No More Learning

This passionate penitence, this beating as it were against the bars
of self in the desire to break through to a fuller apprehension of
the mercy and love of God, is the intensely human note of these latest
poems. Nothing came easily to his soul that knew so well how to be
subtle to plague itself. The vision of divine wrath he can conjure up
more easily than the beatific vision of the love that 'moves the sun
in heaven and all the stars'. Nevertheless it was that vision which
Donne sought. He could never have been content with Milton's heaven of
majesty and awe divorced from the quickening spirit of love. And there
are moments when he comes as close to that beatific vision as perhaps
a self-tormenting mind involved in the web of seventeenth-century
theology ever could,--at moments love and ecstasy gain the upper hand
of fear and penitence. But it is in the sermons that he reaches these
highest levels. There is nothing in the florid eloquence of Jeremy
Taylor that can equal the splendour of occasional passages in Donne's
sermons, when the lava-like flow of his heated reasoning seems
suddenly to burst and flower in such a splendid incandescence of
mystical rapture as this:--

'Death and life are in the power of the tongue, says Solomon,
in another sense: and in this sense too, If my tongue,
suggested by my heart, and by my heart rooted in faith, can
say, _non moriar, non moriar_: If I can say (and my conscience
do not tell me that I belie mine own state) if I can say, That
the blood of the Saviour runs in my veins, That the breath of
his spirit quickens all my purposes, that all my deaths
have their Resurrection, all my sins their remorses, all my
rebellions their reconciliations, I will hearken no more after
this question as it is intended _de morte naturali_, of a
natural death; I know I must die that death; what care I? nor
_de morte spirituali_, the death of sin, I know I doe, and
shall die so; why despair I? but I will find out another
death, _mortem raptus_, a death of rapture and of extasy, that
death which St. Paul died more than once, the death which St.
Gregory speaks of, _divina contemplatio quoddam sepulchrum
animae_, the contemplation of God and heaven is a kind of
burial and sepulchre and rest of the soul; and in this death
of rapture and extasy, in this death of the Contemplation of
my interest in my Saviour, I shall find myself and all my
sins enterred, and entombed in his wounds, and like a Lily in
Paradise, out of red earth, I shall see my soul rise out of
his blade, in a candor, and in an innocence, contracted there,
acceptable in the sight of his Father. '

This is the highest level that Donne ever reached in eloquence
inspired by the vision of the joy and not the terror of the Christian
faith, higher than anything in the _Second Anniversary_, but in his
last hymns hope and confidence find a simpler and a tenderer note. The
noble hymn, 'In what torn ship so ever I embark,' is in somewhat
the same anguished tone as the _Holy Sonnets_; but the highly
characteristic

Since I am coming to that Holy roome,
Where with thy Quire of Saints for evermore,
I shall be made thy Musique;

and the _Hymn to God the Father_, speak of final faith and hope in
tones which recall--recall also by their sea-coloured imagery, and
by their rhythm--the lines in which another sensitive and tormented
poet-soul contemplated the last voyage:

I have a sinne of feare, that when I have spunne
My last thred, I shall perish on the shore;
Swear by thy self that at my death thy sunne
Shall shine as he shines now and heretofore:
And having done that, Thou hast done,
I feare no more.

Beside the passion of these lines even Tennyson's grow a little pale:

Twilight and evening bell
And after that the dark;
And may there be no sadness of farewell
When I embark:
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
It has not been the aim of the present editor to attempt to pronounce
a final judgement upon Donne. It seems to him idle to compare Donne's
poetry with that of other poets or to endeavour to fix its relative
worth. Its faults are great and manifest; its beauties _sui generis_,
incommunicable and incomparable. My endeavour here has been by
an analysis of some of the different elements in this composite
work--poems composed at different times and in different moods; flung
together at the end so carelessly that youthful extravagances of witty
sensuality and pious aspirations jostle each other cheek by jowl;
and presenting a texture so diverse from that of poetry as we usually
think of it--to show how many are the strands which run through it,
and that one of these is a poetry, not perfect in form, rugged of line
and careless in rhyme, a poetry in which intellect and feeling are
seldom or never perfectly fused in a work that is of imagination all
compact, yet a poetry of an extraordinarily arresting and haunting
quality, passionate, thoughtful, and with a deep melody of its own.




[Footnote 1: _History of English Poetry_, iii. 154. Mr.
Courthope qualifies this statement somewhat on the next
page: 'From this spirit of cynical lawlessness he was
perhaps reclaimed by genuine love,' &c. But he has, I think,
insufficiently analysed the diverse strains in Donne's
love-poetry. ]

[Footnote 2: Gaspary: _History of Italian Literature_
(Oelsner's translation), 1904. Consult also Karl Vossler:
_Die philosophischen Grundlagen des 'sussen neuen Stils'_,
Heidelberg, 1904, and _La Poesia giovanile &c. di Guido
Cavalcanti: Studi di Giulio Salvadori_, Roma, 1895. ]

[Footnote 3: Gaspary: _Op. Cit. _]


* * * * *




II

THE TEXT AND CANON OF DONNE'S POEMS




TEXT


Both the text and the canon of Donne's poems present problems which
have never been frankly faced by any of his editors--problems which,
considering the greatness of his reputation in the seventeenth
century, and the very considerable revival of his reputation which
began with Coleridge and De Quincey and has advanced uninterruptedly
since, are of a rather surprising character. An attempt to define and,
as far as may be, to solve these problems will begin most simply with
a brief account of the form in which Donne's poems have come down to
us.