No More Learning

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 kenos isos theoisin emmen oner]

or

O my love's like a red, red rose
That's newly sprung in June.