Various content
To your eyes, eares, and tongue, and every part:
If then your body goe, what need you a heart?
I have adopted the MS. readings 'tongue' and 'what need you a heart?' because they seem to me more certainly what Donne wrote. He may have altered them, but so may an editor. 'Tongue' is more exactly parallel to eyes and ears, and the whole talk is of organs. 'What need you a heart?' is more pointed. 'With these organs of sense, what need have you of a heart?' The idiom was not uncommon, the verb being used impersonally. The O.E.D. gives among others:
What need us so many instances abroad.
Andros Tracts, 1691.
'What need your heart go' is of course also idiomatic. The latest example the O.E.D. gives is from Hall's Satires, 1597: 'What needs me care for any bookish skill?'
Page 61. The Primrose, &c.
It is noteworthy that the addition 'being at Montgomery Castle', &c. was made in 1635. It is unknown to 1633 and the MSS. It may be unwarranted. If it be accurate, then the poem is probably addressed to Mrs. Herbert and is a half mystical, half cynical description of Platonic passion. The perfect primrose has apparently five petals, but more or less may be found. Seeking for one to symbolize his love, he fears to find either more or less. What can be less than woman? But if more than woman she becomes that unreal thing, the object of Platonic affection and Petrarchian adoration: but, as he says elsewhere,
Love's not so pure and abstract as they use