These verses of Donne's disturbed and adventurous youth, poems ingenious, conceited, passionate, mystical, or cynical, have not the music as of birds' songs which rings in the lyrists of that age: nor have the Epithalamia the charm of Spenser's. Donne in youth was not at ease with himself: he speculates too curiously. He may try to play the sensualist, but there is a dark backward in his genius; there are chords not in tune with mirth and pleasure. He is as unique as Browning, as little like other poets. If his Elegies contain, as has been supposed, the story of a love affair, it was of a nature to make him uneasy.
In 1597 Donne became secretary of the Lord Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, and met his niece, Anne More, daughter of Sir George More, Lieutenant of the Tower. He married her secretly at the end of 1601, and therefore was imprisoned in the Fleet jail, in February, 1602, thanks to the lady's angry father, who soon after forgave the young lovers.
By 1601 he had begun "The Progress of the Soul," or "Metempsychosis," the adventures of a soul "placed in most shapes,"[1] for example, in that fabulous and mortuary weed, a mandrake, in the roe of a fish, in a sparrow, and so forth, all to little purpose. He was unemployed, eager for employment, given to writing long letters, and laments for deaths in verse, and he assisted in a controversy with the Catholics.
Now come such more or less theological works as "Pseudo-Martyr," "Ignatius His Conclave," and "Biathanatos": the first (1610) is addressed to the King, who finally induced Donne to take holy orders. "Divine" poems he also wrote, but he was not anxious to be a professional divine. Donne's conceits were daring to the border of profanity. A visit to Paris with his patron, Sir Robert Drury, while Mrs. Donne was about to become a mother, was marked by a telepathic experience—Donne saw his wife, then in England, with a dead baby in her arms. Walton says that the day of the vision was that of the child's birth and death, but the dates do not bear out the statement. Walton's remark that Drury sent an express messenger to England, to inquire about Mrs. Donne, is certainly untrue.
In honour of a daughter of Drury who died young, Donne had written two extraordinary poems: "The First Anniversary" of the decease was published in 1611, "The Second Anniversary" was written in 1612. There seemed reason to fear that Donne would celebrate Miss Drury, whom he had never seen, once a year, while his life endured. The poem as a whole is "An Anatomy, of the World, wherein, by occasion of the death of Mistress Elizabeth Drury, the frailty and decay of this whole world is represented". Donne indulges in an exaggeration of hyperbole equalled only by the ancient Irish bards who sang the feats of Cuchulainn. For example, when Elizabeth joined the Saints
This world in that great earthquake languished,
For in a common bath of tears it bled,
an allusion to Seneca bleeding to death in a bath full of hot water. This manner of hyperbole flourished after Donne's time, infecting Crashaw and others,
For there's a kind of world remaining still,
as Donne admits. Poetry on the deplorable brevity of life and the instability of things may be excellent, and that instability is the theme of Donne, but Mistress Drury is harped upon too much, and Donne was taking this paragon on trust:—