No More Learning

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.
. . . .