Why we should read. S. P. B. Mais
died before the God of Love was born,"
of
"I wonder by my troth what thou and I
Did till we loved?"
of the
"Bracelet of bright hair about the bone,"
that attracts the ordinary man and woman of to-day.
In spite of repeated incentives to listen, we turn deaf ears to sermons: towards poetry we are inclined to be perhaps too kind.
Donne is all the more important as a poet because he treats of the universal passion of love in more phases than any other poet. He was the complete experimentalist in love, both in actual life and in his work. He is frankly in search of bodily experiences:
"Whoever loves, if he do not propose
The right true end of love, he's one that goes
To sea for nothing but to make him sick."
He is brutal:
"For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love."
He is inconstant:
"I can love any, so she be not true."
He bewails the inconstancy of women:
"Though she were true when you met her,
And last till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two or three."
His passion for sheer ugliness carries him away time after time:
"Had it been some bad smell, he would have thought
That his own feet, or breath, that smell had wrought."
Or again:
"And like a bunch of ragged carrots stand
The short swollen fingers of thy gouty hand."
In his Elegies he tells stories of his conquests dramatically, in full detail, satirically, sensually. In Jealousy we are given an exact picture of the deformed husband who,
"Swol'n and pampered with great fare,
Sits down and snorts, cag'd in his basket chair"
—so that the poet and his mistress perforce have to "play in another house," away from those "towering eyes, that flamed with oily sweat of jealousy."
In The Perfume we see the girl's "immortal mother, which doth lie still buried in her bed, yet will not die," who, fearing lest her daughter be swollen, embraces her and names strange meats to try her longings: we see
"The grim-eight-foot-high-iron-bound-serving-man
That oft names God in oaths, and only then."
But the scent that the lover uses gives him away and so he is by her "hydroptic father catechized."
There is a good deal of frank naturalism in the elegy entitled To his Mistress Going to Bed, but it is healthily coarse, though scarcely quotable even in these times, which is a pity.
"There is no penance due to innocence."
But playing as he does on all the notes of all the different sorts of love, Donne gives the impression of one who attained in the end an abiding love for one person, Anne More, his wife.
In The Ecstasy we see him crying out against passionate friendship:
"But O alas, so long, so far,
Our bodies why do we forbear?"
and makes an unanswerable point in this verse:
"So must pure lovers' souls descend
T'affections and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great Prince in prison lies.
To our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love reveal'd may look;
Love's mysteries in souls do grow
But yet the body is the book."
And in The Anniversary he retracts all that he had once said about inconstancy:
"Here upon earth we are Kings, and none but we
Can be such Kings, nor of such subjects be.
Who is so safe as we, where none can do
Treason to us, except one of us two?
True and false fears let us refrain;
Let us live nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write three-score: This is the second of our reign."
There are few lovelier lyrics than Break of Day:
"Stay, O sweet, and do not rise;
The light that shines comes from thine eyes;
The day breaks not, it is my heart,
Because that you and I must part.
Stay, or else my joys will die
And perish in their infancy."
Or, to take a complete poem, none shows Donne in truer, finer light than The Dream:
"Dear love, for nothing less than thee
Would I have broke this happy dream;
It was a theme
For reason, much too strong for fantasy.
Therefore thou waked'st me wisely; yet
My dream thou brokest not, but continued'st it.
Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice
To make dreams truths, and fables histories;
Enter these arms, for since thou thought'st it best,
Not to dream all my dream, let's act the rest.
As lightning, or a taper's light,
Thine eyes, and not thy noise waked me;
Yet I thought thee
—For thou lovest truth—an angel, at first sight;
But when I saw thou saw'st my heart,
And knew'st my thoughts beyond an angel's art,
When thou knew'st what I dreamt, when thou knew'st when
Excess of joy would wake me, and earnest then,
I must confess, it could not choose but be
Profane, to think thee anything but thee."
There is enough nastiness, eccentricity, coarseness, roughness and extravagance in Donne to put off many fastidious readers: but his faults lie open to the sky: his beauties are frequently hidden, but they are worth searching for.
And yet—a word of warning—let George Saintsbury give it: "No one who thinks Don Quixote a merely funny book, no one who sees in Aristophanes a dirty-minded fellow with a knack of Greek versification … need trouble himself even to attempt to like Donne."
We read Donne, then, for his fiery imagination, for his deep and subtle analysis, for his humanity, for his passion, for his anti-sentimentalism, for his eager search "to find a north-west passage of his own" in intellect and morals, for the richness and rarity of the gems with which all his work, both prose and poetry, is studded, for his modernity and freshness. We read Donne as a corrective of lazy thinking: he frees us from illusion.
IX
SUCH A BOOK AS THE BEGGAR'S OPERA