50

Both the years and the days | deep midnight is.

6

The wrenching of accent which Jonson complained of is not
entirely due to carelessness or indifference. It has often both
a rhetorical and a harmonious justification. (Donne plays with
rhythmical effects as with conceits and words and often in much
the same way. Mr. Fletcher Melton's interesting analysis of
his verse has not, I think, established his main thesis, which
like so many research' scholars he over-emphasizes, that the
whole mystery of Donne's art lies in his use of the same sound
now in arsis, now in thesis; but his examples show that this
is one of many devices by which Donne secures two effects,
the troubling of the regular fall of the verse stresses by the
intrusion of rhetorical stress on syllables which the metrical
pattern leaves unstressed, and, secondly, an echoing and re-echoing
of similar sounds parallel to his fondness for resemblances in
thoughts and things apparently the most remote from one another.
There is, that is to say, in his verse the same blend as in his
diction of the colloquial and the bizarre. He writes as one
who will say what he has to say without regard to conventions
of poetic diction or smooth verse, but what he has to say is subtle
and surprising, and so are the metrical effects with which it is
presented. There is nothing of unconscious or merely careless
harshness in such an effect as this:

Poor soul, in this thy flesh what dost thou know?
Thou know'st thyself so little that thou knowst not
How thou didst die, nor how thou wast begot.
Thou neither know'st how thou at first camest in,
Nor how thou took'st the poison of man's sin;

Nor dost thou though thou know'st that thou art so
By what way thou art made immortal know.

In Donne's pronunciation, as in southern English to-day, 'thou', 'how', 'soul', 'know', 'though', and 'so' were not far removed from each other in sound and the reiterated notes ring through the lines like a tolling bell. Mr. Melton has collected, and any careful reader may discover for himself, many similar subtleties of poetical rhetoric; for Donne is perhaps our first great master of poetic rhetoric, of poetry used as, Dryden Peter and Pope were to use it, for effects of oratory rather than of/ song, and the advance which Dryden achieved was secured by subordinating to oratory the more passionate and imaginative qualities which troubled the balance and movement of Donne's packed but imaginative rhetoric.

It was not indeed in lyrical verse that (Dryden followed and developed Donne,) but in his eulogistic, elegiac, satirical, and epistolary verse.) The progress of Dryden's eulogistic style is traceable from his earliest metaphysical extravagances through lines such as those addressed to the Duchess of York, where Waller is his model, to the verses on the death of Oldham in which a more natural and classical strain has entirely superseded his earlier extravagances and elegancies. In truth Donne's metaphysical eulogies and elegies and epistles are a hard nut to crack for his most sympathetic admirers. And yet they have undeniable qualities. The metaphysics are developed in a more serious, a less paradoxical, strain than in some of the .songs and elegies. In his letters he is an excellent, if far from a perfect, talker in verse; and the personality which they reveal is a singularly charming one; grave, loyal, melancholy, witty. If some of the elegiac pieces are packed with tasteless and extravagant hyperboles, the Anniversaries (especially the second) remains,

despite all its faults, one of the greatest poems on death in the language, the fullest record in our literature of the disintegrating collision in a sensitive mind of the old tradition and the new learning. Some of the invocational passages in Of the Progresse of the Soule are among the finest examples of his subtle and passionate thinking as well as of his most elaborate verse rhetoric.

But the most intense and personal of Donne's poems, after the love songs and elegies, are his later religious sonnets and songs; and their influence on subsequent poetry was even more obvious and potent.) They are as personal and as tormented as his earlier 'love-song weeds', for his spiritual Aeneid was a troubled one. To date his conversion to Anglicanism is not easy. In his satires there is a veiled Roman tone. By 1602 he disclaims to Egerton 'all love of a corrupt religion', but in the autumn of the previous year he had been meditating a satire on Queen Elizabeth as one of the world's great heretics. (His was not a conversion but a reconciliation, an acquiescence in the faith of his country, the established religion of his legal sovereign, and the act cost him some pangs.) A convert from Popery to Protestantism,' said Dr. Johnson, 'gives up so much of what he has held as sacred as anything that he retains, there is so much laceration of mind in such a conversion, that it can hardly be sincere and lasting.' Something of that laceration of mind is discernible in Donne's religious verse:

6

Show me dear Christ that spouse so bright and clear.

But the conflict between the old and the reformed faiths was not the only, nor perhaps the principal trouble for Donne's enlightened mind ready to recognize in all the Churches 'virtual beams of one sun', 'connatural pieces of one circle'. A harder fight was that between the secular, the 'man of the world']

temper of his mind and the claims of a pious and ascetic calling. It was not the errors of his youth, as the good Walton supposed, which constituted the great stumbling block, though he never ignores these:

O might those sighs and tears return again
Into my breast and eyes, which I have spent,
That I might in this holy discontent

Mourn with some fruit, as I have mourned in vain.

It was rather the temperament of one who, at a time when a public career was more open to unassisted talent, might have proved an active and useful, if ambitious, civil servant, or professional man, at war with the claims of a religious life which his upbringing had taught him was incompatible with worldly ambition. George Herbert, a much more contented Anglican than Donne ever became, knew something of the same struggle before he bent his neck to the collar.

*

The two notes then of Donne's religious poems are the Catholic and the personal. He is the first of our AngloCatholic poets, and he is our first intensely personal religious poet, expressing always not the mind simply of the Christian as such, but the conflicts and longings of one troubled soul, one subtle and fantastic mind. For Donne's technique-his phrasing and conceits, the metaphysics of mediaeval Christianity, his packed verse with its bold, irregular fingering and echoing vowel sounds-remains what it had been from the outset. The echoing sounds in lines such as these cannot be quite casual:

O might those sighs and tears return again
Into my breast and which I have spent,
That I might in this holy discontent

eyes,

Mourn with some fruit, as I have mourned in vain;

In mine Idolatry what showers of rain

Mine eyes did waste? What griefs my heart did rent?
That sufferance was my sin; now I repent

Cause I did suffer I must suffer pain.

In the remaining six lines the same sound never recurs.

A metaphysical, a philosophical poet, to the degree to which even his contemporary Fulke Greville might be called such, Donne was not. The thought in his poetry is not his primary concern but the feeling.) No scheme of thought, no interpretation of life became for him a complete and illuminating experience. The central theme of his poetry is ever his own intense personal moods, as a lover, a friend, an analyst of his own experiences worldly and religious. His philosophy cannot unify these experiences. It represents the reaction of his restless and acute mind on the intense experience of the moment, a reading of it in the light now of one, now of another philosophical or theological dogma or thesis caught from his multifarious reading, developed with audacious paradox or more serious intention, as an expression, an illumination of that mood to himself and to his reader. Whether one choose to call him a metaphysical or a fantastic poet, the stress must be laid on the word 'poet Whether verse or prose be his medium, Donne is always a poet, a creature of feeling and imagination, seeking expression in vivid phrase and complex harmonies, whose acute and subtle intellect was the servant, if sometimes the unruly servant, of passion and imagination.

II

Donne's influence was felt in his own day by two strangely different classes of men, both attached by close ties to the Court. For the Court, the corrupt, ambitious, intriguing, dissolute but