No More Learning

Apart from poetry there is
in Donne's 'wit' a great deal that is still fresh and vivid, wit as we
understand wit; satire pungent and vivid; reflection on religion
and on life, rugged at times in form but never really unmusical as
Jonson's verse is unmusical, and, despite frequent carelessness,
singularly lucid and felicitous in expression; elegant compliment,
extravagant and grotesque at times but often subtle and piquant;
and in the _Anniversaries_, amid much that is both puerile and
extravagant, a loftier strain of impassioned reflection and vision. It
is not of course that these things are not, or may not be constituents
of poetry, made poetic by their handling. To me it seems that in Donne
they generally are. It is the poet in Donne which flavours them all,
touching his wit with fancy, his reflection with imagination, his
vision with passion. But if we wish to estimate the poet simply in
Donne, we must examine his love-poetry and his religious poetry. It is
here that every one who cares for his unique and arresting genius will
admit that he must stand or fall as a great poet.

For it is here that we find the full effect of what De Quincey points
to as Donne's peculiarity, the combination of dialectical subtlety
with weight and force of passion. Objections to admit the poetic worth
and interest of Donne's love-poetry come from two sides--from those
who are indisposed to admit that passion, and especially the
passion of love, can ever speak so ingeniously (this was the
eighteenth-century criticism); and from those, and these are his more
modern critics, who deny that Donne is a great poet because with rare
exceptions, exceptions rather of occasional lines and phrases than of
whole poems, his songs and elegies lack beauty. Can poetry be at once
passionate and ingenious, sincere in feeling and witty,--packed with
thought, and that subtle and abstract thought, Scholastic dialectic?
Can love-poetry speak a language which is impassioned and expressive
but lacks beauty, is quite different from the language of Dante
and Petrarch, the loveliest language that lovers ever spoke, or the
picturesque hyperboles of _Romeo and Juliet_? Must not the imagery and
the cadences of love poetry reflect 'l'infinita, ineffabile bellezza'
which is its inspiration?

The first criticism is put very clearly by Steele, who goes so far as
to exemplify what the style of love-poetry should be; and certainly
it is something entirely different from that of _The Extasie_ or the
_Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day_. Nothing could illustrate better the
'return to nature' of our Augustan literature than Steele's words:

'I will suppose an author to be really possessed with the
passion which he writes upon and then we shall see how he
would acquit himself. This I take to be the safest way to form
a judgement upon him: since if he be not truly moved, he
must at least work up his imagination as near as possible
to resemble reality.
I choose to instance in love, which is
observed to have produced the most finished performances in
this kind. A lover will be full of sincerity, that he may be
believed by his mistress; he will therefore think simply; he
will express himself perspicuously, that he may not perplex
her; he will therefore write unaffectedly. Deep reflections
are made by a head undisturbed; and points of wit and fancy
are the work of a heart at ease; these two dangers then into
which poets are apt to run, are effectually removed out of the
lover's way. The selecting proper circumstances, and placing
them in agreeable lights, are the finest secrets of all
poetry; but the recollection of little circumstances is the
lover's sole meditation, and relating them pleasantly, the
business of his life. Accordingly we find that the most
celebrated authors of this rank excel in love-verses. Out of
ten thousand instances I shall name one which I think the most
delicate and tender I ever saw.

To myself I sigh often, without knowing why;
And when absent from Phyllis methinks I could die.

A man who hath ever been in love will be touched by the
reading of these lines; and everyone who now feels that
passion, actually feels that they are true. '

It is not possible to find so distinct a statement of the other view
to which I have referred, but I could imagine it coming from Mr.
Robert Bridges, or (since I have no authority to quote Mr. Bridges in
this connexion) from an admirer of his beautiful poetry. Mr. Bridges'
love-poetry is far indeed from the vapid naturalness which Steele
commended in _The Guardian_. It is as instinct with thought, and
subtle thought, as Donne's own poetry; but the final effect of his
poetry is beauty, emotion recollected in tranquillity, and recollected
especially in order to fix its delicate beauty in appropriate and
musical words:

Awake, my heart, to be loved, awake, awake!
The darkness silvers away, the morn doth break,
It leaps in the sky: unrisen lustres slake
The o'ertaken moon. Awake, O heart, awake!