John Donne - Delphi Poets Series

by John Donne

  To adore or scorn an image, or protest,

  May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way

  To stand inquiring right, is not to stray;

  To sleep or run wrong is. On a huge hill,

  Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will

  Reach her, about must and about must go;

  And what the hill’s suddenness resists win so.

  This surely was the heresy of an inquisitive mind, not the mood of a theologian. It betrays a tolerance springing from ardent doubt, not from ardent faith.

  It is all in keeping with one’s impression of the young Donne as a man setting out bravely in his cockle-shell on the oceans of knowledge and experience. He travels, though he knows not why he travels. He loves, though he knows not why he loves. He must escape from that “hydroptic, immoderate” thirst of experience by yielding to it. One fancies that it was in this spirit that he joined the expedition of Essex to Cadiz in 1596 and afterwards sailed to the Azores. Or partly in this spirit, for he himself leads one to think that his love-affairs may have had something to do with it. In the second of those prematurely realistic descriptions of storm and calm relating to the Azores voyage, he writes:

  Whether a rotten state, and hope of gain,

  Or to disuse me from the queasy pain

  Of being belov’d, and loving, or the thirst

  Of honour, or fair death, out pusht me first.

  In these lines we get a glimpse of the Donne that has attracted most interest in recent years — the Donne who experienced more variously than any other poet of his time “the queasy pain of being beloved and loving.” Donne was curious of adventures of many kinds, but in nothing more than in love. As a youth he leaves the impression of having been an Odysseus of love, a man of many wiles and many travels. He was a virile neurotic, comparable in some points to Baudelaire, who was a sensualist of the mind even more than of the body. His sensibilities were different as well as less of a piece, but he had something of Baudelaire’s taste for hideous and shocking aspects of lust. One is not surprised to find among his poems that “heroical epistle of Sappho to Philaenis,” in which he makes himself the casuist of forbidden things. His studies of sensuality, however, are for the most part normal, even in their grossness. There was in him more of the Yahoo than of the decadent. There was an excremental element in his genius as in the genius of that other gloomy dean, Jonathan Swift. Donne and Swift were alike satirists born under Saturn. They laughed more frequently from disillusion than from happiness. Donne, it must be admitted, turned his disillusion to charming as well as hideous uses. Go and Catch a Falling Star is but one of a series of delightful lyrics in disparagement of women. In several of the Elegies, however, he throws away his lute and comes to the satirist’s more prosaic business. He writes frankly as a man in search of bodily experiences:

  Whoever loves, if he do not propose

  The right true end of love, he’s one that goes

  To sea for nothing but to make him sick.

  In Love Progress he lets his fancy dwell on the detailed geography of a woman’s body, with the sick imagination of a schoolboy, till the beautiful seems almost beastly. In The Anagram and The Comparison he plays the Yahoo at the expense of all women by the similes he uses in insulting two of them. In The Perfume he relates the story of an intrigue with a girl whose father discovered his presence in the house as a result of his using scent. Donne’s jest about it is suggestive of his uncontrollable passion for ugliness:

  Had it been some bad smell, he would have thought

  That his own feet, or breath, that smell had brought.

  It may be contended that in The Perfume he was describing an imaginary experience, and indeed we have his own words on record: “I did best when I had least truth for my subjects.” But even if we did not accept Mr. Gosse’s common-sense explanation of these words, we should feel that the details of the story have a vividness that springs straight from reality. It is difficult to believe that Donne had not actually lived in terror of the gigantic manservant who was set to spy on the lovers:

  The grim eight-foot-high iron-bound serving-man

  That oft names God in oaths, and only then;

  He that to bar the first gate doth as wide

  As the great Rhodian Colossus stride,

  Which, if in hell no other pains there were,

  Makes me fear hell, because he must be there.

  But the most interesting of all the sensual intrigues of Donne, from the point of view of biography, especially since Mr. Gosse gave it such commanding significance in that Life of John Donne in which he made a living man out of a mummy, is that of which we have the story in Jealousy and His Parting from Her. It is another story of furtive and forbidden love. Its theme is an intrigue carried on under a

  Husband’s towering eyes,

  That flamed with oily sweat of jealousy.

  A characteristic touch of grimness is added to the story by making the husband a deformed man. Donne, however, merely laughs at his deformity, as he bids the lady laugh at the jealousy that reduces her to tears:

  O give him many thanks, he is courteous,

  That in suspecting kindly warneth us.

  We must not, as we used, flout openly,

  In scoffing riddles, his deformity;

  Nor at his board together being set,

  With words nor touch scarce looks adulterate.

  And he proposes that, now that the husband seems to have discovered them, they shall henceforth carry on their intrigue at some distance from where

  He, swol’n and pampered with great fare,

  Sits down and snorts, cag’d in his basket chair.

  It is an extraordinary story, if it is true. It throws a scarcely less extraordinary light on the nature of Donne’s mind, if he invented it. At the same time, I do not think the events it relates played the important part which Mr. Gosse assigns to them in Donne’s spiritual biography. It is impossible to read Mr. Gosse’s two volumes without getting the impression that “the deplorable but eventful liaison,” as he calls it, was the most fruitful occurrence in Donne’s life as a poet. He discovers traces of it in one great poem after another — even in the Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day, which is commonly supposed to relate to the Countess of Bedford, and in The Funeral, the theme of which Professor Grierson takes to be the mother of George Herbert. I confess that the oftener I read the poetry of Donne the more firmly I become convinced that, far from being primarily the poet of desire gratified and satiated, he is essentially the poet of frustrated love. He is often described by the historians of literature as the poet who finally broke down the tradition of Platonic love. I believe that, so far is this from being the case, he is the supreme example of a Platonic lover among the English poets. He was usually Platonic under protest, but at other times exultantly so. Whether he finally overcame the more consistent Platonism of his mistress by the impassioned logic of The Ecstasy we have no means of knowing. If he did, it would be difficult to resist the conclusion that the lady who wished to continue to be his passionate friend and to ignore the physical side of love was Anne More, whom he afterwards married. If not, we may look for her where we will, whether in Magdalen Herbert (already a young widow who had borne ten children when he first met her) or in the Countess of Bedford or in another. The name is not important, and one is not concerned to know it, especially when one remembers Donne’s alarming curse on:

  Whoever guesses, thinks, or dreams he knows

  Who is my mistress.

  One sort of readers will go on speculating, hoping to discover real people in the shadows, as they speculate about Swift’s Stella and Vanessa, and his relations to them. It is enough for us to feel, however, that these poems railing at or glorying in Platonic love are no mere goldsmith’s compliments, like the rhymed letters to Mrs. Herbert and Lady Bedford. Miracles of this sort are not wrought save by the heart. We do not find in them the underground and sardonic element that appears in so much of Donne’s merely
amorous work. We no longer picture him as a sort of Vulcan hammering out the poetry of base love, raucous, powerful, mocking. He becomes in them a child Apollo, as far as his temperament will allow him. He makes music of so grave and stately a beauty that one begins to wonder at all the critics who have found fault with his rhythms — from Ben Jonson, who said that “for not keeping accent, Donne deserved hanging,” down to Coleridge, who declared that his “muse on dromedary trots,” and described him as “rhyme’s sturdy cripple.” Coleridge’s quatrain on Donne is, without doubt, an unequalled masterpiece of epigrammatic criticism. But Donne rode no dromedary. In his greatest poems he rides Pegasus like a master, even if he does rather weigh the poor beast down by carrying an encyclopædia in his saddle-bags.

  Not only does Donne remain a learned man on his Pegasus, however: he also remains a humorist, a serious fantastic. Humour and passion pursue each other through the labyrinth of his being, as we find in those two beautiful poems, The Relic and The Funeral, addressed to the lady who had given him a bracelet of her hair. In the former he foretells what will happen if ever his grave is broken up and his skeleton discovered with

  A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.

  People will fancy, he declares, that the bracelet is a device of lovers

  To make their souls at the last busy day

  Meet at the grave and make a little stay.

  Bone and bracelet will be worshipped as relics — the relics of a Magdalen and her lover. He conjectures with a quiet smile:

  All women shall adore us, and some men.

  He warns his worshippers, however, that the facts are far different from what they imagine, and tells the miracle seekers what in reality were “the miracles we harmless lovers wrought”:

  First we loved well and faithfully,

  Yet knew not what we lov’d, nor why;

  Difference of sex no more we knew

  Than our guardian angels do;

  Coming and going, we

  Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals;

  Our hands ne’er touch’d the seals,

  Which nature, injur’d by late law, sets free:

  These miracles we did; but now, alas!

  All measure, and all language I should pass,

  Should I tell what a miracle she was.

  In The Funeral he returns to the same theme:

  Whoever comes to shroud me do not harm

  Nor question much

  That subtle wreath of hair that crowns my arm;

  The mystery, the sign you must not touch,

  For ‘tis my outward soul.

  In this poem, however, he finds less consolation than before in the too miraculous nobleness of their love:

  Whate’er she meant by it, bury it with me,

  For since I am

  Love’s martyr, it might breed idolatry,

  If into other hands these relics came;

  As ‘twas humility

  To afford to it all that a soul can do,

  So, ‘tis some bravery,

  That, since you would have none of me, I bury some of you.

  In The Blossom he is in a still more earthly mood, and declares that, if his mistress remains obdurate, he will return to London, where he will find a mistress:

  As glad to have my body as my mind.

  The Primrose is another appeal for a less intellectual love:

  Should she

  Be more than woman, she would get above

  All thought of sex, and think to move

  My heart to study her, and not to love.

  If we turn back to The Undertaking, however, we find Donne boasting once more of the miraculous purity of a love which it would be useless to communicate to other men, since, there being no other mistress to love in the same kind, they “would love but as before.” Hence he will keep the tale a secret:

  If, as I have, you also do,

  Virtue attir’d in woman see,

  And dare love that, and say so too,

  And forget the He and She.

  And if this love, though placed so,

  From profane men you hide,

  Which will no faith on this bestow,

  Or, if they do, deride:

  Then you have done a braver thing

  Than all the Worthies did;

  And a braver thence will spring,

  Which is, to keep that hid.

  It seems to me, in view of this remarkable series of poems, that it is useless to look in Donne for a single consistent attitude to love. His poems take us round the entire compass of love as the work of no other English poet — not even, perhaps, Browning’s — does. He was by destiny the complete experimentalist in love in English literature. He passed through phase after phase of the love of the body only, phase after phase of the love of the soul only, and ended as the poet of the perfect marriage. In his youth he was a gay — but was he ever really gay? — free-lover, who sang jestingly:

  How happy were our sires in ancient time,

  Who held plurality of loves no crime!

  But even then he looks forward, not with cynicism, to a time when he

  Shall not so easily be to change dispos’d,

  Nor to the arts of several eyes obeying;

  But beauty with true worth securely weighing,

  Which, being found assembled in some one,

  We’ll love her ever, and love her alone.

  By the time he writes The Ecstasy the victim of the body has become the protesting victim of the soul. He cries out against a love that is merely an ecstatic friendship:

  But O alas, so long, so far,

  Our bodies why do we forbear?

  He pleads for the recognition of the body, contending that it is not the enemy but the companion of the soul:

  Soul into the soul may flow

  Though it to body first repair.

  The realistic philosophy of love has never been set forth with greater intellectual vehemence:

  So must pure lovers’ souls descend

  T’ affections and to faculties,

  Which sense may reach and apprehend,

  Else a great Prince in prison lies.

  To our bodies turn we then, that so

  Weak men on love reveal’d may look;

  Love’s mysteries in souls do grow

  But yet the body is the book.

  I, for one, find it impossible to believe that all this passionate verse — verse in which we find the quintessence of Donne’s genius — was a mere utterance of abstract thoughts into the wind. Donne, as has been pointed out, was more than most writers a poet of personal experience. His greatest poetry was born of struggle and conflict in the obscure depths of the soul as surely as was the religion of St. Paul. I doubt if, in the history of his genius, any event ever happened of equal importance to his meeting with the lady who first set going in his brain that fevered dialogue between the body and the soul. Had he been less of a frustrated lover, less of a martyr, in whom love’s

  Art did express

  A quintessence even from nothingness,

  From dull privations and lean emptiness,

  much of his greatest poetry, it seems to me, would never have been written.

  One cannot, unfortunately, write the history of the progress of Donne’s genius save by inference and guessing. His poems were not, with some unimportant exceptions, published in his lifetime. He did not arrange them in chronological or in any sort of order. His poem on the flea that has bitten both him and his inamorata comes after the triumphant Anniversary, and but a page or two before the Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day. Hence there is no means of telling how far we are indebted to the Platonism of one woman, how much to his marriage with another, for the enrichment of his genius. Such a poem as The Canonisation can be interpreted either in a Platonic sense or as a poem written to Anne More, who was to bring him both imprisonment and the liberty of love. It is, in either case, written in defence of his love against some who censured him for it:

  For
God’s sake, hold your tongue, and let me love.

  In the last verses of the poem Donne proclaims that his love cannot be measured by the standards of the vulgar:

  We can die by it, if not live by love,

  And if unfit for tombs or hearse

  Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;

  And, if no piece of chronicle we prove,

  We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;

  As well a well-wrought urn becomes

  The greatest ashes as half-acre tombs,

  And by these hymns all shall approve

  Us canoniz’d by love:

  And thus invoke us: “You whom reverend love

  Made one another’s hermitage;

  You to whom love was peace, that now is rage;

  Who did the whole world’s soul contract and drove

  Into the glasses of your eyes

  (So made such mirrors, and such spies,

  That they did all to you epitomize),

  Countries, towns, courts. Beg from above

  A pattern of your love!”

  According to Walton, it was to his wife that Donne addressed the beautiful verses beginning:

  Sweetest love, I do not go

  For weariness of thee;

  as well as the series of Valedictions. Of many of the other love-poems, however, we can measure the intensity but not guess the occasion. All that we can say with confidence when we have read them is that, after we have followed one tributary on another leading down to the ultimate Thames of his genius, we know that his progress as a lover was a progress from infidelity to fidelity, from wandering amorousness to deep and enduring passion. The image that is finally stamped on his greatest work is not that of a roving adulterer, but of a monotheist of love. It is true that there is enough Don-Juanism in the poems to have led even Sir Thomas Browne to think of Donne’s verse rather as a confession of his sins than as a golden book of love. Browne’s quaint poem, To the deceased Author, before the Promiscuous printing of his Poems, the Looser Sort, with the Religious, is so little known that it may be quoted in full as the expression of one point of view in regard to Donne’s work: