Note 7 — POEMS

Some such arrangement may have been intended by Donne himself when he contemplated issuing his poems in 1614, for he speaks, in a letter to Sir Henry Goodyere (see II. pp. 144-5), of including a letter in verse to the Countess of Bedford 'amongst the rest to persons of that rank'. The manuscripts, especially the later and more ambitious, e.g. Stephens and O'Flaherty, show similar groupings; and in 1633, though there is no consistent sequence, the poems fall into irregularly recurring groups. The order of the poems within each of these groups in 1633 is generally retained in 1635. In the 1633 arrangement there were occasional errors in the placing of individual poems, especially Elegies, owing to the use of that name both for love poems and for funeral elegies or epicedes. These were sometimes corrected in later editions.

Modern editors have dealt rather arbitrarily and variously with the old classification. Grosart shifted the poems about according to his own whims in a quite inexplicable fashion. The Grolier Club edition preserves the groups and their original order (except that the Epigrams and Progresse of the Soule follow the Satyres), but corrects some of the errors in placing, and assigns to their relevant groups the poems added in 1650. Chambers makes similar corrections and replacings, but he further rearranges the groups. In his first volume he brings together—possibly because of their special interest—the Songs and Sonets, Epithalamions, Elegies, and Divine Poems, keeping for his second volume the Letters to Severall Personages, Funerall Elegies, Progresse of the Soul, Satyres, and Epigrams. There is this to be said for the old arrangement, that it does, as Walton indicated, correspond generally to the order in which the poems were written, to the succession of mood and experience in Donne's life. In the present edition this original order has been preserved with these modifications: (1) In the Songs and Sonets, The Flea has been restored to the place which it occupied in 1633; (2) the rearrangement of the misplaced Elegies by modern editors has been accepted; (3) their distribution of the few poems added in 1650 (in two sheets bound up with the body of the work) has also been accepted, but I have placed the poem On Mr. Thomas Coryats Crudities after the Satyres; (4) two new groups have been inserted, Heroical Epistles and Epitaphs. It was absurd to class Sappho to Philaenis with the Letters to Severall Personages. At the same time it is not exactly an Elegy. There is a slight difference again between the Funerall Elegy and the Epitaph, though the latter term is sometimes loosely used. Ben Jonson speaks of Donne's Epitaph on Prince Henry. (5) The Letter, to E. of D. with six holy Sonnets has been placed before the Divine Poems. (6) The Hymne to the Saints, and to Marquesse Hamylton has been transferred to the Epicedes. (7) Some poems have been assigned to an Appendix as doubtful.