And made'st us sigh and glow, and pant, and burn, And then thy self into our flame did'st turn? And those so ambush'd round with houshold And over all, thy husbands towring eyes Of becks, winks, looks, and often under-boards Must sad divorce make us the vulgar story? Toward the end of the elegy are found the most pleasant lines that Donne wrote in this connexion. Still addressing Love, he says Do thy great worst, my friend and I have armes, Though not against thy strokes, against thy harmes. Rend us in sunder, thou canst not divide Our bodies so, but that our souls are ty'd, And we can love by letters still and gifts, And thoughts and dreams; Love never wanteth shifts. I will not look upon the quickning Sun, But straight her beauty to my sense shall run; The ayre shall note her soft, the fire most pure; The couplet I will not look upon the quickning Sun, But straight her beauty to my sense shall run, is excellent, and from there to the end of the quotation the standard is high. It was not likely, however, that Donne would end the affair on so gentle a note. He was now some years older than when it began, and had high hopes of a career. Calm afterthought threw into relief aspects of the intrigue which pricked his conscience, now beginning to reassert its sway after the pagan fit; above all, the ignominy of it lashed his pride. It was brooding upon all this which probably gave rise to such pieces as the following, which occurs in the poem called "The Curse." Who ever guesses, thinks, or dreames he knowes Who is my mistris, wither by this curse; The venom of all stepdames, gamsters gall, What Plants, Mynes, Beasts, Foule, Fish, Be annex'd in schedules unto this by mee, Nature before hand hath out-cursed mee. This, of course, is a mere general outburst, but in the end Donne reached such a pitch of fury that he turned, most unjustly, upon the lady in one of the finest hate poems in the language. There is a cold malignity about it which almost makes one shudder, but the expression is perfect. THE APPARITION When by thy scorne, O murdresse, I am dead, From all solicitation from mee, Then shall my ghost come to thy bed, And thee, fain'd vestall, in worse armes shall see; And he, whose thou art then, being tyr'd before, And in false sleepe will from thee shrinke, What I will say, I will not tell thee now, spent, I had rather thou shouldst painfully repent, Then by my threatnings rest still innocent. The reader had already been made aware that the above sequence of events is conjectural. It is safe to assume that it is in the main correct, provided that the poems are based on actual experience, which is made probable by the fact that there are in the collection poems-unquotable here—which prove that Donne had such experience. To me the poems themselves are evidence that they record real incidents. They contain things that surely would not find their way into a poem of pure invention. But if the reader chooses to consider that Donne, standing apart from this side of life, invented these poems from the materials supplied by conversation and a very occasional experience, then he is making a new claim. In any case these lyrics and "The Satyres" show Donne as the first of the great seventeenth-century realists; this view would claim for him powers of dramatic imagination of a high order. If, then, these poems record for the most part actual facts the question will be asked whether this writer was not a very depraved young man. Viewed in the light of his after career the answer is in the negative. His outstanding characteristic is uncompromising intellectual honesty. He had hidden away a high ideal of conduct, which for the time was overcome by the demands of his exceedingly vigorous body. But he was honest with himself. Many other young men of his time were equally at fault in conduct, but their graceful and conventional love-poems were a sham. Shams of all kind were hateful to Donne, and he revolted from convention to realism. Like most people who head a new movement, he went too far, and his realism is at times crude. IV ITTLE is known of Donne's relations with L the literary men of the time during these early years of his manhood. Probably he extended dislike of the style of their verse to their persons. The only poet of distinction with whom we know him to have been on cordial terms is Ben Jonson, though there is nothing to show that they were personal friends. Donne wrote to Jonson a copy of Latin verses, and himself won the difficult praises of the dramatist. Several of the latter's comments on Donne are recorded by Drummond of Hawthornden in the notes which he made of his conversations with Jonson, who visited him in the course of a tramp to Scotland. Jonson declared that Donne, for not keeping of accent deserved hanging," also that he, "for not being understood, would perish." Another dictum recorded by Drummond is that "he esteemeth John Donne the first poet in the world in some things his verses of 'The Lost Chain ' he hath by heart." Now this is curious, for the piece in question-"Elegie XI: The Bracelet "-is the last of Donne's poems which the modern critic would praise. Nearly half a hundred verses of it are nothing but a toying-ingenious, |