No More Learning

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.
. . . . . . .
Up, up my drowsie Soule, where thy new eare
Shall in the Angels songs no discord heere, &c.

In passages like these there is an earnest of the highest note of
spiritual eloquence that Donne was to attain to in his sermons and
last hymns.

Another aspect of Donne's poetry in the _Anniversaries_, of his
_contemptus mundi_ and ecstatic vision, connects them more closely
with Tennyson's _In Memoriam_ than Milton's _Lycidas_. Like Tennyson,
Donne is much concerned with the progress of science, the revolution
which was going on in men's knowledge of the universe, and its
disintegrating effect on accepted beliefs. To him the new astronomy is
as bewildering in its displacement of the earth and disturbance of a
concentric universe as the new geology was to be to Tennyson with the
vistas which it opened into the infinities of time, the origin and the
destiny of man:

The new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The Element of fire is quite put out;
The Sun is lost, and th' earth, and no mans wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confesse that this world's spent,
When in the Planets, and the Firmament
They seeke so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies.
On Tennyson the effect of a similar dislocation of thought, the
revelation of a Nature which seemed to bring to death and bring to
life through endless ages, careless alike of individual and type, was
religious doubt tending to despair:

O life as futile, then, as frail!
. . . . .
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.

On Donne the effect was quite the opposite. It was not of religion he
doubted but of science, of human knowledge with its uncertainties, its
shifting theories, its concern about the unimportant:

Poore soule, in this thy flesh what dost thou know?
Thou know'st thy selfe so little, as thou know'st not,
How thou didst die, nor how thou wast begot.
. . . . .