No More Learning

_The Progresse of the Soule. _

_l. 1. _ The world's life is the life that breeds in corruption. Let
me, forgetting the rotten world, meditate on death. _l. 85. _ Think,
my soul, that thou art on thy death-bed, and consider death a release.
_l. 157. _ Think how the body poisoned the soul, tainting it with
original sin. Set free, thou art in Heaven in a moment. _l. 250. _ Here
all our knowledge is ignorance.
The new learning has thrown all in
doubt. We sweat to learn trifles. In Heaven we know all we need to
know. _l. 321. _ Here, our converse is evil and corrupting. There our
converse will be with Mary; the Patriarchs; Apostles, Martyrs and
Virgins (compare _A Litany_). Here in the perpetual flux of things is
no essential joy. Essential joy is to see God. And even the accidental
joys of heaven surpass the essential joys of earth, were there such
joys here where all is casual:

Only in Heaven joys strength is never spent,
And accidental things are permanent.

One of the most interesting strands of thought common to the twin
poems is the reflection on the disintegrating effect of the New
Learning. Copernicus' displacement of the earth, and the consequent
disturbance of the accepted mediaeval cosmology with its concentric
arrangement of elements and heavenly bodies, arrests and disturbs
Donne's imagination much as the later geology with its revelation
of vanished species and first suggestion of a doctrine of evolution
absorbed and perturbed Tennyson when he wrote _In Memoriam_ and
throughout his life. No other poet of the seventeenth century known
to me shows the same sensitiveness to the consequences of the new
discoveries of traveller, astronomer, physiologist and physician as
Donne.


TO THE PRAISE OF THE DEAD.

PAGE =231=, l. 43.