No More Learning

Gosse, and there is no higher authority
when it comes to the interpretation of Donne's character and mind,
rightly, I think, suggests that the death of the lady addressed is
assumed, not actual, but he connects the poem with Donne's earlier and
troubled loves. 'So also in a most curious ode, the _Nocturnal_ . . . ,
amid fireworks of conceit, he calls his mistress dead and protests
that his hatred has grown cold at last. ' But I can find no note of
bitterness, active or spent, in the song. It _might_ have been written
to Ann More. It is a highly metaphysical yet sombre and sincere
description of the emptiness of life without love. The critics have,
I think, failed somewhat to reckon with this stratum in Donne's songs,
of poems Petrarchian in convention but with a Petrarchianism coloured
by Donne's realistic temper and impatient wit. Any interpretation of
so enigmatical a poem must be conjectural, but before one denied too
positively that its subject was Lady Bedford--perhaps her illness
in 1612--one would need to answer two questions, how far could a
conventional passion inspire a strain so sincere, and what was Donne's
feeling for Lady Bedford and hers for him?

Poetry is the language of passion, but the passion which moves the
poet most constantly is the delight of making poetry, and very little
is sufficient to quicken the imagination to its congenial task.
Our soberer minds are apt to think that there must be an actual,
particular experience behind every sincere poem. But history refutes
the idea of such a simple relation between experience and art. No
poet will sing of love convincingly who has never loved, but that
experience will suffice him for many and diverse webs of song and
drama. Without pursuing the theme, it is sufficient for the moment to
recall that in the fashion of the day Spenser's sonnets were addressed
to Lady Carey, not to his wife; that it was to Idea or to Anne Goodere
that Drayton wrote so passionate a poem as

Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part;

and that we know very little of what really lies behind Shakespeare's
profound and plangent sonnets, weave what web of fancy we will.
Of Lady Bedford's feeling for Donne we know only what his letters
reveal, and that is no more than that she was his warm friend
and generous patroness. It is clear, however, from their enduring
friendship and from the tone of that correspondence that she found in
him a friend of a rarer and finer calibre than in the other poets whom
she patronized in turn, Daniel and Drayton and Jonson--some one whose
sensitive, complex, fascinating personality could hardly fail to touch
a woman's imagination and heart. Friendship between man and woman is
love in some degree. There is no need to exaggerate the situation, or
to reflect on either her loyalty or his to other claims, to recognize
that their mutual feeling was of the kind for which the Petrarchian
convention afforded a ready and recognized vehicle of expression.

And so it was, one fancies, with Mrs. Herbert. She too found in Donne
a rare and comprehending spirit, and he in her a gracious and delicate
friend. His relation to her, indeed, was probably simpler than to
Lady Bedford, their friendship more equal. The letter and the elegy
referred to already are instinct with affection and tender reverence.
To her Donne sent some of his earliest religious sonnets, with a
sonnet on her beautiful name. And to her also it would seem that at
some period in the history of their friendship, the beginning of which
is very difficult to date, he wrote songs in the tone of hopeless,
impatient passion, of Petrarch writing to Laura, and others which
celebrate their mutual affection as a love that rose superior to
earthly and physical passion. The clue here is the title prefixed to
that strange poem _The Primrose, being at Montgomery Castle upon the
hill on which it is situate_. It is true that the title is found
for the first time in the edition of 1635 and is in none of the
manuscripts. But it is easier to explain the occasional suppression
of a revealing title than to conceive a motive for inventing such
a gloss. The poem is doubtless, as Mr. Gosse says, 'a mystical
celebration of the beauty, dignity and intelligence of Magdalen
Herbert'--a celebration, however, which takes the form (as it might
with Petrarch) of a reproach, a reproach which Donne's passionate
temper and caustic wit seem even to touch with scorn.