John Donne

The Critical Heritage

A.J. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415134125
• eBook ISBN: 9781134783267
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work,enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes), and as individual volumes.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

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‘an absolute and unique genius’

112. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1795–1833

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Coleridge and Lamb set out to rediscover the old authors who had fallen out of favour in the eighteenth century, and to reinstate the principles by which they wrote, Coleridge seems to have found Donne's writings peculiarly congenial and he took Donne's stature for granted when he championed him, to the alarm of some hearers. His close comments on Donne's poems, had they been widely known, must have stimulated people to read Donne himself rather than Johnson's account of him; but they were not printed until the 1850s when the general revival of interest in Donne was already well under way, and they are still insufficiently reckoned with.

Some of Coleridge's marginal comments on Donne's letters and sermons are given because they illustrate an attitude to Donne which one finds in the account of the poetry.

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(i) Entries Coleridge made in his Notebooks between 1795 and 1804 show that he was reading Donne's poetry, probably in volume iv of Anderson's The Poets of Great Britain which came out in 1793. In the winter of 1803–4 Coleridge seems to have got bits of Donne by heart for he familiarly adapts lines from the funeral poems and verse letters. (The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1794–1804, ed. K. Coburn, 1957. The extracts given below are denoted by the number of their entry in this edition.)

Satires in the manner of Donne—
1. Horace Walpole
2. Monthly Reviewers &c … Bowles.

No. 698 (February–March 1800):

‘The all-ey'd Firmament’ Donne—

[Eclogue, 1613. December 26, line 28]

Nos 1786–9 (December 1803–January 1804):

Mismotion/to unapparel.

[Both words occur in the Obsequies to the Lord Harrington, lines 12 and 132.]

‘Bedded and bath'd in all his Ordures’

Donne.

[The second Anniversary, line 171]

In heaven/
God help me, Girl! I would not miss you there,
For all the bliss that you can give me here.

[‘To the Countesse of Bedford’ (‘Reason is our Soules left hand’), lines 37–8]

For Folly's Lion is but Wisdom's ape—

[‘To Mr T. W.’ (‘All haile sweet Poet’)]

(ii) About 1796 Coleridge drew up some ‘Memoranda for a History of English Poetry, biographical, bibliographical, critical and philosophical, in distinct Essay’. He sketched the topics of eight essays, covering English poetry from the ‘English Romances’ to ‘Modern Poetry’. Donne was to be treated in the seventh essay. (Given in K. Coburn, Inquiring Spirit, 1957, pp. 152–3.)

7. Dryden and the History of the witty Logicians, Butler (ought he not to have a distinct tho' short Essay?)—B. Johnson, Donne, Cowley—— Pope.—

(iii) Coleridge twice quoted lines from Donne in The Friend. As the motto for Essay xv (30 November 1809) he adapted lines 5–17 of the verse letter ‘To Sir Henry Goodyere’ (‘Who makes the Past, a paterne for next yeare,’). In Essay xvi (7 December 1809) he used lines 48–52 of the Eclogue, 1613. December 26, considerably adapted, to illustrate his argument that ‘the previous condition of all insight into truth, is to dare commune with our very and permanent self’(The Friend, ed. B. E. Rooke, London, 1969, i, p. 115).

Coleridge adapted Donne's lines seemingly on the principle he set out in his Notebook no. 43, many years later (see (xii) below, p. 276, entry for 1830). Thus he amends what Donne wrote in the verse letter to Goodyer—

So had your body'her morning, hath her noone,
And shall not better; her next change is night:

to

Our bodies had their morning, have their noon,
And shall not better—the next change is night;

And he partly rewrites the extract from the epithalamion, altering Donne's lines—

So, reclus'd hermits often times do know
More of heavens glory, then a worldling can

to

The recluse Hermit oft' times more doth know
Of the world's inmost wheels, than More of heavens glory, then a worldling can

(iv) On 2 May 1811 Coleridge scribbled notes in the margin of Charles Lamb's copy of Donne's poems and added a message excusing himself to Lamb—‘I shall die soon, my dear Charles Lamb, and then you will not be vexed that I had bescribbled your book’. The notes were printed in Notes Theological, Political, and Miscellaneous, 1853, pp, 255–61, and in an American journal, The Literary World, New York, 1853, xii, pp. 349–50 (30 April), 393 (14 May), and 433 (28 May). The Literary World offered them with a great flourish, plainly not just because they were Coleridge's but because this was Coleridge on Donne:

To read Dryden, Pope, &c., you need only count syllables; but to read Donne you must measure time, and discover the time of each word by the sense of passion. I would ask no surer test of a Scotchman's substratum (for the turf-cover of pretension they all have) than to make him read Donne's satires aloud. If he made manly metre of them and yet strict metre, then,—why, then he wasn't a Scotchman, or his soul was geographically slandered by his body's first appearing there.

Doubtless, all the copies I have ever seen of Donne's poems are grievously misprinted. Wonderful that they are not more so, considering that not one in a thousand of his readers has any notion how his lines are to be read—to the many, five out of six appear anti-metrical. How greatly this aided the compositor's negligence or ignorance, and prevented the corrector's remedy, any man may ascertain by examining the earliest editions of blank verse plays, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, &c. Now, Donne's rhythm was as inexplicable to the many as blank verse, spite of his rhymes—ergo, as blank verse, misprinted. I am convinced that where no mode of rational declamation by pause, hurrying of voice, or apt and sometimes double emphasis, can at once make the verse metrical and bring out the sense of passion more prominently, that there we are entitled to alter the text, when it can be done by simple omission or addition of that, which, and, and such ‘small deer’; or by mere new placing of the same words—I would venture nothing beyond.

[On ‘The Triple Fool’]
And by delighting many, frees again
Grief which Verse did restrain.

A good instance how Donne read his own verses. We should write, ‘The Grief, verse did restrain;’ but Donne roughly emphasized the two main words, Grief and Verse, and, therefore, made each the first syllable of a trochee or dactyl:—

Grīef, whĭch / vērse dĭd ĕe / straīn.
Song
A

d

e joīn

o't ŏur strēngth,
A

d

e teāch i

a

t a

d le

gth.

The anapest judiciously used, in the eagerness and haste to confirm and aggravate. This beautiful and perfect poem proves, by its title ‘Song,’ that all Donne's poems are equally metrical (misprints allowed for) though smoothness (i.e., the metre necessitating the proper reading) be deemed appropriate to songs; but in poems where the writer thinks, and expects the reader to do so, the sense must be understood in order to ascertain the metre.

[On Satyre iii]

If you would teach a scholar in the highest form how to read, take Donne, and of Donne this satire. When he has learnt to read Donne, with all the force and meaning which are involved in the words, then send him to Milton, and he will stalk on like a master, enjoying his walk.

[On ‘The Flea’]

Be proud as Spaniards. Leap for pride, ye Fleas!
In Nature's minim realm ye're now grandees.
Skip-jacks no more, nor civiller skip-johns;
Thrice-honored Fleas! I greet you all as Dons.
In Phoebus's archives registered are ye,
And this your patent of nobility.

[On ‘The Good-morrow’]

What ever dies is not mixt equally;
If our two loves be one, both thou and I
Love just alike in all; none of these loves can die.

Too good for mere wit. It contains a deep practical truth, this triplet.

[On ‘Womans Constancy’]

After all, there is but one Donne! and now tell me yet, wherein, in his own kind, he differs from the similar power in Shakespeare? Shakespeare was all men, potentially, except Milton; and they differ from him by negation, or privation, or both. This power of dissolving orient pearls, worth a kingdom, in a health to a whore!—this absolute right of dominion over all thoughts, that dukes are bid to clean his shoes, and are yet honored by it! But, I say, in this lordliness of opulence, in which the positive of Donne agrees with a positive of Shakespeare, what is it that makes them homoiousian, indeed: yet not homoousian?

[He quotes the first stanza of ‘The Sunne Rising’, and four lines of the second stanza, then comments]

Fine, vigorous exultation, both soul and body in full puissance.

[He quotes the first stanza of ‘The Indifferent’.]

How legitimate a child was not Cowley of Donne; but Cowley had a soul-mother as well as a soul-father, and who was she? What was that? Perhaps, sickly court-loyalty, conscientious per accident—a discursive intellect, naturally less vigorous and daring, and then cowed by king-worship. The populousness, the activity, is as great in C. as in D.; but the vigor, the insufficiency to the poet of active fancy without a substrate of profound, tho' mislocate thinking,—the will-worship, in squandering golden hecatombs on a fetisch, on the first stick or straw met with at rising—this pride of doing what he likes with his own, fearless of an immense surplus to pay all lawful debts to self-subsisting themes, that rule, while they cannot create, the moral will—this is Donne! He was an orthodox Christian only because he could have been an infidel more easily; and, therefore willed to be a Christian: and he was a Protestant, because it enabled him to lash about to the right and the left, and without a motive, to say better things for the Papists than they could say for themselves. It was the impulse of a purse-proud opulence of innate power! In the sluggish pond the waves roll this or that way; for such is the wind's direction: but in the brisk spring or lake, boiling at bottom, wind this way, that way, all ways, most irregular in the calm, yet inexplicable by the most violent ab extra tempest.

[On ‘The Canonization’]

One of my favourite poems. As late as ten years ago, I used to seek and find out grand lines and fine stanzas; but my delight has been far greater since it has consisted more in tracing the leading thought thro'out the whole. The former is too much like coveting your neighbour's goods; in the latter you merge yourself in the author, you become He.

[On ‘A Feaver’]

Yet I had rather owner be
Of thee one hour, than all else ever.

Just and affecting, as dramatic; i.e., the outburst of a transient feeling, itself the symbol of a deeper feeling, that would have made one hour, known to be only one hour (or even one year), a perfect hell! All the preceding verses are detestable. Shakespeare has nothing of this. He is never positively bad, even in his Sonnets. He may be sometimes worthless (N.B., I don't say he is), but nowhere is he unworthy.

[On ‘A Valediction: forbidding Mourning’]

An admirable poem which none but Donne could have written. Nothing was ever more admirably made out than the figure of the Compass.

[He quotes the last four stanzas of the poem.]

[On ‘The Exstasie’]

I should never f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• THE CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES
• Full Title
• Copyright
• General Editor's Preface
• Contents
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• NOTE ON THE TEXT
• The seventeenth century
• The eighteenth century
• The nineteenth century
• APPENDIX A: The publication of Donne's poems down to 1912
• APPENDIX B: Poems by Donne which are known to have been set to music down to the nineteenth century
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX