A Paradox.
Whosoe termes Love a fire, may like a poet
Faine what he will, for certaine cannot showe it.
For Fire nere burnes, but when the fuell's neare
But Love doth at most distance most appeare.
Yet out of fire water did never goe,
But teares from Love abundantly doe flowe.
Fire still mounts upward; but Love oft descendeth.
Fire leaves the midst: Love to the Center tendeth.
Fire dryes and hardens: Love doth mollifie.
Fire doth consume, but Love doth fructifie.
The powerful Queene of Love (faire Venus) came
Descended from the Sea, not from the flame,
Whence passions ebbe and flowe, and from the braine
Run to the hart like streames, and back againe.
Yea Love oft fills mens breasts with melting snow
Drowning their Love-sick minds in flouds of woe.
What is Love, water then? it may be soe;
But hee saith trueth, that saith hee doth not knowe.
FINIS.
Page 71. Farewell to Love.
l. 12. His highnesse &c. 'Presumably his highness was made of gilt gingerbread.' Chambers. See Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, III. i.
ll. 28-30. As these lines stand in the old editions they are unintelligible:
Because that other curse of being short,
And only for a minute made to be
Eager, desires to raise posterity.
Grosart prints:
Because that other curse of being short
And—only-for-a-minute-made-to-be—
Eager desires to raise posterity.
This and the note which he appends I find more incomprehensible than the old text. This is his note: 'The whole sense then is: Unless Nature decreed this in order that man should despise it, (just) as she made it short, that man might for that reason also despise a sport that was only for a minute made to be eager desires to raise posterity.' Surely this is Abracadabra!
What has happened is, I believe, this: Donne here, as elsewhere, used an obsolescent word, viz. 'eagers', the verb, meaning 'sharpens'. The copyist did not recognize the form, took 'desire' for the verb, and made 'eager' the adjectival complement to 'be', changing 'desire' to 'desires' as predicate to 'curse'. What Donne had in mind was the Aristotelian doctrine that the desire to beget children is an expression of man's craving for immortality. The most natural function, according to Aristotle, of every living thing which is not maimed in any way is to beget another living thing like itself, that so it may partake of what is eternal and divine. This participation is the goal of all desire, and of all natural activity. But perishable individuals cannot partake of the immortal and divine by continuous existence. Nothing that is perishable can continue always one and the same individual. Each, therefore, participates as best he may, some more, some less; remaining the same in a way, i.e. in the species, not in the individual.' (De Anima, B. 4. 415 A-B.) Donne's argument then is this: 'Why of all animals have we alone this feeling of depression and remorse after the act of love? Is it a device of nature to restrain us from an act which shortens the life of the individual (he refers here to a prevalent belief as to the deleterious effect of the act of love), needed because that other curse which Adam brought upon man, the curse of mortality,
of being short,
And only for a minute made to be,
Eagers [i.e. whets or provokes] desire to raise posterity.'
The latest use of 'eager' as a verb quoted by the O.E.D. is from Mulcaster's Positions (1581), where the sense is that of imitating physically: 'They that be gawled ... may neither runne nor wrastle for eagering the inward'. The Middle English use is closer to Donne's: 'The nature of som men is so ... unconvenable that ... poverte myhte rather egren hym to don felonies.' Chaucer, Boëth. De Consol. Phil. In the Burley MS. (seventeenth century) the following epigram on Bancroft appears:
A learned Bishop of this land
Thinking to make religion stand,
In equall poise on every syde
The mixture of them thus he tryde:
An ounce of protestants he singles
And a dramme of papists mingles,
Then adds a scruple of a puritan
And melts them down in his brayne pan,
But where hee lookes they should digest
The scruple eagers all the rest.
In Harl. MS. 4908 f. 83 the last line reads:
That scruple troubles all the rest.
Page 71. A Lecture upon the Shadow.
The text of this poem in the editions is that of A18, N, TC among the MSS. A slightly different recension is found in most of the other MSS. The chief difference is that the latter read 'love' for 'loves' at ll. 9, 14, and 19. They also, however, read 'least' for 'high'st' at l. 12. In l. 19 they vacillate between 'once' and 'our'. It would not be difficult to defend either version. The only variation from the printed text which I have admitted is that on which all the MSS. are unanimous, viz. 'first' for 'short' in l. 26; 'short' is an obvious blunder.