To date one of the poems is not of course to date them all, but their paradoxical, witty, daring tone is so uniform that one may fairly conjecture that these thirteen Elegies were written between 1593 and Donne's first entry upon responsible office as secretary to Egerton in 1598.
The twelfth (His parting from her) and fifteenth (The Expostulation) Elegies it is impossible to date, but it is not likely that they were written after his marriage. Julia is quite undatable, a witty sally Donne might have written any time before 1615. But the fourteenth (A Tale of a Citizen and his Wife) was certainly written after 1609, probably in 1610.
The Autumnall raises rather an interesting question. Mr. Gosse has argued that it was most probably composed as late as 1625. Walton's dating of it is hopelessly confused. He states (Life of Mr. George Herbert, 1670, pp. 14-19) 'that Donne made the acquaintance of Mrs. Herbert and wrote this poem when she was residing at Oxford with her son Edward, Donne being then near to (about First Ed.) the Fortieth year of his Age'; 'both he and she were then past the Meridian of man's life.' But according to Lord Herbert his mother left Oxford and brought him to town about 1600, shortly before the insurrection of Essex, i.e. when Donne was twenty-seven years old, and secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, and Lady Herbert was about thirty-five or thirty-six. It is, of course, not impossible that Donne visited Oxford between 1596 and 1600, but he was not then the grave person Walton portrays. The period which the latter has in view is that in which Donne was at Mitcham and Mrs. Herbert living in London. 'This day', he writes in a letter to her, dated July 23, 1607, 'I came to town and to the best part of it your house.' In 1609 Mrs. Herbert married Sir John Danvers. We know that in 1607-9 Donne was in correspondence with Mrs. Herbert and was sending her copies of his religious verses. Walton's evidence points to its being about the same time that he wrote this poem.
Mr. Gosse's argument for a later date is, regarded a priori, very persuasive. 'Unless it is taken as describing the venerable and beautiful old age of a distinguished woman, the piece is an absurdity; to address such lines to a youthful widow, who was about to become the bride of a boy of twenty, would have been a monstrous breach of taste and good manners' (Life, &c., ii. 228). It is, however, somewhat hazardous to fix a standard of taste for the age of James I, and above all others for John Donne. To the taste of the time and the temper of Donne such a poem might more becomingly be addressed to a widow of forty, the mother of ten children, one already an accomplished courtier, than it might be written by a priest in orders. Donne would have been startled to hear that in 1625 he had spent any time in such a vain amusement as composing a secular elegy. The poem he wrote to Mrs. Herbert before 1609 was probably thought by her and him an exquisite compliment. He expressly disclaims speaking of the old age which disfigures. He writes of one whose youthful beauty has flown. Forty seemed old for a woman, even to Jane Austen, and in Montaigne's opinion it is old for a man: 'J'estois tel, car je ne me considère pas à cette heure, que je suis engagé dans les avenues de la vieillesse, ayant pieça franchy les quarante ans:
Minutatim vires et robur adultum
Frangit, et in partem pejorem liquitur aetas.
Ce que je seray doresnevant ce ne sera plus qu'un demy estre, ce ne sera plus moy; je m'eschappe les jours et me desrobe a moy mesme:
Singula de nobis anni praedantur euntes.' Essais, ii. 17.
Mrs. Herbert's marriage was due to no 'heyday of the blood'. It was the gravity of Danvers' temper which attracted her, and he became the steady friend and adviser of her children.
There are, moreover, some items of evidence which go to support Walton's testimony. The poem is found in one MS., S, dated 1620, which gives us a downward date; and in 1610 occurs what looks very like an allusion to Donne's poem in Ben Jonson's Silent Woman. Clerimont and True-wit are speaking of the Collegiate ladies, and the former asks,