No More Learning

Returning to the list of poems open to question on pp. cxxviii-ix we
have sixteen left to consider. Of some of these there is very little
to say.

Nos. 1 and 14 are most probably by the Earl of Pembroke, and the Earl
of Pembroke collaborating with Sir Benjamin Rudyard. Both were wits
and poets of Donne's circle. The first song,

'Soules joy, now I am gone'

is ascribed to Donne only in _1635-69_, and is there inaccurately
printed. It is assigned to Pembroke in the younger Donne's edition
of Pembroke and Ruddier's _Poems_ (1660), a bad witness, but also
by Lansdowne MS. 777, which Mr. Chambers justly calls 'a very good
authority'. [14] The latter, however, believes the poem to be Donne's
because the central idea--the inseparableness of souls--is his, and so
is the contemptuous tone of

Fooles have no meanes to meet,
But by their feet.

But both the contemptuous tone and the Platonic thought were growing
common. We get it again in Lovelace's

If to be absent were to be
Away from thee.

The thought is Donne's, but not the airy note, the easy style, or
the tripping prosody. Donne never writes of absence in this cheerful,
confident strain.
He consoles himself at times with the doctrine of
inseparable souls, but the note of pain is never absent. He cannot
cheat his passionate heart and senses with metaphysical subtleties.

The song _Farewell to love_, the second in the list of poems added
in _1635_, is found only in _O'F_ and _S96_. There is therefore no
weighty external evidence for assigning it to Donne, but no one can
read it without feeling that it is his. The cynical yet passionate
strain of wit, the condensed style, and the metaphysical turn given to
the argument, are all in his manner. As printed in _1635_ the point
of the third stanza is obscured. As I have ventured to amend it, an
Aristotelian doctrine is referred to in a way that only Donne would
have done in quite such a setting.

The three _Elegies_, XII, XIII, and XIV (7, 8, 9 in the list), must
also be assigned to Donne, unless some more suitable candidate can be
advanced on really convincing grounds. The first of the three, _His
parting from her_, is so fine a poem that it is difficult to think any
unknown poet could have written it. In sincerity and poetic quality it
is one of the finest of the _Elegies_,[15] and in this sincerer
note, the absence of witty paradox, it differs from poems like _The
Bracelet_ and _The Perfume_ and resembles the fine elegy called _His
Picture_ and two other pieces that stand somewhat apart from the
general tenor of the _Elegies_, namely, the famous elegy _On his
Mistris_, in which he dissuades her from travelling with him as a
page:

By our first strange and fatal interview,

and that rather enigmatical poem _The Expostulation_, which found its
way into Jonson's _Underwoods_:

To make the doubt clear that no woman's true,
Was it my fate to prove it strong in you?

All of these poems bear the imprint of some actual experience, and to
this cause we may perhaps trace the comparative rareness with which
_His parting from her_ is found in manuscripts, and that it finally
appeared in a mutilated form. The poet may have given copies only to
a few friends and desired that it should not be circulated. In the
Second Collection of poems in _TCD_ it is signed at the close, 'Sir
Franc: Wryothlesse. ' Who is intended by this I do not know. The
ascriptions in this collection are many of them purely fanciful.
Still, that the poem is Donne's rests on internal evidence alone.