The
ascriptions in this collection are many of them purely fanciful.
ascriptions in this collection are many of them purely fanciful.
John Donne
Donne never writes of absence in this cheerful,
confident strain. He consoles himself at times with the doctrine of
inseparable souls, but the note of pain is never absent. He cannot
cheat his passionate heart and senses with metaphysical subtleties.
The song _Farewell to love_, the second in the list of poems added
in _1635_, is found only in _O'F_ and _S96_. There is therefore no
weighty external evidence for assigning it to Donne, but no one can
read it without feeling that it is his. The cynical yet passionate
strain of wit, the condensed style, and the metaphysical turn given to
the argument, are all in his manner. As printed in _1635_ the point
of the third stanza is obscured. As I have ventured to amend it, an
Aristotelian doctrine is referred to in a way that only Donne would
have done in quite such a setting.
The three _Elegies_, XII, XIII, and XIV (7, 8, 9 in the list), must
also be assigned to Donne, unless some more suitable candidate can be
advanced on really convincing grounds. The first of the three, _His
parting from her_, is so fine a poem that it is difficult to think any
unknown poet could have written it. In sincerity and poetic quality it
is one of the finest of the _Elegies_,[15] and in this sincerer
note, the absence of witty paradox, it differs from poems like _The
Bracelet_ and _The Perfume_ and resembles the fine elegy called _His
Picture_ and two other pieces that stand somewhat apart from the
general tenor of the _Elegies_, namely, the famous elegy _On his
Mistris_, in which he dissuades her from travelling with him as a
page:
By our first strange and fatal interview,
and that rather enigmatical poem _The Expostulation_, which found its
way into Jonson's _Underwoods_:
To make the doubt clear that no woman's true,
Was it my fate to prove it strong in you?
All of these poems bear the imprint of some actual experience, and to
this cause we may perhaps trace the comparative rareness with which
_His parting from her_ is found in manuscripts, and that it finally
appeared in a mutilated form. The poet may have given copies only to
a few friends and desired that it should not be circulated. In the
Second Collection of poems in _TCD_ it is signed at the close, 'Sir
Franc: Wryothlesse. ' Who is intended by this I do not know.
The
ascriptions in this collection are many of them purely fanciful.
Still, that the poem is Donne's rests on internal evidence alone.
Of the other two elegies, _Julia_, which is found in only two
manuscripts, _B_ and _O'F_, is quite the kind of thing Donne might
have amused himself by writing in the scurrilous style of Horace's
invectives against Canidia, frequently imitated by Mantuan and other
Humanists. The chief difficulty with regard to the second, _A Tale of
a Citizen and his Wife_, is to find Donne writing in this vein at
so late a period as 1609 or 1610, the date implied in several of the
allusions. He was already the author of religious poems, including
probably _La Corona_. In 1610 he wrote his _Litanie_, and, as
Professor Norton points out, in the same letter in which he tells of
the writing of the latter he refers to some poem of a lighter nature,
the name of which is lost through a mutilation of the letter, and
says, 'Even at this time when (I humbly thank God) I ask and have his
comfort of sadder meditations I do not condemn in myself that I
have given my wit such evaporations as those, if they be free from
profaneness, or obscene provocations. ' Whether this would cover the
elegy in question is a point on which perhaps our age and Donne's
would not decide alike. Donne's nature was a complex one. Jack Donne
and the grave and reverend divine existed side by side for not a
little time, and even in the sermons Donne's wit is once or twice
rather coarser than our generation would relish in the pulpit. But
once more we must add that it is possible Donne has in this case
been made responsible for what is another's. Every one wrote this
occasional poetry, and sometimes wrote it well.
There is no more difficult poem to understand or to assign to or from
Donne than the long letter headed _To the Countesse of Huntington_, 13
on the list, which, for the time being, I have placed in the Appendix
B. On internal grounds there is more to be said for ascribing it to
Donne than any other single poem in this collection. Nevertheless I
have resolved to let it stand, that it may challenge the attention it
deserves. [16] The reasons which led me to doubt Donne's authorship are
these:
(1) The poem was not included in the 1633 edition, nor is it found in
either of the groups _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ and _A18_, _N_, _TCC_, _TCD_.
It was added in _1635_ with four other spurious poems, the dialogue
ascribed to Donne and Wotton but assigned by the great majority of
manuscripts to the Earl of Pembroke and Sir Benjamin Rudyard, the two
epistles to Ben Jonson, and the Elegy addressed to Sir Thomas Roe,
which we have assigned, for reasons given above, to Sir John Roe.
confident strain. He consoles himself at times with the doctrine of
inseparable souls, but the note of pain is never absent. He cannot
cheat his passionate heart and senses with metaphysical subtleties.
The song _Farewell to love_, the second in the list of poems added
in _1635_, is found only in _O'F_ and _S96_. There is therefore no
weighty external evidence for assigning it to Donne, but no one can
read it without feeling that it is his. The cynical yet passionate
strain of wit, the condensed style, and the metaphysical turn given to
the argument, are all in his manner. As printed in _1635_ the point
of the third stanza is obscured. As I have ventured to amend it, an
Aristotelian doctrine is referred to in a way that only Donne would
have done in quite such a setting.
The three _Elegies_, XII, XIII, and XIV (7, 8, 9 in the list), must
also be assigned to Donne, unless some more suitable candidate can be
advanced on really convincing grounds. The first of the three, _His
parting from her_, is so fine a poem that it is difficult to think any
unknown poet could have written it. In sincerity and poetic quality it
is one of the finest of the _Elegies_,[15] and in this sincerer
note, the absence of witty paradox, it differs from poems like _The
Bracelet_ and _The Perfume_ and resembles the fine elegy called _His
Picture_ and two other pieces that stand somewhat apart from the
general tenor of the _Elegies_, namely, the famous elegy _On his
Mistris_, in which he dissuades her from travelling with him as a
page:
By our first strange and fatal interview,
and that rather enigmatical poem _The Expostulation_, which found its
way into Jonson's _Underwoods_:
To make the doubt clear that no woman's true,
Was it my fate to prove it strong in you?
All of these poems bear the imprint of some actual experience, and to
this cause we may perhaps trace the comparative rareness with which
_His parting from her_ is found in manuscripts, and that it finally
appeared in a mutilated form. The poet may have given copies only to
a few friends and desired that it should not be circulated. In the
Second Collection of poems in _TCD_ it is signed at the close, 'Sir
Franc: Wryothlesse. ' Who is intended by this I do not know.
The
ascriptions in this collection are many of them purely fanciful.
Still, that the poem is Donne's rests on internal evidence alone.
Of the other two elegies, _Julia_, which is found in only two
manuscripts, _B_ and _O'F_, is quite the kind of thing Donne might
have amused himself by writing in the scurrilous style of Horace's
invectives against Canidia, frequently imitated by Mantuan and other
Humanists. The chief difficulty with regard to the second, _A Tale of
a Citizen and his Wife_, is to find Donne writing in this vein at
so late a period as 1609 or 1610, the date implied in several of the
allusions. He was already the author of religious poems, including
probably _La Corona_. In 1610 he wrote his _Litanie_, and, as
Professor Norton points out, in the same letter in which he tells of
the writing of the latter he refers to some poem of a lighter nature,
the name of which is lost through a mutilation of the letter, and
says, 'Even at this time when (I humbly thank God) I ask and have his
comfort of sadder meditations I do not condemn in myself that I
have given my wit such evaporations as those, if they be free from
profaneness, or obscene provocations. ' Whether this would cover the
elegy in question is a point on which perhaps our age and Donne's
would not decide alike. Donne's nature was a complex one. Jack Donne
and the grave and reverend divine existed side by side for not a
little time, and even in the sermons Donne's wit is once or twice
rather coarser than our generation would relish in the pulpit. But
once more we must add that it is possible Donne has in this case
been made responsible for what is another's. Every one wrote this
occasional poetry, and sometimes wrote it well.
There is no more difficult poem to understand or to assign to or from
Donne than the long letter headed _To the Countesse of Huntington_, 13
on the list, which, for the time being, I have placed in the Appendix
B. On internal grounds there is more to be said for ascribing it to
Donne than any other single poem in this collection. Nevertheless I
have resolved to let it stand, that it may challenge the attention it
deserves. [16] The reasons which led me to doubt Donne's authorship are
these:
(1) The poem was not included in the 1633 edition, nor is it found in
either of the groups _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ and _A18_, _N_, _TCC_, _TCD_.
It was added in _1635_ with four other spurious poems, the dialogue
ascribed to Donne and Wotton but assigned by the great majority of
manuscripts to the Earl of Pembroke and Sir Benjamin Rudyard, the two
epistles to Ben Jonson, and the Elegy addressed to Sir Thomas Roe,
which we have assigned, for reasons given above, to Sir John Roe.
