The Poems of John Donne: Volume One

Robin Robbins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317905325
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

John Donne (1572-1631) is firmly fixed in the canon of English literature. "No man is an island" and "For whom the bell tolls" are just two of his phrases known by virtually everyone.

The Poems of John Donne is a two volume edition of Donnes poems based on a comprehensive re-evaluation of his work from composition to circulation and reception. Donnes output is tremendously varied in style and form and demonstrates his ability to change his writing according to context and occasion. This edition presents the text of all his known poems, from the epigrams, songs and satires written for fellow young men about town, to the more mature verse-epistles and memorial elegies written for his patrons.

Volume One contains the Epigrams, Verse Letters to Friends, Love Lyrics, Love Elegies and Satires.

LOVE-LYRICS (‘SONGS AND SONNETS’)

Air and Angels

Date and context. c. 1607–8? The possible echo in ll. 23–4 of Victorellus’ book on angels of 1605, perhaps alluded to in Litany 47 (1608) and SecAn (1611), and explicitly used in Pseudo-Martyr (1610), together with the parallel in ll. 1–2 with BedfordReason (c. 1607–8), suggest a relatively late date, as does the rhetorical sophistication of the poem. With its employment of a shifting pseudo-logic of excuse, traditional flattery and religious dogma to subordinate the woman, asserting her inferior, merely physical purity while claiming in the rejection of a blazon (ll. 10–22) that the speaker has risen above his own bodily attraction towards her, this is literally a metaphysical poem—perplexing ‘the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy’ (Dryden, Discourse of the Original and Progress of Satire, 1692), if it is thought of as actually addressed to a woman. That seems unlikely, given the focus on a specifically male anxiety and the disparaging conclusion. This recalls Mummy, which addresses a male reader, but rejects spiritualisation of love of women and talk of angels in favour of the physical. Thematically, if not necessarily chronologically, Air thus falls between Mummy and Ecstasy.

Analogues. Richmond (pp. 234–7) sees D. as here ‘Synthesizing motifs’ from several poems.

Text. Though Shawcross, JDJ 9 (1990) 33–41, argues that Group I (followed as in most of the love-lyrics by 1633, correcting from Group II) appears to give the most error-free text, the possibly slightly earlier text of H40 (see Gardner ESS lxv–lxvii) does not require correction, so is followed here. Group I is probably erroneous once in line 13, Group II in ll. 17 (twice) and 22, Group III in ll. 14 and 28. Within Group I, H49 and D do not contain the further errors of C57 and Lec. None of the differences between groups of MSS suggests authorial revision.

Form. That the stanzas comprise fourteen lines does not suffice to indicate an intended comment on the sonnet-tradition, since neither line-length nor rhyme-scheme are those of the sonnet. The seventh line of the first stanza and ninth of the second do provide a ‘turn’, but D.’s dialectic mode makes their occurrence probable independently of formal aims.

TWICE or thrice had I loved thee

Before I knew thy face or name;

Sources collated: H40; Group I: H49, D, C57, Lec; Group II: TCC, TCD, DC;

Group III: Dob, S96, Lut, O’F; 1633, 1635

Base text: H40

Select variants:

Heading I, II, III, 1633, 1635

So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame,

Angels affect us oft, and worshipped be.

5 Still, when to where thou wert I came,

Some lovely glorious nothing I did see;

But since my soul, whose child Love is,

Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,

More subtle than the parent is

10 Love must not be, but take a body too;

And therefore, what thou wert and who

I bid Love ask, and now

That it assume thy body I allow,

And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.

15 Whilst thus to ballast Love I thought,

And so more steadily to

have gone,

13 assume] ~s I 14 lip] ~s III

With wares which would sink admiratïon,

I saw, I had Love’s pinnace overfraught:

Ev’ry thy hair for Love to work upon

20 Is much too much: some fitter must be sought,

For nor in nothing nor in things

Extreme and scatt’ring bright can Love inhere.

Then, as an angel face and wings

17 wares] warrs II, DC: waues III 22 inhere] inherit II, DC

Of air, not pure as it, yet pure, doth wear,

25 So thy love may be my love’s sphere.

Just such disparity

As is ’twixt air and angels’ purity

’Twixt women’s love and men’s will ever be.

24 it] yt H49, D: yet C57, Lec 28 love] loves III

The Anniversary

Date and context. 1598? If read as gender-specific, l. 1’s ‘kings and all their favourites’ would have been particularly topical in the reign of James I, but was a commonplace under Queen Elizabeth, as in Satyre 2 70 (c. 1594), ‘a king’s favourite’. Verbal connections with Corona in l. 10, a letter to Goodyer in l. 20, and with Pseudo-Martyr in ll. 19–20 suggest 1607–9, and Gardner argues (DP xliii–xlvii and Appendix A, pp. 114–18) that D. first expressed l. 19’s definite view on the destination of the soul at the moment of death in Pseudo-Martyr, finished by Dec. 1609. She suggests that Anniversary was written during his reading of theological controversy on that point for Pseudo-Martyr, probably after DivM6Play, -8Round, -10Faith, dated by her to Feb.–Aug. 1609. Four thousand deaths from plague in London that year would have been a sharp reminder of decay, but the awareness in ll. 6–7 might have been enhanced by any year’s autumn or winter, and Fatal, which Gardner ESS xxxii–xxxiii suggests was written in the mid 1590s (and whose first line refers like Anniversary 5 to its lovers’ first meeting), implies in 17–18 that if the addressee dies the soul will go to heaven before the speaker dies and they are reunited. In any case, precisely considered theological conclusions are not a prime goal of love-poems (even D.’s). Those critics such as Marotti (1986) p. 321 who read Anniversary as addressed to Ann More, whom D. probably first met when he joined the staff of her uncle by marriage, Sir Thomas Egerton, in late 1597 (when she was ‘about fourteen’—Bald p. 96) to early 1598 must place it in 1598 or 1599, but there is no evidence that she was the addressee. The phrase ‘sweet salt tears’ in 1. 16 occurs also in Witchcraft, also of disputable date (Marotti dissociating it from More). Arguments for biographical reference or dating based on the recurrence of words and ideas are thus, as often, insecure and inconclusive. There is, nevertheless, another reason for dating Anniversary to 1598. The parity of the partners in Anniversary, contrasting with the inequality affirmed in the same analogy in Sun, where ‘kings … all here in one bed’ lie but it is the man alone who is ‘all princes’, suggests an exclusively male relationship. E. E. Duncan-Jones, LRB 7 (Oct. 1993) 4, argues persuasively that, since the gender of the addressee is not specified, D. may in the thrice-repeated ‘kings’ be punning on the surname (as he does in a letter of 1613 (Bald p. 292), and on his own and Ann More’s surnames in Name, HSW1Since, Germany and Christ) of John King (1559?–1621), a lifelong friend, with whom his relationship was termed by Walton ‘a marriage of souls’. King was later Dean of Christ Church, Oxford (1605), then Bishop of London (1611–21). As in the case of Ann More, D. probably first met him on joining Egerton’s household, where King was chaplain from the mid-1590s to 1600. He was the father of Henry King (1592–1669), the metaphysical poet and Bishop of Chichester, to whom D., according again to Walton, on his deathbed in March 1631 entrusted the MSS of his sermons.

Analogues. As in Metem, in the love-poem Morrow, and in the epithalamia Lincoln, Elizabeth, an alexandrine rounds off each stanza.

Text. The substantive readings of II (for this poem DC gives a Group II text) and 1633 against other groups in the heading, ll. 10, 23–4, and of II, III and 1633 against I in l. 24, might be authorial revisions. Reference to ‘the first, last, ever-lasting day’ borders on blasphemy. In ll. 23–4 the meaning is universalised and the metre filled out, in 1. 24 a possible ambiguity removed. The editor of 1633, while keeping Anniversary’s position in the sequence of the lyrics in C57, evidently used a MS closer to II than to any others.

ALL kings and all their favourites,

All glory

of honours, beauties, wits,

The sun itself, which makes time...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Note by the General Editors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Abbreviations
• EPIGRAMS
• VERSE LETTERS TO FRIENDS
• LOVE-LYRICS (‘SONGS AND SONNETS’)
• LOVE-ELEGIES
• SATIRE