Come more adored, O adored, for his coming's sake,
And awake my heart to be loved: awake, awake!'
Donne has written nothing at once so subtle and so pure and lovely as this, nothing the end and aim of which is so entirely to leave an untroubled impression of beauty.
But it is not true either that the thought and imagery of love-poetry must be of the simple, obvious kind which Steele supposes, that any display of dialectical subtlety, any scintillation of wit, must be fatal to the impression of sincerity and feeling, or on the other hand that love is always a beautiful emotion naturally expressing itself in delicate and beautiful language. To some natures love comes as above all things a force quickening the mind, intensifying its purely intellectual energy, opening new vistas of thought abstract and subtle, making the soul 'intensely, wondrously alive'. Of such were Donne and Browning. A love-poem like 'Come into the garden, Maud' suspends thought and fills the mind with a succession of picturesque and voluptuous images in harmony with the dominant mood. A poem such as The Anniversarie or The Extasie, The Last Ride Together or Too Late, is a record of intense, rapid thinking, expressed in the simplest, most appropriate language—and it is a no whit less natural utterance of passion. Even the abstractness of the thought, on which Mr. Courthope lays so much stress in speaking of Donne and the 'metaphysicals' generally, is no necessary implication of want of feeling. It has been said of St. Augustine 'that his most profound thoughts regarding the first and last things arose out of prayer ... concentration of his whole being in prayer led to the most abstract observation'. So it may be with love-poetry—so it was with Dante in the Vita Nuova, and so, on a lower scale, and allowing for the time that the passion is a more earthly and sensual one, the thought more capricious and unruly, with Donne. The Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day is not less passionate because that passion finds expression in abstract and subtle thought. Nor is it true that all love-poetry is beautiful. Of none of the four poems I have mentioned in the last paragraph is pure beauty, beauty such as is the note of Mr. Bridges' song, the distinctive quality. It is rather vivid realism:
And alive I shall keep and long, you will see!
I knew a man, was kicked like a dog
From gutter to cesspool; what cared he
So long as he picked from the filth his prog?
He saw youth, beauty and genius die,
And jollily lived to his hundredth year.