No More Learning

Lo all things wake and tarry and look for thee:
She looketh and saith, 'O sun, now bring him to me.
Come more adored, O adored, for his coming's sake,
And awake my heart to be loved: awake, awake! '

Donne has written nothing at once so subtle and so pure and lovely
as this, nothing the end and aim of which is so entirely to leave an
untroubled impression of beauty.

But it is not true either that the thought and imagery of love-poetry
must be of the simple, obvious kind which Steele supposes, that any
display of dialectical subtlety, any scintillation of wit, must be
fatal to the impression of sincerity and feeling, or on the other hand
that love is always a beautiful emotion naturally expressing itself in
delicate and beautiful language. To some natures love comes as above
all things a force quickening the mind, intensifying its purely
intellectual energy, opening new vistas of thought abstract and
subtle, making the soul 'intensely, wondrously alive'. Of such were
Donne and Browning. A love-poem like 'Come into the garden, Maud'
suspends thought and fills the mind with a succession of picturesque
and voluptuous images in harmony with the dominant mood. A poem such
as _The Anniversarie_ or _The Extasie_, _The Last Ride Together_ or
_Too Late_, is a record of intense, rapid thinking, expressed in the
simplest, most appropriate language--and it is a no whit less natural
utterance of passion. Even the abstractness of the thought, on
which Mr. Courthope lays so much stress in speaking of Donne and the
'metaphysicals' generally, is no necessary implication of want of
feeling. It has been said of St. Augustine 'that his most profound
thoughts regarding the first and last things arose out of prayer . . .
concentration of his whole being in prayer led to the most abstract
observation'.
So it may be with love-poetry--so it was with Dante in
the _Vita Nuova_, and so, on a lower scale, and allowing for the time
that the passion is a more earthly and sensual one, the thought more
capricious and unruly, with Donne. The _Nocturnall upon S. Lucies
Day_ is not less passionate because that passion finds expression in
abstract and subtle thought. Nor is it true that all love-poetry is
beautiful. Of none of the four poems I have mentioned in the last
paragraph is pure beauty, beauty such as is the note of Mr. Bridges'
song, the distinctive quality. It is rather vivid realism:

And alive I shall keep and long, you will see!
I knew a man, was kicked like a dog
From gutter to cesspool; what cared he
So long as he picked from the filth his prog?
He saw youth, beauty and genius die,
And jollily lived to his hundredth year.
But I will live otherwise: none of such life!
At once I begin as I mean to end.

But this sacrifice of beauty to dramatic vividness is a characteristic
of passionate poetry. Beauty is not precisely the quality we should
predicate of the burning lines of Sappho translated by Catullus:

lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinant aures geminae, teguntur
lumina nocte.

Beauty is the quality of poetry which records an ideal passion
recollected in tranquillity, rather than of poetry either dramatic or
lyric which utters the very movement and moment of passion itself.

Donne's love-poetry is a very complex phenomenon, but the two dominant
strains in it are just these: the strain of dialectic, subtle play
of argument and wit, erudite and fantastic; and the strain of vivid
realism, the record of a passion which is not ideal nor conventional,
neither recollected in tranquillity nor a pure product of literary
fashion, but love as an actual, immediate experience in all its
moods, gay and angry, scornful and rapturous with joy, touched with
tenderness and darkened with sorrow--though these last two moods,
the commonest in love-poetry, are with Donne the rarest. The first of
these strains comes to Donne from the Middle Ages, the dialectic of
the Schools, which passed into mediaeval love-poetry almost from
its inception; the second is the expression of the new temper of the
Renaissance as Donne had assimilated it in Latin countries.