Before coming to close quarters with this difficult and debated question one may in the first place insist that there is in Donne's verse a great deal which, whether it be poetry in the full sense of the word or not, is arresting and of worth both historically and intrinsically. Whatever we may think of Donne's poetry, it is impossible not to recognize the extraordinary interest of his mind and character. In an age of great and fascinating men he is not the least so. The immortal and transcendent genius of Shakespeare leaves Donne, as every other contemporary, lost in the shadows and cross-lights of an age that is no longer ours, but from which Shakespeare emerges into the clear sunlight. Of Bacon's mind, 'deep and slow, exhausting thought,' and divining as none other the direction in which the road led through the débris of outworn learning to a renovated science and a new philosophy, Donne could not boast. Alike in his poetry and in his soberest prose, treatise or sermon, Donne's mind seems to want the high seriousness which comes from a conviction that truth is, and is to be found. A spirit of scepticism and paradox plays through and disturbs almost everything he wrote, except at moments when an intense mood of feeling, whether love or devotion, begets faith, and silences the sceptical and destructive wit by the power of vision rather than of intellectual conviction. Poles apart as the two poets seem at a first glance to lie in feeling and in art, there is yet something of Tennyson in the conflict which wages perpetually in Donne's poetry between feeling and intellect.
But short of the highest gifts of serene imagination or serene wisdom Donne's mind has every power it well could, wit, insight, imagination; and these move in such a strange medium of feeling and learning, mediaeval, renaissance and modern, that every imprint becomes of interest. To do full justice to that interest one's study of Donne must include his prose as well as his verse, his paradoxical Pseudomartyr, and equally paradoxical, more strangely mooded Biathanatos, the intense and subtle eloquence of his sermons, the tormented passion and wit of his devotions, and the gaiety and melancholy, wit and wisdom, of his letters. But most of these qualities have left their mark on his poetry, and given it interests over and above its worth simply as poetry.
One quality of his verse, which has been somewhat overlooked by critics intent upon the definition and sources of metaphysical wit, is wit in our sense of the word, wit like the wit of Swift and Sheridan. The habit in which this wit masquerades is doubtless old-fashioned. It is not always the worse for that, for the wit of the Elizabethans is delightfully blended with fancy and feeling. There is a little of Jaques in all of them. But if fanciful and at times even boyish, Donne's wit is still amusing, the quickest and most fertile wit of the century till we come to the author of Hudibras.
It is not in the Satyres that this wit is to us most obvious. Nothing grows so soon out of date as contemporary satire. Even the brilliance and polish of Pope's satire—and Pope's art is nowhere more perfect than in The Dunciad and the Imitations of Horace—cannot interest us in Lord Hervey, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and the forgotten poets of an unpoetic age. How then should we be interested in Elizabeth's fantastic 'Presence', the streets of sixteenth-century London, and the knavery of pursuivants, presented with a satiric art which is wonderfully vivid and caustic but still tentative,—over-emphatic, rough in style and verse, though with a roughness which is obviously a studied and in a measure successful effect. The verses upon Coryats Crudities are in their way a masterpiece of insult veiled as compliment, but it is a rather boyish and barbarous way.
It is in the lighter of his love verses that Donne's laughable wit is most obvious and most agile. Whatever one may think of the choice of subject, and the flame of a young man's lust that burns undisguised in some of the Elegies, it is impossible to ignore the dazzling wit which neither flags nor falters from the first line to the last. And in the more graceful and fanciful, the less heated Songs and Sonets, the same wit, gay and insolent, disports itself in a philosophy of love which must not be taken altogether seriously. Donne at least, as we shall see, outgrew it. His attitude is very much that of Shakespeare in the early comedies. But the Petrarchian love, which Shakespeare treats with light and charming irony, the vows and tears of Romeo and Proteus, Donne openly scoffs. He is one of Shakespeare's young men as these were in the flesh and the Inns of Court, and he tells us frankly what in their youthful cynicism (which is often even more of a pose than their idealism) they think of love, and constancy, and women.
Of all miracles, Donne cries, a constant woman is the greatest, of all strange sights the strangest:
If thou findst one, let mee know,
Such a Pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet doe not, I would not goe,
Though at next doore wee might meet,