No More Learning

But, though sceptical in tone, the poem is written from a
Catholic standpoint; its theme is the progress of the soul of heresy.
And, as the seventh stanza clearly indicates, the great heretic in
whom the line closed was to be not Calvin but Queen Elizabeth:

the great soule which here among us now
Doth dwell, and moves that hand, and tongue, and brow
Which, as the Moone the sea, moves us.

Donne can hardly have thought of publishing such a poem, or
circulating it in the Queen's lifetime. It was an expression of the
mood which begot the 'black and envious slanders breath'd against
Diana for her divine justice on Actaeon' to which Jonson refers in
_Cynthia's Revels_ the same year. That some copies were circulated in
manuscript later is probably due to the reaction which brought
into favour at James's Court the Earl of Southampton and the former
adherents of Essex generally.

The tone, moreover, of the stanza quoted above suggests that it was
no vulgar libel on Elizabeth which Donne contemplated. Elizabeth, the
cruel persecutor of his Catholic kinsfolk, now stained with the blood
of her favourite, appeared to him somewhat as she did to Pope Sixtus,
a heretic but a great woman. He felt to her as Burke did to the 'whole
race of Guises, Condes and Colignis'--'the hand that like a destroying
angel smote the country communicated to it the force and energy under
which it suffered. ' In a mood of bitter admiration, of sceptical and
sardonic wonder, he contemplates the great bad souls who had troubled
the world and served it too, for the idea on which the poem was to
rest is the disconcerting reflection that we owe many good things to
heretics and bad men:

Who ere thou beest that read'st this sullen Writ,
Which just so much courts thee, as thou dost it,
Let me arrest thy thoughts; wonder with mee,
Why plowing, building, ruling and the rest,
Or most of those arts, whence our lives are blest,
By cursed _Cains_ race invented be,
And blest _Seth_ vext us with Astronomie.
Ther's nothing simply good, nor ill alone,
Of every quality comparison,
The onely measure is, and judge, opinion.

It would have been interesting to read Donne's history of the great
souls that troubled and yet quickened the world from Cain to Arius and
from Mahomet to Elizabeth, but unfortunately Donne never got beyond
the introduction, a couple of cantos which describe the progress of
the soul while it is still passing through the vegetable and animal
planes, the motive of which, so far as it can be disentangled, is to
describe the pre-human education of a woman's soul:

keeping some quality
Of every past shape, she knew treachery,
Rapine, deceit, and lust, and ills enow
To be a woman.

The fragment has some of the sombre power which De Quincey attributes
to it, but on the whole one must confess it is a failure. The 'wit' of
Donne did not apparently include invention, for many of the episodes
seem pointless as well as disgusting, and indeed in no poem is the
least attractive side of Donne's mind so clearly revealed, that aspect
of his wit which to some readers is more repellent, more fatal to
his claim to be a poet, than too subtle ingenuity or misplaced
erudition--the vein of sheer ugliness which runs through his work,
presenting details that seem merely and wantonly repulsive. The same
vein is apparent in the work of Chapman, of Jonson, and even in places
of Spenser, and the imagery of _Hamlet_ and the tragedies owes some of
its dramatic vividness and power to the same quality. The ugly has its
place in art, and it would not be difficult to find it in every phase
of Renaissance art, marked like the beautiful in that art by the
same evidence of power.
Decadence brought with it not ugliness but
prettiness.

The reflective, philosophic, somewhat melancholy strain of the poems
I have been touching on reappears in the letters addressed to noble
ladies. Here, however, it is softened, less sardonic in tone, while
it blends with or gives place to another strain, that of absurd and
extravagant but fanciful and subtle compliment. Donne cannot write to
a lady without his heart and fancy taking wing in their own passionate
and erudite fashion. Scholastic theology is made the instrument
of courtly compliment and pious flirtation. He blends in the
same disturbing fashion as in some of the songs and elegies that
depreciation of woman in general, which he owes less to classical
poetry than to his over-acquaintance with the Fathers, with an
adoration of her charms in the individual which passes into the
transcendental. He tells the Countess of Huntingdon that active
goodness in a woman is a miracle; but it is clear that she and the
Countess of Bedford and Mrs. Herbert and Lady Carey and the Countess
of Salisbury are all examples of such miracle--ladies whose beauty
itself is virtue, while their virtues are a mystery revealable only to
the initiated.

The highest place is held by Lady Bedford and Mrs. Herbert. Nothing
could surpass the strain of intellectual and etherealized compliment
in which he addresses the Countess. If lines like the following are
not pure poetry, they haunt some quaint borderland of poetry to which
the polished felicities of Pope's compliments are a stranger. If not
pure fancy, they are not mere ingenuity, being too intellectual and
argumentative for the one, too winged and ardent for the other:

Should I say I liv'd darker then were true,
Your radiation can all clouds subdue;
But one, 'tis best light to contemplate you.

You, for whose body God made better clay,
Or tooke Soules stuffe such as shall late decay,
Or such as needs small change at the last day.

This, as an Amber drop enwraps a Bee,
Covering discovers your quicke Soule; that we
May in your through-shine front your hearts thoughts see.

You teach (though wee learne not) a thing unknowne
To our late times, the use of specular stone,
Through which all things within without were shown.