Had we never lov'd sae kindly
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r Take, O take those lips away. And strangest of all perhaps is the tenderness which came into Donne'spoetry when a sincere passion quickened in his heart, for tenderness,the note of O wert thou in the cauld blast, is the last quality one would look for in the poetry of a nature atonce so intellectual and with such a capacity for caustic satire. Butthe beautiful if not flawless _Elegy XVI_, By our first strange and fatal interview, and the _Valedictions_ which he wrote on different occasions ofparting from his wife, combine with the peculiar _élan_ of all Donne'spassionate poetry and its intellectual content a tenderness as perfectas anything in Burns or in Browning: O more than Moone,Draw not up seas to drowne me in thy spheare,Weepe me not dead in thine armes, but forbeareTo teach the sea, what it may doe too soone. Let not thy divining heartForethink me any ill,Destiny may take thy partAnd may thy feares fulfill;But thinke that weAre but turn'd aside to sleep;They who one another keepeAlive, ne'er parted be. Such wilt thou be to mee, who mustLike th' other foot, obliquely runne;Thy firmnes makes my circle just,And makes me end, where I begunne. The poet who wrote such verses as these did not believe any longerthat 'love ... represents the principle of perpetual flux in nature'. But Donne's poetry is not so simple a thing of the heart and of thesenses as that of Burns and Catullus. Even his purer poetry has morecomplex moods--consider _The Prohibition_--and it is metaphysical, notonly in the sense of being erudite and witty, but in the proper senseof being reflective and philosophical. Donne is always conscious ofthe import of his moods; and so it is that there emerges from hispoems a philosophy or a suggested philosophy of love to take the placeof the idealism which he rejects. Set a song of the joy of loveby Burns or by Catullus such as I have cited beside Donne's_Anniversarie_, All Kings, and all their favorites,All glory of honors, beauties, wits,The Sun itselfe, which makes times, as they passe,Is elder by a year, now, than it wasWhen thou and I first one another saw, and the difference is at once apparent. Burns gets no further than theexperience, Catullus than the obvious and hedonistic reflection thattime is flying, the moment of pleasure short. In Donne's poem onefeels the quickening of the brain, the vision extending its range, thepassion gathering sweep with the expanding rhythms, and from the mindthus heated and inspired emerges, not a cry that time might stay itscourse, Lente, lente currite noctis equi, but a clearer consciousness of the eternal significance of love, notthe love that aspires after the unattainable, but the love thatunites contented hearts. The method of the poet is, I suppose, toodialectical to be popular, for the poem is in few Anthologies. It maybe that the Pagan and Christian strains which the poet unites are notperfectly blended--if it is possible to do so--but to me it seems thatthe joy of love has never been expressed at once with such intensityand such elevation. And it is with sorrow as with joy. There is the same differenceof manner in the expression between Donne and these poets, and thedeepest thought is the same. The _Nocturnall on S. Lucies Day_ isat the opposite pole of Donne's thought from the _Anniversarie_, andcompared with
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