Note 45 — POEMS

The printer's prejudice was one which Donne shared, but not, I think, to quite the same extent. Compared, for example, with the Anniversaries (printed in Donne's lifetime) 1633 shows a fondness for the semicolon,45 not only within the sentence, but separating sentences, instead of a full stop, when these are closely related in thought to one another. In an argumentative and rhetorical poet like Donne the result is excellent, once one grows accustomed to it, as is the use of commas, where we should use semicolons, within the sentence, dividing co-ordinate clauses from one another. On the other hand this use of semicolons leads to occasional ambiguity when one which separates two sentences comes into close contact with another within the sentence. For example, in Satyre III, ll. 69-72, how should an editor, modernizing the punctuation, deal with the semicolons in ll. 70 and 71? Should he print thus?—