Page 195. To the Countesse of Bedford.
l. 1. T'have written then, &c. This is one of the most difficult of Donne's poems. With his usual strain of extravagant compliment Donne has interwoven some of his deepest thought and most out-of-the-way theological erudition and scientific lore. Moreover the poem is one of those for which the MS. resembling D, H49, Lec was not available. The text of 1633 was taken from a MS. belonging to the group A18, N, TCC, TCD, and contains several errors. Some of these were corrected in 1635 from O'F or a MS. resembling it, but in the most vital case what was a right but difficult reading in 1633 was changed for an apparently easier but erroneous reading.
The emendations which I have accepted from 1635 are—
l. 5. 'debt' for 'doubt'.
l. 7. 'nothings' for 'nothing'.
l. 20. 'or all It; You.' for 'or all, in you.' There is not much to choose between the two, but 'the world's best all' is not a very logical expression. But the 1633 reading may mean 'the world's best part, or the world's all,—you.' The alteration of 1635 is not necessary, but looks to me like the author's own emendation.
l. 4. Then worst of civill vices, thanklessenesse. 'Naturall and morall men are better acquainted with the duty of gratitude, of thankesgiving, before they come to the Scriptures, then they are with the other duty of repentance which belongs to Prayer; for in all Solomons bookes, you shall not finde halfe so much of the duty of thankefulnesse, as you shall in Seneca and in Plutarch. No book of Ethicks, of moral doctrine, is come to us, where there is not, almost in every leafe, some detestation, some Anathema against ingratitude.' Sermons 80. 55. 550.
Page 197, l. 54. Wee (but no forraine tyrants could) remove. Following the hint of O'F, I have bracketed all these words to show that the verb to 'Wee' is 'remove', not 'could remove'.
ll. 57-8. For, bodies shall from death redeemed bee,
Soules but preserved, not naturally free.
Here the later editions change 'not' to 'borne', and the correction has been accepted by Grosart and Chambers. But 1633 is right. If 'not' be changed, the force of the antithesis is lost. What is 'borne free' does not need to be preserved. What Donne expresses is a form of the doctrine of conditional immortality. In a sermon on the Penitential Psalms (Sermons 80. 53. 532) he says: 'We have a full cleerenesse of the state of the soule after this life, not only above those of the old Law, but above those of the Primitive Christian Church, which, in some hundreds of years, came not to a cleere understanding in that point, whether the soule were immortall by nature, or but by preservation, whether the soule could not die or only should not die,' &c. Here the antithesis between 'being preserved' and 'being naturally free' (i.e. immortal) is presented as sharply as in this line of the verse Letter. But Donne states the doctrine tentatively 'because that perchance may be without any constant cleerenesse yet'. Elsewhere he seems to accept it: 'And for the Immortality of the Soule, it is safelier said to be immortall by preservation, then immortal, by nature; That God keepes it from dying, then, that it cannot dye.' Sermons 80. 27. 269. This makes the correct reading of the line quite certain.
The tenor of Donne's thought seems to me to be as follows: He is speaking of the soul's eclipse by the body (ll. 40-2), by the body which should itself be an organ of the soul's life, of prayer as well as labour (ll. 43-8). He returns in ll. 49-52 to the main theme of the body's corrupting influence, and this leads him to a new thought. It is not only the soul which suffers by this absorption in the body, but the body itself:
What hate could hurt our bodies like our love?
By this descent of the soul into the body we deprive the latter of its proper dignity, to be the Casket, Temple, Palace of the Soul. Then Donne turns aside to enforce the dignity of the Body. It will be redeemed from death, and the Soul is only preserved. No more than the Body is the Soul naturally immortal. These lines are almost a parenthesis. The poet returns once more to his main theme, the degradation of the soul by our exclusive regard for the body.
Thus the deepest thought of Donne's poetry, his love poetry and his religious poetry, emerges here again. He will not accept the antithesis between soul and body. The dignity of the body is hardly less than that of the soul. But we cannot exalt the body at the expense of the soul. If we immerse the soul in the body it is not the soul alone which suffers but the body also. In the highest spiritual life, as in the fullest and most perfect love, body and soul are complementary, are merged in each other; and after death the life of the soul is in some measure incomplete, the end for which it was created is not obtained until it is reunited to the body. 'Yet have not those Fathers, nor those Expositors, who have in this text, acknowledged a Resurrection of the soule, mistaken nor miscalled the matter. Take Damascens owne definition of Resurrection: Resurrectio est ejus quod cecidit secunda surrectio: A Resurrection is a second rising to that state, from which anything is formerly fallen. Now though by death, the soule do not fall into any such state, as that it can complaine, (for what can that lack, which God fils?) yet by death, the soule fals from that, for which it was infused, and poured into man at first; that is to be the forme of that body, the King of that Kingdome; and therefore, when in the generall Resurrection, the soule returns to that state, for which it was created, and to which it hath had an affection, and a desire, even in the fulnesse of the Joyes of Heaven, then, when the soule returns to her office, to make up the man, because the whole man hath, therefore the soule hath a Resurrection: not from death, but from a deprivation of her former state; that state which she was made for, and is ever enclined to.' Sermons 80. 19. 189.
Here, as before, Donne is probably following St. Augustine, who combats the Neo-Platonic view (to which mediaeval thought tended to recur) that a direct source of evil was the descent of the soul into the body. The body is not essentially evil. It is not the body as such that weighs down the soul (aggravat animam), but the body corrupted by sin: 'Nam corruptio corporis ... non peccati primi est causa, sed poena; nec caro corruptibilis animam peccatricem, sed anima peccatrix fecit esse corruptibilem carnem.' In the Resurrection we desire not to escape from the body but to be clothed with a new body,—'nolumus corpore exspoliari, sed ejus immortalitate vestiri.' Aug. De Civ. Dei, xiv. 3, 5. He cites St. Paul, 2 Cor. v. 1-4.
l. 59. As men to our prisons, new soules to us are sent, &c.: 'new' is the reading of 1633 only, 'now' followed or preceded by a comma of the other editions and the MSS. It is difficult to decide between them, but Donne speaks of 'new souls' elsewhere: 'The Father creates new souls every day in the inanimation of Children, and the Sonne creates them with him.' Sermons 50. 12. 100. 'Our nature is Meteorique, we respect (because we partake so) both earth and heaven; for as our bodies glorified shall be capable of spirituall joy, so our souls demerged into those bodies, are allowed to partake earthly pleasure. Our soul is not sent hither, only to go back again; we have some errand to do here; nor is it sent into prison, because it comes innocent; and he which sent it, is just.' Letters (1651), p. 46.
l. 68. Two new starres. See Introductory Note to Letters.
Page 198, l. 72. Stand on two truths: i.e. the wickedness of the world and your goodness. You will believe neither.
Page 198. To the Countesse of Bedford.
On New-yeares day.
l. 3. of stuffe and forme perplext: i.e. whose matter and form are a perplexed, intricate, difficult question:
Whose what, and where in disputation is.
Donne cannot mean that the matter and form are 'intricately intertwined or intermingled', using the words as in Bacon: 'The formes of substances (as they are now by compounding and transplanting multiplied) are so perplexed.' Bacon, Adv. Learn. ii. 7. § 5. The question of meteors in all their forms was one of great interest and great difficulty to ancient science. Seneca, who gathers up most of what has been said before him, recurs to the subject again and again. See the Quaestiones Naturales, i. 1, and elsewhere. Aristotle, he says, attributes them to exhalations from the earth heated by the sun's rays. They are at any rate not falling stars, or parts of stars, but 'have their origin below the stars, and—being without solid foundation or fixed abode—quickly perish'. But there was great uncertainty as to their what and where. Donne compares himself to them in the uncertainty of his position and worldly affairs. 'Wind is a mixt Meteor, to the making whereof divers occasions concurre with exhalations.' Sermons 80. 31. 305.
Page 199, l. 19. cherish, us doe wast. The punctuation of 1633 is odd at the first glance, but accurate. If with all the later editions one prints 'cherish us, doe wast', the suggestion is that 'wast' is intransitive—'in cherishing us they waste themselves,' which is not Donne's meaning. It is us they waste.
Page 200, l. 44. Some pitty. I was tempted to think that Lowell's conjecture of 'piety' for 'pitty' must be right, the more so that the spelling of the two words was not always differentiated. But it is improbable that Donne would say that 'piety' in the sense of piety to God could ever be out of place. What he means is probably that at Court pity, which elsewhere is a virtue, may not be so if it induces a lady to lend a relenting ear to the complaint of a lover.
Beware faire maides of musky courtiers oathes
Take heed what giftes and favors you receive,
. . . . . . . . .
Beleeve not oathes or much protesting men,
Credit no vowes nor no bewayling songs.
Joshua Sylvester (attributed to Donne).
What follows is ambiguous. As punctuated in 1633 the lines run:
some vaine disport,
On this side, sinne: with that place may comport.
This must mean, practically repeating what has been said: 'Some vain amusements which, on this side of the line separating the cloister from the Court, would be sin; are on that side, in the Court, becoming—amusements, sinful in the cloister, are permissible at Court.' The last line thus contains a sharp antithesis. But can 'on this side' mean 'in the cloister'? Donne is not writing from the cloister, and if he had been would say 'In this place'. 'Faith', he says elsewhere, 'is not on this side Knowledge but beyond it.' Sermons 50. 36. 325. This is what he means here, and I have so punctuated it, following 1719 and subsequent editions: 'Some vain disport, so long as it falls short of actual sin, is permissible at Court.'
l. 48. what none else lost: i.e. innocence. Others never had it.
Page 201. To the Countesse of Huntingdon.
Elizabeth Stanley, daughter of Ferdinando, fifth Earl of Derby, married Henry Hastings, fifth Earl of Huntingdon, in 1603. Her mother's second husband was Sir Thomas Egerton, whom Lady Derby married in 1600. Donne was then Egerton's secretary, and in lines 57-60 he refers to his early acquaintance with her, then Lady Alice Stanley. If the letter in Appendix A, p. [417], 'That unripe side', &c., be also by Donne, and addressed to the Countess of Huntingdon, it must have been written earlier than this letter, which belongs probably to the period immediately before Donne's ordination.
l. 13. the Magi. The MSS. give Magis, and in The First Anniversary (l. 390) Donne writes, 'The Aegyptian Mages'. The argument of the verse is: 'As such a miraculous star led the Magi to the infant Christ, so may the beams of virtue transmitted by your fame guide fit souls to the knowledge of virtue; and indeed none are so bad that they may not be thus led. Your light can illumine and guide the darkest.'
l. 18. the Sunnes fall. In Autumn? or does Donne refer to the fall of the sun to the centre in the new Astronomy? In the Letters, p. 102, he says that 'Copernicisme in the Mathematiques hath carried earth farther up from the stupid Center; and yet not honoured it, because for the necessity of appearances, it hath carried heaven so much higher from it'. Compare An Anatomie of the World, [l. 274].
Page 202, l. 25. She guilded us: But you are gold, and Shee; The 1633 reading is the more pregnant, and therefore the more characteristic of Donne. 'She guilded us, but you she changed into her own substance.' The 1635 reading implies transubstantiation, but does not indicate so clearly the identity of the new substance with virtue's own essence.
ll. 33-6. Else being alike pure, &c. This verse follows in the closest way on what has gone before, and should not be separated from it by a full stop as in Chambers and Grolier. The last line of this stanza concludes the whole argument which began at l. 29. 'The high grace of virginity indeed is not yours, because virtue, having made you one with herself, wished in you to reveal herself. Virtue and Virginity are each too pure for earthly vision. As air and aqueous vapour are each invisible till both are changed into thickened air or cloud, so virtue becomes manifest in you as mother and wife. It is for our sake you take these low names.'
ll. 41-4. So you, as woman, one doth comprehend, &c. 'One, your husband, comprehends your being. To others it is revealed, but under the veil of kindred; to still others of friendship; to me, who stand more remote, under the relationship of prince to subject.'
l. 47. I, which doe soe. The edition of 1633 reads, 'I, which to you', making a logical and grammatical construction of the sentence impossible. The editor has failed to note that the personal reference of 'owe' is supplied in l. 45, 'To whom'. 'I, which doe so' means 'I, who contemplate you'.
Page 203. To Mr T. W.
To Mr T. W. The group of letters which begins with this I have arranged according to the order in which they are found in W, Mr. Gosse's Westmoreland MS. In this MS. a better text of these poems is given than that of 1633; lines are supplied which have been dropped, and a few whole letters. The series contains also a reply to one of Donne's letters. For these reasons it seems to me preferable to follow an order which may correspond to the order of composition.
In 1633, which follows A18, N, TCC, TCD, the letters are headed M. T. W., M. R. W., &c., 'M' standing, as often, for 'Mr.' Seeing, however, that 'Mr.' is the general form in W, I have used it as clearer.
The first of the letters has been headed hitherto To M. I. W., and Mr. Chambers conjectured that the person addressed might be Izaak Walton. It is clear from the other MSS. that A18, N, TC, which 1633 follows, is wrong and that I. W. should be T. W., Thomas Woodward. The T and I of this MS. are very similar, though distinguishable. Unfortunately we know nothing more of Thomas Woodward than that he was Rowland's brother and Donne's friend. The 'sweet Poet' must not be taken too seriously. Donne and his friends were corresponding with one another in verse, and complimenting each other in the polite fashion of the day.
Page 204, ll. 13-16. But care not for me, &c. These lines form a crux in the textual criticism of Donne's poetry. I shall print them as they stand in W:
But care not for mee: I yt ever was
In natures & in fortunes guifts alas
Before thy grace got in the Muses schoole
A monster & a begger, am now a foole.
Some copies of the 1633 edition (including those used by myself and by the Grolier Club editor) print these words, but obscure the meaning by bracketing 'alas ... schoole'. Other copies (e.g. that used by Chambers) insert after 'Before' a 'by', which the Grolier Club editor also does as a conjecture. The 1635 editor, probably following O'F, resorted to another device to clear up the sense and changed 'Before' to 'But for', which Grosart and Chambers follow. The majority of the MSS., however, agree with W, and the case illustrates well the difficulties which beset an eclectic use of the editions.
If the bracket in 1633 is dropt, or rearranged as in the text, the reading is correct and intelligible. The printers and editors have been misled by Donne's phrase, 'In Natures, and in Fortunes gifts'. They took this to go with 'A monster and a beggar': 'I that ever was a monster and a beggar in Natures and in Fortunes gifts.' This is a strange expression, taken, I suppose, to mean that Donne never enjoyed the blessings either of Nature or of Fortune. But what Donne says is somewhat different. The phrase 'I that ever was in Natures and in Fortunes gifts' means 'I that ever was the Almsman of Nature and Fortune'. Donne is using metaphorically a phrase of which the O.E.D. quotes a single instance: 'I live in Henry the 7th's Gifts' (i.e. his Almshouses). T. Barker, The Art of Angling (1651). The whole sentence might be paraphrased thus: 'I, who was ever the Almsman of Nature and Fortune, am now a fool.' Parenthetically he adds, 'Till thy grace begot me, a monster and a beggar, in the Muses' school'. Possibly 'and a beggar' should be left outside the brackets and taken with 'In Natures and in Fortunes gifts': 'I, that was an almsman and beggar, was by you begotten a poet, though a monstrous one;' ('monster' goes properly with 'got') 'and am now a fool'—possibly the last allusion is to his rash marriage. Donne's prose and verse of the years following 1601 are full of this melancholy depreciation of himself and his lot. Daniel calls himself the
Delia, 26.Orphan of Fortune, borne to be her scorne.
Compare also:
O I am fortune's fool.
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, III. i. 129.
Let your study
Be to content your lord, who hath received you
Shakespeare, King Lear, I. i. 277-9.At fortune's alms.
So shall I clothe me in a forced content,
And shut myself up in some other course,
Shakespeare, Othello, III. iv. 120-2.To fortune's alms.
In W 'All haile sweet Poet' is followed at once by these lines, presumably written by Thomas Woodward and possibly in reply to the above. They are found standing by themselves in B, O'F, P, S96. In these they are apparently ascribed to Donne. I print from W:
To Mr J. D.
Thou sendst me prose and rimes, I send for those
Lynes, which, being neither, seem or verse or prose.
They'are lame and harsh, and have no heat at all
But what thy Liberall beams on them let fall.
The nimble fyre which in thy braynes doth dwell
Is it the fyre of heaven or that of hell?
It doth beget and comfort like Heavens eye,
And like hells fyre it burnes eternally.
And those whom in thy fury and judgment
Thy verse shall skourge like hell it will torment.
Have mercy on mee and my sinfull Muse
Which rub'd and tickled with thine could not chuse
But spend some of her pith, and yeild to bee
One in that chaste and mistique Tribadree.
Bassaes adultery no fruit did Leave,
Nor theirs, which their swollen thighs did nimbly weave,
And with new armes and mouths embrace and kiss,
Though they had issue was not like to this.
Thy muse, Oh strange and holy Lecheree
Being a mayde still, gott this song on mee.
l. 25. Now if this song, &c. By interchanging the stops at 'evill' and at 'passe' the old editions have obscured these lines. Mr. Chambers, accepting the full stop at 'evill', prints:—
If thou forget the rhyme as thou dost pass,
Then write;
The reason for writing is not clear. 'If thou forget,' &c. explains ''Twill be good prose'. 'Read this without attending to the rhymes and you will find it good prose.' If we drop the epithet 'good', this criticism will apply to a considerable portion of metaphysical poetry.
Page 205, l. 30. thy zanee, i.e. thy imitator, as the Merry-Andrew imitates the Mountebank:
He's like the Zani to a tumbler
That tries tricks after him to make men laugh.
Jonson, Every Man out of his Humour, IV. i.
Page 205. To Mr T. W.
l. 1. Haste thee, &c. By the lines 5-6, supplied from W, this poem is restored to the compass of a sonnet, though a very irregular one in form. The letter is evidently written from London, where the plague is prevalent. The letter is to be (l. 14) Donne's pledge of affection if he lives, his testament if he dies.
Page 206. To Mr T. W.
l. 5. hand and eye is the reading of all the MSS., including W. It is written in the latter with a contraction which could easily be mistaken for 'or'.
To Mr T. W.
l. 3. I to the Nurse, they to the child of Art. The 'Nurse of Art' is probably Leisure, 'I to my soft still walks':
And add to these retired Leisure,
That in trim gardens takes his pleasure.
According to Aristotle, all the higher, more intellectual arts, as distinct from those which supply necessities or add to the pleasures of life, are the fruits of leisure: 'At first he who invented any art that went beyond the common perceptions of man was naturally admired by men, not only because there was something useful in the inventions, but because he was thought wise and superior to the rest. But as more arts were invented, and some were directed to the necessities of life, others to its recreation, the inventors of the latter were naturally always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former, because their branches of knowledge did not aim at utility. Hence when all such inventions were already established, the sciences which do not aim at giving pleasure or at the necessities of life were discovered, and first in the places where men first began to have leisure. This is why the mathematical arts were founded in Egypt; for there the priestly caste was allowed to be at leisure.' Met. A. 981b (translated by W. D. Ross).
l. 12. a Picture, or bare Sacrament. The last word would seem to be used in the legal sense: 'The sacramentum or pledge which each of the parties deposited or became bound for before a suit.' O.E.D. The letter is a picture of his mind or pledge of his affection.
Page 207. To Mr R. W.
Muse not that by, &c. l. 7. a Lay Mans Genius: i.e. his Guardian Angel. The 'Lay Man' is opposed to the 'Poet'. Donne is very familiar with the Catholic doctrine of Guardian Angels and recurs to it repeatedly. Compare Shakespeare, Macbeth, III. i. 55.
l. 11. Wright then. The version of this poem in W is probably made from Donne's autograph. One of his characteristic spellings is 'wright' for 'write'. The Losely Manuscripts (ed. Kempe, 1836), in which some of Donne's letters are printed from the originals, show this spelling on every page. It is perhaps worth noting that the irregular past participle similarly spelt, i.e. 'wrought', has occasionally misled editors by its identity of form with the past participle of the verb 'work', which has 'gh' legitimately. Thus Mr. Beeching (A Selection from the Poetry of Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton, 1899) prints:
Read in my face a volume of despairs,
The wailing Iliads of my tragic woe,
Drawn with my blood, and painted with my cares,
Wrought by her hand that I have honoured so.
Here 'wrought' should be 'wrote', used, as frequently, for 'written'. In Professor Saintsbury's Patrick Carey (Caroline Poets, II.) we read:
Who writ this song would little care
Although at the end his name were wrought.
i.e. 'wrote'.
See also Donne's The Litanie, i. p. [342], l. 112.
Page 208. To Mr C. B.
Pretty certainly Christopher Brooke, to whom The Storme and The Calme, are addressed. Chambers takes 'the Saint of his affection' to be Donne's wife, and dates the letter after 1600. But surely the last two lines would not have been written of a wife. They are in the conventional tone of the poet to his cruel Mistress. If Ann More is the 'Saint' referred to, she was not yet Donne's wife. Possibly it is some one else. Writing from Wales in 1599, Wotton says (in a letter which Mr. Pearsall Smith thinks is addressed to Donne, but this is not at all certain), 'May I after these, kiss that fair and learned hand of your mistress, than whom the world doth possess nothing more virtuous.' (Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, i. 306.)
l. 10. Heavens liberall and earths thrice fairer Sunne. I prefer the 1633 and 1669 reading, amended from W which reads 'fairer', to that of the later editions, 'the thrice faire Sunne', which Chambers adopts. There are obviously two suns in question—the Heavens' liberal sun, and the earth's thrice-fairer one, i.e. the lady. Exiled from both, Donne carries with him sufficient fire to melt the ice of the wintry regions he must visit—not 'that which walls her heart'. Commenting on a similar conceit in Petrarch:
Ite caldi sospiri al freddo core,
Rompete il ghiaccio, che pietà contende,
Tassoni tells how while writing he found himself detained at an Inn by a severe frost, and that sighs were of little use to melt it. Considerazioni, &c. (1609), p. 228.
To Mr E. G.
Gosse conjectures that the person addressed is Edward Guilpin, or Gilpin, author of Skialetheia (1598), a collection of epigrams and satires. Guilpin imitates one of Donne's Satyres, which may imply acquaintance. He makes no traceable reference to Donne in his works, and we know so little of Guilpin that it is impossible to affirm anything with confidence. Whoever is meant is in Suffolk. There were Gilpins of Bungay there in 1664. It is worth noting that Sir Henry Goodyere begins one of his poems (preserved in MS. at the Record Office, State Papers Dom., 1623) with the line: 'Even as lame things thirst their perfection.' Goodyere's poem was written before the issue of Donne's poems in 1633, and that edition does not contain this letter. One suspects that E. G. may be a Goodyere.
ll. 5-6. oreseest ... overseene. Donne is probably punning: 'Thou from the height of Parnassus lookest down upon London; I in London am too much overlooked, disregarded.' But it is not clear. He may mean 'am too much in men's eye, or kept too strictly under observation'. The first meaning seems to me the more probable.
Page 209. To Mr R. W.
l. 3. brother. W reads 'brethren', and Morpheus had many brothers; but of these only two had with himself the power of assuming what form they would, and of these two Phantasus took forms that lack life. Donne, therefore, probably means Phobetor, but a friend copying the poem thought to amend his mythology. See Ovid, Metam. xi. 635-41.
Page 210. To Mr R. W.
l. 18. Guyanaes harvest is nip'd in the spring. See introductory note to the Letters.
l. 23. businesse. The use of 'businesse' as a trisyllable with plural meaning is quite legitimate: 'Idle and discoursing men, that were not much affected, how businesse went, so they might talke of them.' Sermon, Judges XX. 15. p. 7.
Page 211. To Mr S. B.
Probably Samuel Brooke, the brother of Christopher. He officiated at Donne's marriage and was imprisoned. He was later Chaplain to Prince Henry, to James I, and to Charles I; professor of Divinity at Gresham College (1612-29) and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, 1629. He wrote Latin plays, poems, and religious treatises. The tone of Donne's letter implies that he is a student at Cambridge. It was written therefore before 1601, probably, like several of these letters, while Donne was Egerton's secretary, and living in chambers with Christopher Brooke. A poem by Samuel Brooke, On Tears, is printed in Hannah's Courtly Poets.
Page 212. To Mr J. L.
Of the J. L. of this and the letter which follows the next, nothing has been unearthed. He clearly belonged to the North of England, beyond the Trent.
To Mr B. B.
Grosart conjectures that this was Basil Brooke (1576-1646?), a Catholic, who was knighted in 1604. In 1644 he was committed to the Tower by Parliament and in 1646 imprisoned in the King's Bench. He translated Entertainments for Lent from the French. He was not a brother of Christopher and Samuel. The identification is only a conjecture. The tenor of the poem is very similar to that addressed to Mr. S. B.
Page 213, l. 18. widowhed. W here clearly gives us the form which Donne used. The rhyme requires it and the poet has used it elsewhere:
The Litanie, xii. 108.And call chast widowhead Virginitie.
ll. 19-22. As punctuated in the old editions these lines are somewhat ambiguous:
My Muse, (for I had one) because I'am cold,
Divorc'd her self, the cause being in me,
That I can take no new in Bigamye,
Not my will only but power doth withhold.
Chambers and the Grolier Club editor, by putting a full stop or semi-colon after 'the cause being in me', connect these words with what precedes. This makes the first two lines verbose ('the cause being in me' repeating 'because I'am cold') and the last two obscure. I regard 'the cause being in me' as an explanatory participial phrase qualifying what follows. 'My Muse divorc'd me because of my coldness. The cause of this divorce, coldness, being in me, the divorced one, I lack not only the will but the power to contract a new marriage'. I have therefore, following W, placed a colon after 'selfe'.
Page 213. To Mr I. L.
l. 2. My Sun is with you. Here, as in the letter 'To Mr. C. B.' (p. [208]), reference is made to some lady whose 'servant' Donne is. See the note to that poem and the quotation from Sir Henry Wotton. It seems to me most probable that the person referred to was neither Ann More nor any predecessor of her in Donne's affections, but some noble lady to whom the poet stood in the attitude of dependence masking itself in love which Spenser occupied towards Lady Carey, and so many other poets towards their patronesses. But in regard to all the references in these letters we can only grope in darkness. As Professor Saintsbury would say, we do not really know to whom one of the letters was addressed.
Page 214, ll. 11-12. These lines from W make the sense more complete and the transition to the closing invocation less abrupt. 'Sacrifice my heart to that beauteous Sunne; and since being with her you are in Paradise where joy admits of no addition, think of me at the sacrifice'; and then begins the prayer to his friend as an interceding saint. See note to p. [24], l. 22.
The lines seem to have been dropped, not in printing, but at some stage in transcription, for I have found them in no MS. but W.
l. 20. Thy Sonne ne'r Ward: i.e. 'May thy son never become a royal ward, to be handed over to the guardianship of some courtier who will plunder his estate.' Sir John Roe's father, in his will, begs his wife to procure the wardship of his son that he be not utterly ruined.
The series of letters which this to Mr. I. L. closes was probably written during the years 1597 to 1608 or 1610. Donne's first Letters were The Storme and The Calme. These were followed by Letters to Wotton before and after he went to Ireland, and this series continues them during the years of Donne's secretaryship and his subsequent residence at Pyrford and Mitcham. They are written to friends of his youth, some still at college. Clearly too, what we have preserved is Donne's side of a mutual correspondence. Of Letters to Donne I have printed one, probably from Thomas Woodward. Chance has preserved another probably in the form in which it was sent. Mr. Gosse has printed it (Life, &c., i, p. 91). I reproduce it from the original MS., Tanner 306, in the Bodleian Library:
To my ever to be respected friend
Mr John Done secretary to my
Lord Keeper give these.
As in tymes past the rusticke shepheards sceant
Thir Tideast lambs or kids for sacrefize
Vnto thir gods, sincear beinge thir intent
Thoughe base thir gift, if that shoulde moralize
thir loves, yet noe direackt discerninge eye
Will judge thir ackt but full of piety.
Soe offir I my beast affection
Apparaled in these harsh totterd rimes.
Think not they want love, though perfection
or that my loves noe truer than my lyens
Smothe is my love thoughe rugged be my years
Yet well they mean, thoughe well they ill rehears.
What tyme thou meanst to offir Idillnes
Come to my den for heer she always stayes;
If then for change of howers you seem careles
Agree with me to lose them at the playes.
farewell dear freand, my love, not lyens respeackt,
So shall you shewe, my freandship you affeckt.
Yours
William Cornwaleys.
The writer is, Mr. Gosse says, Sir William Cornwallis, the eldest son of Sir Charles Cornwallis of Beeston-in-Sprouston, Norfolk. Like Wotton, Goodyere, Roe, and others of Donne's circle he followed Essex to Ireland and was knighted at Dublin in 1599. The letter probably dates from 1600 or 1601. I have reproduced the original spelling, which is remarkable.
This letter and that to Mr. E. G. show that Donne was a frequenter of the theatre in these interesting years, 1593 to 1610, the greatest dramatic era since the age of Pericles. Sir Richard Baker, in his Chronicle of the Kings of England (1730, p. 424), recalls his 'Old Acquaintance ... Mr. John Dunne, who leaving Oxford, liv'd at the Inns of Court, not dissolute but very neat: a great Visiter of Ladies, a great Frequenter of Plays, a great Writer of conceited Verses'. But of the Elizabethan drama there is almost no echo in Donne's poetry. The theatres are an amusement for idle hours: 'Because I am drousie, I will be kept awake with the obscenities and scurrilities of a Comedy, or the drums and ejulations of a Tragedy.' Sermons 80. 38. 383.
Page 214. To Sir H. W. at his going Ambassador to Venice.
On July 8 O.S., 1604, Wotton was knighted by James, and on the 13th sailed for Venice. 'He is a gentleman', the Venetian ambassador reported, 'of excellent condition, wise, prudent, able. Your serenity, it is to be hoped, will be very well pleased with him.' Mr. Pearsall Smith adds, 'It is worth noting that while Wotton was travelling to Venice, Shakespeare was probably engaged in writing his great Venetian tragedy, Othello, which was acted before James I in November of this year.'
Page 215, ll. 21-4. To sweare much love, &c. The meaning of this verse, accepting the 1633 text, is: 'Admit this honest paper to swear much love,—a love that will not change until with your elevation to the peerage (or increasing eminence) it must be called honour rather than love.' (We honour, not love, those who are high above us.) 'But when that time comes I shall not more honour your fortune, the rank that fortune gives you, than I have honoured your honour ["nobleness of mind, scorn of meanness, magnanimity" (Johnson)], your high character, magnanimity, without it, i.e. when yet unhonoured.' Donne plays on the word 'honour'.
Walton's version, and the slight variant of this in 1635-69, give a different thought, and this is perhaps the correct reading, more probably either another (perhaps an earlier) version of the poet or an attempt to correct due to a failure to catch the meaning of the rather fanciful phrase 'honouring your honour'. The meaning is, 'I shall not then more honour your fortune than I have your wit while it was still unhonoured, or (1635-69) unennobled.' The 1633 version seems to me the more likely to be the correct or final form of the text, because a reference to character rather than 'wit' or intellectual ability is implied by the following verse:
But 'tis an easier load (though both oppresse)
To want then governe greatnesse, &c.
This stress on character, too, and indifference to fortune, is quite in the vein of Donne's and Wotton's earlier verse correspondence and all Wotton's poetry.
For the distinction between love and honour compare Lyly's Endimion, v. iii. 150-80:
'Cinthia. Was there such a time when as for my love thou did'st vow thyself to death, and in respect of it loth'd thy life? Speake Endimion, I will not revenge it with hate ...
Endimion. My unspotted thoughts, my languishing bodie, my discontented life, let them obtaine by princelie favour that, which to challenge they must not presume, onelie wishing of impossibilities: with imagination of which I will spend my spirits, and to myselfe that no creature may heare, softlie call it love. And if any urge to utter what I whisper, then will I name it honor....
... Cinthia. Endimion, this honourable respect of thine, shalbe christened love in thee, and my reward for it favor.'
With the lines,
Nor shall I then honour your fortune, &c.,
compare in the same play:
'O Endimion, Tellus was faire, but what availeth Beautie without wisdom? Nay, Endimion, she was wise, but what availeth wisdom without honour? She was honourable, Endimion, belie her not. I, but how obscure is honour without fortune?' II. iii. 11-17.
The antithesis here between 'honour' and 'fortune' is exactly that which Donne makes.
If we may accept 'noble-wanting-wit' as Donne's own phrase (and Walton's authority pleads for it) and interpret it as 'wit that yet wants ennoblement' it forms an interesting parallel to a phrase of Shakespeare's in Macbeth, when Banquo addresses the witches:
My noble partner
You greet with present grace and great prediction,
Of noble having and of royal hope.
Macbeth, I. iii. 55-7.
Some editors refer 'present grace' to the first salutation, 'Thane of Glamis'. This is unlikely as there is nothing startling in a salutation to which Macbeth was already entitled. The Clarendon Press editors refer the line, more probably, to the two prophecies, 'thane of Cawdor' and 'that shalt be King hereafter'. The word 'having' is then not quite the same as in the phrases 'my having is not great', &c., which these editors quote, but is simply opposed to 'hope'. You greet him with 'nobility in possession', with 'royalty in expectation', as being already thane of Cawdor, as to be king hereafter. Shakespeare's 'noble having' is the opposite of Donne's 'noble wanting'.
One is tempted to put, as Chambers does, an emphasizing comma after 'honour' as well as 'fortune'; but the antithesis is between 'fortune' and 'honour wanting fortune'.
'Sir Philip Sidney is none of this number; for the greatness which he affected was built upon true Worth, esteeming Fame more than Riches, and Noble actions far above Nobility it self.' Fulke Greville's Life of Sidney, c. iii. p. 38 (Tudor and Stuart Library).
Page 216. To Mrs M. H.
I.e. Mrs. Magdalen Herbert, daughter of Sir Richard Newport, mother of Sir Edward Herbert (Lord Herbert of Cherbury), and of George Herbert the poet. For her friendship with Donne, see Walton's Life of Mr. George Herbert (1670), Gosse's Life and Letters of John Donne, i. 162 f., and what is said in the Introduction to this volume and the Introductory Note to the Elegies. In 1608 she married Sir John Danvers. Her funeral sermon was preached by Donne in 1627.
Page 217, l. 27. For, speech of ill, and her, thou must abstaine. The O.E.D. gives no example of 'abstain' thus used without 'from' before the object, and it is tempting with 1635-69 and all the MSS. to change 'For' to 'From'. But none of the MSS. has great authority textually, and the 'For' in 1633 is too carefully comma'd off to suggest a mere slip. Probably Donne wrote the line as it stands. One does not miss the 'from' so much when the verb comes so long after the object. 'Abstain' acquires the sense of 'forgo'.
ll. 31-2. And since they'are but her cloathes, &c. Compare:
For he who colour loves and skinne,
Loves but their oldest clothes.
The Undertaking, p. [10].