No More Learning

From the first lines, which describe how

The South and West winds join'd, and as they blew,
Waves like a rolling trench before them threw,

to the close of _The Storme_ the noise of the contending elements is
deafening:

Thousands our noises were, yet we 'mongst all
Could none by his right name, but thunder call:
Lightning was all our light, and it rain'd more
Than if the Sunne had drunke the sea before.
. . . . . . . . .
Hearing hath deaf'd our sailors, and if they
Knew how to hear, there's none knowes what to say:
Compared to these stormes, death is but a qualme,
Hell somewhat lightsome, and the Bermuda calme.

The sense of tropical heat and calm in the companion poem is hardly
less oppressive, and, if the whole is not quite so happy as the
first, it contains two lines whose vivid and unexpected felicity is
as delightful to-day as when Ben Jonson recited them to Drummond at
Hawthornden:

No use of lanthorns; and in one place lay
Feathers and dust, to-day and yesterday.

Donne's letters generally fall into two groups. The first comprises
those addressed to his fellow-students at Cambridge and the Inns of
Court, the Woodwards, Brookes, and others, or to his maturer and more
fashionable companions in the quest of favour and employment at Court,
Wotton, and Goodyere, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. To the other
belong the complimentary and elegant epistles in which he delighted
and perhaps bewildered his noble lady friends and patronesses with
erudite and transcendental flattery.
In the first class, and the same is true of some of the _Satyres_,
notably the third, and of the satirical _Progresse of the Soule_,
especially at the beginning and the end, the reflective, moralizing
strain predominates. Donne's 'wit' becomes the instrument of a
criticism of life, grave or satiric, melancholy or stoical. Despite
Matthew Arnold's definition, verse of this kind seldom is poetry in
the full sense of the word; but, as Stevenson says in speaking of his
own Scotch verses, talk not song. The first of English poets was a
master of the art. Neither Horace nor Martial, whom Stevenson cites,
is a more delightful talker in verse than Geoffrey Chaucer, and the
archaism of his style seems only to lend the additional charm of a
lisp to his babble. Since Donne's day English poetry has been rich
in such verse talkers--Butler and Dryden, Pope and Swift, Cowper and
Burns, Byron and Shelley, Browning and Landor. It did not come easy to
the Elizabethans, whose natural accent was song. Donne's chief rivals
were Daniel and Jonson, and I venture to think that he excels them
both in the clear and pointed yet easy and conversational development
of his thought, in the play of wit and wisdom, and, despite the
pedantic cast of Elizabethan erudite moralizing, in the power to
leave on the reader the impression of a potent and yet a winning
personality. We seem to get nearer to the man himself in Donne's
letters to Goodyere and Wotton than in Daniel's weighty, but also
heavy, moralizing epistles to the Countess of Cumberland or Sir Thomas
Egerton; and the personality whose voice sounds so distinct and human
in our ear is a more attractive one than the harsh, censorious, burly
but a little blustering Jonson of the epistles on country life and
generous givers. Donne's style is less clumsy, his verse less stiff.
His wit brings to a clear point whatever he has to say, while from
his verse as from his prose letters there disengages itself a very
distinct sense of what it was in the man, underlying his brilliant
intellect, his almost superhuman cleverness, which won for him the
devotion of friends like Wotton and Goodyere and Walton and King, the
admiration of a stranger like Huyghens, who heard him talk as well as
preach:--a serious and melancholy, a generous and chivalrous spirit.

However, keepe the lively tast you hold
Of God, love him as now, but feare him more,
And in your afternoones thinke what you told
And promis'd him, at morning prayer before.

Let falshood like a discord anger you,
Else be not froward. But why doe I touch
Things, of which none is in your practise new,
And Tables, or fruit-trenchers teach as much;

But thus I make you keepe your promise Sir,
Riding I had you, though you still staid there,
And in these thoughts, although you never stirre,
You came with mee to Micham, and are here.

So he writes to Goodyere, but the letter to Wotton going Ambassador to
Venice is Donne's masterpiece in this simpler style, and it seems to
me that neither Daniel nor Jonson nor Drayton ever catches this note
at once sensitive and courtly. To find a like courtliness we must go
to Wotton; witness the reply to Donne's earlier epistle which I have
printed in the notes.