Part 5 (1/2)

that attracts the ordinary man and woman of to-day.

In spite of repeated incentives to listen, we turn deaf ears to sermons: towards poetry we are inclined to be perhaps too kind.

Donne is all the more important as a poet because he treats of the universal pa.s.sion of love in more phases than any other poet. He was the complete experimentalist in love, both in actual life and in his work.

He is frankly in search of bodily experiences:

”Whoever loves, if he do not propose The right true end of love, he's one that goes To sea for nothing but to make him sick.”

He is brutal:

”For G.o.d's sake hold your tongue, and let me love.”

He is inconstant:

”I can love any, so she be not true.”

He bewails the inconstancy of women:

”Though she were true when you met her, And last till you write your letter, Yet she Will be False, ere I come, to two or three.”

His pa.s.sion for sheer ugliness carries him away time after time:

”Had it been some bad smell, he would have thought That his own feet, or breath, that smell had wrought.”

Or again:

”And like a bunch of ragged carrots stand The short swollen fingers of thy gouty hand.”

In his _Elegies_ he tells stories of his conquests dramatically, in full detail, satirically, sensually. In _Jealousy_ we are given an exact picture of the deformed husband who,

”Swol'n and pampered with great fare, Sits down and snorts, cag'd in his basket chair”

--so that the poet and his mistress perforce have to ”play in another house,” away from those ”towering eyes, that flamed with oily sweat of jealousy.”

In _The Perfume_ we see the girl's ”immortal mother, which doth lie still buried in her bed, yet will not die,” who, fearing lest her daughter be swollen, embraces her and names strange meats to try her longings: we see

”The grim-eight-foot-high-iron-bound-serving-man That oft names G.o.d in oaths, and only then.”

But the scent that the lover uses gives him away and so he is by her ”hydroptic father catechized.”

There is a good deal of frank naturalism in the elegy ent.i.tled _To his Mistress Going to Bed_, but it is healthily coa.r.s.e, though scarcely quotable even in these times, which is a pity.

”There is no penance due to innocence.”

But playing as he does on all the notes of all the different sorts of love, Donne gives the impression of one who attained in the end an abiding love for one person, Anne More, his wife.

In _The Ecstasy_ we see him crying out against pa.s.sionate friends.h.i.+p:

”But O alas, so long, so far, Our bodies why do we forbear?”

and makes an unanswerable point in this verse: