Fishers,they kill not, nor with noise awake,
They doe not hunt, nor strive to make a prey
Of beasts, nor their yong sonnes to beare away;
Foules they pursue not, nor do undertake
To spoile the nests industrious birds do make;
Yet them all these unkinde kinds feed upon,
To kill them is an occupation,

And lawes make Fasts, and Lents for their
destruction.

On this occasion the fish is caught by a seabird, which flies off with her and

Exalted she is, but to the exalters good,

As are by great ones, men which lowly stood.

It's rais'd, to be the Raisers instrument and food.

The sea-bird is blown out to sea,

And with his prey, that till then languisht, dies :
The soules no longer foes, two wayes did erre,
The fish I follow, and keepe no calender

Of the other; he lives yet in some great officer.

Each of these last quotations shows Donne striking at his second chief subject of satire, courtiers. The last hit is very well done. The next tenement for this soul is a whale, which is described thus:

At every stroake his brazen finnes do take,
More circles in the broken sea they make
Then cannons voices, when the aire they teare:
His ribs are pillars, and his high arch'd roofe
Of barke that blunts best steele, is thunder-proofe :
Swimme in him swallow'd Dolphins, without feare,
And feele no sides, as if his vast wombe were

Some Inland sea, and ever as hee went
Hee spouted rivers up, as if he ment

To joyne our seas, with seas above the firmament. He hunts not fish, but as an officer,

Stayes in his court, at his owne net, and there
All suitors of all sorts themselves enthrall;
So on his backe lyes this whale wantoning,
And in his gulfe-like throat, sucks every thing
That passeth neare.
Fish chaseth fish, and all,
Flyer and follower, in this whirlepoole fall;

Now drinkes he up seas, and he eates up flocks,
He justles Ilands, and he shakes firme rockes.
Now in a roomeful house this Soule doth float,
And like a Prince she sends her faculties

To all her limbes, distant as Provinces.

It would seem that this description must have its origin in some bestiary, save for the 'officer' simile. A thresher and a swordfish kill the whale, and the soul,

having for her house Got the streight cloyster of a wreched mouse

and having been

late taught that great things might by lesse Be slain, to gallant mischiefe doth herselfe addresse. Natures great master-peece, an Elephant,

The onely harmlesse great thing; the giant
Of beasts; who thought, no more had gone, to

make one wise

But to be just, and thankfull, loth to offend,

stood sleeping, and before it hung down its trunk,

In which as in a gallery this mouse

Walk'd, and surveid the roomes of this vast house, And to the braine, the soules bedchamber, went, And gnaw'd the life cords there; Like a whole towne

Cleane undermin'd, the slaine beast tumbled
downe;

With him the murtherer dies, whom envy sent
To kill, not scape, (for, only hee that ment
To die, did ever kill a man of better roome,)
And thus he made his foe, his prey, and tombe :
Who cares not to turn back, may any whither

come.

The description of the fall of the elephant is admirable, and the phrasing of the final aphorism very apt.

The soul next inhabits a wolf, which attempts to raid the flocks of "Abel, as white, and milde as his sheepe were." The sheep were safe until the wolf seduced Abel's "bitch, his sentinell," after which depredations are frequent up to the time when a trap kills the wolf. Abel's dog at this time giving birth to a litter, the soul enters a puppy, whose career was short because

He, as his dam, from sheepe drove wolves away,
And as his Sire, he made them his owne prey.

The soul next enters the body of an ape, which, making an attempt upon "Adams fift daughter Siphatecia," is killed by her brother, Tethlemite, whereupon the soul flies, and since

Of every past shape, she knew treachery,

Rapine, deceit, and lust, and ills enow

To be a woman. Themech she is now,

Sister and wife to Caine, Caine that first did
plow.

At this point the poet doubtless realized that, as Sir Edmund Gosse has happily put it, "at this rate of progress it would have taken millions of verses to bring us safely down to Queen Elizabeth." He, therefore, rounds off the poem with the following outburst of dissatisfaction, and throws down his pen:

Who ere thou beest that read'st this sullen Writ,
Which just so much courts thee, as thou dost it,
Let me arrest thy thoughts; wonder with mee,
Why plowing, building, ruling and the rest,
Or most of those arts, whence our lives are blest,
By cursed Cains race invented be,

And blest Seth vext us with Astronomie.
Ther's nothing simply good, nor ill alone,
Of every quality comparison,

The onely measure is, and judge, opinion.

Only one critic of eminence, De Quincey, makes a high claim for "Metempsychosis." He says that massy diamonds compose the very substance of this poem, thoughts and descriptions which have the fervent and gloomy sublimity of Ezekiel or Eschylus." Though many brilliant things are to be found in it, some of which have been indicated, not many will agree with this estimate. Yet it has a certain foundation. The original plan was majestic. Donne

proposed to indict at once Woman and God. Woman he attacked, as is shown by the quotation from Stanza LI, by representing her as animated by a soul which retained something of all vices, and intended to show how it entered naturally thereafter into heretics and evil people, finally coming to rest in the arch-heretic John Knox.

Donne at this time had no religious belief, but his outlook was more or less Catholic by association. Probably, just as he was beginning to write, however, Elizabeth executed Essex, who was a patron of Donne, and a friend of Egerton. Donne therefore substituted Elizabeth for John Knox, the more willingly that she was a woman. But in addition to his distaste for women Donne had a bitter grievance in the general wrongness and injustice of life, and, as the last stanza shows, by describing how many good things have come from "cursed Cains race " he must have intended to question either the truth of Christianity as it was then understood or the wisdom of the Supreme Being.

Now these last two factors are on a much higher plane, and, properly handled, would have given such a poem as De Quincey describes. And, indeed, the echoes of them, rumbling about in the poem as it stands, give it touches of grandeur.

Is it of necessity

That thousand guiltless smals, to make one great,

must die?