Eager, desires to raise posterity.
Grosart prints:
Because that other curse of being short
And—only-for-a-minute-made-to-be—
Eager desires to raise posterity.
This and the note which he appends I find more incomprehensible than the old text. This is his note: 'The whole sense then is: Unless Nature decreed this in order that man should despise it, (just) as she made it short, that man might for that reason also despise a sport that was only for a minute made to be eager desires to raise posterity.' Surely this is Abracadabra!
What has happened is, I believe, this: Donne here, as elsewhere, used an obsolescent word, viz. 'eagers', the verb, meaning 'sharpens'. The copyist did not recognize the form, took 'desire' for the verb, and made 'eager' the adjectival complement to 'be', changing 'desire' to 'desires' as predicate to 'curse'. What Donne had in mind was the Aristotelian doctrine that the desire to beget children is an expression of man's craving for immortality. The most natural function, according to Aristotle, of every living thing which is not maimed in any way is to beget another living thing like itself, that so it may partake of what is eternal and divine. This participation is the goal of all desire, and of all natural activity. But perishable individuals cannot partake of the immortal and divine by continuous existence. Nothing that is perishable can continue always one and the same individual. Each, therefore, participates as best he may, some more, some less; remaining the same in a way, i.e. in the species, not in the individual.' (De Anima, B. 4. 415 A-B.) Donne's argument then is this: 'Why of all animals have we alone this feeling of depression and remorse after the act of love? Is it a device of nature to restrain us from an act which shortens the life of the individual (he refers here to a prevalent belief as to the deleterious effect of the act of love), needed because that other curse which Adam brought upon man, the curse of mortality,
of being short,
And only for a minute made to be,
Eagers [i.e. whets or provokes] desire to raise posterity.'