Thou shalt be a Mary _Magdalen_ and I
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as ceased to be Petrarchian and become Platonic, their love a thingpure and of the spirit, but none the less passionate for that: First, we lov'd well and faithfully,Yet knew not what wee lov'd, nor why,Difference of sex no more wee knew,Then our Guardian Angells doe;Comming and going, weePerchance might kisse, but not between those meales;Our hands ne'r toucht the seales,Which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free:These miracles wee did; but now alas,All measure, and all language, I should passe,Should I tell what a miracle shee was. Such were the notes that a poet in the seventeenth century might stillsing to a high-born lady his patroness and his friend. No one whoknows the fashion of the day will read into them more than they wereintended to convey. No one who knows human nature will read them asmerely frigid and conventional compliments. Any uncertainty one mayfeel about the subject arises not from their being love-poems, butfrom the difficulty which Donne has in adjusting himself to thePetrarchian convention, the tendency of his passionate heart andsatiric wit to break through the prescribed tone of worship andcomplaint. Without some touch of passion, some vibration of the heart, Donne isonly too apt to accumulate 'monstrous and disgusting hyperboles'. Thisis very obvious in the _Epicedes_--his complimentary laments for theyoung Lord Harington, Miss Boulstred, Lady Markham, Elizabeth Druryand the Marquis of Hamilton, poems in which it is difficult to find aline that moves. Indeed, seventeenth-century elegies are not as a rulepathetic. A poem in the simple, piercing strain and the Wordsworthianplainness of style of the Dutch poet Vondel's lament for his littledaughter is hardly to be found in English. An occasional epitaph likeBrowne's May! be thou never grac'd with birds that sing,Nor Flora's pride!In thee all flowers and roses spring,Mine only died, comes near it, but in general seventeenth-century elegy is apt tospend itself on three not easily reconcilable themes--extravaganteulogy of the dead, which is the characteristically Renaissancestrain, the Mediaeval meditation on death and its horrors, the moresimply Christian mood of hope rising at times to the rapt vision ofa higher life. In the pastoral elegy, such as _Lycidas_, the poetwas able to escape from a too literal treatment of the first into asequence of charming conventions. The second was alien to Milton'sthought, and with his genius for turning everything to beauty Miltonextracts from the reference to the circumstances of King's death theonly touch of pathos in the poem:
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