Page 89. Elegie VII.
l. 1. Natures lay Ideot. Here 'lay' means, I suppose, ignorant', as Grosart says. His other suggestion, that 'lay' has the meaning of 'lay' in 'layman', a painter's figure, is unlikely. That word has a different origin from 'lay' (Lat. laicus), and the earliest example of it given in O.E.D. is dated 1688.
ll. 7-8. Nor by the'eyes water call a maladie
Desperately hot, or changing feaverously.
The 'call' of 1633 is so strongly supported by the MSS. that it is dangerous to alter it. Grosart (whom Chambers follows) reads 'cast', from S; but a glance at the whole line as it stands there shows how little can be built upon it. 'To cast' is generally used in the phrase 'to cast his water' and thereby tell his malady; but the O.E.D. gives one example which resembles this passage if 'cast' be the right word here:
Able to cast his disease without his water.
Greene's Menaphon.
I rather fancy, however, that 'call' is right, and is to be taken in close connexion with the next line, 'You could not cast the eyes water, and thereby call the malady desperately hot or changing feverously.'
If thou couldst, Doctor, cast
The water of my land, find her disease.
Shakespeare, Macbeth, V. iii. 50.
The 'casting' preceded and led to the finding, naming the disease, calling it this or that.
ll. 9 f. I had not taught thee then, the Alphabet
Of flowers, &c.
'Posy, in both its senses, is a contraction of poesy, the flowers of a nosegay expressing by their arrangement a sentiment like that engraved on a ring.' Weekly, Romance of Words, London, 1912, p. 134. She had not yet learned to sort flowers so as to make a posy.
l. 13. Remember since, &c. For the idiom compare:
Beseech you, sir,
Remember since you owed no more to time
Than I do now. Shakespeare, Winter's Tale, V. i. 219.
See Franz, Shakespeare-Grammatik, § 559.
l. 22. Inlaid thee. The O.E.D. cites this line as the only example of 'inlay' meaning 'to lay in, or as in, a place of concealment or preservation.' The sense is much that of 'to lay up', but the word has perhaps some of its more usual meaning, 'to set or embed in another substance.' 'Your husband has given to you, his jewel, such a setting as conceals instead of setting off your charms. I have refined and heightened those charms.'
l. 25. Thy graces and good words my creatures bee. I was tempted to adopt with Chambers the 'good works' of 1669 and some MSS., the theological connexion of 'grace' and 'works' being just the kind of conceit Donne loves to play with. But the 'words' of 1633-54 has the support of so good a MS. as W, and 'good words' is an Elizabethan idiom for commendation, praise, flattery:
He that will give,
Good words to thee will flatter neath abhorring.
Shakespeare, Coriolanus, I. i. 170-1.
In your bad strokes you give good words.
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, V. i. 30.
Moreover, Donne's word is 'graces', not 'grace'. 'Your graces and commendations are my work', i.e. either the commendations you receive, or, more probably, the refined and elegant flatteries with which you can now cajole a lover, though once your whole stock of conversation did not extend beyond 'broken proverbs and torne sentences'. Compare, in Elegie IX: The Autumnall, the description of Lady Danvers' conversation:
In all her words, unto all hearers fit,
You may at Revels, you at Counsaile, sit.
And again, Elegie XVIII: Loves Progresse:
So we her ayres contemplate, words and heart,
And virtues.
l. 28. Frame and enamell Plate. Compare: 'And therefore they that thinke to gild and enamell deceit, and falsehood, with the additions of good deceit, good falshood, before they will make deceit good, will make God bad.' Sermons 80. 73. 742. 'Frame' means, of course, 'shape, fashion', and 'plate' gold or silver service. The elaborate enamelling of such dishes and cups was, I presume, as common as in the case of gold watches and clocks. See F. J. Britten's Old Clocks and Watches and their Makers, 1904.
Page 90. Elegie VIII.
l. 2. Muskats, i.e. 'Musk-cats.' The 'muskets' of 1669 is only a misprint.
ll. 5-6. In these lines as they stand in the editions and most of the MSS. there is clearly something wrong:
And on her neck her skin such lustre sets,
They seeme no sweat drops but pearle coronets.
A 'coronet' is not an ornament of the neck, but of the head. The obvious emendation is that of A25, C, JC, and W, which Grosart and Chambers have adopted. A 'carcanet' is a necklace, and carcanets of pearl were not unusual: see O.E.D., s. v. But why then do the editions and so many MSS. read 'coronets'? Consideration of this has convinced me that the original error is not here but in the word 'neck'. Article by article, as in an inventory, Donne contrasts his mistress and his enemy's. But in the next line he goes on:
Ranke sweaty froth thy Mistresse's brow defiles,
contrasting her brow with that of his mistress, where the sweat drops seem 'no sweat drops but pearle coronets'.
The explanation of the error is, probably, that an early copyist passed in his mind from breast to neck more easily than to brow. Another explanation is that Donne altered 'brow' to 'neck' and forgot to alter 'coronets' to 'carcanets'. I do not think this likely. The force of the poem lies in its contrasts, and the brow is proverbially connected with sweat. 'In the sweat of thy brow,' &c. Possibly Donne himself in the first version, or a copy of it, wrote 'neck', meaning to write 'brow', misled by the proximity and associations of 'breast'. Mr. J. C. Smith has shown that Spenser occasionally wrote a word which association brought into his mind, but which was clearly not the word he intended to use, as it is destructive of the rhyme-scheme. Oddly enough the late Francis Thompson used 'carcanet' in the sense of 'coronet':
Who scarfed her with the morning? and who set
Upon her brow the day-fall's carcanet?
Ode to the Setting Sun.
Page 91, l. 10. Sanserra's starved men. 'When I consider what God did for Goshen in Egypt ... How many Sancerraes he hath delivered from famines, how many Genevas from plots and machinations.' Sermons.
The Protestants in Sancerra were besieged by the Catholics for nine months in 1573, and suffered extreme privations. Norton quotes Henri Martin, Histoire de France, ix. 364: 'On se disputa les débris les plus immondes de toute substance animale ou végétale; on créa, pour ainsi dire, des aliments monstrueux, impossibles.'
ll. 13-14. And like vile lying stones in saffrond tinne,
Or warts, or wheales, they hang upon her skinne.
Following the MSS. I have made 'lying' an epithet attached to 'stones' and substituted 'they hang' for the superficially more grammatical 'it hangs'. The readings of 1633, 'vile stones lying' and 'it hangs', seem to me just the kind of changes a hasty editor would make, the kind of changes which characterize the Second Folio of Shakespeare. The stones are not only 'vile'; they are 'lying', inasmuch as they pretend to be what they are not, as the 'saffron'd tinne' pretends to be gold.
l. 19. Thy head: i.e. 'the head of thy mistress.' Donne continues this construction in ll. 25, 32, 39, and I have restored it from the later editions and MSS. at l. 34, 'thy gouty hand.'
l. 34. thy gouty hand: 'thy' is the reading of all the editions except 1633 and of all the MSS. except JC and S. It is probably right, corresponding to l. 19 'Thy head' and l. 32 'thy tann'd skins'. Donne uses 'thy' in a condensed fashion for 'the head of thy mistress', &c.
Page 92, l. 51. And such. The 'such' of the MSS. is doubtless right, the 'nice' of the editions being repeated from l. 49.
Page 92. Elegie IX.
For the date, &c., of this poem, see the introductory note on the Elegies.
The text of 1633 diverges in some points from that of all the MSS., in some others it agrees with D, H49, Lec. In the latter case I have retained it, but where D, H49, Lec agree with the rest of the MSS. I have corrected 1633, e.g.:
Page 93, l. 6. Affection here takes Reverences name: where 'Affection' seems more appropriate than 'Affections'; and l. 8. But now shee's gold: where 'They are gold' of 1633 involves a very loose use of 'they'. Possibly 1633 here gives a first version afterwards corrected.
ll. 29-32. Xerxes strange Lydian love, &c. Herodotus (vii. 31) tells how Xerxes, on his march to Greece, found in Lydia a plane-tree which for its beauty (κάλλεος εἵνεκα) he decked with gold ornaments, and entrusted to a guardian. Aelian, Variae Historiae, ii. 14, De platano Xerxe amato, attributes his admiration to its size: ἐν Λυδίᾳ γοῦν, φασίν, ἰδὼν φυτὸν εὐμέγεθες πλατάνου, &c. In the Latin translation in Hercler's edition (Firmin Didot, 1858) size is taken as equivalent to height, 'quum vidisset proceram platanum,' but the reference is more probably to extent. Pliny, N. H. 12. 1-3, has much to say of the size of certain planes under which companies of men camped and slept.
The quotation from Aelian confirms the 1633 reading, 'none being so large as shee,' which indeed is confirmed by the lines that follow. The question of age is left open. The reference to' barrennesse' I do not understand.
Page 94, l. 47. naturall lation. This, the reading of the great majority of the MSS., is obviously correct and explains the vacillation of the editions. The word was rare but quite good. The O.E.D. quotes: 'I mean lation or Local-motion from one place to another.' Fotherby (1619);
Make me the straight and oblique lines,
The motions, lations, and the signs. (Herrick, Hesper. 64);
and other examples as late as 1690. The term was specially astronomical, as here. The 'motion natural' of 1633 is an unusual order in Donne; the 'natural station' of 1635-69 is the opposite of motion. The first was doubtless an intentional alteration by the editor, which the printer took in at the wrong place; the second a misreading of 'lation'.