No More Learning

Compare the song,

Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,

with the famous thirteenth Elegy of the first book,

Iam super oceanum venit a seniore marito,
Flava pruinoso quae vehit axe diem.

Ovid passes from one natural and simple thought to another, from one
aspect of dawn to another equally objective. Donne just touches one or
two of the same features, borrowing them doubtless from Ovid, but the
greater part of the song is devoted to the subtle and extravagant, if
you like, but not the less passionate development of the thought that
for him the woman he loves is the whole world.

But if the difference between Donne's metaphysical conceits and Ovid's
naturalness and simplicity is palpable it is not less clear that the
emotions which they express, with some important exceptions to which I
shall recur, are identical. The love which is the main burden of their
song is something very different from the ideal passion of Dante or of
Petrarch, of Sidney or Spenser. It is a more sensual passion. The same
tone of witty depravity runs through the work of the two poets. There
is in Donne a purer strain which, we shall see directly, is of the
greatest importance, but such a rapid reader as I am contemplating
might be forgiven if for the moment he overlooked it, and declared
that the modern poet was as sensual and depraved as the ancient, that
there was little to choose between the social morality reflected in
the Elizabethan and in the Augustan poet.

And yet even in these more cynical and sensual poems a careful reader
will soon detect a difference between Donne and Ovid. He will begin
to suspect that the English poet is imitating the Roman, and that
the depravity is in part a reflected depravity. In revolt from one
convention the young poet is cultivating another, a cynicism and
sensuality which is just as little to be taken _au pied de la
lettre_ as the idealizing worship, the anguish and adoration of the
sonneteers. There is, as has been said already, a gaiety in the poems
elaborating the thesis that love is a perpetual flux, fickleness the
law of its being, which warns us against taking them too seriously;
and even those _Elegies_ which seem to our taste most reprehensible
are aerated by a wit which makes us almost forget their indecency. In
the last resort there is all the difference in the world between the
untroubled, heartless sensuality of the Roman poet and the gay wit,
the paradoxical and passionate audacities and sensualities of the
young Elizabethan law-student impatient of an unreal convention, and
eager to startle and delight his fellow students by the fertility and
audacity of his wit.

It is not of course my intention to represent Donne's love-poetry
as purely an 'evaporation' of wit, to suggest that there is in it
no reflection either of his own life as a young man or the moral
atmosphere of Elizabethan London. It would be a much less interesting
poetry if this were so.
Donne has pleaded guilty to a careless and
passionate youth:

In mine Idolatry what showres of raine
Mine eyes did waste? what griefs my heart did rent?
That sufferance was my sinne; now I repent;
Cause I did suffer I must suffer pain.

From what we know of the lives of Essex, Raleigh, Southampton,
Pembroke, and others it is probable that Donne's _Elegies_ come quite
as close to the truth of life as Sidney's Petrarchianism or Spenser's
Platonism. The later cantos of _The Faerie Queene_ reflect vividly the
unchaste loves and troubled friendships of Elizabeth's Court. Whether
we can accept in its entirety the history of Donne's early amours
which Mr. Gosse has gathered from the poems or not, there can be no
doubt that actual experiences do lie behind these poems as behind
Shakespeare's sonnets. In the one case as in the other, to recognize a
literary model is not to exclude the probability of a source in actual
experience.

But however we may explain or palliate the tone of these poems it is
impossible to deny their power, the vivid and packed force with which
they portray a variously mooded passion working through a swift and
subtle brain. If there is little of the elegant and accomplished art
which Milton admired in the Latin Elegiasts while he 'deplored' their
immorality, there is more strength and sincerity both of thought and
imagination. The brutal cynicism of

Fond woman which would have thy husband die,

the witty anger of _The Apparition_, the mordant and paradoxical
wit of _The Perfume_ and _The Bracelet_, the passionate dignity and
strength of _His Picture_,

My body a sack of bones broken within,
And powders blew stains scatter'd on my skin,

the passion that rises superior to sensuality and wit, and takes wing
into a more spiritual and ideal atmosphere, of _His parting from her_,

I will not look upon the quick'ning Sun,
But straight her beauty to my sense shall run;
The ayre shall note her soft, the fire most pure;
Water suggest her clear, and the earth sure--

compare these with Ovid and the difference is apparent between an
artistic, witty voluptuary and a poet whose passionate force redeems
many errors of taste and art. Compare them with the sonnets and
mythological idylls and _Heroicall Epistles_ of the Elizabethans and
it is they, not Donne, who are revealed as witty and 'fantastic' poets
content to adorn a conventional sentiment with mythological fancies
and verbal conceits. Donne's interest is his theme, love and woman,
and he uses words not for their own sake but to communicate his
consciousness of these surprising phenomena in all their varying and
conflicting aspects. The only contemporary poems that have the same
dramatic quality are Shakespeare's sonnets and some of Drayton's later
sonnets. In Shakespeare this dramatic intensity and variety is of
course united with a rarer poetic charm. Charm is a quality which
Donne's poetry possesses in a few single lines.