But sad mortality o'er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
Now if we turn from Elizabethan love-poetry to the Songs and Sonets and the Elegies of Donne, we find at once two distinguishing features. In the first place his poetry is in one respect less classical than theirs. There is far less in it of the superficial evidence of classical learning with which the poetry of the 'University Wits' abounds, pastoral and mythological imagery. The texture of his poetry is more mediaeval than theirs in as far as it is more dialectical, though a dialectical evolution is not infrequent in the Elizabethan sonnet, and the imagery is less picturesque, more scientific, philosophic, realistic, and homely. The place of the
goodly exiled train
Of gods and goddesses
is taken by images drawn from all the sciences of the day, from the definitions and distinctions of the Schoolmen, from the travels and speculations of the new age, and (as in Shakespeare's tragedies or Browning's poems) from the experiences of everyday life. Maps and sea discoveries, latitude and longitude, the phoenix and the mandrake's root, the Scholastic theories of Angelic bodies and Angelic knowledge, Alchemy and Astrology, legal contracts and non obstantes, 'late schoolboys and sour prentices,' 'the king's real and his stamped face'—these are the kind of images, erudite, fanciful, and homely, which give to Donne's poems a texture so different at a first glance from the florid and diffuse Elizabethan poetry, whether romantic epic, mythological idyll, sonnet, or song; while by their presence and their abundance they distinguish it equally (as Mr. Gosse has justly insisted) from the studiously moderate and plain style of 'well-languaged Daniel'.
But if the imagery of Donne's poetry be less classical than that of Marlowe or the younger Shakespeare there is no poet the spirit of whose love-poetry is so classical, so penetrated with the sensual, realistic, scornful tone of the Latin lyric and elegiac poets. If one reads rapidly through the three books of Ovid's Amores, and then in the same continuous rapid fashion the Songs and the Elegies of Donne, one will note striking differences of style and treatment. Ovid develops his theme simply and concretely, Donne dialectically and abstractly. There is little of the ease and grace of Ovid's verses in the rough and vehement lines of Donne's Elegies. Compare the song,
Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,
with the famous thirteenth Elegy of the first book,