The dating of Donne's Divine Poems raises some questions that have not received all the consideration they deserve. They fall into two groups—those written before and those written after he took orders. Of the former the majority would seem to belong to the years of his residence at Mitcham. The poem On the Annunciation and Passion was written on March 25, 1608⁄9. The Litanie was written, we gather from a letter to Sir Henry Goodyere, about the same time. The Crosse we cannot date, but I should be inclined with Mr. Gosse to connect it rather with the earlier than the later poems. It is in the same somewhat tormented, intellectual style. On the other hand the Holy Sonnets were composed, we know now from Sonnet XVII, first published by Mr. Gosse, after the death of Donne's wife in 1617; and The Lamentations of Jeremy appear to have been written at the same juncture. The first sermon which Donne preached after that event was on the text (Lam. iii. 1): 'I am the man that hath seen affliction,' and Walton speaks significantly of his having ended the night and begun the day in lamentations.
The more difficult question is the date of the La Corona group of sonnets. It is usual to attribute them to the later period of Donne's ministry. This is not, I think, correct. It seems to me most probable that they too were composed at Mitcham in or before 1609.
Dr. Grosart first pointed out that one of Donne's short verse-letters, headed in 1663 and later editions To E. of D. with six holy Sonnets, must have been sent with a copy of six of these sonnets, the seventh being held back on account of some imperfection. It appears with the same heading in O'F, but in W it is entitled simply To L. of D., and is placed immediately after the letter To Mr. T. W., 'Haste thee harsh verse' (p. [205]), and before the next to the same person, 'Pregnant again' (p. 206). It thus belongs to this group of letters written apparently between 1597 and 1609-10.
Who is the E. of D.? Dr. Grosart, Mr. Chambers, and Mr. Gosse assume that it must be Lord Doncaster, though admitting in the same breath that the latter was not Earl of, but Viscount Doncaster, and that only between 1618 and 1622, four short years. The title 'L. of D.' might indicate Doncaster because the title 'my Lord of' is apparently given to a Viscount. In his letters from Germany Donne speaks of 'my Lord of Doncaster'. It may, therefore, be a mistake of the printer or editor of 1633; which turned 'L. of D.' into 'E. of D.'; but Hay was still alive in 1633, and the natural thing for the printer to do would have been to alter the title to 'E. of C.' or 'Earl of Carlisle'. Before 1618 Donne speaks of the 'Lord Hay' or 'the L. Hay' (see Letters, p. 145),[1] and this or 'the L. H.' is the title the poem would have borne if addressed to him in any of the years to which the other letters in the Westmoreland MS. (W) seem to belong.
Moreover, there is another of Donne's noble friends who might correctly be described as either E. of D. or L. of D. and that is Richard Sackville, third Earl of Dorset. Donne generally speaks of him as 'my Lord of Dorset': 'I lack you here', he writes to Goodyere, 'for my L. of Dorset, he might make a cheap bargain with me now, and disingage his honour, which in good faith, is a little bound, because he admitted so many witnesses of his large disposition towards me.' Born in 1589, the grandson of the great poet of Elizabeth's early reign, Richard Sackville was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. He succeeded as third Earl of Dorset on February 27, 1608⁄9, having two days previously married Anne, Baroness Clifford in her own right, the daughter of George Clifford, the buccaneering Earl of Cumberland, and Margaret, daughter of Francis, second Earl of Bedford. The Countess of Dorset was therefore a first cousin to Edward, third Earl of Bedford, the husband of Donne's patroness Lucy, Countess of Bedford.
The earliest date at which the letter could have been addressed to Dorset as L. of D. or E. of D. is 1609, just after his marriage into the circle of Donne's friends. Now in Harleian MS. 4955 (H49) we find the heading,
Holy Sonnets: written 20 yeares since.
This is followed at once by 'Deign at my hands', and then the title La Corona is given to the six sonnets which ensue. Thereafter follow, without any fresh heading, twelve of the sonnets belonging to the second group, generally entitled Holy Sonnets. It will be noticed that in the editions this last title is used twice, first for both groups and then, in italics, for the second alone. The question is, did the copyist of H49 intend that the note should apply to all the sonnets he transcribed or only to the La Corona group? If to all, he was certainly wrong as to the second lot, which were written later; but he was quite possibly right as to the first. Now twenty years before 1629, which is the date given to some of Andrewes' poems in the MS., would bring us to 1609, the year of the Earl of Dorset's accession and marriage, and the period when most of the letters among which that to L. of D. in W appears were written.
Note, moreover, the content of the letter To L. of D. Most of the letters in this group, to Thomas and Rowland Woodward, to S. B., and B. B., are poetical replies to poetical epistles. Now that To L. of D. is in the same strain:
See Sir, how as the Suns hot Masculine flame