitted in manuscript should
have appeared so soon, that the text and canon of Donne's poems should
present an editor in one form or another with all the chief problems
which confront the editor of a classical or a mediaeval author.
The manuscripts fall into three main groups (1) _D_, _H49_, _Lec_.
These with a portion of _1633_ come from a common source. (2) _A18_,
_N_, _TCC_, _TCD_. These also come from a single stream and some parts
of _1633_ follow them. _L74_ is closely connected with them, at least
in parts. (3) _A25_, _B_, _Cy_, _JC_, _O'F_, _P_, _S_, _S96_, _W_.
These cannot be traced in their entirety to a single head, but in
certain groups of poems they tend to follow a common tradition which
may or may not be that of one or other of the first two groups. Of the
_Elegies_, for example, _A25_, _JC_, _O'F_ and _W_ transcribe twelve
in the same order and with much the same text. Again, _B_, _O'F_,
_S96_, and _W_ have taken the _Holy Sonnets_ from a common source,
but _O'F_ has corrected or altered its readings by a reference to a
manuscript resembling _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, while _W_ has a more correct
version than the others of the common tradition, and three sonnets
which none of these include. Generally, whenever _B_, _O'F_, _S96_,
and _W_ derive from the same source, _W_ is much the most reliable
witness.
Indeed, our first two groups and _W_ have the appearance of being
derived from some authoritative source, from manuscripts in the
possession of members of Donne's circle. All the others suggest, by
the headings they give to occasional poems, their misunderstanding
of the true character of some poems, their erroneous ascriptions of
poems, that they are the work of amateurs to whom Donne was not known,
or who belonged to a generation that knew Donne as a divine, only
vaguely as a wit.
These being the materials at our command, the question is, how are we
to use them to secure as accurate a text as possible of Donne's poems,
to get back as close as may be to what the poet wrote himself. The
answer is fairly obvious, though it could not be so until some effort
had been made to survey the manuscript material as a whole.
Of the three most recent editors--the first to attempt to obtain a
true text--of Donne's poems, each has pursued a different plan.
The late Dr. Grosart[36] proceeded on a principle which makes it
exceedingly difficult to determine accurately what is the source of,
or authority for, any particular reading he adopted. He printed now
from one manuscript, now from another, but corrected the errors of
the manuscript by one or other of the editions, most often by that of
1669. He made no estimate of the relative value of either manuscripts
or editions, nor used them in any systematic fashion.
The Grolier Club edition[37] was constructed on a different principle.
For all those poems which _1633_ contains, that edition was accepted
as the basis; for other poems, the first edition, whichever that
might be. The text of _1633_ is reproduced very closely, even when the
editor leans to the acceptance of a later reading as correct. Only
one or two corrections are actually incorporated in the text. But the
punctuation has been freely altered throughout, and no record of these
changes is preserved in the textual notes even when they affect the
sense. In more than one instance the words of _1633_ are retained
in this edition but are made to convey a different meaning from that
which they bear in the original.
The edition of Donne's poems prepared by Mr. E. K. Chambers[38] for
the _Muses Library_ was not based, like Dr. Grosart's, on a casual
use of individual manuscripts and editions, nor like the Grolier Club
edition on a rigid adherence to the first edition, but on an eclectic
use of all the seventeenth-century editions, supplemented by an
occasional reference to one or other of the manuscript collections,
either at first hand or through Dr. Grosart.
Of these three methods, that of the Grolier Club editor is, there can
be no doubt, the soundest. The edition of 1633 comes to us, indeed,
with no _a priori_ authority. It was not published, or (like the
sermons) prepared for the press[39] by the author; nor (as in the case
of the first folio edition of Shakespeare's plays) was it issued by
the author's executors.
But if we apply to _1633_ the _a posteriori_ tests described by
Dr. Moore in his work on the textual criticism of Dante's _Divina
Commedia_, if we select a number of test passages, passages where
the editions vary, but where one reading can be clearly shown to be
intrinsically the more probable, by certain definite tests,[40] we
shall find that _1633_ is, taken all over, far and away superior to
any other single edition, and, I may add at once, to any _single_
manuscript.
Moreover, any careful examination of the later editions, of their
variations from _1633_, and of the text of the poems which they print
for the first time, shows clearly that some method more trustworthy
than individual preference must be found if we are to distinguish
between those of their variations whi
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