But I will live otherwise: none of such life!
At once I begin as I mean to end.
But this sacrifice of beauty to dramatic vividness is a characteristic of passionate poetry. Beauty is not precisely the quality we should predicate of the burning lines of Sappho translated by Catullus:
lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinant aures geminae, teguntur
lumina nocte.
Beauty is the quality of poetry which records an ideal passion recollected in tranquillity, rather than of poetry either dramatic or lyric which utters the very movement and moment of passion itself.
Donne's love-poetry is a very complex phenomenon, but the two dominant strains in it are just these: the strain of dialectic, subtle play of argument and wit, erudite and fantastic; and the strain of vivid realism, the record of a passion which is not ideal nor conventional, neither recollected in tranquillity nor a pure product of literary fashion, but love as an actual, immediate experience in all its moods, gay and angry, scornful and rapturous with joy, touched with tenderness and darkened with sorrow—though these last two moods, the commonest in love-poetry, are with Donne the rarest. The first of these strains comes to Donne from the Middle Ages, the dialectic of the Schools, which passed into mediaeval love-poetry almost from its inception; the second is the expression of the new temper of the Renaissance as Donne had assimilated it in Latin countries. Donne uses the method, the dialectic of the mediaeval love-poets, the poets of the dolce stil nuovo, Guinicelli, Cavalcanti, Dante, and their successors, the intellectual, argumentative evolution of their canzoni, but he uses it to express a temper of mind and a conception of love which are at the opposite pole from their lofty idealism. The result, however, is not so entirely disintegrating as Mr. Courthope seems to think: 'This fine Platonic edifice is ruthlessly demolished in the poetry of Donne. To him love, in its infinite variety and inconsistency, represented the principle of perpetual flux in nature.'[1] The truth is rather that, owing to the fullness of Donne's experience as a lover, the accident that made of the earlier libertine a devoted lover and husband, and from the play of his restless and subtle mind on the phenomenon of love conceived and realized in this less ideal fashion, there emerged in his poetry the suggestion of a new philosophy of love which, if less transcendental than that of Dante, rests on a juster, because a less dualistic and ascetic, conception of the nature of the love of man and woman.
The fundamental weakness of the mediaeval doctrine of love, despite its refining influence and its exaltation of woman, was that it proved unable to justify love ethically against the claims of the counter-ideal of asceticism. Taking its rise in a relationship which excluded the thought of marriage as the end and justification of love, which presumed in theory that the relation of the 'servant' to his lady must always be one of reverent and unrewarded service, this poetry found itself involved from the beginning in a dualism from which there was no escape. On the one hand the love of woman is the great ennobler of the human heart, the influence which elicits its latent virtue as the sun converts clay to gold and precious stones. On the other hand, love is a passion which in the end is to be repented of in sackcloth and ashes. Lancelot is the knight whom love has made perfect in all the virtues of manhood and chivalry; but the vision of the Holy Grail is not for him, but for the virgin and stainless Sir Galahad.