Art of Letters — John Donne Part II from "One sort of readers" through "Anne Donne; Undone"

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: When thy loose raptures, Donne, shall meet with those That do confine Tuning unto the duller line, And sing not but in sanctified prose, How will they, with sharper eyes, The foreskin of thy fancy circumcise, And fear thy wantonness should now begin Example, that hath ceased to be sin!

And that fear fans their heat; whilst knowing eyes Will not admire At this strange fire That here is mingled with thy sacrifice, But dare read even thy wanton story As thy confession, not thy glory;

And will so envy both to future times, That they would buy thy goodness with thy crimes.

To the modern reader, on the contrary, it will seem that there is as much divinity in the best of the love-poems as in the best of the religious ones.

Donne's last word as a secular poet may well be regarded as having been uttered in that great poem in celebration of lasting love, _The Anniversary_, which closes with so majestic a sweep: Here upon earth we are kings, and none but we Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be.

Who is so safe as we, where none can do Treason to us, except one of us two?

True and false fears let us refrain;

Let us love nobly, and live, and add again Years and years unto years, till we attain To write three-score: this is the second of our reign.

Donne's conversion as a lover was obviously as complete and revolutionary as his conversion in religion.

It is said, indeed, to have led to his conversion to passionate religion.

When his marriage with Sir George More's sixteen-year-old daughter brought him at first only imprisonment and poverty, he summed up the sorrows of the situation in the famous line--a line which has some additional interest as suggesting the correct pronunciation of his name: