No More Learning

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. 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.