l. 1. The world which suffered in her death is now fallen into the worse lethargy of oblivion. l. 60. I will anatomize the world for the benefit of those who still, by the influence of her virtue, lead a kind of glimmering life. l. 91. There is no health in the world. We are still under the curse of woman. l. 111. How short is our life compared with that of the patriarchs! l. 134. How small is our stature compared with that of the giants of old! l. 147. How shrunken of soul we are, especially since her death! l. 191. And as man, so is the whole world. The new learning or philosophy has shattered in fragments that complete scheme of the universe in which we rested so confidently, and (l. 211) in human society the same disorder prevails. l. 250. There is no beauty in the world, for, first, the beauty of proportion is lost, alike in the movements of the heavenly bodies, and (l. 285) in the earth with its mountains and hollows, and (l. 302) in the administration of justice in society. l. 339. So is Beauty's other element, Colour and Lustre. l. 377. Heaven and earth are at variance. We can no longer read terrestrial fortunes in the stars. But (l. 435) an Anatomy can be pushed too far.
The Progresse of the Soule.
l. 1. The world's life is the life that breeds in corruption. Let me, forgetting the rotten world, meditate on death. l. 85. Think, my soul, that thou art on thy death-bed, and consider death a release. l. 157. Think how the body poisoned the soul, tainting it with original sin. Set free, thou art in Heaven in a moment. l. 250. Here all our knowledge is ignorance. The new learning has thrown all in doubt. We sweat to learn trifles. In Heaven we know all we need to know. l. 321. Here, our converse is evil and corrupting. There our converse will be with Mary; the Patriarchs; Apostles, Martyrs and Virgins (compare A Litany). Here in the perpetual flux of things is no essential joy. Essential joy is to see God. And even the accidental joys of heaven surpass the essential joys of earth, were there such joys here where all is casual:
Only in Heaven joys strength is never spent,
And accidental things are permanent.
One of the most interesting strands of thought common to the twin poems is the reflection on the disintegrating effect of the New Learning. Copernicus' displacement of the earth, and the consequent disturbance of the accepted mediaeval cosmology with its concentric arrangement of elements and heavenly bodies, arrests and disturbs Donne's imagination much as the later geology with its revelation of vanished species and first suggestion of a doctrine of evolution absorbed and perturbed Tennyson when he wrote In Memoriam and throughout his life. No other poet of the seventeenth century known to me shows the same sensitiveness to the consequences of the new discoveries of traveller, astronomer, physiologist and physician as Donne.
To the Praise of the Dead.
Page 231, l. 43. What high part thou bearest in those best songs. The contraction of 'bearest' to 'bear'st' in the earliest editions (1611-25) led to the insertion of 'of' after 'best' in the later ones (1633-69).
An Anatomie of the World.
Page 235, ll. 133-6. Chambers alters the punctuation of these lines in such a way as to connect them more closely: