No More Learning

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. Between his most sensual and his most
spiritual love-songs there is no cleavage such as separates natural
love from Dante's love of Beatrice, who is in the end Theology. The
passion that burns in Donne's most outspoken elegies, and wantons
in the _Epithalamia_, is not cast out in _The Anniversarie_ or _The
Canonization_, but absorbed. It is purified and enriched by being
brought into harmony with his whole nature, spiritual as well as
physical. It has lost the exclusive consciousness of itself which
is lust, and become merged in an entire affection, as a turbid and
discoloured stream is lost in the sea.

This justification of natural love as fullness of joy and life is the
deepest thought in Donne's love-poems, far deeper and sincerer than
the Platonic conceptions of the affinity and identity of souls with
which he plays in some of the verses addressed to Mrs. Herbert. The
nearest approach that he makes to anything like a reasoned statement
of the thought latent rather than expressed in _The Anniversarie_
is in _The Extasie_, a poem which, like the _Nocturnall_, only Donne
could have written. Here with the same intensity of feeling, and
in the same abstract, dialectical, erudite strain he emphasizes the
interdependence of soul and body:

As our blood labours to beget
Spirits, as like soules as it can,
Because such fingers need to knit
That subtile knot, which makes us man:
So must pure lovers soules descend
T'affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
_Else a great Prince in prison lies_.

It may be that Donne has not entirely succeeded in what he here
attempts. There hangs about the poem just a suspicion of the
conventional and unreal Platonism of the seventeenth century. In
attempting to state and vindicate the relation of soul and body he
falls perhaps inevitably into the appearance, at any rate, of the
dualism which he is trying to transcend. He places them over against
each other as separate entities and the lower bulks unduly. In love,
says Pascal, the body disappears from sight in the intellectual and
spiritual passion which it has kindled.
That is what happens in _The
Anniversarie_, not altogether in _The Extasie_. Yet no poem makes one
realize more fully what Jonson meant by calling Donne 'the first poet
in the world for some things'. 'I should never find any fault with
metaphysical poems,' is Coleridge's judgement, 'if they were all like
this or but half as excellent. '

It was only the force of Donne's personality that could achieve even
an approximate harmony of elements so divergent as are united in his
love-verses, that could master the lower-natured steed that drew the
chariot of his troubled and passionate soul and make it subservient to
his yoke-fellow of purer strain who is a lover of honour, and modesty,
and temperance, and the follower of true glory. In the work of his
followers, who were many, though they owed allegiance to Jonson
also, the lower elements predominated. The strain of metaphysical
love-poetry in the seventeenth century with its splendid _elan_ and
sonorous cadence is in general Epicurean and witty. It is only now and
again--in Marvell, perhaps in Herrick's

Bid me to live, and I will live,
Thy Protestant to be,

certainly in Rochester's songs, in

An age in her embraces past
Would seem a winter's day,

or the unequalled:

When wearied with a world of woe
To thy safe bosom I retire,
Where love, and peace, and truth does flow,
May I contented there expire,

that the accents of the _heart_ are clearly audible, that passion
prevails over Epicurean fancy or cynical wit. On the other hand, the
idealism of seventeenth-century poetry and romances, the Platonism of
the Hotel de Rambouillet that one finds in Habington's _Castara_, in
Kenelm Digby's _Private Memoirs_, in the French romances of chivalry
and their imitations in English is the silliest, because the emptiest,
that ever masqueraded as such in any literature, at any period. A
sensual and cynical flippancy on the one hand, a passionless, mannered
idealism on the other, led directly to that thinly veiled contempt
of women which is so obvious in the satirical essays of Addison and
Pope's _Rape of the Lock_.

But there was one poet who meditated on the same problem as Donne, who
felt like him the power and greatness of love, and like him could
not accept a doctrine of love which seemed to exclude or depreciate
marriage. In 1640, just before his marriage, as rash in its way as
Donne's but less happy in the issue, Milton, defending his character
against accusations of immorality, traced the development of his
thought about love. The passage, in _An Apology against a Pamphlet
called 'A Modest Confutation'_, &c. , has been taken as having a
reference to the _Paradise Lost_. But Milton rather seems at the time
to have been meditating a work like the _Vita Nuova_ or a romance like
that of Tasso in which love was to be a motive as well as religion,
for the whole theme of his thought is love, true love and its
mysterious link with chastity, of which, however, 'marriage is no
defilement'. In the arrogance of his youthful purity Milton would
doubtless have looked with scorn or loathing on the _Elegies_ and the
more careless of Donne's songs. But perhaps pride is a greater enemy
of love than such faults of sense as Donne in his passionate youth was
guilty of, and from which Dante by his own evidence was not exempt.