In The Blossom, he is in a still more earthly mood, and declares that, if his mistress remains obdurate, he will return to London, where he will find a mistress:
As glad to have my body as my mind.
The Primrose is another appeal for a less intellectual love:
Should she
Be more than woman, she would get above
All thought of sex, and think to move
My heart to study her, and not to love.
If we turn back to The Undertaking, however, we find Donne boasting once more of the miraculous purity of a love which it would be useless to communicate to other men, since, there being no other mistress to love in the same kind, they "would love but as before." Hence he will keep the tale a secret:
If, as I have, you also do,
Virtue attir'd in woman see,
And dare love that, and say so too,
And forget the He and She;
And if this love, though placed so,
From profane men you hide,
Which will no faith on this bestow,
Or, if they do, deride:
Then you have done a braver thing
Than all the Worthies did;
And a braver thence will spring,
Which is, to keep that hid.
It seems to me, in view of this remarkable series of poems, that it is useless to look in Donne for a single consistent attitude to love. His poems take us round the entire compass of love as the work of no other English poet—not even, perhaps, Browning's—does. He was by destiny the complete experimentalist in love in English literature. He passed through phase after phase of the love of the body only, phase after phase of the love of the soul only, and ended as the poet of the perfect marriage. In his youth he was a gay—but was he ever really gay?—free-lover, who sang jestingly:
How happy were our sires in ancient times,
Who held plurality of loves no crime!