Love’s mysteries in souls do grow
But yet the body is the book.
I, for one, find it impossible to believe that all this passionate verse—verse in which we find the quintessence of Donne’s genius—was a mere utterance of abstract thoughts into the wind. Donne, as has been pointed out, was more than most writers a poet of personal experience. His greatest poetry was born of struggle and conflict in the obscure depths of the soul as surely as was the religion of St. Paul. I doubt if, in the history of his genius, any event ever happened of equal importance to his meeting with the lady who first set going in his brain that fevered dialogue between the body and the soul. Had he been less of a frustrated lover, less of a martyr, in whom love’s
Art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations and lean emptiness,
much of his greatest poetry, it seems to me, would never have been written.
One cannot, unfortunately, write the history of the progress of Donne’s genius save by inference and guessing. His poems were not, with some unimportant exceptions, published in his lifetime. He did not arrange them in chronological or in any sort of order. His poem on the flea that has bitten both him and his inamorata comes after the triumphant Anniversary, and but a page or two before the Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day. Hence there is no means of telling how far we are indebted to the Platonism of one woman, how much to his marriage with another, for the enrichment of his genius. Such a poem as The Canonisation can be interpreted either in a Platonic sense or as a poem written to Anne More, who was to bring him both imprisonment and the liberty of love. It is, in either case, written in defence of his love against some who censured him for it:
For God’s sake, hold your tongue, and let me love.
In the last verses of the poem Donne proclaims that his love cannot be measured by the standards of the vulgar: