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DR. DONNE.
We now come to Dr. John Donne, a man of justly great respect and
authority, who, born in the year 1573, the fifteenth of Queen Elizabeth,
died Dean of St. Paul's in the year 1636. But, although even Ben Jonson
addresses him as "the delight of Phoebus and each Muse," we are too far
beyond the power of his social presence and the influence of his public
utterances to feel that admiration of his poems which was so largely
expressed during his lifetime. Of many of those that were written in his
youth, Izaak Walton says Dr. Donne "wished that his own eyes had
witnessed their funerals." Faulty as they are, however, they are not the
less the work of a great and earnest man.
Bred to the law, but never having practised it, he lost his secretaryship
to the Lord Chancellor Ellesmere through the revenge of Sir George More,
whose daughter Donne had married in secret because of her father's
opposition. Dependent thereafter for years on the generous kindness of
unrelated friends, he yet for conscience' sake refused to take orders
when a good living was offered him; and it was only after prolonged
thought that he yielded to the importunity of King James, who was so
convinced of his surpassing fitness for the church that he would speed
him towards no other goal. When at length he dared hope that God might
have called him to the high office, never man gave himself to its duties
with more of whole-heartedness and devotion, and none have proved
themselves more clean of the sacrilege of serving at the altar for the
sake of the things offered thereon.
He is represented by Dr. Johnson as one of the chief examples of that
school of poets called by himself the metaphysical, an epithet which,
as a definition, is almost false. True it is that Donne and his followers
were always ready to deal with metaphysical subjects, but it was from
their mode, and not their subjects, that Dr. Johnson classed them. What
this mode was we shall see presently, for I shall be justified in setting
forth its strangeness, even absurdity, by the fact that Dr. Donne was the
dear friend of George Herbert, and had much to do with the formation of
his poetic habits. Just twenty years older than Herbert, and the valued
and intimate friend of his mother, Donne was in precisely that relation
of age and circumstance to influence the other in the highest degree.
The central thought of Dr. Donne is nearly sure to be just: the
subordinate thoughts by means of which he unfolds it are often grotesque,
and so wildly associated as to remind one of the lawlessness of a dream,
wherein mere suggestion without choice or fitness rules the sequence. As
some of the writers of whom I have last spoken would play with words, Dr.
Donne would sport with ideas, and with the visual images or embodiments
of them. Certainly in his case much knowledge reveals itself in the
association of his ideas, and great facility in the management and
utterance of them. True likewise, he says nothing unrelated to the main
idea of the poem; but not the less certainly does the whole resemble the
speech of a child of active imagination, to whom judgment as to the
character of his suggestions is impossible, his taste being equally
gratified with a lovely image and a brilliant absurdity: a butterfly and
a shining potsherd are to him similarly desirable. Whatever wild thing
starts from the thicket of thought, all is worthy game to the hunting
intellect of Dr. Donne, and is followed without question of tone,
keeping, or harmony. In his play with words, Sir Philip Sidney kept good
heed that even that should serve the end in view; in his play with ideas,
Dr. John Donne, so far from serving the end, sometimes obscures it almost
hopelessly: the hart escapes while he follows the squirrels and weasels
and bats. It is not surprising that, their author being so inartistic
with regard to their object, his verses themselves should be harsh and
unmusical beyond the worst that one would imagine fit to be called verse.
He enjoys the unenviable distinction of having no rival in ruggedness of
metric movement and associated sounds. This is clearly the result of
indifference; an indifference, however, which grows very strange to us
when we find that he can write a lovely verse and even an exquisite
stanza.
Greatly for its own sake, partly for the sake of illustration, I quote a
poem containing at once his best and his worst, the result being such an
incongruity that we wonder whether it might not be called his best and
his worst, because we cannot determine which. He calls it Hymn to God,
my God, in my Sickness. The first stanza is worthy of George Herbert in
his best mood.
Since I am coming to that holy room,
Where with the choir of saints for evermore
- I
- shall be made thy music, as I come
I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think here before.
To recognize its beauty, leaving aside the depth and truth of the phrase,
"Where I shall be made thy music," we must recall the custom of those
days to send out for "a noise of musicians." Hence he imagines that he
has been summoned as one of a band already gone in to play before the
king of "The High Countries:" he is now at the door, where he is
listening to catch the tone, that he may have his instrument tuned and
ready before he enters. But with what a jar the next stanza breaks on
heart, mind, and ear!
Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
Cosmographers, and I[72] their map, who lie
Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown
That this is my south-west discovery,
Per fretum febris--by these straits to die;--
Here, in the midst of comparing himself to a map, and his physicians to
cosmographers consulting the map, he changes without warning into a
navigator whom they are trying to follow upon the map as he passes
through certain straits--namely, those of the fever--towards his
south-west discovery, Death. Grotesque as this is, the absurdity deepens
in the end of the next stanza by a return to the former idea. He is
alternately a map and a man sailing on the map of himself. But the first
half of the stanza is lovely: my reader must remember that the region of
the West was at that time the Land of Promise to England.
- I
- joy that in these straits I see my West;
For though those currents yield return to none,
What shall my West hurt me? As west and east
In all flat maps (and I am one) are one,
So death doth touch the resurrection.
It is hardly worth while, except for the strangeness of the phenomenon,
to spend any time in elucidating this. Once more a map, he is that of the
two hemispheres, in which the east of the one touches the west of the
other. Could anything be much more unmusical than the line, "In all flat
maps (and I am one) are one"? But the next stanza is worse.
Is the Pacific sea my home? Or are
The eastern riches? Is Jerusalem?
Anvan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar?
All straits, and none but straits are ways to them,
Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Sem.
The meaning of the stanza is this: there is no earthly home: all these
places are only straits that lead home, just as they themselves cannot be
reached but through straits.
Let my reader now forget all but the first stanza, and take it along with
the following, the last two:
We think that Paradise and Calvary,
Christ's cross and Adam's tree, stood in one place:
Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;
As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace.
So, in his purple wrapped, receive me, Lord;
By these his thorns give me his other crown;
And as to others' souls I preached thy word,
Be this my text, my sermon to mine own:
Therefore, that he may raise, the Lord throws down.
Surely these are very fine, especially the middle verse of the former and
the first verse of the latter stanza. The three stanzas together make us
lovingly regret that Dr. Donne should have ridden his Pegasus over quarry
and housetop, instead of teaching him his paces.
The next I quote is artistic throughout. Perhaps the fact, of which we
are informed by Izaak Walton, "that he caused it to be set to a grave and
solemn tune, and to be often sung to the organ by the choristers of St.
Paul's church in his own hearing, especially at the evening service," may
have something to do with its degree of perfection. There is no sign of
his usual haste about it. It is even elaborately rhymed after Norman
fashion, the rhymes in each stanza being consonant with the rhymes in
every stanza.
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