Volume 1 — THE PROGRES of the SOVLE

Wherein,

By Occasion Of The Re- ligious death of Mistris

Elizabeth Drvry the incommodities of the Soule in this life, and her exaltation in the next, are Contemplated.

The Second Anniuersarie.

LONDON

Printed by W. Stansby for Tho. Dewe, and are to be sold in S. Dunstanes Church-yard. 1625.

Title Page

The symbolic figures in the title-pages of 1625 probably represent the seven Liberal Arts. A feature of the editions of 1611, 1612, and 1625 is the marginal notes. These are reproduced in 1633, but a little carelessly, for some copies do not contain them all. They are omitted in the subsequent editions.

In typographical respects 1611 shows the hand of the author more clearly than the later editions. Donne was fastidious in matters of punctuation and the use of italics and capital letters, witness the LXXX Sermons (1640), printed from MSS. prepared for the press by the author. But the printer had to be reckoned with, and perfection was not obtainable. In a note to one of the separately published sermons Donne says: 'Those Errors which are committed in mispointing, or in changing the form of the Character, will soone be discernd, and corrected by the Eye of any deliberate Reader'. The 1611 text shows a more consistent use in certain passages of emphasizing capitals, and at places its punctuation is better than that of 1633. My text reproduces 1633, corrected where necessary from the earlier editions; and I have occasionally followed the typography of 1611. But every case in which 1633 is modified is recorded.

Of the Second Anniversarie, in like manner, my text is that of 1633, corrected in a few details, and with a few typographical features borrowed, from the edition of 1612. The editor of 1633 had rather definite views of his own on punctuation, notably a predilection for semicolons in place of full stops. The only certain emendations which 1612 supplies are in the marginal note at p. 234 and in l. 421 of the Second Anniversarie 'this' for 'his'. The spelling is less ambiguous in ll. 27 and 326.

The subject of the Anniversaries was the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Drury, who died in 1610. Her father, Sir Robert Drury, of Hawsted in the county of Suffolk, was a man of some note on account of his great wealth. He was knighted by Essex when about seventeen years old, at the siege of Rouen (1591-2). He served in the Low Countries, and at the battle of Nieuport (1600) brought off Sir Francis Vere when his horse was shot under him. He was courtier, traveller, member of Parliament, and in 1613 would have been glad to go as Ambassador to Paris when Sir Thomas Overbury refused the proffered honour and was sent to the Tower. Lady Drury was the daughter of Sir Nicholas Bacon, the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth's Lord Keeper. She and her brother, Sir Edmund Bacon, were friends and patrons of Joseph Hall, Donne's rival as an early satirist. From 1600 to 1608 Hall was rector of Hawsted, and though he was not very kindly treated by Sir Robert he dedicated to him his Meditations Morall and Divine. This tie explains the fact, which we learn from Jonson's conversations with Drummond, that Hall is the author of the Harbinger to the Progresse. As he wrote this we may infer that he is also responsible for To the praise of the dead, and the Anatomie.

Readers of Donne's Life by Walton are aware of the munificence with which Sir Robert rewarded Donne for his poems, how he opened his house to him, and took him abroad. Donne's letters, on the other hand, reveal that the poem gave considerable offence to the Countess of Bedford and other older patrons and friends. In his letters to Gerrard he endeavoured to explain away his eulogies. In verse-letters to the Countess of Bedford and others he atoned for his inconstancy by subtle and erudite compliments.

The Funerall Elegie was doubtless written in 1610 and sent to Sir Robert Drury. He and Donne may already have been acquainted through Wotton, who was closely related by friendship and marriage with Sir Edmund Bacon. (See Pearsall Smith, Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton (1907). The Anatomie of the World was composed in 1611, Of the Progresse of the Soule in France in 1612, at some time prior to the 14th of April, when he refers to his Anniversaries in a letter to George Gerrard.

Ben Jonson declared to Drummond 'That Donnes Anniversaries were profane and full of blasphemies: that he told Mr. Done if it had been written of the Virgin Marie it had been something; to which he answered that he described the Idea of a Woman, and not as she was'. This is a better defence of Donne's poems than any which he advances in his letters, but it is not a complete description of his work. Rather, he interwove with a rapt and extravagantly conceited laudation of an ideal woman two topics familiar to his catholic and mediaeval learning, and developed each in a characteristically subtle and ingenious strain, a strain whose occasional sceptical, disintegrating reflections belong as obviously to the seventeenth century as the general content of the thought is mediaeval.

The burden of the whole is an impassioned and exalted meditatio mortis based on two themes common enough in mediaeval devotional literature—a De Contemptu Mundi, and a contemplation of the Glories of Paradise. A very brief analysis of the two poems, omitting the laudatory portions, may help a reader who cannot at once see the wood for the trees, and be better than detailed notes.

The Anatomie of the World.

l. 1. The world which suffered in her death is now fallen into the worse lethargy of oblivion. l. 60. I will anatomize the world for the benefit of those who still, by the influence of her virtue, lead a kind of glimmering life. l. 91. There is no health in the world. We are still under the curse of woman. l. 111. How short is our life compared with that of the patriarchs! l. 134. How small is our stature compared with that of the giants of old! l. 147. How shrunken of soul we are, especially since her death! l. 191. And as man, so is the whole world. The new learning or philosophy has shattered in fragments that complete scheme of the universe in which we rested so confidently, and (l. 211) in human society the same disorder prevails. l. 250. There is no beauty in the world, for, first, the beauty of proportion is lost, alike in the movements of the heavenly bodies, and (l. 285) in the earth with its mountains and hollows, and (l. 302) in the administration of justice in society. l. 339. So is Beauty's other element, Colour and Lustre. l. 377. Heaven and earth are at variance. We can no longer read terrestrial fortunes in the stars. But (l. 435) an Anatomy can be pushed too far.

The Progresse of the Soule.

l. 1. The world's life is the life that breeds in corruption. Let me, forgetting the rotten world, meditate on death. l. 85. Think, my soul, that thou art on thy death-bed, and consider death a release. l. 157. Think how the body poisoned the soul, tainting it with original sin. Set free, thou art in Heaven in a moment. l. 250. Here all our knowledge is ignorance. The new learning has thrown all in doubt. We sweat to learn trifles. In Heaven we know all we need to know. l. 321. Here, our converse is evil and corrupting. There our converse will be with Mary; the Patriarchs; Apostles, Martyrs and Virgins (compare A Litany). Here in the perpetual flux of things is no essential joy. Essential joy is to see God. And even the accidental joys of heaven surpass the essential joys of earth, were there such joys here where all is casual:

One of the most interesting strands of thought common to the twin poems is the reflection on the disintegrating effect of the New Learning. Copernicus' displacement of the earth, and the consequent disturbance of the accepted mediaeval cosmology with its concentric arrangement of elements and heavenly bodies, arrests and disturbs Donne's imagination much as the later geology with its revelation of vanished species and first suggestion of a doctrine of evolution absorbed and perturbed Tennyson when he wrote In Memoriam and throughout his life. No other poet of the seventeenth century known to me shows the same sensitiveness to the consequences of the new discoveries of traveller, astronomer, physiologist and physician as Donne.

To the Praise of the Dead.

Page 231, l. 43. What high part thou bearest in those best songs. The contraction of 'bearest' to 'bear'st' in the earliest editions (1611-25) led to the insertion of 'of' after 'best' in the later ones (1633-69).

An Anatomie of the World.

Page 235, ll. 133-6. Chambers alters the punctuation of these lines in such a way as to connect them more closely:

But the punctuation of 1633 is careful and correct. A new paragraph begins with 'And as in lasting, so, &c.' From length of years Donne passes to physical stature. The full stop is at 'lives', the semicolon at 'span'. Grosart and the Grolier Club editor punctuate correctly.

l. 144. We'are scarce our Fathers shadowes cast at noone: Compare:

Page 236, l. 160. And with new Physicke: i.e. the new mineral drugs of the Paracelsians.

Page 237, l. 190. Be more then man, or thou'rt lesse then an Ant. Compare To M^r Rowland Woodward, p. 185, ll. 16-18 and note.

l. 205. The new Philosophy calls all in doubt, &c. The philosophy of Galileo and Copernicus has displaced the earth and discredited the concentric arrangement of the elements,—earth, water, air, fire. Norton quotes: 'The fire is an element most hot and dry, pure, subtill, and so clear as it doth not hinder our sight looking through the same towards the stars, and is placed next to the Spheare of the Moon, under the which it is turned about like a celestial Spheare'. M. Blundeville His Exercises, 1594.

When the world was formed from Chaos, then—

Burton, in the Anatomy of Melancholy, Part 2, Sect. 2, Mem. 3, tells how the new Astronomers Tycho, Rotman, Kepler, &c. by their new doctrine of the heavens are 'exploding in the meantime that element of fire, those fictitious, first watry movers, those heavens I mean above the firmament, which Delrio, Lodovicus Imola, Patricius and many of the fathers affirm'. They have abolished, that is to say, the fire which surrounded the air, as that air surrounded the water and the earth (all below the moon); and they have also abolished the Crystalline Sphere and the Primum Mobile which were supposed to surround the sphere of the fixed stars, or the firmament.

Page 238, l. 215. Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne are things forgot. Donne has probably in mind the effect of the religious wars in Germany, France, the Low Countries, &c.

l. 217. that then can be. This is the reading of all the editions before 1669, and there is no reason to change 'then' to 'there': 'Every man thinks he has come to be a Phoenix (preferring private judgement to authority) and that then comparison ceases, for there is nothing of the same kind with which to compare himself. There is nothing left to reverence.'

Page 239, l. 258.

Norton says that in the catalogue of Hipparchus, preserved in the Almagest of Ptolemy, the stars were divided into forty-eight constellations.

l. 260. New starres. Norton says: 'It was the apparition of a new star in 1572, in the constellation of Cassiopeia, that turned Tycho Brahe to astronomy: and a new bright star in Ophiuchus, in 1604, had excited general wonder, and afforded Galileo a text for an attack on the Ptolemaic system'.

At p. 247, l. 70, Donne notes that the 'new starres' went out again.

Page 240, l. 286. a Tenarif, or higher hill. 'Tenarif' is the 1611 spelling, 'Tenarus' that of 1633-69. Donne speaks of 'Tenarus' elsewhere, but it is not the same place.

It is not probable that Donne ever saw the Peak of Teneriffe, although biographers speak of this line as a descriptive touch drawn from memory. The Canary Isles are below the 30th degree of latitude. The fleet that made the Islands Exhibition was never much if at all further south than 43 degrees. After coasting off Corunna 43° N. 8° W., and some leagues south of that port, the fleet struck straight across to the Azores, 37° N. 25° W. Donne was somewhat nearer in the previous year when he was at Cadiz, 36° N. 6° W., but too far off to descry the Peak. His description, though vivid, is 'metaphysical', like that of Hell which follows: 'The Pike of Teneriff, how high is it? 79 miles or 52, as Patricius holds, or 9 as Snellius demonstrates in his Eratosthenes'. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Part 2, Sec. 2, Mem. 3.

ll. 295 f. If under all, a Vault infernall bee, &c. Hell, according to mediaeval philosophy, was in the middle of the earth. 'If this be true,' says Donne, 'and if at the same time the Sea is in places bottomless, then the earth is neither solid nor round. We use these words only approximately. But you may hold, on the other hand, that the deepest seas we know are but pock-holes, the highest hills but warts, on the face of the solid earth. Well, even in that case you must admit that in the moral sphere at any rate the world's proportion is disfigured by the want of all proportioning of reward and punishment to conduct.' The sudden transition from the physical to the moral sphere is very disconcerting. Compare: 'Or is it the place of hell, as Virgil in his Aeneides, Plato, Lucian, Dante, and others poetically describe it, and as many of our divines think. In good earnest, Antony Rusca, one of the society of that Ambrosian college in Millan, in his great volume de Inferno, lib. i, cap. 47, is stiffe in this tenent.... Whatsoever philosophers write (saith Surius) there be certaine mouthes of Hell, and places appointed for the punishment of mens souls, as at Hecla in Island, where the ghosts of dead men are familiarly seen, and sometimes talk with the living. God would have such visible places, that mortal men might be certainly informed, that there be such punishments after death, and learn hence to fear God,' &c. Burton, Anat. of Melancholy, Part 2, Sec. 2, Mem. 3.

ll. 296-8. Which sure is spacious, &c. 'Franciscus Ribera will have hell a materiall and locall fire in the centre of the earth, 200 Italian miles in diameter, as he defines it out of those words Exivit sanguis de terra ... per stadia mille sexcenta, &c. But Lessius (lib. 13, de moribus divinis, cap. 24) will have this locall hell far less, one Dutch mile in diameter, all filled with fire and brimstone; because, as he there demonstrates, that space, cubically multiplied, will make a sphere able to hold eight hundred thousand millions of damned bodies (allowing each body six foot square); which will abundantly suffice, 'cum certum sit, inquit, facta subductione, non futuros centies mille milliones damnandorum.' Burton, Anat. of Melancholy, ut sup. Eschatology was the 'dismal science' of those days and was studied with astonishing gusto and acumen. 'For as one Author, who is afraid of admitting too great a hollownesse in the Earth, lest then the Earth might not be said to be solid, pronounces that Hell cannot possibly be above three thousand miles in compasse, (and then one of the torments of Hell will be the throng, for their bodies must be there in their dimensions, as well as their soules) so when the Schoole-men come to measure the house in heaven (as they will measure it, and the Master, God, and all his Attributes, and tell us how Allmighty, and how Infinite he is) they pronounce that every soule in that house shall have more roome to it selfe, then all this world is.' Sermons 80. 73. 747. The reference in the margin is to Munster.

l. 311. that Ancient, &c. 'Many erroneous opinions are about the essence and originall of it' (i.e. the rational soul), 'whether it be fire, as Zeno held; harmony, as Aristoxenus; number, as Xenocrates,' &c. Burton, Anat. of Melancholy, Part i, Sec. 1, Mem. 2, Subsec. 9. Probably Donne has the same 'Ancient' in view. It is from Cicero (Tusc. Disp. i. 10) that we learn that Aristoxenus held the soul to be a harmony of the body. Though a Peripatetic, Aristoxenus lived in close communion with the latest Pythagoreans, and the doctrine is attributed to Pythagoras as a consequence of his theory of numbers. Simmias, the disciple of the Pythagorean Philolaus, maintains the doctrine in Plato's Phaedo, and Socrates criticizes it. Aristotle states and examines it in the De Anima, 407b. 30. Two classes of thinkers, Bouillet says (Plotinus, Fourth Ennead, Seventh Book, note), regarded the soul as a harmony, doctors as Hippocrates and Galen, who considered it a harmony of the four elements—the hot, the cold, the dry and the moist (as the definition of health Donne refers to this more than once, e.g. The good-morrow, l. 19, and The Second Anniversary, ll. 130 f.); and musicians like Aristoxenus, who compared the soul to the harmony of the lyre. Donne leaves the sense in which he uses the word quite vague; but l. 321 suggests the medical sense.

l. 312. at next. This common Anglo-Saxon construction is very rare in later English. The O.E.D. cites no instance later than 1449, Pecock's Repression. The instance cited there is prepositional in character rather than adverbial: 'Immediatli at next to the now bifore alleggid text of Peter this proces folewith.' Donne's use seems to correspond exactly to the Anglo-Saxon: 'Johannes ða ofhreow þaēre mēden and ðaera licmanna drēorignysse, and āstrehte his licaman tō eorðan on langsumum gebēde, and ða aet nēxtan āras, and eft upahafenum handum langlice baed.' Aelfric (Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader, 1894, p. 67). But 'at next' in the poem possibly does not mean simply 'next', but 'immediately', i.e. 'the first thing he said would have been ...'

l. 314. Resultances: i.e. productions of, or emanations from, her. 'She is the harmony from which proceeds that harmony of our bodies which is their soul.' Donne uses the word also in the sense of 'the sum or gist of a thing': 'He speakes out of the strength and resultance of many lawes and Canons there alleadged.' Pseudo-martyr, p. 245; and Walton says that Donne 'left the resultance of 1400 Authors, most of them abridged and analysed with his own hand.' Life (1675), p. 60. He is probably using Donne's own title.

Page 241, l. 318. That th'Arke to mans proportions was made. The following quotation from St. Augustine will show that the plural of 1611-12 is right, and what Donne had in view. St. Augustine is speaking of the Ark as a type of the Church: 'Procul dubio figura est peregrinantis in hoc seculo Civitatis Dei, hoc est Ecclesiae, quae fit salva per lignum in quo pependit Mediator Dei et hominum, homo Iesus Christus. (1 Tim. ii. 5.) Nam et mensurae ipsae longitudinis, altitudinis, latitudinis eius, significant corpus humanum, in cuius veritate ad homines praenuntiatus est venturus, et venit. Humani quippe corporis longitudo a vertice usque ad vestigia sexies tantum habet, quam latitudo, quae est ab uno latere ad alterum latus, et decies tantum, quam altitudo, cuius altitudinis mensura est in latere a dorso ad ventrem: velut si iacentem hominem metiaris supinum, seu pronum, sexies tantum longus est a capite ad pedes, quam latus a dextra in sinistram, vel a sinistra in dextram, et decies, quam altus a terra. Unde facta est arca trecentorum in longitudine cubitorum, et quinquaginta in latitudine, et triginta in altitudine.' De Civitate Dei, XV. 26.

Page 242, ll. 377-80. Nor in ought more, &c. 'The father' is the Heavens, i.e. the various heavenly bodies moving in their spheres; 'the mother', the earth:

Page 243, l. 389. new wormes: probably serpents, such as were described in new books of travels.

l. 394. Imprisoned in an Hearbe, or Charme, or Tree. Compare A Valediction: of my name, in the window, p. 27, ll. 33-6:

l. 409. But as some Serpents poyson, &c. Compare: 'But though all knowledge be in those Authors already, yet, as some poisons, and some medicines, hurt not, nor profit, except the creature in which they reside, contribute their lively activitie and vigor; so, much of the knowledge buried in Books perisheth, and becomes ineffectuall, if it be not applied, and refreshed by a companion, or friend. Much of their goodnesse hath the same period which some Physicians of Italy have observed to be in the biting of their Tarentola, that it affects no longer, then the flie lives.' Letters, p. 107.

Page 245, l. 460. As matter fit for Chronicle, not verse. Compare The Canonization, p. 15, ll. 31-2:

God's 'last, and lasting'st peece, a song' is of course Moses' song in Deuteronomy xxxii: 'Give ear, O ye heavens, and I will speak,' &c.

l. 467. Such an opinion (in due measure) made, &c. The bracket of 1611 makes the sense less ambiguous than the commas of 1633:

According to the habits of old punctuation, 'in due measure' thus comma'd off might be an adjunct of 'made me ... invade'. The bracket shows that the phrase goes with 'opinion'. 'Such an opinion (with all due reverence spoken),' &c. Donne finds that he is attributing to himself the same thoughts as God.

A Funerall Elegie.

l. 2. to confine her in a marble chest. The 'Funerall Elegie' was probably the first composed of these poems. Elizabeth Drury's parents erected over her a very elaborate marble tomb.

Page 246, l. 41. the Affrique Niger. Grosart comments on this: 'A peculiarity generally given to the Nile; and here perhaps not spoken of our Niger, but of the Nile before it is so called, when, according to Pliny (N. H. v. 9), after having twice been underground, and the second time for twenty days' journey, it issues at the spring Nigris.' Probably Donne had been reading 'A Geographical Historie of Africa written in Arabicke by John Leo a More, borne in Granada, and brought up in Barbarie ... Translated and collected by Iohn Porie, late of Gonevill and Caius College in Cambridge, 1600.' Of the Niger he says: 'This land of Negros hath a mighty river, which taking his name of the region is called Niger: this river taketh his originall from the east out of a certain desert called by the foresaide Negros Sen ... Our Cosmographers affirme that the said river of Niger is derived out of Nilus, which they imagine for some certaine space to be swallowed up of the earth, and yet at last to burst forth into such a lake as is before mentioned.' Pory is mentioned occasionally in Donne's correspondence.

Page 247, l. 50. An Angell made a Throne, or Cherubin. See Elegy XI, ll. 77-8 and note. Donne, like Shakespeare, uses 'Cherubin' as a singular. There can be no doubt that the lines in Macbeth, I. vii. 21-3, should read:

It is an echo of:

'Cherubin' is a singular in Shakespeare, and 'cherubim' as a plural he did not know.

l. 73. a Lampe of Balsamum, i.e. burning balsam instead of ordinary oil: 'And as Constantine ordained, that upon this day' (Christmas Day), 'the Church should burne no Oyle, but Balsamum in her Lamps, so let us ever celebrate this day, with a thankfull acknowledgment, that Christ who is unctus Domini, The Anointed of the Lord, hath anointed us with the Oyle of gladnesse above our fellowes.' Sermons 80. 7. 72.

ll. 75-7. Cloath'd in, &c. Chambers's arrangement of these lines is ingenious but, I think, mistaken because it alters the emphasis of the sentences. The stress is not laid by Donne on her purity, but on her early death: 'She expir'd while she was still a virgin. She went away before she was a woman.' Line 76:

is a sudden digression. Dryden filches these lines:

Page 248, l. 83. said History is a strange phrase, but it has the support of all the editions which can be said to have any authority.

l. 92. and then inferre. Compare: 'That this honour might be inferred on some one of the blood and race of their ancient king.' Raleigh (O.E.D.). Donne's sense of 'commit', 'entrust', is not far from Raleigh's of 'confer', 'bestow', and both are natural extensions of the common though now obsolete sense, 'bring on, occasion, cause':

l. 94. thus much to die. To die so far as this life is concerned.