No More Learning

What has happened is, I believe, this: Donne here, as elsewhere, used
an obsolescent word, viz. 'eagers', the verb, meaning 'sharpens'. The
copyist did not recognize the form, took 'desire' for the verb, and
made 'eager' the adjectival complement to 'be', changing 'desire'
to 'desires' as predicate to 'curse'. What Donne had in mind was
the Aristotelian doctrine that the desire to beget children is
an expression of man's craving for immortality. The most natural
function, according to Aristotle, of every living thing which is not
maimed in any way is to beget another living thing like itself, that
so it may partake of what is eternal and divine. This participation
is the goal of all desire, and of all natural activity. But perishable
individuals cannot partake of the immortal and divine by continuous
existence. Nothing that is perishable can continue always one and the
same individual. Each, therefore, participates as best he may, some
more, some less; remaining the same in a way, i. e. in the species, not
in the individual. ' (_De Anima_, B. 4. 415 A-B. ) Donne's argument then
is this: 'Why of all animals have we alone this feeling of depression
and remorse after the act of love?
Is it a device of nature to
restrain us from an act which shortens the life of the individual (he
refers here to a prevalent belief as to the deleterious effect of the
act of love), needed because that other curse which Adam brought upon
man, the curse of mortality,

of being short,
And only for a minute made to be,
Eagers [i. e. whets or provokes] desire to raise posterity. '

The latest use of 'eager' as a verb quoted by the O. E. D. is from
Mulcaster's _Positions_ (1581), where the sense is that of imitating
physically: 'They that be gawled . . . may neither runne nor wrastle
for eagering the inward'. The Middle English use is closer to Donne's:
'The nature of som men is so . . . unconvenable that . . .