And on her neck her skin such lustre sets,
They seeme no sweat drops but pearle coronets.
A 'coronet' is not an ornament of the neck, but of the head. The obvious emendation is that of A25, C, JC, and W, which Grosart and Chambers have adopted. A 'carcanet' is a necklace, and carcanets of pearl were not unusual: see O.E.D., s. v. But why then do the editions and so many MSS. read 'coronets'? Consideration of this has convinced me that the original error is not here but in the word 'neck'. Article by article, as in an inventory, Donne contrasts his mistress and his enemy's. But in the next line he goes on:
Ranke sweaty froth thy Mistresse's brow defiles,
contrasting her brow with that of his mistress, where the sweat drops seem 'no sweat drops but pearle coronets'.
The explanation of the error is, probably, that an early copyist passed in his mind from breast to neck more easily than to brow. Another explanation is that Donne altered 'brow' to 'neck' and forgot to alter 'coronets' to 'carcanets'. I do not think this likely. The force of the poem lies in its contrasts, and the brow is proverbially connected with sweat. 'In the sweat of thy brow,' &c. Possibly Donne himself in the first version, or a copy of it, wrote 'neck', meaning to write 'brow', misled by the proximity and associations of 'breast'. Mr. J. C. Smith has shown that Spenser occasionally wrote a word which association brought into his mind, but which was clearly not the word he intended to use, as it is destructive of the rhyme-scheme. Oddly enough the late Francis Thompson used 'carcanet' in the sense of 'coronet':
Who scarfed her with the morning? and who set
Upon her brow the day-fall's carcanet?
Ode to the Setting Sun.
Page 91, l. 10. Sanserra's starved men. 'When I consider what God did for Goshen in Egypt ... How many Sancerraes he hath delivered from famines, how many Genevas from plots and machinations.' Sermons.