Some unknown grove I'll find, where by the miracle of Love Habington, Castara, 'To Reason.' Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt teares. Jonson, Cynthia's Revells, I. ii. Like God, you are not only true, Io veggio ben che giammai non si sazia Dante, Paradiso, iv. 124-7. Il. 16-17. And knew'st my thoughts, beyond', &c. The comma is necessary, for Donne does not say she knew his thoughts better than an angel could, but that she read his thoughts directly, which God only, and not the angels, can do. 11. 27-8. 'Perchance as torches', &c. If it [a torch] have never been lighted, it does not easily take light, but it must be bruised and beaten first; if it have been lighted and put out . . . it does easily conceive fire.' (Fifty Sermons, 36, p. 332.) p. II. A Valediction: of weeping. The first is a general title given to several of the poems. 'Of weeping' states the special theme. 1. 9. 'divers', i. e. ' diverse '. p. 12. The Message. 1. 14. crosse', i. e. 'cancel'. Editions read 'break'. Examine well thy beauty with my truth, p. 13. A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day. Daniel, Delia, I. 1. 12. 'every dead thing'. He is the quintessence of all negations, 'absence, darkness, death; things which are not', the quintessence even of that first nothing' from which all things are created. Of this we will say no more; for this Nothing, being no creature, is more incomprehensible than all the rest' (Donne, Essays in Divinity). The poem illustrates Donne's strength and weakness, his power to produce an intense impression by the most abstract means, here an impression of the sense of nothingness which may overtake one who has lost the central motive of his life. But here and there he refines too much and weakens the effect. p. 14. A Valediction: forbidding mourning. This, like 'Sweetest love', p. 5, and 'Of weeping', p. 11, was written on the occasion of a parting from his wife, perhaps in 1612, when Donne's wife was unwilling to let him go, saying her divining soul boded her some ill in his absence'. Donne had a vision of her in the daytime, and sending a messenger home learned that her child had been born dead. A copy of verses given by Mr. Donne to his wife at the time he then parted from her. And I beg leave to tell that I have heard critics, learned both in languages and poetry, say that none of the Greek or Latin poets did ever equal them' (Walton). An admirable poem which none but Donne could have written. Nothing was ever more admirably made out than the figure of the compass' (Coleridge). 1. II. trepidation of the spheares', i. e. the precession of the equinoxes or movement of the axis of the earth, which has altered our position relative to the various constellations. p. 16. The Extasie. 'I should never find fault with metaphysical poems, were they all like this, or but half as excellent' (Coleridge). The Oxford Book of Verse gives some stanzas from this poem, but it must be read as a whole. As late as ten years ago I used to seek and find out grand lines and fine stanzas; but my delight has been far greater since it has consisted more in tracing the leading thought throughout the whole. The former is to much like coveting your neighbours' goods; in the latter you merge yourself in the author, you become He' (Coleridge). 6 1. 55. forces, sense,' &c. The duváμeis, forces or faculties, of the body, are sense, working on which the soul perceives and conceives. 1. 59. 'Soe soule into the soule may flow', &c. As the heavenly bodies affect the soul of man through the medium of the air (as was believed), so soul touches soul through the medium of the body. p. 21. The Relique. 1. 27. 'Comming and going, wee', &c. The curtesye of England is often to kys. Enterlude of Johan the Evangelist. What favour hast thou had more then a kisse p. 22. The Prohibition. Arden of Feversham, i. 378–9. İ. 18. So, these extreames shall neithers office doe'. Of these extremes neither shall discharge its office or function. Compare: And each (though enimes to ethers raigne). Shakespeare, Sonnets, XXVIII. 5. 1. 22. 'So shall I, live', &c. Alive, I shall be the stage on which your victories are daily set forth; dead, I shall be only your triumph achieved once, never to be repeated. Great Conquerors greater glory gain Compare: Butler, Hudibras, I. ii. 1065--8. p. 23. Absence. John Hoskins's poems were lost or destroyed by a Puritan friend of his son in 1653 (Wood, Athenae Oxonienses). A few are preserved in Reliquiae Wottonians and in MSS. This poem, which was first attributed in print to Donne in 1711, appeared in Davison's Poetical Rhapsody as early as 1602, without any ascription, although Davison was at the time on the outlook for poems by Donne: see Bullen's introduction to his reprint of the Rhapsody, p. liii. In a MS. in Drummond's handwriting of poems belonging to John Don', i. e. of poems by himself and his friends which Donne possessed and Drummond copied, this poem and another, Love is a foolish melancholy, &c., are signed J. H. The latter poem is in a Chetham Library MS. (Manchester) and a British Museum MS. ascribed with some others to Mr. Hoskins'. Of not many wandering seventeenthcentury poems is the authorship so well documented. p. 24. On his Mistris, the Queen of Bohemia. 1. 5. 'What are you when the Sun shall rise?' This is the reading of the Reliquiae Wottonianae, 1651, and I have let it stand. It gives a less pleasing picture than with 'Moon' for 'Sun', but a sharper antithesis. Compare the Arabian poet Nabigha's address to King Nu'man: All other kings are stars and thou a sun: When the sun rises, lo! the heavens are bare. R. A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs, 1907. But the reading 'moon' appears early, in Este's Madrigals, Sixth Set, 1624, and in all the MS. copies of the poem in the British Museum, which Professor Moore Smith has kindly examined for me. The reading 'moon' is better adapted to a woman: And all the foule which in his flood did dwell The lesser starres. Spenser, Prothalamion, 119–22. Another variant is 'passions' for "Voyces', 1. 8, which is also an improvement. But the Madrigal books and MSS. have less justifiable variations. I have therefore reprinted the Rel. Wot. version as it stands. My texts are not eclectic. The reading 'Sun' is supported by a phrase in Donne's Epithalamion ... on the Lady Elizabeth and Count Palatine, 1613, possibly the date of Wotton's song. Donne speaks of her as a sun, stanza vii: Here lies a shee Sunne, and a hee Moone here, She gives the best light to his spheare, &c. 6 The bolder hyperbole is metaphysical'. pp. 25-6. Loves Victorie. From Aurelian Townshend's Poems and Masks, ed. E. K. Chambers, Oxford, 1912. The ascription of this and the following poem to Townshend is to some extent conjectural. The Malone MS. 13 (Bodleian), p. 51, and Worcester College MS. 58, p. 237, have many variants in the first of these poems. See E. K. Chambers's edition, pp. 102 and 115. p. 27. Elegy over a. Tomb. Dated 1617. p. 28. An Ode upon a Question, &c. The spirit and cadence of this Ode seem to me to echo Donne's The Extasie, though the philosophic theme is different. Donne's is a justification of the body as an intermediary in the most spiritual love; Herbert's, a plea for immortality based on the transcendent worth of love. An earlier version of the poem, Professor Moore Smith tells me, is in Add. MS. 37157, British Museum, where the poem is dated 1630. I. 1. her Infant-birth', i. e. probably the snowdrops and earliest flowers. They had faded, and—as though Nature wept for them—a season of rain had followed. I owe this interpretation to Professor Moore Smith. p. 34. To my inconstant Mistris. A characteristically 'metaphysical' variation on the old theme of Wyatt's 'My lute, awake!' Compare with the last stanza Wyatt's: Vengeance shall fall on thy disdain That mak'st but game of earnest pain; Although my lute and I have done. The metaphysical' notes are the metaphor of excommunication, apostasy, and damnation; the closely knit logical structure; the vehement close. Printed from Carew's Poems, 1651. The text of Carew's poems needs revision, and the canon reconsideration. See C. L. Powell, New Material on Thomas Carew', Modern Language Review, July, 1916. P. 35. Ingratefull beauty threatned. A familiar conceit. See Ronsard, Shakespeare, &c.; but the close is Donnean. Compare Elegy vii, 'Nature's lay Ideot, I taught thee to love', and Elegy xix: Like pictures, or like books gay coverings made |