Woman needs no advantages to arbitrate the fate of man.
In exactly the same mood as The Primrose is The Blossome, possibly written in the same place and on the same day, for the poet is preparing to return to London. The Dampe is in an even more scornful tone, and one hesitates to connect it with Mrs. Herbert. But all these poems recur so repeatedly together in the manuscripts as to suggest that they have a common origin. And with them go the beautiful poems The Funerall and The Relique. In the former the cruelty of the lady has killed her lover, but in the second the tone changes entirely, the relation between Donne and Mrs. Herbert (note the lines
Thou shalt be a Mary Magdalen and I
A something else thereby)
has ceased to be Petrarchian and become Platonic, their love a thing pure and of the spirit, but none the less passionate for that:
First, we lov'd well and faithfully,
Yet knew not what wee lov'd, nor why,
Difference of sex no more wee knew,
Then our Guardian Angells doe;
Comming and going, wee