These verses are somewhat
difficult
but very
characteristic.
characteristic.
John Donne
_ Compare: 'First,
_Ossa_, bones, We know in the naturall and ordinary acceptation, what
they are; They are these Beames, and Timbers, and Rafters of these
Tabernacles, these Temples of the Holy Ghost, these bodies of ours. '
_Sermons_ 80. 51. 516.
PAGE =27=, ll. 31-2. _Till my returne, repaire
And recompact my scattered body so. _
This verse is rightly printed in the 1633 edition. In that of 1635 it
went wrong; and the errors were transmitted through all the subsequent
editions, and have been retained by Grosart and Chambers, but
corrected in the Grolier Club edition. The full stop after 'so' was
changed to a comma on the natural but mistaken assumption that 'so'
pointed forward to the immediately following 'as'. In fact, 'so'
refers _back_ to the preceding verse. Donne has described how from his
anatomy or skeleton, i. e. his name scratched in the glass, the lady
may repair and recompact his whole frame, and he opens the new verse
by bidding her do so. Compare: 'In this chapter . . . we have Job's
Anatomy, Jobs Sceleton, the ruins to which he was reduced. . . . Job felt
the hand of destruction upon him, and he felt the hand of preservation
too; and it was all one hand: This is God's Method . . . even God's
demolitions are super-edifications, his Anatomies, his dissections
are so many recompactings, so many resurrections; God winds us off the
Skein, that he may weave us up into the whole peece, and he cuts us
out of the whole peece into peeces, that he may make us up into a
whole garment. ' _Sermons_ 80. 43. 127-9. Again, 'It is a divorce
and no super-induction, it is a separating, and no redintegration. '
_Sermons_ 80. 55. 552. With the third line, 'As all the virtuous
powers,' Donne begins a new comparison which is completed in the next
stanza. Therefore the sixth stanza closes rightly in the 1633 text
with a colon. The full stop of the later editions, which Chambers
adopts, is obviously wrong. Grosart has a semicolon, but as he retains
the comma at 'so' and puts a semicolon at the end of the previous
stanza, the sense becomes very obscure.
PAGE =28=. TWICKNAM GARDEN.
l. 1. _surrounded with tears_: i. e. overflowed with tears, the root
idea of 'surrounded'. The Dutch poet translates:
Van suchten hytgedort, van tranen overvloeyt.
Compare: 'The traditional doctrines in the Roman Church, which are
so many, as that they overflow even the water of life, the Scriptures
themselves, and suppresse and surround them. ' _Sermons_ 80. 59. 599.
With this whole poem compare: 'Sir, Because I am in a place and season
where I see every thing bud forth, I must do so too, and vent some of
my meditations to you. . . . The pleasantnesse of the season displeases
me. Everything refreshes, and I wither, and I grow older and not
better, my strength diminishes and my load growes, and being to pass
more and more stormes, I finde that I have not onely cast out all my
ballast, which nature and time gives, Reason and discretion, and so
am as empty and light as Vanity can make me, but I have overfraught
myself with vice, and so am ridd(l)ingly subject to two contrary
wracks, Sinking and Oversetting,' &c. _Letters_ (1651), pp. 78-9 (_To
Sir Henry Goodyere_).
l. 15. _Indure, nor yet leave loving. _ This is at first sight a
strange reading, and I was disposed to think that _1635-69_, which
has the support of several MSS. (none of very high textual authority),
must be right. It is strange to hear the Petrarchian lover (Donne is
probably addressing the Countess of Bedford) speak of 'leaving loving'
as though it were in his power. The reading 'nor leave this garden'
suits what follows: 'Not to be mocked by the garden and yet to linger
here in the vicinity of her I love let me become,' &c.
It is remarkable that _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, and _H40_ omit this half
line. If the same omission was in the MS. from which _1633_ printed,
the present reading might be an editor's emendation. But it is older
than that, for it was the reading of the MS. from which the Dutch poet
Huyghens translated, and he has tried by his rhymes to produce the
effect of the alliteration:
Maer, om my noch te decken
Voor sulcken ongeval, en niet te min de Min
Te voeren in mijn zin,
Komt Min, en laet my hier yet ongevoelicks wezen.
Donne means, I suppose, 'Not to be mocked by the garden, and yet to be
ever the faithful lover. ' Compare _Loves Deitie_, l. 24. 'Love might
make me leave loving. ' The remainder of the verse may have been
suggested by Jonson's
Slow, slow, fresh Fount, keep time with my salt Tears.
_Cynthias Revels_ (1600).
l. 17. I have ventured to adopt 'groane' for 'grow' ('grone' and
'growe' are almost indistinguishable) from _A18_, _N_, _TC_; _D_,
_H49_, _Lec_; and _H40_. It is surely much more in Donne's style than
the colourless and pointless 'growe'. It is, too, in closer touch with
the next line. If 'growing' is all we are to have predicated of the
mandrake, then it should be sufficient for the fountain to 'stand', or
'flow'. The chief difficulty in accepting the MS. reading is that
the mandrake is most often said to shriek, sometimes to howl, not to
groan:
I prethee yet remember
Millions are now in graves, which at last day
Like mandrakes shall rise shreeking.
Webster, _The White Devil_, V. vi. 64.
On the other hand the lover most often groans:
Thy face hath not the power to make love grone.
Shakespeare, _Sonnets_, 131. 6.
Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groane.
Shakespeare, _Sonnets_, 133. 1.
_Ros. _ I would be glad to see it. (_i. e. _ _his heart_)
_Bir. _ I would you heard it groan.
_Love's Labour's Lost. _
In a metaphor where two objects are identified such a transference of
attributes is quite permissible. Moreover, although 'shriek' is the
more common word, 'groan' is used of the mandrake:
Would curses kill, as doth the mandrake's groan,
I would invent as bitter searching terms, &c.
_2 Hen. VI_, III. ii. 310.
In the _Elegie upon . . . Prince Henry_ (p. 269, ll. 53-4) Donne writes:
though such a life wee have
As but so many mandrakes on his grave.
i. e. a life of groans.
PAGE =29=. A VALEDICTION: OF THE BOOKE.
l. 3. _Esloygne. _ Chambers alters to 'eloign', but Donne's is a good
English form.
From worldly care himself he did esloyne.
Spenser, _F. Q. _ I. iv. 20.
The two forms seem to have run parallel from the outset, but that with
's' disappears after the seventeenth century.
PAGE =30=, l. 7. _Her who from Pindar could allure. _ Corinna, who
five times defeated Pindar at Thebes. Aelian, _Var. Hist. _ xiii. 25,
referred to by Professor Norton. He quotes also from Pausanias, ix.
22.
l. 8. _And her, through whose help Lucan is not lame. _ His wife, Polla
Argentaria, who 'assisted her husband in correcting the three first
books of his _Pharsalia_'. Lempriere. The source of this tradition
I cannot discover. The only reference indicated by Schanz is to
Apollinaris Sidonius (Epist. 2, 10, 6, p. 46), who includes her among
a list of women who aided and inspired their husbands: 'saepe versum
. . . complevit . . . Argentaria cum Lucano. '
l. 9. _And her, whose booke (they say) Homer did finde, and name. _ I
owe my understanding of this line to Professor Norton, who refers
to the _Myriobiblon_ or _Bibliotheca_ of Photius, of which the first
edition was published at Augsburg in 1601. There Photius, in an
abstract of a work by Ptolemy Hephaestion of Alexandria, states that
Musaeus' daughter Helena wrote on the war of Troy, and that from her
work Homer took the subject of his poem. But another account refers to
Phantasia of Memphis, the daughter of Nicarchus, whose work Homer
got from a sacred scribe named Pharis at Memphis. This last source
is mentioned by Lempriere, who knows nothing of the other. Probably,
therefore, it is the better known tradition.
ll. 21-2. I have interchanged the old semicolon at the end of l. 21
and the comma at the end of l. 22. I take the first three lines of the
stanza to form an absolute clause: 'This book once written, in
cipher or new-made idiom, we are thereby (in these letters) the only
instruments for Loves clergy--their Missal and Breviary. ' I presume
this is how it is understood by Chambers and the Grolier Club editor,
who place a semicolon at the end of each line. It seems to me that
with so heavy a pause after l. 21 a full stop would be better at the
end of l. 22.
l. 25. _Vandals and Goths inundate us. _ This, the reading of quite a
number of independent MSS. , seems to me greatly preferable to that of
the printed texts:
Vandals and the Goths invade us.
The agreement of the printed texts does not carry much weight, for
any examination of the variants in this poem will reveal that they are
errors due to misunderstanding, e. g. l. 20, 'tome,' 'to me,' 'tomb'
show that each edition has been printed from the last, preserving,
or conjecturally amending, its blunders. If therefore the 1633 editor
mistook 'in? date' for 'invade', that is sufficient. Besides the
metrical harshness of the line there seems to be no reason why the
epithet 'ravenous' should be applied to the Vandals and not extended
to the Goths. The metaphor of inundation is used by Donne in the
sermons: 'The Torrents, and Inundations, which invasive Armies pour
upon Nations, we are fain to call by the name of Law, _The Law of
Armes_. ' _Sermons_ 26. 3. 36. Milton too uses it:
A multitude like which the populous North
Poured never from her frozen loins, to pass
Rhene or the Danaw, where her barbarous sons
Came like a deluge on the South, and spread
Beneath Gibraltar to the Libyan sands.
_Paradise Lost_, i. 351-4.
Probably both Donne and Milton had in mind Isaiah's description of the
Assyrian invasion, where in the Vulgate the word is that used here:
'Propter hoc ecce Dominus adducet super eos aquas fluminis fortes et
multas, regem Assyriorum, et omnem gloriam eius; et ascendet super
omnes rivos eius, et fluet super universas ripas eius; et ibit per
Iudam, _inundans_, et transiens usque ad collum veniet. ' Isaiah viii.
7-8.
Donne uses the word exactly as here in the _Essays in Divinity_: 'To
which foreign sojourning . . . many have assimilated and compared the
Roman Church's straying into France and being impounded in Avignon
seventy years; and so long also lasted the inundation of the Goths in
Italy. ' Ed. Jessop (1855), p. 155.
PAGE =31=, ll. 37-54.
These verses are somewhat difficult but very
characteristic. 'In these our letters, wherein is contained the
whole mystery of love, Lawyers will find by what titles we hold our
mistresses, what dues we are bound to pay as to feudal superiors. They
will find also how, claiming prerogative or privilege they devour
or confiscate the estates for which we have paid due service, by
transferring what we owe to love, to womankind. The service which we
pay expecting love in return, they claim as due to their womanhood,
and deserving of no recompense, no return of love. Even when going
beyond the strict fee they demand subsidies they will forsake a lover
who thinks he has thereby secured them, and will plead "honour" or
"conscience". '
'Statesmen will learn here the secret of their art. Love and
statesmanship both alike depend upon what we might call the art of
"bluffing". Neither will bear too curious examination. The statesman
and the lover must impose for the moment, disguising weakness or
inspiring fear in those who descry it. '
l. 53. _In this thy booke, such will their nothing see. _ After some
hesitation I have adopted the 1635-54 reading in preference to that of
1633 and 1669, 'there something. ' I do so because (1) the MSS. support
it. Their uncertainty as to 'their' and 'there' is of no importance;
(2) 'there' is a weak repetition of 'in this thy book', an emphatic
enough indication of place; (3) 'their nothing' is both the more
difficult reading and the more characteristic of Donne. The art of a
statesman is a 'nothing'. He uses the word in the same way of his own
Paradoxes and Problems when sending some of them to Sir Henry Wotton,
and with the same emphatic stress on the first syllable: 'having
this advantage to escape from being called ill things that they are
nothings' (An unpublished letter, quoted in the _Cambridge History of
Literature_, vol. iv, p. 218). The word was pronounced with a fully
rounded 'no'. Compare _Negative Love_, l. 16.
With the sentiment compare: 'And as our Alchymists can finde their
whole art and worke of Alchymy, not only in Virgil and Ovid, but in
Moses and Solomon; so these men can find such a transmutation
into golde, such a foundation of profit, in extorting a sense for
Purgatory, or other profitable Doctrines, out of any Scripture. '
_Sermons_ 80. 78. 791.
'Un personnage de grande dignite, me voulant approuver par authorite
cette queste de la pierre philosophale ou il est tout plonge,
m'allegua dernierement cinq ou six passages de la Bible, sur
lesquels il disoit s'estre premierement fonde pour la descharge de sa
conscience (car il est de profession ecclesiastique); et, a la verite,
l'invention n'en estoit pas seulement plaisante, mais encore bien
proprement accommodee a la defence de cette belle science. ' Montaigne,
_Apologie de Raimond Sebond_ (_Les Essais_, ii. 12).
PAGE =32=, ll. 59-61. _To take a latitude, &c. _ The latitude of a spot
may always be found by measuring the distance from the zenith of a
star whose altitude, i. e. distance from the equator, is known. The
words 'At their brightest' are only used to point the antithesis with
the 'dark eclipses' used to measure longitude.
ll. 61-3. _but to conclude
Of longitudes, what other way have wee,
But to marke when, and where the dark eclipses bee_.
This method of estimating longitude was, it is said, first discovered
by noting that an eclipse which took place during the battle of Arbela
was observed at Alexandria an hour later. If the time at which an
instantaneous phenomenon such as an eclipse of the moon begins at
Greenwich (or whatever be the first meridian) is known, and the
time of its beginning at whatever place a ship is be then noted, the
difference gives the longitude. The eclipses of the moons in Saturn
have been used for the purpose. The method is not, however, a
practically useful one. Owing to the penumbra it is difficult to
observe the exact moment at which an eclipse of the moon begins. In
certain positions of Saturn her satellites are not visible. Another
method used was to note the lunar distances of certain stars, but the
most common and practical method is by the use of well adjusted and
carefully corrected chronometers giving Greenwich time.
The comparison in the last five lines rests on a purely verbal basis.
'Longitude' means literally 'length', 'latitude', 'breadth'. Therefore
longitude is compared with the duration of love, 'how long this love
will be. ' There is no real appropriateness.
PAGE =33=. LOVES GROWTH.
ll. 7-8. _But if this medicine, &c. _ 'The quintessence then is a
certain matter extracted from all things which Nature has produced,
and from everything which has life corporeally in itself, a matter
most subtly purged of all impurities and mortality, and separated from
all the elements. From this it is evident that the quintessence is,
so to say, a nature, a force, a virtue, and a medicine, once shut
up within things but now free from any domicile and from all outward
incorporation. The same is also the colour, the life, the properties
of things. . . . Now the fact _that this quintessence cures all diseases_
does not arise from temperature, but from an innate property, namely
its great cleanliness and purity, by which, after a wonderful manner,
it alters the body into its own purity, and entirely changes it. . . .
When therefore the quintessence is separated from that which is not
the quintessence, as the soul from its body, and itself is taken into
the body, what infirmity is able to withstand this so noble, pure,
and powerful nature, or to take away our life save death, which being
predestined separates our soul and body, as we teach in our treatise
on Life and Death. But by whatsoever method it takes place, the
quintessence should not be extracted by the mixture or the addition
of incongruous matters; but the element of the quintessence must be
extracted from a separated body, and in like manner by that separated
body which is extracted. ' Paracelsus, _The Fourth Book of the
Archidoxies. Concerning the Quintessence_.
The O. E. D. quotes the first sentence of this passage to illustrate its
first sense of the word--'the "fifth essence" of ancient and mediaeval
philosophy, supposed to be the substance of which the heavenly bodies
were composed, and to be actually latent in all things, the extraction
of it . . . being one of the great objects of Alchemy. ' But Paracelsus
expressly denies 'that the quintessence exists as a fifth element
beyond the other four'; and as he goes on to discuss the different
quintessences of different things (each thing having in its
constitution the four elements, though one may be predominant) it
would seem that he is using the word rather in the second sense given
in the O. E. D. --'The most essential part of any substance, extracted by
natural or artificial processes. ' Probably the two meanings ran into
each other. There was a real and an ideal quintessence of things.
A specific sense given to the word in older Chemistry is a definite
alcoholic tincture obtained by digestion at a gentle heat. This is
probably the 'soule of simples' (p. 186, l. 26), unless that also is
the quintessence in Paracelsus's full sense of the word.
ll. 17-20. _As, in the firmament,
Starres by the Sunne are not inlarg'd, but showne.
Gentle love deeds, as blossomes on a bough,
From loves awakened root do bud out now_.
_P_ reads here:
As in the firmament
Starres by the sunne are not enlarg'd but showne
Greater; Loves deeds, &c.
This certainly makes the verse clearer. As it stands l. 18 is
rather an enigma. The stars are not revealed by the sun, but hidden.
Grosart's note is equally enigmatical: 'a curious phrase meaning that
the stars that show in daylight are not enlarged, but showne to be
brighter than their invisible neighbours, and to be comparatively
brighter than they appear to be when all are seen together in
the darkness of the night. ' _P_ is so carelessly written that an
occasional good reading may be an old one because there is no evidence
of any editing. The copyist seems to have written on without paying
any attention to the sense of what he set down. Still, 'Gentle' is the
reading of all the other MSS. and editions, and I do not think it is
necessary or desirable to change it. But _P_'s emendation shows what
Donne meant. By 'showne' he does not mean 'revealed'--an adjectival
predicate 'larger' or 'greater' must be supplied from the verb
'enlarg'd'. 'The stars at sunrise are not really made larger, but they
are made to seem larger. ' It is a characteristically elliptical and
careless wording of a characteristically acute and vivid image. Mr.
Wells has used the same phenomenon with effect:
'He peered upwards. "Look! " he said.
"What? " I asked.
"In the sky. Already. On the blackness--a little touch of blue.
See! _The stars seem larger. _ And the little ones and all those dim
nebulosities we saw in empty space--they are hidden. "
Swiftly, steadily the day approached us. ' _The first Men in the Moon. _
(Chap. vii. Sunrise on the Moon. )
A similar phenomenon is noted by Donne: 'A Torch in a misty night,
seemeth greater then in a clear. ' _Sermons_ 50. 36. 326.
PAGE =34=. LOVES EXCHANGE.
l. 11. _A non obstante_: a privilege, a waiving of any law in favour
of an individual: 'Who shall give any other interpretation, any
modification, any _Non obstante_ upon his law in my behalf, when he
comes to judge me according to that law which himself hath made. '
_Sermons_ 50. 12. 97. 'A _Non obstante_ and priviledge to doe a sinne
before hand. ' Ibid. 50. 35. 313.
l. 14. _minion_: i. e. 'one specially favoured or beloved; a dearest
friend' &c. O. E. D. Not used in a contemptuous sense. '_John_ the
Minion of _Christ_ upon earth, and survivor of the Apostles, (whose
books rather seem fallen from Heaven, and writ with the hand which
ingraved the stone Tables, then a mans work)' &c. _Sermons_ 50. 33.
309.
ll. 29 f. Dryden borrows:
Great God of Love, why hast thou made
A Face that can all Hearts command,
That all Religions can invade,
And change the Laws of ev'ry Land?
_A Song to a fair Young Lady Going out of Town in
the Spring. _
PAGE =36=. CONFINED LOVE.
Compare with this the poem _Loves Freedome_ in Beaumont's _Poems_
(1652), sig. E. 6:
Why should man be only ty'd
To a foolish Female thing,
When all Creatures else beside,
Birds and Beasts, change every Spring?
Who would then to one be bound,
When so many may be found?
The third verse runs:
Would you think him wise that now
Still one sort of meat doth eat,
When both Sea and Land allow
Sundry sorts of other meat?
Who would then, &c.
Poems on such themes were doubtless exercises of wit at which more
than one author tried his hand in rivalry with his fellows.
l. 16. _And not to seeke new lands, or not to deale withall. _ I have,
after some consideration, adhered to the _1633_ reading. Chambers has
adopted that of the later editions, taking the line to mean that a man
builds ships in order to seek new lands and to deal or trade with all
lands. But ships cannot trade with inland countries. The form 'withal'
is the regular one for 'with' when it follows the noun it governs.
'We build ships not to let them lie in harbours but to seek new lands
with, and to trade with. ' The MS. evidence is not of much assistance,
because it is not clear in all cases what 'w^{th} all' stands for. The
words were sometimes separated even when the simple preposition
was intended. 'People, such as I have dealt with all in their
marchaundyse. ' Berners' _Froissart_, I. cclxvii. 395 (O. E. D. ). But
_D_, _H49_, _Lec_ read 'w^{th} All', supporting Chambers.
For the sentiment compare:
A stately builded ship well rig'd and tall
The Ocean maketh more majesticall:
Why vowest thou to live in Sestos here,
Who on Loves seas more glorious would appeare.
Marlowe, _Hero and Leander_: _First Sestiad_ 219-222.
For 'deale withall' compare:
For ye have much adoe to deale withal.
Spenser's _Faerie Queene_, VI. i. 10.
PAGE =37=. THE DREAME.
ll. 1-10. _Deare love, for nothing lesse then thee
Would I have broke this happy dreame,
It was a theame
For reason, much too strong for phantasie,
Therefore thou wak'dst me wisely; yet
My Dreame thou brok'st not, but continued'st it,
Thou art so truth, that thoughts of thee suffice,
To make dreames truths; and fables histories;
Enter these armes, &c. _
I have left the punctuation of the first stanza unaltered. The sense
is clear and any modernization alters the rhetoric. Chambers places a
semicolon after 'dreame' and a full stop after 'phantasie'. The
last is certainly wrong, for the statement 'It was a theme', &c. is
connected not with what precedes, but with what follows, 'Therefore
thou waked'st me wisely. ' In like manner Chambers's full stop
after 'but continued'st it' breaks the close connexion with the two
following lines, which are really an adverbial clause of explanation
or reason.
_Ossa_, bones, We know in the naturall and ordinary acceptation, what
they are; They are these Beames, and Timbers, and Rafters of these
Tabernacles, these Temples of the Holy Ghost, these bodies of ours. '
_Sermons_ 80. 51. 516.
PAGE =27=, ll. 31-2. _Till my returne, repaire
And recompact my scattered body so. _
This verse is rightly printed in the 1633 edition. In that of 1635 it
went wrong; and the errors were transmitted through all the subsequent
editions, and have been retained by Grosart and Chambers, but
corrected in the Grolier Club edition. The full stop after 'so' was
changed to a comma on the natural but mistaken assumption that 'so'
pointed forward to the immediately following 'as'. In fact, 'so'
refers _back_ to the preceding verse. Donne has described how from his
anatomy or skeleton, i. e. his name scratched in the glass, the lady
may repair and recompact his whole frame, and he opens the new verse
by bidding her do so. Compare: 'In this chapter . . . we have Job's
Anatomy, Jobs Sceleton, the ruins to which he was reduced. . . . Job felt
the hand of destruction upon him, and he felt the hand of preservation
too; and it was all one hand: This is God's Method . . . even God's
demolitions are super-edifications, his Anatomies, his dissections
are so many recompactings, so many resurrections; God winds us off the
Skein, that he may weave us up into the whole peece, and he cuts us
out of the whole peece into peeces, that he may make us up into a
whole garment. ' _Sermons_ 80. 43. 127-9. Again, 'It is a divorce
and no super-induction, it is a separating, and no redintegration. '
_Sermons_ 80. 55. 552. With the third line, 'As all the virtuous
powers,' Donne begins a new comparison which is completed in the next
stanza. Therefore the sixth stanza closes rightly in the 1633 text
with a colon. The full stop of the later editions, which Chambers
adopts, is obviously wrong. Grosart has a semicolon, but as he retains
the comma at 'so' and puts a semicolon at the end of the previous
stanza, the sense becomes very obscure.
PAGE =28=. TWICKNAM GARDEN.
l. 1. _surrounded with tears_: i. e. overflowed with tears, the root
idea of 'surrounded'. The Dutch poet translates:
Van suchten hytgedort, van tranen overvloeyt.
Compare: 'The traditional doctrines in the Roman Church, which are
so many, as that they overflow even the water of life, the Scriptures
themselves, and suppresse and surround them. ' _Sermons_ 80. 59. 599.
With this whole poem compare: 'Sir, Because I am in a place and season
where I see every thing bud forth, I must do so too, and vent some of
my meditations to you. . . . The pleasantnesse of the season displeases
me. Everything refreshes, and I wither, and I grow older and not
better, my strength diminishes and my load growes, and being to pass
more and more stormes, I finde that I have not onely cast out all my
ballast, which nature and time gives, Reason and discretion, and so
am as empty and light as Vanity can make me, but I have overfraught
myself with vice, and so am ridd(l)ingly subject to two contrary
wracks, Sinking and Oversetting,' &c. _Letters_ (1651), pp. 78-9 (_To
Sir Henry Goodyere_).
l. 15. _Indure, nor yet leave loving. _ This is at first sight a
strange reading, and I was disposed to think that _1635-69_, which
has the support of several MSS. (none of very high textual authority),
must be right. It is strange to hear the Petrarchian lover (Donne is
probably addressing the Countess of Bedford) speak of 'leaving loving'
as though it were in his power. The reading 'nor leave this garden'
suits what follows: 'Not to be mocked by the garden and yet to linger
here in the vicinity of her I love let me become,' &c.
It is remarkable that _D_, _H49_, _Lec_, and _H40_ omit this half
line. If the same omission was in the MS. from which _1633_ printed,
the present reading might be an editor's emendation. But it is older
than that, for it was the reading of the MS. from which the Dutch poet
Huyghens translated, and he has tried by his rhymes to produce the
effect of the alliteration:
Maer, om my noch te decken
Voor sulcken ongeval, en niet te min de Min
Te voeren in mijn zin,
Komt Min, en laet my hier yet ongevoelicks wezen.
Donne means, I suppose, 'Not to be mocked by the garden, and yet to be
ever the faithful lover. ' Compare _Loves Deitie_, l. 24. 'Love might
make me leave loving. ' The remainder of the verse may have been
suggested by Jonson's
Slow, slow, fresh Fount, keep time with my salt Tears.
_Cynthias Revels_ (1600).
l. 17. I have ventured to adopt 'groane' for 'grow' ('grone' and
'growe' are almost indistinguishable) from _A18_, _N_, _TC_; _D_,
_H49_, _Lec_; and _H40_. It is surely much more in Donne's style than
the colourless and pointless 'growe'. It is, too, in closer touch with
the next line. If 'growing' is all we are to have predicated of the
mandrake, then it should be sufficient for the fountain to 'stand', or
'flow'. The chief difficulty in accepting the MS. reading is that
the mandrake is most often said to shriek, sometimes to howl, not to
groan:
I prethee yet remember
Millions are now in graves, which at last day
Like mandrakes shall rise shreeking.
Webster, _The White Devil_, V. vi. 64.
On the other hand the lover most often groans:
Thy face hath not the power to make love grone.
Shakespeare, _Sonnets_, 131. 6.
Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groane.
Shakespeare, _Sonnets_, 133. 1.
_Ros. _ I would be glad to see it. (_i. e. _ _his heart_)
_Bir. _ I would you heard it groan.
_Love's Labour's Lost. _
In a metaphor where two objects are identified such a transference of
attributes is quite permissible. Moreover, although 'shriek' is the
more common word, 'groan' is used of the mandrake:
Would curses kill, as doth the mandrake's groan,
I would invent as bitter searching terms, &c.
_2 Hen. VI_, III. ii. 310.
In the _Elegie upon . . . Prince Henry_ (p. 269, ll. 53-4) Donne writes:
though such a life wee have
As but so many mandrakes on his grave.
i. e. a life of groans.
PAGE =29=. A VALEDICTION: OF THE BOOKE.
l. 3. _Esloygne. _ Chambers alters to 'eloign', but Donne's is a good
English form.
From worldly care himself he did esloyne.
Spenser, _F. Q. _ I. iv. 20.
The two forms seem to have run parallel from the outset, but that with
's' disappears after the seventeenth century.
PAGE =30=, l. 7. _Her who from Pindar could allure. _ Corinna, who
five times defeated Pindar at Thebes. Aelian, _Var. Hist. _ xiii. 25,
referred to by Professor Norton. He quotes also from Pausanias, ix.
22.
l. 8. _And her, through whose help Lucan is not lame. _ His wife, Polla
Argentaria, who 'assisted her husband in correcting the three first
books of his _Pharsalia_'. Lempriere. The source of this tradition
I cannot discover. The only reference indicated by Schanz is to
Apollinaris Sidonius (Epist. 2, 10, 6, p. 46), who includes her among
a list of women who aided and inspired their husbands: 'saepe versum
. . . complevit . . . Argentaria cum Lucano. '
l. 9. _And her, whose booke (they say) Homer did finde, and name. _ I
owe my understanding of this line to Professor Norton, who refers
to the _Myriobiblon_ or _Bibliotheca_ of Photius, of which the first
edition was published at Augsburg in 1601. There Photius, in an
abstract of a work by Ptolemy Hephaestion of Alexandria, states that
Musaeus' daughter Helena wrote on the war of Troy, and that from her
work Homer took the subject of his poem. But another account refers to
Phantasia of Memphis, the daughter of Nicarchus, whose work Homer
got from a sacred scribe named Pharis at Memphis. This last source
is mentioned by Lempriere, who knows nothing of the other. Probably,
therefore, it is the better known tradition.
ll. 21-2. I have interchanged the old semicolon at the end of l. 21
and the comma at the end of l. 22. I take the first three lines of the
stanza to form an absolute clause: 'This book once written, in
cipher or new-made idiom, we are thereby (in these letters) the only
instruments for Loves clergy--their Missal and Breviary. ' I presume
this is how it is understood by Chambers and the Grolier Club editor,
who place a semicolon at the end of each line. It seems to me that
with so heavy a pause after l. 21 a full stop would be better at the
end of l. 22.
l. 25. _Vandals and Goths inundate us. _ This, the reading of quite a
number of independent MSS. , seems to me greatly preferable to that of
the printed texts:
Vandals and the Goths invade us.
The agreement of the printed texts does not carry much weight, for
any examination of the variants in this poem will reveal that they are
errors due to misunderstanding, e. g. l. 20, 'tome,' 'to me,' 'tomb'
show that each edition has been printed from the last, preserving,
or conjecturally amending, its blunders. If therefore the 1633 editor
mistook 'in? date' for 'invade', that is sufficient. Besides the
metrical harshness of the line there seems to be no reason why the
epithet 'ravenous' should be applied to the Vandals and not extended
to the Goths. The metaphor of inundation is used by Donne in the
sermons: 'The Torrents, and Inundations, which invasive Armies pour
upon Nations, we are fain to call by the name of Law, _The Law of
Armes_. ' _Sermons_ 26. 3. 36. Milton too uses it:
A multitude like which the populous North
Poured never from her frozen loins, to pass
Rhene or the Danaw, where her barbarous sons
Came like a deluge on the South, and spread
Beneath Gibraltar to the Libyan sands.
_Paradise Lost_, i. 351-4.
Probably both Donne and Milton had in mind Isaiah's description of the
Assyrian invasion, where in the Vulgate the word is that used here:
'Propter hoc ecce Dominus adducet super eos aquas fluminis fortes et
multas, regem Assyriorum, et omnem gloriam eius; et ascendet super
omnes rivos eius, et fluet super universas ripas eius; et ibit per
Iudam, _inundans_, et transiens usque ad collum veniet. ' Isaiah viii.
7-8.
Donne uses the word exactly as here in the _Essays in Divinity_: 'To
which foreign sojourning . . . many have assimilated and compared the
Roman Church's straying into France and being impounded in Avignon
seventy years; and so long also lasted the inundation of the Goths in
Italy. ' Ed. Jessop (1855), p. 155.
PAGE =31=, ll. 37-54.
These verses are somewhat difficult but very
characteristic. 'In these our letters, wherein is contained the
whole mystery of love, Lawyers will find by what titles we hold our
mistresses, what dues we are bound to pay as to feudal superiors. They
will find also how, claiming prerogative or privilege they devour
or confiscate the estates for which we have paid due service, by
transferring what we owe to love, to womankind. The service which we
pay expecting love in return, they claim as due to their womanhood,
and deserving of no recompense, no return of love. Even when going
beyond the strict fee they demand subsidies they will forsake a lover
who thinks he has thereby secured them, and will plead "honour" or
"conscience". '
'Statesmen will learn here the secret of their art. Love and
statesmanship both alike depend upon what we might call the art of
"bluffing". Neither will bear too curious examination. The statesman
and the lover must impose for the moment, disguising weakness or
inspiring fear in those who descry it. '
l. 53. _In this thy booke, such will their nothing see. _ After some
hesitation I have adopted the 1635-54 reading in preference to that of
1633 and 1669, 'there something. ' I do so because (1) the MSS. support
it. Their uncertainty as to 'their' and 'there' is of no importance;
(2) 'there' is a weak repetition of 'in this thy book', an emphatic
enough indication of place; (3) 'their nothing' is both the more
difficult reading and the more characteristic of Donne. The art of a
statesman is a 'nothing'. He uses the word in the same way of his own
Paradoxes and Problems when sending some of them to Sir Henry Wotton,
and with the same emphatic stress on the first syllable: 'having
this advantage to escape from being called ill things that they are
nothings' (An unpublished letter, quoted in the _Cambridge History of
Literature_, vol. iv, p. 218). The word was pronounced with a fully
rounded 'no'. Compare _Negative Love_, l. 16.
With the sentiment compare: 'And as our Alchymists can finde their
whole art and worke of Alchymy, not only in Virgil and Ovid, but in
Moses and Solomon; so these men can find such a transmutation
into golde, such a foundation of profit, in extorting a sense for
Purgatory, or other profitable Doctrines, out of any Scripture. '
_Sermons_ 80. 78. 791.
'Un personnage de grande dignite, me voulant approuver par authorite
cette queste de la pierre philosophale ou il est tout plonge,
m'allegua dernierement cinq ou six passages de la Bible, sur
lesquels il disoit s'estre premierement fonde pour la descharge de sa
conscience (car il est de profession ecclesiastique); et, a la verite,
l'invention n'en estoit pas seulement plaisante, mais encore bien
proprement accommodee a la defence de cette belle science. ' Montaigne,
_Apologie de Raimond Sebond_ (_Les Essais_, ii. 12).
PAGE =32=, ll. 59-61. _To take a latitude, &c. _ The latitude of a spot
may always be found by measuring the distance from the zenith of a
star whose altitude, i. e. distance from the equator, is known. The
words 'At their brightest' are only used to point the antithesis with
the 'dark eclipses' used to measure longitude.
ll. 61-3. _but to conclude
Of longitudes, what other way have wee,
But to marke when, and where the dark eclipses bee_.
This method of estimating longitude was, it is said, first discovered
by noting that an eclipse which took place during the battle of Arbela
was observed at Alexandria an hour later. If the time at which an
instantaneous phenomenon such as an eclipse of the moon begins at
Greenwich (or whatever be the first meridian) is known, and the
time of its beginning at whatever place a ship is be then noted, the
difference gives the longitude. The eclipses of the moons in Saturn
have been used for the purpose. The method is not, however, a
practically useful one. Owing to the penumbra it is difficult to
observe the exact moment at which an eclipse of the moon begins. In
certain positions of Saturn her satellites are not visible. Another
method used was to note the lunar distances of certain stars, but the
most common and practical method is by the use of well adjusted and
carefully corrected chronometers giving Greenwich time.
The comparison in the last five lines rests on a purely verbal basis.
'Longitude' means literally 'length', 'latitude', 'breadth'. Therefore
longitude is compared with the duration of love, 'how long this love
will be. ' There is no real appropriateness.
PAGE =33=. LOVES GROWTH.
ll. 7-8. _But if this medicine, &c. _ 'The quintessence then is a
certain matter extracted from all things which Nature has produced,
and from everything which has life corporeally in itself, a matter
most subtly purged of all impurities and mortality, and separated from
all the elements. From this it is evident that the quintessence is,
so to say, a nature, a force, a virtue, and a medicine, once shut
up within things but now free from any domicile and from all outward
incorporation. The same is also the colour, the life, the properties
of things. . . . Now the fact _that this quintessence cures all diseases_
does not arise from temperature, but from an innate property, namely
its great cleanliness and purity, by which, after a wonderful manner,
it alters the body into its own purity, and entirely changes it. . . .
When therefore the quintessence is separated from that which is not
the quintessence, as the soul from its body, and itself is taken into
the body, what infirmity is able to withstand this so noble, pure,
and powerful nature, or to take away our life save death, which being
predestined separates our soul and body, as we teach in our treatise
on Life and Death. But by whatsoever method it takes place, the
quintessence should not be extracted by the mixture or the addition
of incongruous matters; but the element of the quintessence must be
extracted from a separated body, and in like manner by that separated
body which is extracted. ' Paracelsus, _The Fourth Book of the
Archidoxies. Concerning the Quintessence_.
The O. E. D. quotes the first sentence of this passage to illustrate its
first sense of the word--'the "fifth essence" of ancient and mediaeval
philosophy, supposed to be the substance of which the heavenly bodies
were composed, and to be actually latent in all things, the extraction
of it . . . being one of the great objects of Alchemy. ' But Paracelsus
expressly denies 'that the quintessence exists as a fifth element
beyond the other four'; and as he goes on to discuss the different
quintessences of different things (each thing having in its
constitution the four elements, though one may be predominant) it
would seem that he is using the word rather in the second sense given
in the O. E. D. --'The most essential part of any substance, extracted by
natural or artificial processes. ' Probably the two meanings ran into
each other. There was a real and an ideal quintessence of things.
A specific sense given to the word in older Chemistry is a definite
alcoholic tincture obtained by digestion at a gentle heat. This is
probably the 'soule of simples' (p. 186, l. 26), unless that also is
the quintessence in Paracelsus's full sense of the word.
ll. 17-20. _As, in the firmament,
Starres by the Sunne are not inlarg'd, but showne.
Gentle love deeds, as blossomes on a bough,
From loves awakened root do bud out now_.
_P_ reads here:
As in the firmament
Starres by the sunne are not enlarg'd but showne
Greater; Loves deeds, &c.
This certainly makes the verse clearer. As it stands l. 18 is
rather an enigma. The stars are not revealed by the sun, but hidden.
Grosart's note is equally enigmatical: 'a curious phrase meaning that
the stars that show in daylight are not enlarged, but showne to be
brighter than their invisible neighbours, and to be comparatively
brighter than they appear to be when all are seen together in
the darkness of the night. ' _P_ is so carelessly written that an
occasional good reading may be an old one because there is no evidence
of any editing. The copyist seems to have written on without paying
any attention to the sense of what he set down. Still, 'Gentle' is the
reading of all the other MSS. and editions, and I do not think it is
necessary or desirable to change it. But _P_'s emendation shows what
Donne meant. By 'showne' he does not mean 'revealed'--an adjectival
predicate 'larger' or 'greater' must be supplied from the verb
'enlarg'd'. 'The stars at sunrise are not really made larger, but they
are made to seem larger. ' It is a characteristically elliptical and
careless wording of a characteristically acute and vivid image. Mr.
Wells has used the same phenomenon with effect:
'He peered upwards. "Look! " he said.
"What? " I asked.
"In the sky. Already. On the blackness--a little touch of blue.
See! _The stars seem larger. _ And the little ones and all those dim
nebulosities we saw in empty space--they are hidden. "
Swiftly, steadily the day approached us. ' _The first Men in the Moon. _
(Chap. vii. Sunrise on the Moon. )
A similar phenomenon is noted by Donne: 'A Torch in a misty night,
seemeth greater then in a clear. ' _Sermons_ 50. 36. 326.
PAGE =34=. LOVES EXCHANGE.
l. 11. _A non obstante_: a privilege, a waiving of any law in favour
of an individual: 'Who shall give any other interpretation, any
modification, any _Non obstante_ upon his law in my behalf, when he
comes to judge me according to that law which himself hath made. '
_Sermons_ 50. 12. 97. 'A _Non obstante_ and priviledge to doe a sinne
before hand. ' Ibid. 50. 35. 313.
l. 14. _minion_: i. e. 'one specially favoured or beloved; a dearest
friend' &c. O. E. D. Not used in a contemptuous sense. '_John_ the
Minion of _Christ_ upon earth, and survivor of the Apostles, (whose
books rather seem fallen from Heaven, and writ with the hand which
ingraved the stone Tables, then a mans work)' &c. _Sermons_ 50. 33.
309.
ll. 29 f. Dryden borrows:
Great God of Love, why hast thou made
A Face that can all Hearts command,
That all Religions can invade,
And change the Laws of ev'ry Land?
_A Song to a fair Young Lady Going out of Town in
the Spring. _
PAGE =36=. CONFINED LOVE.
Compare with this the poem _Loves Freedome_ in Beaumont's _Poems_
(1652), sig. E. 6:
Why should man be only ty'd
To a foolish Female thing,
When all Creatures else beside,
Birds and Beasts, change every Spring?
Who would then to one be bound,
When so many may be found?
The third verse runs:
Would you think him wise that now
Still one sort of meat doth eat,
When both Sea and Land allow
Sundry sorts of other meat?
Who would then, &c.
Poems on such themes were doubtless exercises of wit at which more
than one author tried his hand in rivalry with his fellows.
l. 16. _And not to seeke new lands, or not to deale withall. _ I have,
after some consideration, adhered to the _1633_ reading. Chambers has
adopted that of the later editions, taking the line to mean that a man
builds ships in order to seek new lands and to deal or trade with all
lands. But ships cannot trade with inland countries. The form 'withal'
is the regular one for 'with' when it follows the noun it governs.
'We build ships not to let them lie in harbours but to seek new lands
with, and to trade with. ' The MS. evidence is not of much assistance,
because it is not clear in all cases what 'w^{th} all' stands for. The
words were sometimes separated even when the simple preposition
was intended. 'People, such as I have dealt with all in their
marchaundyse. ' Berners' _Froissart_, I. cclxvii. 395 (O. E. D. ). But
_D_, _H49_, _Lec_ read 'w^{th} All', supporting Chambers.
For the sentiment compare:
A stately builded ship well rig'd and tall
The Ocean maketh more majesticall:
Why vowest thou to live in Sestos here,
Who on Loves seas more glorious would appeare.
Marlowe, _Hero and Leander_: _First Sestiad_ 219-222.
For 'deale withall' compare:
For ye have much adoe to deale withal.
Spenser's _Faerie Queene_, VI. i. 10.
PAGE =37=. THE DREAME.
ll. 1-10. _Deare love, for nothing lesse then thee
Would I have broke this happy dreame,
It was a theame
For reason, much too strong for phantasie,
Therefore thou wak'dst me wisely; yet
My Dreame thou brok'st not, but continued'st it,
Thou art so truth, that thoughts of thee suffice,
To make dreames truths; and fables histories;
Enter these armes, &c. _
I have left the punctuation of the first stanza unaltered. The sense
is clear and any modernization alters the rhetoric. Chambers places a
semicolon after 'dreame' and a full stop after 'phantasie'. The
last is certainly wrong, for the statement 'It was a theme', &c. is
connected not with what precedes, but with what follows, 'Therefore
thou waked'st me wisely. ' In like manner Chambers's full stop
after 'but continued'st it' breaks the close connexion with the two
following lines, which are really an adverbial clause of explanation
or reason.
