Metaphysical
Poetry.

Donne is a 'metaphysical' poet. The term was perhaps first applied by Dryden, from whom Johnson borrowed it: 'He' (Donne) 'affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with the speculations of philosophy, where he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softness of love.' Essay on Satire. 'The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour.' Johnson, Life of Cowley. The parade of learning, and a philosophical or abstract treatment of love had been a strain in mediaeval poetry from the outset, manifesting itself most fully in the Tuscan poets of the 'dolce stil nuovo', but never altogether absent from mediaeval love-poetry. The Italian poet Testi (1593-1646), describing his choice of classical in preference to Italian models (he is thinking specially of Marino), says: 'poichÈ lasciando quei concetti metafisici ed ideali di cui sono piene le poesie italiane, mi sono provato di spiegare cose piÙ domestiche, e di maneggiarle con effetti piÙ famigliari a imitazione d'Ovidio, di Tibullo, di Properzio, e degli altri migliori.' Donne's love-poetry is often classical in spirit; his conceits are the 'concetti metafisici' of mediaeval poetry given a character due to his own individuality and the scientific interests of his age.

A metaphysical poet in the full sense of the word is a poet who finds his inspiration in learning; not in the world as his own and common sense reveal it, but in the world as science and philosophy report of it. The two greatest metaphysical poets of Europe are Lucretius and Dante. What the philosophy of Epicurus was to Lucretius, that of Thomas Aquinas was to Dante. Their poetry is the product of their learning, transfigured by the imagination, and it is not to be understood without some study of their thought and knowledge.

Donne is not a metaphysical poet of the compass of Lucretius and Dante. He sets forth in his poetry no ordered system of the universe. The ordered system which Dante had set forth was breaking in pieces while Donne lived, under the criticism of Copernicus, Galileo, and others, and no poet was so conscious as Donne of the effect on the imagination of that disintegration. In the two Anniversaries mystical religion is made an escape from scientific scepticism. Moreover, Donne's use of metaphysics is often frivolous and flippant, at best simply poetical. But he is a learned poet, and he is a philosophical poet, and without some attention to the philosophy and science underlying his conceits and his graver thought it is impossible to understand or appreciate either aright. Failure to do so has led occasionally to the corruption of his text.

Donne's
Learning.

Walton tells us that Donne's learning, in his eleventh year when he went to Oxford, 'made one then give this censure of him, "That this age had brought forth another Picus Mirandula; of whom story says that he was rather born than made wise by study."' 'In the most unsettled days of his youth', the same authority reports, 'his bed was not able to detain him beyond the hour of four in the morning; and it was no common business that drew him out of his chamber till past ten; all which time was employed in study; though he took great liberty after it.' 'He left the resultances of 1,400 authors, most of them abridged and analysed with his own hand.' The lists of authors prefixed to his prose treatises and the allusions and definite references in the sermons corroborate Walton's statement regarding the range of Donne's theological and controversial reading.

Classical
Literature.

Confining attention here to Donne's poetry, and the spontaneous evidence of learning which it affords, one would gather that his reading was less literary and poetic in character than was Milton's during the years spent at Horton. It is clear that he knew the classical poets, but there are few specific allusions. Ovid, Horace, and Juvenal one can trace, not any other with certainty, nor in his sermons do references to Virgil, Horace, or other poets abound.

Italian.

Like Milton, Donne had doubtless read the Italian romances. One reference to Angelica and an incident in the Orlando Furioso occur in the Satyres, and from the same source as well as from an unpublished letter we learn that he had read Dante. Aretino is the only other Italian to whom he makes explicit reference.

French.

One of RÉgnier's satires opens in a manner resembling the fourth of Donne's, and in a letter written from France apparently in 1612 he refers to 'a book of French Satires', which Mr. Gosse conjectures to be RÉgnier's. The resemblance may be accidental, for Donne's Satyres were written before the publication of RÉgnier's (1608, 1613), and Donne makes no explicit mention of him or any other French poet. We learn, however, from his letters that he had read Montaigne and Rabelais; and it is improbable that he did not share the general interest of his contemporaries in the poetry of the PlÉiade. The one poet to whom recent criticism has pointed as the inspiration of Donne's metaphysical verse is the Protestant poet Du Bartas. Mr. Alfred Horatio Upham (The French Influence in English Literature. New York, 1908), and following him Sir Sidney Lee (The French Renaissance in England. Oxford, 1910), have insisted strongly on the importance of this influence. The latter goes so far as to say that 'Donne clothed elegies, eclogues, divine poems, epicedes, obsequies, satires, in a garb barely distinguishable from the style of Du Bartas and Sylvester', and that the metaphysical style in English poetry is a heritage from Du Bartas.

I confess this seems to me a somewhat exaggerated statement. When I turn from Donne's passionate and subtle songs and elegies to Sylvester's hum-drum and yet 'conceited' work, I find their styles eminently distinguishable. Mr. Upham indeed allows that Donne's genius makes 'vital and impressive' what in the original is 'vapid and commonplace'. He pleads for no more than an 'element of French suggestion'.

Of the most characteristic features of Du Bartas's rhetoric, his affected antitheses, his studied alliterative effects, and especially his double-epithets 'aime-carnage', 'charme-souci', 'blesse-honneur', Sylvester's 'forbidden-Bit-lost-glory', 'the Act-simply-pure', &c., Mr. Upham admits that Donne makes sparing use. Donne uses a fair number of compounds but the majority of these are nouns and verbs. Of the epithets only one or two are of the sentence-compressing character which the French poet cultivated. The most like is 'full-on-both-side-written rolls'. The real link between Du Bartas and Donne is that they are metaphysical poets. Following Lucretius, whom he often translates, the Frenchman set himself to give a scientific account of the creation of the universe as outlined in Genesis. He describes with the utmost minuteness of detail, and necessarily uses similes better fitted to elucidate and illustrate than to give poetic pleasure, drawn from the most everyday sources as well as arts and sciences. It was part of the programme of the PlÉiade thus to annex the vocabulary of learning and the crafts. Now Donne may have read Du Bartas in the original, or he may have seen some parts of Sylvester's translation (it did not appear till 1598), as it was in preparation, though to a Catholic, as Donne was, the poem would not have the attraction it had for Protestant poets in England, Holland, and Germany. The bent of his own mind was to metaphysics, to erudition, and also to figures realistic and surprising rather than beautiful. It would be rash to deny that he may have found in Du Bartas a style which he preferred to the Italianate picturesqueness of sonneteers and idyllists, and been encouraged to follow his bent. That he borrowed his style from Du Bartas is non proven: and there are in his work strains of feeling, thought, and learning which cannot be traced to the French poet. Two poets more essentially unlike it would be difficult to imagine. There are very few passages where one can trace or conjecture echoes or borrowings (see note, II. p. 193). I agree indeed with Mr. Upham that the poems which most strongly suggest that Donne had been reading Du Bartas are the First and Second Anniversaries, which Sir Sidney Lee inadvertently calls early poems. Here at least he is often dealing with the same themes. One can illustrate his thought from Du Bartas. Perhaps it was the latter's poem which suggested the use of marginal notes, giving the argument of the poem.

Spanish.

We know from Donne's explicit statement that his library was full both of Spanish poets and Spanish theologians, and there has been some talk of Spanish influence in his poetry. But no one has adduced evidence. Gongora is out of the question, for Gongora did not begin to cultivate the extravagant conceits of his later poetry till he came under the influence of Carillo's posthumous poems in 1611 (Fitzmaurice Kelly: Spanish Literature, 283-5); nor is there much resemblance between his high-flown Marinism and Donne's metaphysical subtleties. It is possible that Spanish mysticism and religious eloquence have left traces in Donne's Divine Poems and sermons. The subject awaits investigation.

Scholastic
Philosophy.

A commentator on Donne is, therefore, not called on to trace literary echoes in his poetry as Bishop Newton and others have done in Milton's poems. It is reading of another kind, though a kind also traceable in Milton, that he has to note. Donne was steeped in Scholastic Philosophy and Theology. Often under his most playful conceits lurk Scholastic definitions and distinctions. The question of the influence of Plato on the poets of the Renaissance has been discussed of recent years, but generally without a sufficient preliminary inquiry as to the Scholastic inheritance of these poets. Doctrines that derive ultimately, it may be, from Plato and Aristotle were familiar to Donne and others in the first place from Aquinas and the theology of the Schools, and, as Professor Picavet has insisted (Esquisse d'une histoire gÉnÉrale et comparÉe des philosophies mÉdiÉvales. Paris, 1907), they entered the Scholastic Philosophy through Plotinus and were modified in the passage.¹ The present editor is in no way a specialist in Scholasticism, and such notes and extracts as are given here concern passages where some inquiry was necessary to fix the text and to elucidate the meaning. They are intended simply to do this as far as possible, and to suggest the direction which further investigation must follow. An expert will doubtless note many allusions that have escaped notice. Whenever possible I have endeavoured to start from Donne's own sermons and prose works.

¹ The influence of Scholastic Philosophy and Theology in English poetry deserves attention. When Milton states that

he has probably in mind the opinion of Dionysius the Areopagite (adopted by Aquinas), that the four highest orders of angels (Dominations, Thrones, Cherubs, and Seraphim) never leave God's presence to bear messages.

The Fathers,
&c.

Donne is as familiar with the Fathers as with the Schoolmen, especially Tertullian and Augustine, and of them too he makes use in poems neither serious nor edifying. His work with Morton had familiarized him with the whole range of Catholic controversy from Bellarmine to Spanish and German Jesuit pamphleteers and casuists. The Progresse of the Soule reveals his acquaintance with Jewish apocryphal legends.

Law.

But Donne's studies were not confined to Divinity. When a Law-student he was 'diverted by the worst voluptuousness, which is an hydroptic immoderate desire of humane learning and languages'; but his legal studies have left their mark in his Songs and Sonets. Of Medicine he had made an extensive study, and the poems abound in allusions to both the orthodox Galenist doctrines and the new Paracelsian medicine with its chemical drugs and homoeopathic cures.² In Physics he knows, like Milton, the older doctrines, the elements, their concentric arrangement, the origin of winds and meteors, &c., and at the same time is acutely interested in the speculations of the newer science, of Copernicus and Galileo, and the disintegrating effect of their doctrines on the traditional views.

² In the Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, &c. (1651, 1654), pp. 14-15, Donne gives a short sketch of the history of medical doctrines from Hippocrates through Galen to Paracelsus, but declares that the new principles are attributed to the latter 'too much to his honour'.

Travels.

A special feature of Donne's imagery is the use of images drawn from the voyages and discoveries of the age. Sir Walter Raleigh has not included Donne among the poets whom he discusses in considering the influence of the Voyages on Poetry and Imagination (The English Voyages of the Sixteenth Century. Glasgow, 1906, iii), but perhaps none took a more curious interest. His mistress is 'my America, my Newfoundland', his East and West Indies; he sees, at least in imagination,

he sails to heaven, the Pacific Ocean, the Fortunate Islands, by the North-West Passage, or through the Straits of Magellan.

In attempting to illustrate these and other aspects of Donne's erudition as displayed in his poetry it has been my endeavour not so much to trace them to their remote sources as to discover the form in which he was familiar with a doctrine or a theory. Next to his own works, therefore, I have had recourse to contemporary or but slightly later works, as Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica. I have made constant use of the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, using the edition in Migne's Patrologiae Cursus Completus (1845). By Professor Picavet my attention was called to Bouillet's translation of Plotinus's Enneads with ample notes on the analogies to and developments of Neo-Platonic thought in the Schoolmen. I have also used Zeller's Philosophie der Griechen, on Plotinus, and Harnack's History of Dogma. Throughout, my effort has been rather to justify, elucidate, and suggest, than to accumulate parallels.

^*_*^* In the following notes the LXXX Sermons &c. (1640), Fifty Sermons &c. (1649), and XXVI Sermons &c. (1669/70) are referred to thus:—80. 19. 189, i.e. the LXXX Sermons, the nineteenth sermon, page 189. References to page and line simply of the poems are to the first volume of this edition. References to the second are given thus, II. p. 249.

THE PRINTER TO &c.

See Text and Canon of Donne's Poems, p. lix.

Page 1, ll. 17-18. it would have come to us from beyond the Seas: e.g. from Holland.

ll. 19-20. My charge and pains in procuring of it: A significant statement as to the source of the edition.

Page 3. Hexastichon Bibliopolae.

l. 1. his last preach'd, and printed Booke, i.e. Deaths Duell or a Consolation to the Soule against the dying Life and living Death of the body. Delivered in a sermon at Whitehall, before the Kings Majesty in the beginning of Lent 1630, &c. ... Being his last Sermon and called by his Majesties household the Doctors owne Funerall Sermon. 1632, 1633.

This has for frontispiece a bust of Donne in his shroud, engraved by Martin Dr[oeshout] from the drawing from which Nicholas Stone cut the figure on Donne's tomb (Gosse's Life, &c. ii. 288). Walton's account of the manner in which this picture was prepared is well known. See II. p. 249.

Page 4. William, Lord Craven, &c. This is the younger Donne's dedication. See Text and Canon, &c., p. lxx.

William Craven (1606-1697) entered the service of Maurice, Prince of Nassau in 1623. He served later, 1631, under Gustavus Adolphus; and became a devoted adherent of Elizabeth of Bohemia and the cause of the Palatine house. He lost his estates in the Rebellion, but after the Restoration was created successively Baron Craven of Hampsted-Marsham, Viscount Craven of Uffington, and Earl of Craven. He was an early member of the Royal Society.

Of the younger John Donne, D.C.L., whose life was dissolute and poetry indecent, perhaps the most pleasing relic is the following poem addressed to his father. It is found in O'F and has been printed by Mr. Warwick Bond:

A Letter.

Pages 5, 6. The three poems by Jonson were printed in the sheets hastily added by the younger Donne in 1650 to the edition of Donne's poems prepared for the press in 1649. See Text and Canon, &c. They were taken from Jonson's Epigrams (1616), where they are Nos. xxiii., xciv., and xcvi. Of Donne as a poet Jonson uttered three memorable criticisms in his Conversations with Drummond (ed. Laing, Shakespeare Society, 1842):

'He esteemeth John Done the first poet in the world for some things.'

'That Done for not keeping of accent deserved hanging.'

'That Done himself, for not being understood, would perish.'