Cause I did suffer I must suffer pain.
From what we know of the lives of Essex, Raleigh, Southampton, Pembroke, and others it is probable that Donne's Elegies come quite as close to the truth of life as Sidney's Petrarchianism or Spenser's Platonism. The later cantos of The Faerie Queene reflect vividly the unchaste loves and troubled friendships of Elizabeth's Court. Whether we can accept in its entirety the history of Donne's early amours which Mr. Gosse has gathered from the poems or not, there can be no doubt that actual experiences do lie behind these poems as behind Shakespeare's sonnets. In the one case as in the other, to recognize a literary model is not to exclude the probability of a source in actual experience.
But however we may explain or palliate the tone of these poems it is impossible to deny their power, the vivid and packed force with which they portray a variously mooded passion working through a swift and subtle brain. If there is little of the elegant and accomplished art which Milton admired in the Latin Elegiasts while he 'deplored' their immorality, there is more strength and sincerity both of thought and imagination. The brutal cynicism of
Fond woman which would have thy husband die,
the witty anger of The Apparition, the mordant and paradoxical wit of The Perfume and The Bracelet, the passionate dignity and strength of His Picture,
My body a sack of bones broken within,
And powders blew stains scatter'd on my skin,
the passion that rises superior to sensuality and wit, and takes wing into a more spiritual and ideal atmosphere, of His parting from her,
I will not look upon the quick'ning Sun,
But straight her beauty to my sense shall run;