The first result of this study was the discovery that there were
several passages in the poems, as printed in Mr.
several passages in the poems, as printed in Mr.
John Donne
Grierson
Release Date: April 12, 2015 [EBook #48688]
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE POEMS OF JOHN DONNE [2 ***
Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Lesley Halamek, Stephen Rowland
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www. pgdp. net
THE POEMS OF JOHN DONNE
EDITED FROM THE OLD EDITIONS AND NUMEROUS MANUSCRIPTS,
WITH INTRODUCTIONS & COMMENTARY
BY
HERBERT J. C. GRIERSON M. A.
CHALMERS PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN
VOL. I
THE TEXT OF THE POEMS WITH APPENDIXES
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1912
HENRY FROWDE, M. A.
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
LONDON, EDINBURGH, NEW YORK
TORONTO AND MELBOURNE
PREFACE
The present edition of Donne's poems grew out of my work as a teacher.
In the spring of 1907, just after I had published a small volume on
the literature of the early seventeenth century, I was lecturing to
a class of Honours students on the 'Metaphysical poets'. They found
Donne difficult alike to understand and to appreciate, and accordingly
I undertook to read with them a selection from his poems with a view
to elucidating difficult passages and illustrating the character
of his 'metaphysics', the Scholastic and scientific doctrines which
underlie his conceits. The only editions which we had at our disposal
were the modern editions of Donne's poems by Grosart and Chambers, but
I did not anticipate that this would present any obstacle to the task
I had undertaken. About the same time the Master of Peterhouse asked
me to undertake the chapter on Donne, as poet and prose-artist, for
the _Cambridge History of English Literature_. The result was that
though I had long been interested in Donne, and had given, while at
work on the poetry of the seventeenth century, much thought to his
poetry as a centre of interest and influence, I began to make a more
minute study of the text of his poems than I had yet attempted.
The first result of this study was the discovery that there were
several passages in the poems, as printed in Mr. Chambers' edition,
of which I could give no satisfactory explanation to my class. At
the close of the session I went to Oxford and began in the Bodleian
a rapid collation of the text of that edition with the older copies,
especially of 1633. The conclusion to which I came was that, excellent
in many ways as that edition is, the editor had too often abandoned
the reading of 1633 for the sometimes more obvious but generally
weaker and often erroneous emendations of the later editions. As he
records the variants this had become clear in some cases already, but
an examination of the older editions brought out another fact,--that
by modernizing the punctuation, while preserving no record of the
changes made, the editor had corrupted some passages in such a manner
as to make it impossible for a student, unprovided with all the old
editions, to recover the original and sometimes quite correct reading,
or to trace the error to its fountainhead.
My first proposal to the Delegates of the Clarendon Press was that I
should attempt an edition of Donne's poems resting on a collation of
the printed texts; that for all poems which it contains the edition
of 1633 should be accepted as the authority, to be departed from only
when the error seemed to be obvious and certain, and that all such
changes, however minute, should be recorded in the notes. In the
case of poems not contained in the edition of 1633, the first edition
(whether 1635, 1649, 1650, or 1669) was to be the authority and to be
treated in the same fashion. Such an edition, it was hoped, might be
ready in a year. I had finished my first collation of the editions
when a copy of the Grolier Club edition came into my hands, and I
included it in the number of those which I compared throughout with
the originals.
While the results of this collation confirmed me in the opinion I
had formed as to the superiority of the edition of 1633 to all
its successors, it showed also that that edition was certainly not
faultless, and that the text of those poems which were issued only in
the later editions was in general very carelessly edited and corrupt,
especially of those poems which were added for the first time in 1669.
This raised the question, what use was to be made of the manuscript
copies of the poems in correcting the errors of the edition? Grosart
had based his whole text on one or two manuscripts in preference to
the editions. Mr. Chambers, while wisely refusing to do this, and
adopting the editions as the basis of his text, had made frequent
reference to the manuscripts and adopted corrections from them.
Professor Norton made no use of the manuscripts in preparing the text
of his edition, but he added in an Appendix an account of one of these
which had come into his hands, and later he described some more and
showed clearly that he believed corrections were to be obtained from
this source. Accordingly I resolved to examine tentatively those which
were accessible in the British Museum, especially the transcript of
three of the _Satyres_ in Harleian MS.
Release Date: April 12, 2015 [EBook #48688]
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE POEMS OF JOHN DONNE [2 ***
Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Lesley Halamek, Stephen Rowland
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www. pgdp. net
THE POEMS OF JOHN DONNE
EDITED FROM THE OLD EDITIONS AND NUMEROUS MANUSCRIPTS,
WITH INTRODUCTIONS & COMMENTARY
BY
HERBERT J. C. GRIERSON M. A.
CHALMERS PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN
VOL. I
THE TEXT OF THE POEMS WITH APPENDIXES
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1912
HENRY FROWDE, M. A.
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
LONDON, EDINBURGH, NEW YORK
TORONTO AND MELBOURNE
PREFACE
The present edition of Donne's poems grew out of my work as a teacher.
In the spring of 1907, just after I had published a small volume on
the literature of the early seventeenth century, I was lecturing to
a class of Honours students on the 'Metaphysical poets'. They found
Donne difficult alike to understand and to appreciate, and accordingly
I undertook to read with them a selection from his poems with a view
to elucidating difficult passages and illustrating the character
of his 'metaphysics', the Scholastic and scientific doctrines which
underlie his conceits. The only editions which we had at our disposal
were the modern editions of Donne's poems by Grosart and Chambers, but
I did not anticipate that this would present any obstacle to the task
I had undertaken. About the same time the Master of Peterhouse asked
me to undertake the chapter on Donne, as poet and prose-artist, for
the _Cambridge History of English Literature_. The result was that
though I had long been interested in Donne, and had given, while at
work on the poetry of the seventeenth century, much thought to his
poetry as a centre of interest and influence, I began to make a more
minute study of the text of his poems than I had yet attempted.
The first result of this study was the discovery that there were
several passages in the poems, as printed in Mr. Chambers' edition,
of which I could give no satisfactory explanation to my class. At
the close of the session I went to Oxford and began in the Bodleian
a rapid collation of the text of that edition with the older copies,
especially of 1633. The conclusion to which I came was that, excellent
in many ways as that edition is, the editor had too often abandoned
the reading of 1633 for the sometimes more obvious but generally
weaker and often erroneous emendations of the later editions. As he
records the variants this had become clear in some cases already, but
an examination of the older editions brought out another fact,--that
by modernizing the punctuation, while preserving no record of the
changes made, the editor had corrupted some passages in such a manner
as to make it impossible for a student, unprovided with all the old
editions, to recover the original and sometimes quite correct reading,
or to trace the error to its fountainhead.
My first proposal to the Delegates of the Clarendon Press was that I
should attempt an edition of Donne's poems resting on a collation of
the printed texts; that for all poems which it contains the edition
of 1633 should be accepted as the authority, to be departed from only
when the error seemed to be obvious and certain, and that all such
changes, however minute, should be recorded in the notes. In the
case of poems not contained in the edition of 1633, the first edition
(whether 1635, 1649, 1650, or 1669) was to be the authority and to be
treated in the same fashion. Such an edition, it was hoped, might be
ready in a year. I had finished my first collation of the editions
when a copy of the Grolier Club edition came into my hands, and I
included it in the number of those which I compared throughout with
the originals.
While the results of this collation confirmed me in the opinion I
had formed as to the superiority of the edition of 1633 to all
its successors, it showed also that that edition was certainly not
faultless, and that the text of those poems which were issued only in
the later editions was in general very carelessly edited and corrupt,
especially of those poems which were added for the first time in 1669.
This raised the question, what use was to be made of the manuscript
copies of the poems in correcting the errors of the edition? Grosart
had based his whole text on one or two manuscripts in preference to
the editions. Mr. Chambers, while wisely refusing to do this, and
adopting the editions as the basis of his text, had made frequent
reference to the manuscripts and adopted corrections from them.
Professor Norton made no use of the manuscripts in preparing the text
of his edition, but he added in an Appendix an account of one of these
which had come into his hands, and later he described some more and
showed clearly that he believed corrections were to be obtained from
this source. Accordingly I resolved to examine tentatively those which
were accessible in the British Museum, especially the transcript of
three of the _Satyres_ in Harleian MS.
