Volume 1 — INTRODUCTION (continued 2)
Reading edition
This is my playes last scene; here heavens appoint My pilgrimages last mile; and my race Idly yet quickly run hath this last space, My spans last inch, my minutes latest point;
or,
At the round earths imagin'd quarters blow Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise From death you numberlesse infinities Of soules, and to your scatter'd bodies go:
and again—
What if this present were the worlds last night! Marke in my heart, O Soule, where thou dost dwell, The picture of Christ crucified, and tell Whether that countenance can thee affright, Teares in his eyes quench the amazing light, Blood fills his frownes, which from his pierc'd head fell.
This passionate penitence, this beating as it were against the bars of self in the desire to break through to a fuller apprehension of the mercy and love of God, is the intensely human note of these latest poems. Nothing came easily to his soul that knew so well how to be subtle to plague itself. The vision of divine wrath he can conjure up more easily than the beatific vision of the love that 'moves the sun in heaven and all the stars'. Nevertheless it was that vision which Donne sought. He could never have been content with Milton's heaven of majesty and awe divorced from the quickening spirit of love. And there are moments when he comes as close to that beatific vision as perhaps a self-tormenting mind involved in the web of seventeenth-century theology ever could,—at moments love and ecstasy gain the upper hand of fear and penitence. But it is in the sermons that he reaches these highest levels. There is nothing in the florid eloquence of Jeremy Taylor that can equal the splendour of occasional passages in Donne's sermons, when the lava-like flow of his heated reasoning seems suddenly to burst and flower in such a splendid incandescence of mystical rapture as this:—
'Death and life are in the power of the tongue, says Solomon, in another sense: and in this sense too, If my tongue, suggested by my heart, and by my heart rooted in faith, can say, non moriar, non moriar: If I can say (and my conscience do not tell me that I belie mine own state) if I can say, That the blood of the Saviour runs in my veins, That the breath of his spirit quickens all my purposes, that all my deaths have their Resurrection, all my sins their remorses, all my rebellions their reconciliations, I will hearken no more after this question as it is intended de morte naturali, of a natural death; I know I must die that death; what care I? nor de morte spirituali, the death of sin, I know I doe, and shall die so; why despair I? but I will find out another death, mortem raptus, a death of rapture and of extasy, that death which St. Paul died more than once, the death which St. Gregory speaks of, divina contemplatio quoddam sepulchrum animae, the contemplation of God and heaven is a kind of burial and sepulchre and rest of the soul; and in this death of rapture and extasy, in this death of the Contemplation of my interest in my Saviour, I shall find myself and all my sins enterred, and entombed in his wounds, and like a Lily in Paradise, out of red earth, I shall see my soul rise out of his blade, in a candor, and in an innocence, contracted there, acceptable in the sight of his Father.'
This is the highest level that Donne ever reached in eloquence inspired by the vision of the joy and not the terror of the Christian faith, higher than anything in the Second Anniversary, but in his last hymns hope and confidence find a simpler and a tenderer note. The noble hymn, 'In what torn ship so ever I embark,' is in somewhat the same anguished tone as the Holy Sonnets; but the highly characteristic
Since I am coming to that Holy roome, Where with thy Quire of Saints for evermore, I shall be made thy Musique;
and the Hymn to God the Father, speak of final faith and hope in tones which recall—recall also by their sea-coloured imagery, and by their rhythm—the lines in which another sensitive and tormented poet-soul contemplated the last voyage:
I have a sinne of feare, that when I have spunne My last thred, I shall perish on the shore; Swear by thy self that at my death thy sunne Shall shine as he shines now and heretofore: And having done that, Thou hast done, I feare no more.
Beside the passion of these lines even Tennyson's grow a little pale:
Twilight and evening bell And after that the dark; And may there be no sadness of farewell When I embark: For though from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crost the bar.
It has not been the aim of the present editor to attempt to pronounce a final judgement upon Donne. It seems to him idle to compare Donne's poetry with that of other poets or to endeavour to fix its relative worth. Its faults are great and manifest; its beauties sui generis, incommunicable and incomparable. My endeavour here has been by an analysis of some of the different elements in this composite work—poems composed at different times and in different moods; flung together at the end so carelessly that youthful extravagances of witty sensuality and pious aspirations jostle each other cheek by jowl; and presenting a texture so diverse from that of poetry as we usually think of it—to show how many are the strands which run through it, and that one of these is a poetry, not perfect in form, rugged of line and careless in rhyme, a poetry in which intellect and feeling are seldom or never perfectly fused in a work that is of imagination all compact, yet a poetry of an extraordinarily arresting and haunting quality, passionate, thoughtful, and with a deep melody of its own.