T John Donne By ROYALL SNOW HE kings of English poetry are those who can tame the lightning of pure inspiration, control it and force it to a sustained incandescence. They are few-perhaps only Shakespeare perhaps Shelley also at his infrequent very best, or Marlowe in a single scene. Lear upon the heath, or Faustus as the clock ticks away his final hour, speak in poetry that is wrought neither of passion nor of intellect; its content, reduced to bare prose, is nothing, nor is it a matter of mere verbal magic. Rather, throughout these scenes, the poet's intuition searches deeper into human verities than words can go, and phrases them in evocatory syllables which give his audience a burning sense-not a logical comprehension-of that same unphraseable truth. But next to the kings there stand the princes, equally of the blood royal, for the single distinction is that, while the one controls inspiration, upon the other it bursts and escapes. And among these John Donne is by no means the least eminent. the rocket into the night, showering stars. His tomb wherein, opened, one will spy A bracelet of bright hair about the bone, has that touch of anguish which belongs to ultimate truth;-oddly enough, pain is the basis of our greatest poetry; and there is a tinge of spiritual sufferbehind his: This soul, to whom Luther and Mahomet were Prisons of the flesh. But such lines are of the type which defies analysis-they are the great in Donne but by no means the whole of him. His average is of the sort which leaves the critical judgement somewhat abashed. Interpretation and judgement are its business, but how interpret the whirlwind, and what judgement may be given of a pile of debris sprinkled with diamonds?—the effect of the mass of his work is indeed superficially that of debris. An academician could fairly swoon over "forgetful" being made a rhyme for "debt" by the horrid process of chopping it in half and carrying the mangled last syllable over to start a new line. His rhythms tend to stagger through a wilderness of cacophony before they break onto the sweep of his best; and such a tumble, jumble, and snarl of thought and ugly words had never been seen before and was not seen His poetry is of that exciting type that cannot be guaged a page in advance: it may be impossibly bad or impossibly good; sensual or religious fantastic or sincere. Ultimately the paradoxes vanish, but in a first impression they compete with a sense of the splendour of his lines of pure inspiration. For Donne has the quality, reserved to poets of the first rank, of throwing off a line that plunges into the again among great poets before dark of human conciousness like a the two hundred years had elaps ed to Browning. Faced with such a mingling of the inferior and the supreme, the critic can only throw up his hands and remember what the first printer said of Donne's book: "Whoso takes not as he finds it, in what manner soever, he is unworthy of it, sith a scattered limb of this author hath more amiableness in it, in the eyes of a discerner, than the whole body of some other." It was Donne's use of the perilous conceit which prejudiced the practical succeeding century against him. Dr. Johnson, one of the brilliant fools of criticism, could not endure them, and Donne never has completely come out from under the cloud of that prejudice. But it must not be forgotten that, while the unsuccessful conceit is an absurdity, the one that succeeds is no longer a conceit but the finest emotional poetry. Shakespeare's: Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread Our eyes upon one double string. The effect is startling-but not quite so startling when embedded among all the other spectacular elements his poetry presents. presents. There his conceits have at least the easy self confidence of being at home. Donne is after all of the great, and if the rags and tatters of his form cannot dim his beauty, neither can the worst of his conceits spoil him, for he was a playmate of fire. There is in him a brilliant capriciousness which is his peculiar savour, and which comes not from his virtues but his faults. His instinct knew the wisdom of being unwise, and, with the mocking line For all our joys are but fantastical he abandoned himself to a world of golden caprice and paradox,-intense passions struggle in him with religious fervor, spectacular bursts of fancy Shall I compare thee to a summer day; play across a pose of utter worldThou art more lovely and more temperate. can mock at Dr. Johnson-and is a conceit. And in essence Donne is doing precisely the same thing save that where Shakespeare's genius, which was really an apothesis of normality, turned to the common life of nature for symbols, Donne's fantastic intellect went roving into the remoter worlds of erudite lore. Like a jack-daw he was fascinated by the shining oddities to be found here or there, and like a jack-daw he brought them back to his nest: in his illness he compares himself to a map that the cosmographers-his physicians -study; parted lovers are like the legs of a pair of compasses; and eyes take on some of the qualities of Venetian beads in two such lines as these: For liness, the cynic turns transcen- Behind every line of even the most inconsequential poem there is the voice it follows him into bed with his mistress in a poem which might well set Mrs. Grundy into a flutter of alarm for the morals of the young; it goes with him, too, into his religion. Thanks to that honesty in all situations, both the love poetry and the divine poems, two of the chief divisions of Donne's work, catch equally the flavour of his alert and restless intellect. Mankind in love tends to a certain uniformity of emotion, the individual is lost in the general; but Donne contrives to protect the frontiers of his personality from invasion. He remains always John Donne in love-never merely the lover. The blending of the physical and the spiritual in his erotic poetry is a critical commonplace. Having the Elizabethan lustiness he avows with a devastating frankness and a word of scorn for those who pretend otherwise, that a man's interest in woman has only one purpose. The cynicism of a Restoration worldling gleams through his fear lest some day a woman will be faithful to him-a fear which amounts almost to absurdity. Yet, playing over the animalism is an intensity which etherealizes. In the end "joys are but fantastical" and sensualism is wedded to phantasy and spirit. It is Pan at large in the world. of shades. Equally intense, equally John Donne are the religious poems, save that wheras in the love poetry his Soul, whose child love is Takes limbs of flesh, in the divine poetry we have the effort of the limbs of flesh to resolve themselves into pure soul again. The note of anguish, never far distant, and yet in most of his work hidden by the gilded decoration of his capricious imagination, comes out clear. He is uncertain, suffering, repentant of that flesh which made him the great poet he is in his erotic work, repentant and yet not sure that he is either sufficiently or permanently so. "Batter my heart," he cries: Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you As yet but knock; Take me to you, imprison me, for I Except you enthral me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. And, characteristically, his spiritual anguish speaks in a paradox. How is one to sum up this metaphysical sensualist, this poet who makes playthings of the stars and stumbles for a rhyme, this saint who is a worldling. To resolve inconsistencies one must, I believe, go behind the lines of the poet and find the man-a man perplexed by a world rapidly growing more incomprehensible. Donne, it must not be forgotten, was the first English poet to feel the dislocating effect of the intrusion of science, and the first to rebel against it. For two hundred years after him the poets avoided difficulty by simply ignoring it, and for them the problem did not become acute until the middle of the last century. But Donne's mind was at once too curious and too fundamentally sincere to preserve the old illusory world by the simple device of shutting his eyes. At the same time he was too acute not to see the menace science brought with it. There is at once bitterness and alarm in his ringing-line. They have impaled within a zodiac The free-born sun, and keep twelve signs awake To watch his steps. and the same bitterness is in his And new philosophy calls all in doubt; Can well direct him where to look for it. For some thousands of years the mass of mankind had thought the earth at least fixed solidly, whatever the stars might do. And with a twist of his fingers Copernicus had just sent that solid earth spinning dizzily through space. The complicated structure of scholastic philosophy, weak with dryrot, had gone down with a crash before Bacon's touch. Within a few years Descartes was to make the soul, which to Plato and the neoplatonists of the Renaissance had been pure fire, an uneasy tenant of the Pineal gland. The old order of thought was breaking up and Donne's inquisitive imagination was trapped in the wreckage. The restlessness of his temperament is perhaps born of that predicament. Shaken in the old and unable to acept the new, he is instinctively in pursuit of the calm that comes from complete absorption in a passion. Now it is a woman, now it is God that he pursues; the basis is the same, the finding in the tempest of emotion and in the flaring wild jets of fancy which accompany it, an odd distorted calm. The Madman By ELIZABETH J. COATSWORTH The circling hills On a red sky. Along the skyline Vague and dim I saw a man And followed him. Ever he cried "There came from the south A corn-haired woman With sunset mouth And when the sun sinks In a scarlet stir Madness returns Along the hill slope Epigram By JAMES FEIBLEMAN Because I stand beneath a star (A straight line drawn between two points Was proved to be the shortest path), It follows as an aftermath I am not one the Lord anoints |