are pipers of Petrarch's woes, sighing in the strain of Ronsard or more often of Desportes Shakespeare, indeed, in his great sequence, and Drayton in at any rate one sonnet, sounded a deeper note, revealed a fuller sense of the complexities and contradictions of passionate devotion. (But Donne's treatment of love is entirely unconventional except when he chooses to dally half ironically with the convention of Petrarchian adoration. His songs are the expression in unconventional, witty language of all the moods of a lover that experience and imagination have taught him to understand-sensuality aerated by a brilliant wit; fascination and scornful anger inextricably blended :

When by thy scorn, O murdress, I am dead
And that thou think'st thee free

From all solicitations from me,

Then shall my ghost come to thy bed;

the passionate joy of mutual and contented love :

All other things to their destruction draw,
Only our love hath no decay;

This no to-morrow hath nor yesterday,

Running it never runs from us away,

But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day;

the sorrow of parting which is the shadow of such joy; the gentler pathos of temporary separation in married life:

Let not thy divining heart.
Forethink me any ill,
Destiny may take thy part,
And may thy fears fulfil;

But think that we

Are but turn'd aside to sleep;
They who one another keep

Alive ne'er parted be;

the mystical heights and the mystical depths of love:

Study me then you who shall lovers be

At the next world, that is, at the next Spring:
For I am every dead thing

In whom love wrought new Alchemy.

6

If Donne had expressed this wide range of intense feeling as perfectly as he has done at times poignantly and startlingly; if he had given to his poems the same impression of entire artistic sincerity that Shakespeare conveys in the greater of his sonnets and Drayton once achieved; (if to his many other gifts had been ⚫ added a deeper and more controlling sense of beauty, he would have been, as he nearly is, the greatest of love poets.) But there is a second quality of his poetry which made it the fashion of an age, but has been inimical to its general acceptance ever since, and 2 that is its metaphysical wit. 'He affects the metaphysics', says Dryden, not only in his satires but in his amorous verses where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy when he should engage their hearts and entertain them with the softnesses of love.' 'Amorous verses', 'the fair sex', and 'the softnesses of love' are the vulgarities of a less poetic and passionate age than Donne's, but metaphysics he does affect. But a metaphysical strand, concetti metafisici ed ideali, had run through the mediaeval lovepoetry of which the Elizabethan sonnets are a descendant. It had attained its fullest development in the poems of Dante and his school, had been subordinated to rhetoric and subtleties of expression rather than thought in Petrarch, and had lost itself in the pseudo-metaphysical extravagances of Tebaldeo, Cariteo, and Serafino. Donne was no conscious reviver of the metaphysics of Dante, but to the game of elaborating fantastic conceits and hyperboles which was the fashion throughout

Europe, he brought not only a full-blooded temperament and acute mind, but a vast and growing store of the same scholastic learning, the same Catholic theology, as controlled Dante's thought, jostling already with the new learning of Copernicus and Paracelsus. The result is startling and disconcerting, the comparison of parted lovers to the legs of a pair of compasses, the deification of his mistress by the discovery that she is only to be defined by negatives or that she can read the thoughts of his heart, a thing 'beyond an angel's art'; (and a thousand other subleties of quintessences and nothingness, the mixture of souls and the significance of numbers, to say nothing of the aerial bodies of angels, the phoenix and the mandrake's root, Alchemy and Astrology, legal contracts and non obstantes, 'late schoolboys and sour prentices', 'the king's real and his stamped face'. But the effect aimed at and secured is not entirely fantastic and erudite. The motive inspiring Donne's images is in part the same as that which led Shakespeare from the picturesque, natural and mythological, images of A Midsummer-Night's Dream and The Merchant of Venice to the homely but startling phrases and metaphors of Hamlet and Macbeth, the 'blanket of the dark, the fat weed

That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,

'the rank sweat of an enseamed bed'. It is the sa

same desire for

vivid and dramatic expression. The great master at a later period of dramatic as well as erudite pulpit oratory coins in his poems many a startling, jarring, arresting phrase:

Look (1)
For God's sake hold your tongue and let me live: Per

Who ever comes to shroud me do not harm

Nor question much

That subtle wreath of hair, which crowns my arm :

I taught my silks their rustling to forbear,

Even my opprest shoes dumb and silent were.

I long to talk with some old lover's ghost
Who died before the God of love was born;

Twice or thrice had I loved thee
Before I knew thy face or name,
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame,
Angels affect us oft and worshipped be;
And whilst our souls negotiate there
We like sepulchral statues lay;
All day the same our postures were
And we said nothing all the day.

My face and brest of haircloth, and my head
With care's harsh, sudden hoariness o'er-spread.

These vivid, simple, realistic touches are too quickly merged in
learned and fantastic elaborations, and the final effect of every
poem of Donne's is a bizarre and blended one; but if the
greatest poetry rises clear of the bizarre, the fantastic, yet very
great poetry may be bizarre if it be the expression of a strangely
blended temperament, an intense emotion, a vivid imagination.
What is true of Donne's imagery is true of the other
disconcerting element in his poetry, its harsh and rugged verse.
It is an outcome of the same double motive, the desire to startle
and the desire to approximate poetic to direct, unconventional,
colloquial speech. Poetry is always a balance, sometimes a
compromise, between what has to be said and the prescribed
pattern to which the saying of it is adjusted. In poetry such as
Spenser's, the musical flow, the melody and harmony of line and
stanza, is dominant, and the meaning is adjusted to it at the not
infrequent cost of diffuseness—if a delightful diffuseness—and even
some weakness of phrasing logically and rhetorically considered.
In Shakespeare's tragedies the thought and feeling tend to break
through the prescribed pattern till blank verse becomes almost
rhythmical prose, the rapid overflow of the lines admitting hardly

the semblance of pause. This is the kind of effect (Donne is

always aiming at, alike in his satires and lyrics, bending and cracking the metrical pattern to the rhetoric of direct and vehement utterance. The result is often, and to eighteenth-century ears attuned to the clear and defined, if limited, harmony of Waller and Dryden and Pope was, rugged and harsh. But here again, to those who have ears that care to hear, the effect is not finally inharmonious. Donne's verse has a powerful and haunting harmony of its own. For Donne is not simply, no poet could be, willing to force his accent, to strain and crack a prescribed pattern; he is striving to find a rhythm that will express the passionate fullness of his inind, the fluxes and refluxes of his moods; and the felicities of verse are as frequent and startling as those of phrasing.) He is one of the first masters, perhaps the first, of the elaborate stanza or paragraph in which the discords of individual lines or phrases are resolved in the complex and rhetorically effective harmony of the whole group of lines:

If yet I have not all thy love,
Deare, I shall never have it all,

I cannot breathe one other sigh, to move,
Nor can entreat one other tear to fall,

And all my treasure, which should purchase thee,
Sighs, tears, and oaths, and letters I have spent.

Yet no more can be due to me,

Than at the bargain made was meant,

Af then thy gift of love was partial,

That some to me, some shuld to others fall,
Deare, I shall never have thee all.

But I am none; nor will my sunne renew.
You lovers for whose sake the lesser sunne
At this time to the Goat is run

To fetch new lust and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all;