But the Nocturnall is a sincerer and profounder poem than Twicknam Garden, and it is more difficult to imagine it the expression of a conventional sentiment. Mr. Gosse, and there is no higher authority when it comes to the interpretation of Donne's character and mind, rightly, I think, suggests that the death of the lady addressed is assumed, not actual, but he connects the poem with Donne's earlier and troubled loves. 'So also in a most curious ode, the Nocturnal ..., amid fireworks of conceit, he calls his mistress dead and protests that his hatred has grown cold at last.' But I can find no note of bitterness, active or spent, in the song. It might have been written to Ann More. It is a highly metaphysical yet sombre and sincere description of the emptiness of life without love. The critics have, I think, failed somewhat to reckon with this stratum in Donne's songs, of poems Petrarchian in convention but with a Petrarchianism coloured by Donne's realistic temper and impatient wit. Any interpretation of so enigmatical a poem must be conjectural, but before one denied too positively that its subject was Lady Bedford—perhaps her illness in 1612—one would need to answer two questions, how far could a conventional passion inspire a strain so sincere, and what was Donne's feeling for Lady Bedford and hers for him?
Poetry is the language of passion, but the passion which moves the poet most constantly is the delight of making poetry, and very little is sufficient to quicken the imagination to its congenial task. Our soberer minds are apt to think that there must be an actual, particular experience behind every sincere poem. But history refutes the idea of such a simple relation between experience and art. No poet will sing of love convincingly who has never loved, but that experience will suffice him for many and diverse webs of song and drama. Without pursuing the theme, it is sufficient for the moment to recall that in the fashion of the day Spenser's sonnets were addressed to Lady Carey, not to his wife; that it was to Idea or to Anne Goodere that Drayton wrote so passionate a poem as
Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part;
and that we know very little of what really lies behind Shakespeare's profound and plangent sonnets, weave what web of fancy we will.
Of Lady Bedford's feeling for Donne we know only what his letters reveal, and that is no more than that she was his warm friend and generous patroness. It is clear, however, from their enduring friendship and from the tone of that correspondence that she found in him a friend of a rarer and finer calibre than in the other poets whom she patronized in turn, Daniel and Drayton and Jonson—some one whose sensitive, complex, fascinating personality could hardly fail to touch a woman's imagination and heart. Friendship between man and woman is love in some degree. There is no need to exaggerate the situation, or to reflect on either her loyalty or his to other claims, to recognize that their mutual feeling was of the kind for which the Petrarchian convention afforded a ready and recognized vehicle of expression.
And so it was, one fancies, with Mrs. Herbert. She too found in Donne a rare and comprehending spirit, and he in her a gracious and delicate friend. His relation to her, indeed, was probably simpler than to Lady Bedford, their friendship more equal. The letter and the elegy referred to already are instinct with affection and tender reverence. To her Donne sent some of his earliest religious sonnets, with a sonnet on her beautiful name. And to her also it would seem that at some period in the history of their friendship, the beginning of which is very difficult to date, he wrote songs in the tone of hopeless, impatient passion, of Petrarch writing to Laura, and others which celebrate their mutual affection as a love that rose superior to earthly and physical passion. The clue here is the title prefixed to that strange poem The Primrose, being at Montgomery Castle upon the hill on which it is situate. It is true that the title is found for the first time in the edition of 1635 and is in none of the manuscripts. But it is easier to explain the occasional suppression of a revealing title than to conceive a motive for inventing such a gloss. The poem is doubtless, as Mr. Gosse says, 'a mystical celebration of the beauty, dignity and intelligence of Magdalen Herbert'—a celebration, however, which takes the form (as it might with Petrarch) of a reproach, a reproach which Donne's passionate temper and caustic wit seem even to touch with scorn. He appears to hint to Mrs. Herbert that to wish to be more than a woman, to claim worship in place of love, is to be a worse monster than a coquette:
Since there must reside
Falshood in woman, I could more abide
She were by Art, than Nature falsifi'd.