The Poems of John Donne, Volume 2 (of 2) / Edited from the Old Editions and Numerous Manuscripts

by John Donne

The Age of Ignorance I'le still condemn.

IO. CA.

Jun. 3. 1620.

The manuscript is divided into three parts, the first containing the five Satyres, the Litany and the Storme and Calme. The second consists of Elegies and Epigrammes and the third of Miscellanea, Poems, Elegies, Sonnets by the same Author. The elegies in the second part are, as in D, H49, Lec, and W, thirteen in number. Their arrangement is that of W, and, like W, JC gives The Comparison, which, D, H49, Lec do not, but drops Loves Progress, which the latter group contains. The text of these poems is generally that of W, but here and throughout JC abounds in errors and emendations. It contains one or two poems which were published in the edition of 1650, and which I have found in no other manuscript except O'F. In these JC supplies some obvious emendations. The poems in the third part are very irregularly arranged. This is the only manuscript, professing to be of Donne's poems, which contains the elegy, 'The heavens rejoice in motion,' which the younger Donne added to the edition of 1650. It is not a very correct, but is an interesting manuscript, with very few spurious poems. At the other end of the manuscript from Donne's, are poems by Corbet.

What seems to be practically a duplicate of JC is preserved in the Dyce Collection at the South Kensington Museum. It belonged originally to a certain 'Johannes Nedlam e Collegio Lincolniense' and is dated 1625. Cave's poem 'Upon Doctor Donne's Satyres' is inscribed and the contents and arrangement of the volume are identical with those of JC except that one poem, The Dampe, is omitted, probably by an oversight, in the Dyce MS. After my experience of JC I did not think it necessary to collate this manuscript. It was from it that Waldron printed some of the unpublished poems of Donne and Corbet in A Collection of Miscellaneous Poetry (1802).

H40 and RP31, i.e. Harleian MS. 4064 in the British Museum, and Rawlinson Poetical MS. 31, in the Bodleian Library, are two manuscripts containing a fairly large number of Donne's poems intermingled with poems by other and contemporary authors. A note on the fly-leaf of RP31 declares that the manuscript contains 'Sir John Harringtons poems written in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth', which is certainly not an accurate description.[²⁷] Some of the poems must have been written as late as 1610, and they are by various authors, Wotton, Jonson, Sir Edward Herbert, Sir John Roe, Donne, Beaumont, and probably others, but names of authors are only occasionally given. Each manuscript starts with the words 'Prolegomena Quaedam', and the poem, 'Paynter while there thou sit'st.' The poems follow the same order in the two manuscripts, but of poems not by Donne RP31 contains several which are not in H40, and, on the other hand, of poems by Donne H40 inserts at various places quite a number, especially of songs, which are not in RP31. The latter is, in short, a miscellaneous collection of Elizabethan and early Jacobean poems, including several of Donne's; the former, the same collection in which Donne's poems have become by insertion the principal feature. I have cited the readings of H40 throughout; those of RP31 only when they differ from H40, or when I wish to emphasize their agreement. Wherever derived from, the poems are generally carefully and intelligently transcribed. They contain some unpublished poems of Jonson, Sir Edward Herbert, and probably Daniel.

L74. The Lansdowne MS. 740, in the British Museum, is an interesting collection of Donne's mainly earlier and secular poems, along with several by contemporaries.[²⁸] The text of the Satyres connects this collection with A18, N, TC, but it is probably older, as it contains none of the Divine Poems and no poem written later than 1610. Its interest, apart from the support which it lends to the readings of other manuscripts, centres in the evidence it affords as to the authorship of some of the unauthentic poems which have been ascribed to Donne.

S. The Stephens MS., now in the Harvard College Library, Boston, is the manuscript on which Dr. Grosart based his edition (though he does not reproduce it either consistently or with invariable accuracy) in 1873—an unhappy choice even were it legitimate to adopt any single manuscript in preference to the edition of 1633. Of all the manuscripts I have examined (I know it only through the collation made for me and from Dr. Grosart's citations) it is, I think, without exception the worst, the fullest of obvious and absurd blunders. There are too in it more evidences of stupid editing than in P, whose blunders are due to careless copying by eye or to dictation, and therefore more easy to correct.

The manuscript is dated, at the end, '19th July 1620,' and contains no poems which are demonstrably later than this date, or indeed than 1610. As, however, it contains several of the Divine Poems, including La Corona, but not the Holy Sonnets, it affords a valuable clue to the date of these poems,—of which more elsewhere. The collection is an ambitious one, and an attempt has been made at classification. Six Satires are followed by twenty-seven Elegies (one is torn out) under which head love and funeral elegies are included, and these by a long series of songs with the Divine Poems interspersed. Some of the songs, as of the elegies, are not by Donne.[²⁹]