Page 41. The Curse.
l. 3. His only, and only his purse. This, the reading of all the editions except the last, and of the MSS., is obviously right. What is to dispose 'some dull heart to love' is his only purse and his alone, no one's but his purse. Chambers adopts the 1669 conjecture, 'Him only for his purse,' but in that case there is no subject to 'may dispose', or if 'some dull heart' be subject then 'itself' must be supplied—a harsh construction. 'Dispose' is not used intransitively in this sense.
l. 27. Mynes. I have adopted the plural from the MSS. It brings it into line with the other objects mentioned.
Page 43. The Message.
l. 11. But if it be taught by thine. It seems incredible that Donne should have written 'which if it' &c. immediately after the 'which' of the preceding line. I had thought that the 1633 printer had accidentally repeated from the line above, but the evidence of the MSS. points to the mistake (if it is a mistake) being older than that. 'Which' was in the MS. used by the printer. If 'But' is not Donne's own reading or emendation it ought to be, and I am loath to injure a charming poem by pedantic adherence to authority in so small a point. De minimis non curat lex; but art cares very much indeed. JC and P read 'Yet since it hath learn'd by thine'.
ll. 14 f. And crosse both
Word and oath, &c.
The 'crosse' of all the MSS. is pretty certainly what Donne wrote. An editor would change to 'break' hardly the other way. To 'crosse' is, of course, to 'cancel'. Compare Jonson's Poetaster, Act II, Scene i:
Faith, sir, your mercer's Book
Will tell you with more patience, then I can
(For I am crost, and so's not that I thinke.)
and
Examine well thy beauty with my truth,
And cross my cares, ere greater sums arise.
Daniel, Delia, i.
Page 44. A Nocturnall, &c.
l. 12. For I am every dead thing. I have not thought it right to alter the 1633 'every' to the 'very' of 1635-69. 'Every' has some MS. support, and it is the more difficult reading, though of course 'a very' might easily enough be misread. But I rather think that 'every' expresses what Donne means. He is 'every dead thing' because he is the quintessence of all negations—'absence, darkness, death: things which are not', and more than that, 'the first nothing.'
ll. 14-18. For his art did expresse ... things which are not. This is a difficult stanza in a difficult poem. I have after considerable hesitation adopted the punctuation of 1719, which is followed by all the modern editors. This makes 'dull privations' and 'lean emptinesse' expansions of 'nothingnesse'. This is the simpler construction. I am not sure, however, that the punctuation of the earlier editions and of the MSS. may not be correct. In that case 'From dull privations' goes with 'he ruined me'. Milton speaks of 'ruining from Heaven'. 'From me, who was nothing', says Donne, 'Love extracted the very quintessence of nothingness—made me more nothing than I already was. My state was already one of "dull privation" and "lean emptiness", and Love reduced it still further, making me once more the non-entity I was before I was created.' Only Donne could be guilty of such refined and extravagant subtlety. But probably this is to refine too much. There is no example of 'ruining' as an active verb used in this fashion. A feature of the MS. collection from which this poem was probably printed is the omission of stops at the end of the line. In the next verse Donne pushes the annihilation further. Made nothing by Love, by the death of her he loves he is made the elixir (i.e. the quintessence) not now of ordinary nothing, but of 'the first nothing', the nothing which preceded God's first act of creation. The poem turns upon the thought of degrees in nothingness.
For 'elixir' as identical with 'quintessence' see Oxf. Eng. Dict., Elixir, † iii. b, and the quotation there, 'A distill'd quintessence, a pure elixar of mischief, pestilent alike to all.' Milton, Church Govt.
Of the 'first Nothing' Donne speaks in the Essays in Divinity (Jessop, 1855), pp. 80-1, but in a rather different strain: 'To speak truth freely there was no such Nothing as this' (the nothing which a man might wish to be) 'before the beginning: for he that hath refined all the old definitions hath put this ingredient Creabile (which cannot be absolutely nothing) into his definition of creation; and that Nothing which was, we cannot desire; for man's will is not larger than God's power: and since Nothing was not a pre-existent matter, nor mother of this all, but only a limitation when any thing began to be; how impossible it is to return to that first point of time, since God (if it imply contradiction) cannot reduce yesterday? Of this we will say no more; for this Nothing being no creature; is more incomprehensible than all the rest.'
ll. 31-2. The Grolier Club edition reads:
I should prefer
If I were any beast; some end, some means;
which is to me unintelligible. 'If I were a beast, I should prefer some end, some means' refers to the Aristotelian and Schools doctrine of the soul. The soul of man is rational and self-conscious; of beasts perceptive and moving, therefore able to select ends and means; the vegetative soul of plants selects what it can feed on and rejects what it cannot, and so far detests and loves. Even stones, which have no souls, attract and repel. But even of stones Donne says: 'We are not sure that stones have not life; stones may have life; neither (to speak humanely) is it unreasonably thought by them, that thought the whole world to be inanimated by one soule, and to be one intire living creature; and in that respect does S. Augustine prefer a fly before the Sun, because a fly hath life, and the Sun hath not.' Sermons 80. 7. 69-70.
l. 35. If I an ordinary nothing were. 'A shadow is nothing, yet, if the rising or falling sun shines out and there be no shadow, I will pronounce there is no body in that place neither. Ceremonies are nothing; but where there are no ceremonies, order, and obedience, and at last (and quickly) religion itself will vanish.' Sermons (quoted in Selections from Donne, 1840).
l. 41. Enjoy your summer all; This is Grosart's punctuation. The old editions have a comma. Chambers, obviously quite wrongly, retains the comma, and closes the sentence in the next line. The clause 'Since she enjoys her long night's festival' explains 43 'Let me prepare towards her', &c., not 41 'Enjoy your summer all'.
Page 47. The Apparition.
ll. 1-13. The Grolier Club editor places a full stop, Chambers a colon, after 'shrinke', for the comma of the old editions. Chambers's division is better than the first, which interrupts the steady run of the thought to the climax,
A verier ghost than I.
The original punctuation preserves the rapid, crowded march of the clauses.
l. 10. This line throws light on the character of the 1669 text. The correct reading of 1633 was spoiled in 1635 by accidentally dropping 'will', and this error continued through 1639-54. The 1669 editor, detecting the metrical fault, made the line decasyllabic by interpolating 'a' and 'even'.
Page 48. The Broken Heart.
l. 8. A flaske of powder burne a day. The 'flash' of later editions is probably a conjectural emendation, for 'flaske' (1633 and many MSS.) makes good sense; and the metaphor of a burning flask of powder seems to suit exactly the later lines which describe what happened to the heart which love inflamed
but Love, alas,
At one first blow did shiver it as glasse.
Shakespeare uses the same simile in a different connexion:
Thy wit, that ornament to shape and love,
Mis-shapen in the conduct of them both:
Like powder in a skilless soldiers flaske,
Is set a fire by thine own ignorance,
And thou dismembred with thine owne defence.
Romeo and Juliet, III. iii. 130.
l. 14. and never chawes: 'chaw' is the form Donne generally uses: 'Implicite beleevers, ignorant beleevers, the adversary may swallow; but the understanding beleever, he must chaw, and pick bones, before he come to assimilate him, and make him like himself.' Sermons 80. 18. 178.
Page 49. A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.
This poem is quoted by Walton after his account of the vision which Donne had of his wife in France, in 1612: 'I forbear the readers farther trouble as to the relation and what concerns it, and will conclude mine with commending to his view a copy of verses given by Mr. Donne to his wife at the time that he then parted from her: and I beg leave to tell, that I have heard some critics, learned both in languages and poetry, say, that none of the Greek or Latin poets did ever equal them.' The critics probably included Wotton,—perhaps also Hales, whose criticism of Shakespeare shows the same readiness to find our own poets as good as the Ancients.
The song, 'Sweetest love I do not go,' was probably written at the same time. It is almost identical in tone. They are certainly the tenderest of Donne's love poems, perhaps the only ones to which the epithet 'tender' can be applied. The Valediction: of weeping is more passionate.
An early translation of this poem into Greek verse is found in a volume in the Bodleian Library.
ll. 9-12. Moving of th'earth, &c. 'The "trepidation" was the precession of the equinoxes, supposed, according to the Ptolemaic astronomy, to be caused by the movements of the Ninth or Crystalline Sphere.' Chambers.
First you see fixt in this huge mirrour blew,
Of trembling lights, a number numberlesse:
Fixt they are nam'd, but with a name untrue,
For they all moove and in a Daunce expresse
That great long yeare, that doth contain no lesse
Then threescore hundreds of those yeares in all,
Which the sunne makes with his course naturall.
What if to you those sparks disordered seem
As if by chaunce they had beene scattered there?
The gods a solemne measure doe it deeme,
And see a iust proportion every where,
And know the points whence first their movings were;
To which first points when all returne againe,
The axel-tree of Heav'n shall breake in twain.
Sir John Davies, Orchestra, 35-6.
l. 16. Those things which elemented it. Chambers follows 1669 and reads 'The thing'—wrongly, I think. 'Elemented' is just 'composed', and the things are enumerated later, 20. 'eyes, lips, hands.' Compare:
But neither chance nor compliment
Did element our love.
Katharine Phillips (Orinda), To Mrs. M. A. at parting.
This and the fellow poem Upon Absence may be compared with Donne's poems on the same theme. See Saintsbury's Caroline Poets, i, pp. 548, 550.
l. 20. and hands: 'and' has the support of all the MSS. The want of it is no great loss, for though without it the line moves a little irregularly, 'and hands' is not a pleasant concatenation.
ll. 25-36. If they be two, &c. Donne's famous simile has a close parallel in Omar Khayyam. Whether Donne's 'hydroptic immoderate thirst of humane learning and languages' extended to Persian I do not know. Captain Harris has supplied me with translations and reference:
In these twin compasses, O Love, you see
One body with two heads, like you and me,
Which wander round one centre, circle wise,
But at the last in one same point agree.
Whinfield's edition of Omar Khayyam (Kegan Paul,
Trübner, 1901, Oriental Series, p. 216).
'Oh my soul, you and I are like a compass. We form but one body having two points. Truly one point moves from the other point, and makes the round of the circle; but the day draws near when the two points must re-unite.' J. H. McCarthy (D. Nutt, 1898).
Page 51. The Extasie.
This is one of the most important of the lyrics as a statement of Donne's metaphysic of love, of the interconnexion and mutual dependence of body and soul. It is printed in 1633 from D, H49, Lec or a MS. resembling it, and from this and the other MSS. I have introduced some alterations in the text: and two rather vital emendations, ll. 55 and 59. The Extasie is probably the source of Lord Herbert of Cherbury's best known poem, An Ode Upon a Question Moved Whether Love Should Continue For Ever. Compare with the opening lines of Donne's poem:
They stay'd at last and on the grass
Reposed so, as o're his breast
She bowed her gracious head to rest,
Such a weight as no burden was.
While over eithers compass'd waist
Their folded arms were so compos'd
As if in straightest bonds inclos'd
They suffer'd for joys they did taste
Long their fixt eyes to Heaven bent,
Unchanged they did never move,
As if so great and pure a love
No glass but it could represent.
In a letter to Sir Thomas Lucy, Donne writes: 'Sir I make account that this writing of letters, when it is with any seriousness, is a kind of extasie, and a departing, and secession, and suspension of the soul, which doth then communicate itself to two bodies.' Ecstasy in Neo-Platonic philosophy was the state of mind in which the soul, escaping from the body, attained to the vision of God, the One, the Absolute. Plotinus thus describes it: 'Even the word vision (θέαμα) does not seem appropriate here. It is rather an ecstasy (ἔκστασις), a simplification, an abandonment of self, a perfect quietude (στάσις), a desire of contact, in short a wish to merge oneself in that which one contemplates in the Sanctuary.' Sixth Ennead, ix. 11 (from the French translation of Bouillet, 1857-8). Readers will observe how closely Donne's poem agrees with this—the exodus of the souls (ll. 15-16), the perfect quiet (ll. 18-20), the new insight (ll. 29-33), the contact and union of the souls (l. 35). Donne had probably read Ficino's translation of Plotinus (1492), but the doctrine of ecstasy passed into Christian thought, connecting itself especially with the experience of St. Paul (2 Cor. xii. 2). St. Paul's word is ἁρπαγέντα, and Aquinas distinguishes between 'raptus' and 'ecstasis': 'Extasis importat simpliciter excessum a seipso ... raptus super hoc addit violentiam quandam.' Another word for 'ecstasy' was 'enthusiasm'.
l. 9. So to entergraft our hands. All the later editions read 'engraft', which makes the line smoother. But to me it seems more probable that Donne wrote 'entergraft' and later editors changed this to 'engraft', than that the opposite should have happened. Moreover, 'entergraft' gives the reciprocal force correctly, which 'engraft' does not. Donne's precision is as marked as his subtlety. 'Entergraft' has the support of all the best MSS.
Page 52, l. 20. And wee said nothing all the day. 'En amour un silence vaut mieux qu'un langage. Il est bon d'être interdit; il y a une éloquence de silence qui pénètre plus que la langue ne saurait faire. Qu'un amant persuade bien sa maîtresse quand il est interdit, et que d'ailleurs il a de l'esprit! Quelque vivacité que l'on ait, il est bon dans certaines rencontres qu'elle s'éteigne. Tout cela se passe sans règle et sans réflexion; et quand l'esprit le fait, il n'y pensait pas auparavant. C'est par nécessité que cela arrive.' Pascal, Discours sur les passions de l'amour.
l. 32. Wee see, wee saw not what did move. Chambers inserts a comma after 'we saw not', perhaps rightly; but the punctuation of the old editions gives a distinct enough sense, viz., 'We see now, that we did not see before the true source of our love. What we thought was due to bodily beauty, we perceive now to have its source in the soul.' Compare, 'But when I wakt, I saw, that I saw not.' The Storme, l. 37.
l. 42. Interinanimates two soules. The MSS. give the word which the metre requires and which I have no doubt Donne used. The verb inanimates occurs more than once in the sermons. 'One that quickens and inanimates all, and is the soul of the whole world.' Sermons 80. 29. 289. 'That universall power which sustaines, and inanimates the whole world.' Ibid. 80. 31. 305. 'In these bowels, in the womb of this promise we lay foure thousand yeares; The blood with which we were fed then, was the blood of the Sacrifices, and the quickening which we had there, was an inanimation, by the often refreshing of this promise of that Messias in the Prophets.' Ibid. 80. 38. 381. 'Hee shews them Heaven, and God in Heaven, sanctifying all their Crosses in this World, inanimating all their worldly blessings.' Ibid. 80. 44. 436.
Page 53, l. 51. They'are ours though they'are not wee, Wee are The line as given in all the MSS. is metrically, in the rhetorically effective position of the stresses, superior to the shortened form of the editions:
They'are ours, though not wee, wee are
l. 52. the spheare. The MSS. all give the singular, the editions the plural. Donne is not incapable of making a singular rhyme with a plural, or at any rate a form with 's' with one without:
Then let us at these mimicke antiques jeast,
Whose deepest projects, and egregious gests
Are but dull Moralls of a game of Chests.
To Sr Henry Wotton, p. 188, ll. 22-4.
Still, I think 'spheare' is right. The bodies made one are the Sphere in which the two Intelligences meet and command. This suits all that followes:
Wee owe them thanks, because they thus, &c.
The Dutch translation runs:
Het Hemel-rond zijn sy,
Wy haren Hemel-geest.
l. 55. forces, sense, This reading of all the MSS. is, I think, certainly right; the 'senses force' of the editions being an emendation. (1) It is the more difficult reading. It is inconceivable that an ordinary copyist would alter 'senses force' to 'forces sense', which, unless properly commaed, is apt to be read as 'forces' sense' and make nonsense. (2) It is more characteristic of Donne's thought. He is, with his usual scholastic precision, distinguishing the functions of soul and body. Perception is the function (the δύναμις, power or force) of soul:
thy faire goodly soul, which doth
Satyre III.Give this flesh power to taste joy.
But the body has its function also, without which the soul could not fulfil its; and that function is 'sense'. It is through this medium that human souls must operate to obtain knowledge of each other. The bodies must yield their forces or faculties ('sense' in all its forms, especially sight and touch—hands and eyes) to us before our souls can become one. The collective term 'sense' recurs:
T'affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend.
ll. 57-8. On man heavens influence workes not so,
But that it first imprints the ayre.
'Aucuns ont escrit que l'air a aussi cette vertu de faire decouler avec le feu elementaire les influences et proprietez secrettes des estoilles et planettes: alleguans que l'efficace des corps celestes ne peut s'estendre aux inferieurs et terrestres, que par les moyens et elemens qui sont entre deux. Mais cela soit au iugement des lecteurs que nous renvoyons aux disputes de ceux qui ont escrit sur la philosophie naturelle. Voyez aussi Pline au 5 ch. du 2 liu., Plutarque au 5 & 2 liu. des opinions des Philosophes, Platon en son Timee, Aristote en ses disputes de physique, specialement au i. liu. de la generation et corruption, et ceux qui ont escrit depuis luy touchant les elemens.' Du Bartas, La Sepmaine, &c. (1581), Indice. Air.
l. 59. Soe soule into the soule may flow. The 'Soe' of the MSS. must, I think, be right rather than the 'For' of D, H49, Lec, and the editions. It corresponds to the 'So' in l. 65, and it expresses the simpler and more intelligible thought. In references to the heavenly bodies and their influence on men one must remember certain aspects of older thought which have become unfamiliar to us. They were bodies of great dignity, 'aeterna corpora,' not composed of any of the four elements, and subject to no change in time but movement, change of position. If not as the older philosophers and some of the Fathers had held, 'animata corpora,' having a soul united to the body, yet each was guided by an Intelligence operating by contact: 'Ad hoc autem quod moveat, non opportet quod uniatur ei ut forma, sed per contactum virtutis, sicut motor unitur mobili.' Aquinas, Summa I. lxx. 3. Such bodies, it was claimed, influence human actions: 'Corpora enim coelestia, cum moveantur a spiritualibus substantiis ... agunt in virtute earum quasi instrumenta. Sed illae substantiae spirituales sunt superiores animabus nostris. Ergo videtur quod possint imprimere in animas nostras, et sic causare actus humanos.' Aquinas, however, disputes this, as Plotinus had before him, and distinguishes: As bodies, the stars affect us only indirectly, in so far namely as the mind and will of man are subject to the influence of physical and corporeal disturbances. But man's will remains free. 'Sapiens homo dominatur astris in quantum scilicet dominatur suis passionibus.' As Intelligences, the stars do not operate on man thus mediately and controllingly: 'sed in intellectum humanum agunt immediate illuminando: voluntatem autem immutare non possunt.' Aquinas, Summa I. cxv. 4.
Now if 'Soe' be the right reading here then Donne is thinking of the heavenly bodies without distinguishing in them between soul or intelligence and body. 'As these high bodies or beings operate on man's soul through the comparatively low intermediary of air, so lovers' souls must interact through the medium of body.'
If 'For' be the right reading, then Donne is giving as an example of soul operating on soul through the medium of body the influence of the heavenly intelligences on our souls. But this is not the orthodox view of their interaction. I feel sure that 'Soe' is the right reading. The thought and construction are simpler, and 'Soe' and 'For' are easily interchanged.
Of noblemen Donne says: 'They are Intelligences that move great Spheares.' Sermon, Judges xv. 20, p. 20 (1622).
ll. 61-4. As our blood labours to beget
Spirits, as like soules as it can,
Because such fingers need to knit
That subtile knot, which makes us man.
'Spirit is a most subtile vapour, which is expressed from the Bloud, and the instrument of the soule, to perform all his actions; a common tye or medium betwixt the body and the soule, as some will have it; or as Paracelsus, a fourth soule of itselfe. Melancthon holds the fountaine of these spirits to be the Heart, begotten there; and afterward convayed to the Braine, they take another nature to them. Of these spirits there be three kindes, according to the three principall parts, Braine, Heart, Liver; Naturall, Vitall, Animall. The Naturall are begotten in the Liver, and thence dispersed through the Veines, to performe those naturall actions. The Vitall Spirits are made in the Heart, of the Naturall, which by the Arteries are transported to all the other parts: if these Spirits cease, then life ceaseth, as in a Syncope or Swowning. The Animall spirits formed of the Vitall, brought up to the Braine, and diffused by the Nerves, to the subordinate Members, give sense and motion to them all.' Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (1638), p. 15. 'The spirits in a man which are the thin and active part of the blood, and so are of a kind of middle nature, between soul and body, those spirits are able to doe, and they doe the office, to unite and apply the faculties of the soul to the organs of the body, and so there is a man.' Sermons 26. 20. 291.
Page 55. Loves Diet.
ll. 19-24. This stanza, carefully and correctly printed in the 1633 edition, which I have followed, was mangled in that of 1635, and has remained in this condition, despite conjectural emendations, in subsequent editions, including those of Grosart and Chambers. What Donne says is obvious: 'Whatever Love dictated I wrote, but burned the letters. When she wrote to me, and when (correctly resumed by 'that') that favour made him (i.e. Love) fat, I said,' &c. The 1650-54 'Whate'er might him distaste,' &c. is obviously an attempt to put right what has gone wrong. No reading but that of the 1633 edition gives any sense to 'that favour' and 'convey'd by this'.
ll. 25-7. reclaim'd ... sport. In 1633 'reclaim'd' became 'redeem'd', probably owing to the frequent misreading of 'cl' as 'd'. The mistake here increases the probability that 'sports' is an error for 'sport' or 'sporte'. It is doubtful if 'sports' was used as now.
Page 56. The Will.
ll. 19-27. This verse is omitted in most of the MSS. Probably in James's reign its references to religion were thought too outspoken and flippant. Charles admired in Donne not only the preacher but also the poet, as Huyghens testifies.
The first three lines turn on a contrast that Donne is fond of elaborating between the extreme Protestant doctrine of justification by faith only and the Catholic, especially Jesuit, doctrine of co-operant works. It divided the Jesuits and the Jansenists. The Jansenists had not yet emerged, but their precursors in the quarrel (as readers of Les Provinciales will recall) were the Dominicans, to whom Donne refers: 'So also when in the beginning of S. Augustines time, Grace had been so much advanced that mans Nature was scarce admitted to be so much as any means or instrument (not only no kind of cause) of his own good works: And soon after in S. Augustines time also mans free will (by fierce opposition and arguing against the former error) was too much overvalued, and admitted into too near degrees of fellowship with Grace; those times admitted a doctrine and form of reconciliation, which though for reverence to the time, both the Dominicans and Jesuits at this day in their great quarrell about Grace and Free Will would yet seem to maintaine, yet indifferent and dispassioned men of that Church see there is no possibility in it, and therefore accuse it of absurdity, and almost of heresie.' Letters (1651), pp. 15-16. As an Anglican preacher Donne upheld James's point of view, that the doctrine of grace and free-will was better left undiscussed: 'Resistibility, and Irresistibility of Grace, which is every Artificers wearing now, was a stuff that our Fathers wore not, a language that pure antiquity spake not.... They knew Gods law, and his Chancery: But for Gods prerogative, what he could do of his absolute power, they knew Gods pleasure, Nolumus disputari: It should scarce be disputed of in Schools, much less serv'd in every popular pulpit to curious and itching ears; least of all made table-talke, and houshold-discourse.' Sermons 26. 1. 4.
The 'Schismaticks of Amsterdam' were the extreme Puritans. See Jonson's The Alchemist for Tribulation Wholesome and 'We of the separation'.