I have transferred this poem hither from its place in 1635-69 among the sober Letters to Severall Personages. It has obviously a closer relation to the Elegies, and must have been composed about the same time. Its genus is the Heroical Epistle modelled on Ovid, of which Drayton produced the most popular English imitations in 1597. Donne's was possibly evoked by these and written in 1597-8, but there is no means of dating it exactly. 'Passionating' and 'conceited' eloquence is the quality of these poems modelled on Ovid, and whatever one may think of the poem on moral grounds it is impossible to deny that Donne has caught the tone of the kind, and written a poem passionate and eloquent in its own not altogether admirable way. The reader is more than once reminded of Mr. Swinburne's far less conceited but more diffuse Anactoria.
l. 22. As Down, as Stars, &c. 'Down' is probably correct, but the 'Dowves' (i.e. doves) of P gives the plural as in the other nouns, and a closer parallel in poetic vividness. We get a series of pictures—doves, stars, cedars, lilies. The meaning conveyed would be the same:
this hand
As soft as doves-downe, and as white as it.
Wint. Tale, IV. iv. 374.
But of course swan's down is also celebrated:
Heaven with sweet repose doth crowne
Each vertue softer than the swan's fam'd downe.
Habington, Castara.
Page 125, l. 33. Modern editors separate 'thorny' and 'hairy' by a comma. They should rather be connected by a hyphen as in TCD.