No More Learning

Let not thy divining heart
Forethink me any ill,
Destiny may take thy part
And may thy feares fulfill;
But thinke that we
Are but turn'd aside to sleep;
They who one another keepe
Alive, ne'er parted be.

Such wilt thou be to mee, who must
Like th' other foot, obliquely runne;
Thy firmnes makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begunne.

The poet who wrote such verses as these did not believe any longer
that 'love . . . represents the principle of perpetual flux in nature'.

But Donne's poetry is not so simple a thing of the heart and of the
senses as that of Burns and Catullus. Even his purer poetry has more
complex moods--consider _The Prohibition_--and it is metaphysical, not
only in the sense of being erudite and witty, but in the proper sense
of being reflective and philosophical. Donne is always conscious of
the import of his moods; and so it is that there emerges from his
poems a philosophy or a suggested philosophy of love to take the place
of the idealism which he rejects. Set a song of the joy of love
by Burns or by Catullus such as I have cited beside Donne's
_Anniversarie_,

All Kings, and all their favorites,
All glory of honors, beauties, wits,
The Sun itselfe, which makes times, as they passe,
Is elder by a year, now, than it was
When thou and I first one another saw,

and the difference is at once apparent. Burns gets no further than the
experience, Catullus than the obvious and hedonistic reflection that
time is flying, the moment of pleasure short. In Donne's poem one
feels the quickening of the brain, the vision extending its range, the
passion gathering sweep with the expanding rhythms, and from the mind
thus heated and inspired emerges, not a cry that time might stay its
course,

Lente, lente currite noctis equi,

but a clearer consciousness of the eternal significance of love, not
the love that aspires after the unattainable, but the love that
unites contented hearts. The method of the poet is, I suppose, too
dialectical to be popular, for the poem is in few Anthologies. It may
be that the Pagan and Christian strains which the poet unites are not
perfectly blended--if it is possible to do so--but to me it seems that
the joy of love has never been expressed at once with such intensity
and such elevation.

And it is with sorrow as with joy.
There is the same difference
of manner in the expression between Donne and these poets, and the
deepest thought is the same. The _Nocturnall on S. Lucies Day_ is
at the opposite pole of Donne's thought from the _Anniversarie_, and
compared with

Had we never loved sae kindly

or

Take, O take those lips away,

both the feeling and its expression are metaphysical. But the passion
is felt through the subtle and fantastic web of dialectic; and the
thought from which the whole springs is the emptiness of life without
love.

What, then, is the philosophy which disengages itself from Donne's
love-poetry studied in its whole compass? It seems to me that it is
more than a purely negative one, that consciously or unconsciously
he sets over against the abstract idealism, the sharp dualism of the
Middle Ages, a justification of love as a natural passion in the human
heart the meaning and end of which is marriage. The sensuality and
exaggerated cynicism of so much of the poetry of the Renaissance was
a reaction from courtly idealism and mediaeval asceticism. But a mere
reaction could lead no-whither. There are no steps which lead only
backward in the history of human thought and feeling. Poems like
Donne's _Elegies_, like Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_, like
Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_ could only end in penitent outcries like
those of Sidney and Spenser and of Donne himself. The true escape from
courtly or ascetic idealism was a poetry which should do justice to
love as a passion in which body and soul alike have their part, and of
which there is no reason to repent.

And this with all its imperfections Donne's love-poetry is. It was not
for nothing that Sir Thomas Egerton's secretary made a runaway match
for love. For Dante the poet, his wife did not exist. In love of his
wife Donne found the meaning and the infinite value of love. In later
days he might bewail his 'idolatry of profane mistresses'; he never
repented of having loved.