No More Learning

There are qualities in the religious poetry of simpler and purer souls
to which Donne seldom or never attains. The natural love of God which
overflows the pages of the great mystics, which dilates the heart
and the verses of a poet like the Dutchman Vondel, the ardour and
tenderness of Crashaw, the chaste, pure piety and penitence of
Herbert, the love from which devotion and ascetic self-denial come
unbidden--to these Donne never attained. The high and passionate joy
of _The Anniversary_ is not heard in his sonnets or hymns. Effort is
the note which predominates--the effort to realize the majesty of God,
the heinousness of sin, the terrors of Hell, the mercy of Christ.
Some of the very worst traits in Donne's mind are brought out in
his religious writing. _The Essays on Divinity_ are an extraordinary
revelation of his accumulations of useless Scholastic erudition, and
his capacity to perform feats of ingenious deduction from traditional
and accepted premises. To compare these freakish deductions from the
theory of verbal inspiration with the luminous sense of the _Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus_ is to realize how much rationalism was doing
in the course of the century for the emancipation and healing of the
human intellect. Some of the poems, and those the earliest written,
before Donne had actually taken Orders, are not much more than
exercises in these theological subtleties, poems such as that _On
the Annunciation and Passion falling in the same year_ (1608), _The
Litany_ (1610), _Good-Friday_ (1613), and _The Cross_ (_c. _ 1615)
are characteristic examples of Donne's intense and imaginative wit
employed on traditional topics of Catholic devotion to which no
change of Church ever made him indifferent. Donne never ignored in his
sermons the gulf that separated the Anglican from the Roman Church, or
the link that bound her to the Protestant Churches of the Continent.
'Our great protestant divines' are one of his courts of appeal,
and included Luther and Calvin of whom he never speaks but with the
deepest respect. But he was unwilling to sacrifice to a fanatical
puritanism any element of Catholic devotion which was capable of
an innocent interpretation. His language is guarded and perhaps not
always consistent, but it would not be difficult to show from his
sermons and prose-writings that many of the most distinctively
Catholic tenets were treated by him with the utmost tenderness.

But, as Mr. Gosse has pointed out, the sincerest and profoundest of
Donne's devotional poetry dates from the death of his wife.
The loss
of her who had purified and sweetened his earliest love songs lent
a new and deeper _timbre_ to the sonnets and lyrics in which he
contemplates the great topics of personal religion,--sin, death,
the Judgement, and throws himself on the mercy of God as revealed in
Christ. The seven sonnets entitled _La Corona_ have been generally
attributed to this period, but it is probable that they were composed
earlier, and their treatment of the subject of Christ's life and death
is more intellectual and theological than spiritual and poetical. It
is when the tone becomes personal, as in the _Holy Sonnets_, when he
is alone with his own soul in the prospect of death and the Judgement,
that Donne's religious poetry acquires something of the same unique
character as his love songs and elegies by a similar combination
of qualities, intensity of feeling, subtle turns of thought, and
occasional Miltonic splendour of phrase. Here again we meet the
magnificent openings of the _Songs and Sonets_:--

This is my playes last scene; here heavens appoint
My pilgrimages last mile; and my race
Idly yet quickly run hath this last space,
My spans last inch, my minutes latest point;

or,

At the round earths imagin'd quarters blow
Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise
From death you numberlesse infinities
Of soules, and to your scatter'd bodies go:

and again--

What if this present were the worlds last night!
Marke in my heart, O Soule, where thou dost dwell,
The picture of Christ crucified, and tell
Whether that countenance can thee affright,
Teares in his eyes quench the amazing light,
Blood fills his frownes, which from his pierc'd head fell.

This passionate penitence, this beating as it were against the bars
of self in the desire to break through to a fuller apprehension of
the mercy and love of God, is the intensely human note of these latest
poems. Nothing came easily to his soul that knew so well how to be
subtle to plague itself. The vision of divine wrath he can conjure up
more easily than the beatific vision of the love that 'moves the sun
in heaven and all the stars'. Nevertheless it was that vision which
Donne sought. He could never have been content with Milton's heaven of
majesty and awe divorced from the quickening spirit of love. And there
are moments when he comes as close to that beatific vision as perhaps
a self-tormenting mind involved in the web of seventeenth-century
theology ever could,--at moments love and ecstasy gain the upper hand
of fear and penitence. But it is in the sermons that he reaches these
highest levels. There is nothing in the florid eloquence of Jeremy
Taylor that can equal the splendour of occasional passages in Donne's
sermons, when the lava-like flow of his heated reasoning seems
suddenly to burst and flower in such a splendid incandescence of
mystical rapture as this:--

'Death and life are in the power of the tongue, says Solomon,
in another sense: and in this sense too, If my tongue,
suggested by my heart, and by my heart rooted in faith, can
say, _non moriar, non moriar_: If I can say (and my conscience
do not tell me that I belie mine own state) if I can say, That
the blood of the Saviour runs in my veins, That the breath of
his spirit quickens all my purposes, that all my deaths
have their Resurrection, all my sins their remorses, all my
rebellions their reconciliations, I will hearken no more after
this question as it is intended _de morte naturali_, of a
natural death; I know I must die that death; what care I? nor
_de morte spirituali_, the death of sin, I know I doe, and
shall die so; why despair I? but I will find out another
death, _mortem raptus_, a death of rapture and of extasy, that
death which St. Paul died more than once, the death which St.