No More Learning

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. His heart might
be subtle to plague itself; its capacity for joy is even more obvious.
Other poets have done many things which Donne could not do. They have
invested their feelings with a garb of richer and sweeter poetry. They
have felt more deeply and finely the reverence which is in the heart
of love. But it is only in the fragments of Sappho, the lyrics of
Catullus, and the songs of Burns that one will find the sheer joy
of loving and being loved expressed in the same direct and simple
language as in some of Donne's songs, only in Browning that one will
find the same simplicity of feeling combined with a like swift and
subtle dialectic.

I wonder by my troth what thou and I
Did till we loved.

For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love.

If yet I have not all thy love,
Deare, I shall never have it all.

Lines like these have the same direct, passionate quality as

[Greek: phainetai moi kenos isos theoisin emmen oner]

or

O my love's like a red, red rose
That's newly sprung in June.

The joy is as intense though it is of a more spiritual and
intellectual quality. And in the other notes of this simple passionate
love-poetry, sorrow which is the shadow of joy, and tenderness,
Donne does not fall far short of Burns in intensity of feeling and
directness of expression.
These notes are not so often heard in Donne,
but

So, so break off this last lamenting kiss

is of the same quality as

Had we never lov'd sae kindly

or

Take, O take those lips away.

And strangest of all perhaps is the tenderness which came into Donne's
poetry when a sincere passion quickened in his heart, for tenderness,
the note of

O wert thou in the cauld blast,

is the last quality one would look for in the poetry of a nature at
once so intellectual and with such a capacity for caustic satire. But
the beautiful if not flawless _Elegy XVI_,

By our first strange and fatal interview,

and the _Valedictions_ which he wrote on different occasions of
parting from his wife, combine with the peculiar _elan_ of all Donne's
passionate poetry and its intellectual content a tenderness as perfect
as anything in Burns or in Browning:

O more than Moone,
Draw not up seas to drowne me in thy spheare,
Weepe me not dead in thine armes, but forbeare
To teach the sea, what it may doe too soone.

Let not thy divining heart
Forethink me any ill,
Destiny may take thy part
And may thy feares fulfill;
But thinke that we
Are but turn'd aside to sleep;
They who one another keepe
Alive, ne'er parted be.

Such wilt thou be to mee, who must
Like th' other foot, obliquely runne;
Thy firmnes makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begunne.

The poet who wrote such verses as these did not believe any longer
that 'love . . . represents the principle of perpetual flux in nature'.

But Donne's poetry is not so simple a thing of the heart and of the
senses as that of Burns and Catullus. Even his purer poetry has more
complex moods--consider _The Prohibition_--and it is metaphysical, not
only in the sense of being erudite and witty, but in the proper sense
of being reflective and philosophical. Donne is always conscious of
the import of his moods; and so it is that there emerges from his
poems a philosophy or a suggested philosophy of love to take the place
of the idealism which he rejects. Set a song of the joy of love
by Burns or by Catullus such as I have cited beside Donne's
_Anniversarie_,

All Kings, and all their favorites,
All glory of honors, beauties, wits,
The Sun itselfe, which makes times, as they passe,
Is elder by a year, now, than it was
When thou and I first one another saw,

and the difference is at once apparent. Burns gets no further than the
experience, Catullus than the obvious and hedonistic reflection that
time is flying, the moment of pleasure short. In Donne's poem one
feels the quickening of the brain, the vision extending its range, the
passion gathering sweep with the expanding rhythms, and from the mind
thus heated and inspired emerges, not a cry that time might stay its
course,

Lente, lente currite noctis equi,

but a clearer consciousness of the eternal significance of love, not
the love that aspires after the unattainable, but the love that
unites contented hearts. The method of the poet is, I suppose, too
dialectical to be popular, for the poem is in few Anthologies.