The Muses' garden, with pedantic weeds
O'erspread, was purged by thee,
says Carew, in those memorial verses in which the famous lines occur:
Here lies a king that ruled as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit.
Shakespeare was living, remember, and it was Elizabethan poetry that Donne set himself to correct. He began with metre, and invented a system of prosody which has many merits, and would have had more in less arbitrary hands. 'Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging,' said Ben Jonson, who was nevertheless his friend and admirer. And yet, if one will but read him always for the sense, for the natural emphasis of what he has to say, there are few lines which will not come out in at all events the way that he meant them to be delivered. The way he meant them to be delivered is not always as beautiful as it is expressive. Donne would be original at all costs, preferring himself to his art. He treated poetry as Æsop's master treated his slave, and broke what he could not bend.
But Donne's novelty of metre is only a part of his too deliberate novelty as a poet. As Mr. Gosse has pointed out, with a self-evident truth which has apparently waited for him to say it, Donne's real position in regard to the poetry of his time was that of a realistic writer, who makes a clean sweep of tradition, and puts everything down in the most modern words and with the help of the most trivial actual images.
To what a cumbersome unwieldiness,
And burdensome corpulence my love hath grown,
he will begin a poem on Love's Diet. Of love, as the master of hearts, he declares seriously: