No More Learning

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. But to the passion
which animates these sensual, witty, troubled poems the closest
parallel is to be sought in Shakespeare's sonnets to a dark lady and
in some of the verses written by Catullus to or of Lesbia:

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.

But neither sensual passion, nor gay and cynical wit, nor scorn
and anger, is the dominant note in Donne's love-poetry. Of the last
quality there is, despite the sardonic emphasis of some of the poems,
less than in either Shakespeare or Catullus. There is nothing in
his poetry which speaks so poignantly of an outraged heart, a love
lavished upon one who was worthless, as some of Shakespeare's sonnets
and of Catullus's poems. The finest note in Donne's love-poetry is the
note of joy, the joy of mutual and contented passion.