Page 338. THE LITANIE.
In a letter to Goodyere written apparently in 1609 or 1610, Donne says: 'Since my imprisonment in my bed, I have made a meditation in verse, which I call a Litany; the word you know imports no other then supplication, but all Churches have one forme of supplication, by that name. Amongst ancient annals I mean some 800 years, I have met two Litanies in Latin verse, which gave me not the reason of my meditations, for in good faith I thought not upon them then, but they give me a defence, if any man, to a Lay man, and a private, impute it as a fault, to take such divine and publique names, to his own little thoughts. The first of these was made by Ratpertus a Monk of Suevia; and the other by S. Notker, of whom I will give you this note by the way, that he is a private Saint, for a few Parishes; they were both but monks and the Letanies poor and barbarous enough; yet Pope Nicolas the 5, valued their devotion so much, that he canonized both their Poems, and commanded them for publike service in their Churches: mine is for lesser Chappels, which are my friends, and though a copy of it were due to you, now, yet I am so unable to serve my self with writing it for you at this time (being some 30 staves of 9 lines) that I must intreat you to take a promise that you shall have the first, for a testimony of that duty which I owe to your love, and to my self, who am bound to cherish it by my best offices. That by which it will deserve best acceptation, is, that neither the Roman Church need call it defective, because it abhors not the particular mention of the blessed Triumphers in heaven; nor the Reformed can discreetly accuse it, of attributing more then a rectified devotion ought to doe.'
The Litanies referred to in Donne's letter to Goodyere may be read in Migne's Patrologia Latina, vol. lxxxvii, col. 39 and 42. They are certainly barbarous enough. That of Ratpertus is entitled Litania Ratperti ad processionem diebus Dominicis, and begins:
Ardua spes mundi, solidator et inclyte coeli
Christe, exaudi nos propitius famulos.
Virgo Dei Genetrix rutilans in honore perennis,
Ora pro famulis, sancta Maria, tuis.
The other is headed Notkeri Magistri cognomento Balbuli Litania rhythmica, and opens thus:
Votis supplicibus voces super astra feramus,
Trinus ut et simplex nos regat omnipotens.
Sancte Pater, adiuva nos, Sancte Fili, adiuva nos,
Compar his et Spiritus, ungue nos intrinsecus.
Michael, John the Baptist, Peter, Paul, and Stephen, martyrs and virgins, are appealed to in both. There are some differences in respect of particular saints invoked.
It is interesting also to compare Donne's series of petitions with those in a Middle English Litany preserved in the Balliol Coll. MS. 354 (published by Edward Flügel in Anglia xxv. 220). The poetry is very poor and I need not quote. The interesting feature is the list of petitions 'Vnto the ffader', 'ye sonne', 'ye holy gost', 'the trinite', 'our lady', 'ye angelles'. 'ye propre angell', 'John baptist', 'ye appostiles', 'ye martires', 'the confessours', 'ye virgins', 'unto all sayntes'. Donne, it will be observed, includes the patriarchs and the prophets, but omits any reference to a guardian angel and to the saints. Other references in his poems and sermons show that he had the thought of a guardian angel often in his mind: 'As that Angel, which God hath given to protect thee, is not weary of his office, for all thy perversenesses, so, howsoever God deale with thee, be not thou weary of bearing thy part, in his Quire here in the Militant Church.' Sermons 80. 44. 440.
Page 339, l. 34.
a such selfe different instinct
Of these;
'As the three persons of the Trinity are distinguished as Power (The Father), Knowledge (The Son), Love (The Holy Ghost), and are yet identical, not three but one, may in me power, love, and knowledge be thus at once distinct and identical.' The comma after 'these' in D, H49, Lec was accidentally dropped. In 1635-69 a comma was then interpolated after 'instinct' and 'Of these' was connected with what follows: 'Of these let all mee elemented bee,' 'these' being made to point forward to the next line. Chambers and the Grolier Club editor both read thus. But D, H49, Lec show what was the original punctuation. Without 'Of these' it is difficult to give a precise meaning to 'instinct'. It would be easy to change 'a such' to 'such a' with most of the MSS., but Donne seems to have affected this order. Compare Elegie X: The Dreame, p. [95], l. 17:
After a such fruition I shall wake.
Page 341, l. 86. In Abel dye. Abel was to the early Church a type of Christ, as being the first martyr.
Page 343, ll. 122-4. One might omit the brackets in these lines and substitute a semicolon after 'hearken too' and a comma after 'and do', and make the sense clearer. The MSS. bear evidence to their difficulty. There is certainly no call for brackets as we use them, and the 1633 edition is more sparing of them in this poem than the later editions. What Donne says is: 'While this quire' (enumerated in the previous stanzas) 'prays for us and thou hearkenest to them, let not us whose duty is to pray, to endure patiently, and to do thy will, trust in their prayers so far as to forget our duty of obedience and service.'
Page 347, l. 231. Which well, if we starve, dine: 'well' has the support of all the MSS. and may be the adverb placed before its verb. 'If we starve they dine well.' In this wire-drawn and tormented poem it is hard to say what Donne may not have written. Most of the editors read 'will', and this appears in some copies of 1633.
l. 243. Heare us, weake ecchoes, O thou eare, and cry. The 'cry' of the editions is surely right. God is at once the source of our prayers and their answerer. Our prayers are echoes of what His grace inspires in our hearts. The 'eye' of S and other MSS., which also read 'wretches' for 'ecchoes', is due to a misapprehension of the condensed thought, and 'eye' with 'ecchoes' is entirely irrelevant. JC tries another emendation: 'Oh thou heare our cry.'
'Every man who prostrates himselfe in his chamber, and poures out his soule in prayer to God;... though his faith assure him, that God hath granted all that he asked upon the first petition of his prayer, yea before he made it, (for God put that petition in to his heart and mouth, and moved him to aske it, that thereby he might be moved to grant it), yet as long as the Spirit enables him he continues his prayer,' &c. Sermons 80. 77. 786.
But indeed we do not need to go to the Sermons to see that this is Donne's meaning. He has emphasized it already in this poem: e.g. in Stanza xxiii:
Heare us, for till thou heare us, Lord
We know not what to say:
Thine eare to'our sighes, teares, thoughts gives voice and word.
O Thou who Satan heard'st in Jobs sicke day,
Heare thy selfe now, for thou in us dost pray.
'But in things of this kind (i.e. sermons), that soul that inanimates them never departs from them. The Spirit of God that dictates them in the speaker or writer, and is present in his tongue or hand, meets him again (as we meet ourselves in a glass) in the eyes and ears and hearts of the hearers and readers.' Gosse, Life, &c., i. 123: To ... the Countess of Montgomery.
'God cannot be called a cry', Grosart says; but St. Paul so describes the work of the Spirit: 'Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities, for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And he that searcheth the heart knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.' Calvin thus closes his note on the passage: 'Atque ita locutus est Paulus quo significantius id totum tribueret Spiritus gratiae. Iubemur quidem pulsare, sed nemo sponte praemeditari vel unam syllabam poterit, nisi arcano Spiritus sui instinctu nos Deus pulset, adeoque sibi corda nostra aperiat.'
Page 348, l. 246. Gaine to thy self, or us allow. If we perish neither Christ nor we have gained anything. Both have died in vain. If 'and' is substituted for 'or' in this line (1635-69 and Chambers) then the next line becomes otiose.
Page 348. Upon the translation of the Psalmes, &c.
We do not know what was the occasion of these lines. The Countess was the mother of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, and of Pembroke after his brother's death. Poems by the former are frequently found with Donne's, e.g. in the Hawthornden MS. which is made from a collection in Donne's own possession. Doubtless they were known to one another, but there is no evidence of intimacy, such as letters. To the Countess of Montgomery Donne in 1619 sent a copy of one of his sermons which she had asked for (Gosse, Life, &c., ii. 123). It may have been for her that he composed this poem.
An elaborate copy of the Psalms was prepared by John Davis of Hereford. From this they were published in 1822.
From l. 53 it is evident that Donne's poem was written after the death of the Countess of Pembroke in 1621.
Page 349, l. 38. So well attyr'd abroad, so ill at home. Donne has probably in mind the French versions of Clement Marot, which were the war-songs of the Huguenots.
Page 351. To Mr. Tilman.
Of Mr. Tilman I can find no trace in printed Oxford or Cambridge registers. The poem is a strange comment on the seventeenth century's estimate of the clergy:
Why do they think unfit
That Gentry should joyne families with it?
In his Life of George Herbert Walton tells us of Herbert's resolution to enter the Church, and the opposition he met with: 'He did, at his return to London, acquaint a Court-friend with his resolution to enter into Sacred Orders, who perswaded him to alter it, as too mean an employment, and too much below his birth, and the excellent abilities and endowments of his mind. To whom he replied, 'It hath been formerly judg'd that the Domestick Servants of the King of Heaven, should be of the noblest Families on Earth: and, though the Iniquity of the late Times have made Clergy-men meanly valued, and the sacred name of Priest contemptible; yet, I will labour to make it honourable, by consecrating all my learning, and all my poor abilities, to advance the Glory of that God that gave them.' This estimate of the clergy must not be overlooked when considering the struggle that went on in Donne's mind too before he crossed the Rubicon.
Page 352, l. 43. As Angels out of clouds, &c. Walton doubtless had this line in his mind when he described Donne's own preaching: 'A Preacher in earnest, weeping sometimes for his Auditory, sometimes with them, alwayes preaching to himselfe, like an Angel from a cloud, though in none: carrying some (as S. Paul was) to heaven, in holy raptures; enticing others, by a sacred art and courtship, to amend their lives; and all this with a most particular grace, and un-imitable fashion of speaking.'