JOHN DONNE, SIR FRANCIS BACON
In 1608 John Donne wrote to Sir Henry Goodere regretting that he had allowed his “Anniversaries” to be printed: “The fault that I acknowledge in myself is to have descended to print anything in verse, which, though it have excuse, even in our times, by example of men which one would think should have little have done it as I; yet I confess I wonder how I declined to it, and do not pardon myself.” Not only were the poems ill received (by Ben Jonson among others); he felt exposed and ridiculous. He’d fallen to Grub Street level. Unlike Sidney, he acquiesced in publication. No blame attaches to his printer. A contemporary described him: “Mr John Donne, who leaving Oxford, liv’d at the Inns of Court, not dissolute but very neat; a great Visitor of Ladies, a great Frequenter of Plays, a great Writer of conceited Verses.” Such a summary Donne found unpleasing.
In his age privacy and “nicety” were finding language and an art: the portrait and portrait miniature, like Hilliard’s: easel paintings for private appreciation, for sharing in a gallery with select friends, or for secret appreciation—like the composer’s chamber-sized airs, or the courtier’s lyrics and elegies, each encoding a specific occasion. Privacy implied that a picture or poem had meaning only, or only in full, to the recipient, the dedicatee, and those in the know. A great violator of such privilege and privacy was the often inaccurate Aubrey, poison-pen portraitist, whose prurience evokes a century of large and little lives. In Donne’s court years the age of vast allegorical tapestries and historical canvases was giving way to a human scale. There were inadequate antecedents for such an art. No wonder that in a poem to Goodere Donne writes:
Who makes the Past, a pattern for next year,
Turns no new leaf, but still the same things reads,
Seen things, he sees again, heard things doth hear,
And makes his life, but like a pair of beads.
The subject is spiritual: the fortifying of the soul. But religious and secular, soul and body, are so intertwined in Donne, his thinking and feeling so of a piece, that what he says of one sphere remains true of another. That’s why his religious and devotional poems affect with force even readers who disbelieve or detest the vexed Anglican faith they arise from. C. H. Sisson invokes him in “A Letter to John Donne”:
I understand you well enough, John Donne
First, that you were a man of ability
Eaten by lust and by the love of God...
Sisson goes on to contrast Donne with modern men of ability:
That you should have spent your time in the corruption of courts
As these in that of cities, gives you no place among us:
Ability is not even the game of a fool
But the click of a computer operating in a waste
Your cleverness is dismissed from this suit
Bring out your genitals and your theology.
What makes you familiar is this dual obsession;
Lust is not what the rutting stag knows
It is to take Eve’s apple and to lose
The stag’s paradisal look:
The love of God comes readily
To those who have most need.
Donne intended to speak to a few, but in the complex clarity of his speaking he engaged, three centuries later, a far wider readership than any of his public-voiced contemporaries.
He allowed his poems to circulate in manuscript among special friends. One of them might copy out a piece for private pleasure, another make a secret record, but the public that knew Donne at court or later heard his sermons in St. Paul’s was generally ignorant of his poetry. He, like George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Traherne and others, did not welcome the sobriquet “poet.” Did Doctor Johnson misvalue him and his fellow “Metaphysicals” because they didn’t say they took themselves seriously as poets? It’s not that they insisted on amateur status, only that they did not see writing poems as imparting a status or constituting a recognizable identity. They lived off their wit, but in a wider world.
Struggling with his religious vocation in 1608, Donne writes to Goodere in depression and indecision; at no point does he consider becoming a writer: “I would fain do something, but that I cannot tell what is no wonder. For to choose is to do. But to be no part of anybody is to be nothing. At most, the greatest persons are but great wens and excrescences, men of wit and delightful conversation but as moles for ornament, except they be so incorporated into the body of the world that they contribute something to the sustentation of the whole.” Here, in the intimacy of a letter, we hear in subtler voice the man who would one day deliver the great “No man is an Island” sermon. He has yet to act, but he knows he can’t contribute—or not sufficiently—to “the sustentation of the whole” by being a poet. Besides, he had only a limited appetite for reading the stuff: “His library contained little poetry, and he confessed that he was ‘no great voyager in other men’s works.’ ”
One man’s works he did voyage in: Francis Bacon’s. Among the papers he kept by him until he died was a copy of Bacon’s then famous poem “The World.”
The world’s a bubble, and the life of man
Less than a span,
In his conception wretched, from the womb,
So to the tomb;
Curst from the cradle, and brought up to years
With cares and fears.
Who then to frail mortality shall trust,
But limns on water, or but writes in dust...
The poem led to a debate in 1597 that harked back to the ancient debate preserved in the classic Greek Anthology: Which life is best, the court, the country or the city? The church is not offered as an option. Bacon’s poem is more than a philosopher’s curious reflection. Formally accomplished, it uses metaphor suggestively, enough indeed to have affected the twenty-year-old Donne, whose “Satires” date from around the time “The World” was circulated among friends, 1592.
Bacon’s poem affirms the vanity of life, the fact of death and the need to prepare for it. These were urgent themes for Donne in later years. Nowhere is the Jacobean way of death better illustrated than in Donne’s preparations. Most men allowed their survivors to bury them as they thought appropriate. Donne took his death into his own hands. The rehearsals as much as the memorial tell us more about him than we could learn from the rooms he lived in. His single aim was to die and remember death appropriately, leaving an adequate monument to commemorate the spiritual struggle and teach others to consider their fate, a sermon in action leading to a sermon in stone. Izaac Walton in his wonderful “Life of Donne” tells the story. “Dr Donne sent for a carver to make for him in wood the figure of an urn, giving him directions for the compass and height of it; and to bring with it a board of the just height of his body. These being got, then without delay a choice painter was got to be in readiness to draw his picture, which was taken as followeth.—Several charcoal fires being first made in his large study, he brought with him into that place his winding-sheet in his hand, and, having put off all his clothes, had this sheet put on him, and so tied with knots at his head and feet, and his hands so placed, as dead bodies are usually fitted to be shrouded and put into their coffin, or grave. Upon this urn he thus stood with his eyes shut, and with so much of the sheet turned aside as might show his lean, pale and deathlike face.” He kept the picture by his bed “where it continued, and became his hourly object till his death.” Before he prepared for death, however, he lived life to the full, first outside, then inside the Church.
Only a little over a decade separates Marlowe’s Elegies and Donne’s love poems, yet the differences are startling. Set Marlowe’s thirteenth elegy from Book One (“To Dawn, not to hurry”) beside Donne’s “The Sun Rising.” Both are in the same genre and draw on similar conventions. This is Marlowe:
Now o’er the sea from her old love comes she
That draws the day from heaven’s cold axle-tree.
Aurora, whither slidest thou? down again,
And birds for Memnon yearly shall be slain.
Now in her tender arms I sweetly bide,
If ever, now well lies she by my side.
The air is cold, and sleep is sweetest now,
And birds send forth shrill notes from every bough:
Whither runn’st thou, that men and women love not?
Hold in thy rosy horses that they move not.
Donne, by contrast, must have seemed to his friends rawly impassioned and possessed of new energies:
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late schoolboys, and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen, that the King will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Between Donne and Marlowe there are obvious formal differences, and consequently stark contrasts: between the cadenced couplets of Marlowe and the harsh, spoken lines of Donne. Marlowe’s language of convention (no less expressive for its conventionality) has been replaced by an “unpoetic,” dramatic handling of the conventions themselves. The main difference is conceptual. Marlowe’s elegy, with the tenderness of lines five to seven, creates with each image a specific scene of love. Donne, by line four, is dealing with generalities. His attention has been distracted from his beloved onto the image of the sun, and thence to the street and the world. We lose sight of the ostensible subject in a poetry of extension, until the third stanza, when the poet’s mind returns to bed, and his relationship, a microcosm, swells to the proportions of a macrocosm. “She is all states, and all princes, I, / Nothing else is.” Donne’s attitude to the sun changes from rancor to charitable pity. Yet the reader remains unenlightened about the relationship that occasions such superb arrogance. Donne’s poem has wit, but one is undecided whether it has an actual subject or is a pretext for developing poetic conceit.
Robert Graves notes how Donne’s opening inspirations wear out after two or three lines, and mere wit propels him forward. There is fitfulness, a counterpoint between imagination and artifice. This is a virtue for a casual reader whose delight is continuously rekindled; but if the poems are reread, delight diminishes. Graves remarks: “Donne is adept at keeping the ball in the air, but he deceives us here by changing the ball.”
A juggler who, unperceived, changes the balls as he juggles was bound to appeal to the modernists. After centuries of relative neglect, Donne found in T. S. Eliot an advocate. But even as he celebrates Donne, Eliot suggests that the work will speak to the first half of the twentieth century more eloquently than to the second. The case—or cases—against Donne and the Metaphysicals are of long standing, and it is worth remembering the terms in which they were made and—Eliot suggests—would be made again.
Jonson, after initial reservations, admired Donne above most of his contemporaries, but “for not keeping number” he deserved hanging. Donne incorporates the energy of speech in his meters and his phrased verse is effective, though we have to agree with Yvor Winters that there are examples “more of rhythmic violence than subtlety.” He lacks Marvell’s metrical agility. “It was as if, impatient as he was of women, love, fools and God, he was impatient too of the close steps of metre.” His satire consciously roughens the surface and defies scansion. Take a passage from the second satire: having pilloried different kinds of writers, he lights on plagiarists:
But he is worst, who (beggarly) doth chaw
Others’ wits’ fruits, and in his ravenous maw
Rankly digested, doth those things out-spew,
As his own things; and they are his own, ’tis true,
For if one eat my meat, though it be known
The meat was mine, th’ excrement is his own:
But these do me no harm, nor they which use
To out-do Dildoes, and out-usure Jews
In this coarse manner he speaks after Juvenal, harshly departing from meter without quite abandoning the norm. Yet the first half of the second line is very nearly unsayable.
Dryden’s case against him goes beyond prosody. Even in the amorous poems Donne is, he says, “metaphysical”; he “perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts.” For Dryden, he’s a great wit, not a great poet. The force of this case is felt by those who, in the brilliance of Donne’s wordplay, his spinning out of startling analogies and conceits, find at work deliberate intelligence, not imagination: a talent of the surface rather than the depths, for which dalliance with language is more erotic than dalliance with the beloved. He moves us by surprise rather than by truth. Marvell and Herbert deliver a kernel of experience, while Donne might seem to deliver the husk that held it. We’re aware of a person delivering the poems in various voices. “The vividness of the descriptions or declamations in Donne, or Dryden,” says Coleridge, “is as much and as often derived from the forced fervour of the describer as from the reflections, forms or incidents which constitute their subject and materials. The wheels take fire from the mere rapidity of their motion.” Having hoisted Dryden on the same petard, Coleridge offers an epigram on Donne:
With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots,
Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots;
Rhyme’s sturdy cripple, fancy’s maze and clue,
Wit’s forge and fire-blast, meaning’s press and screw.
“Self-impassioned”: that’s Coleridge’s verdict and “Valediction Forbidding Mourning” justifies it. Metaphor and conceit develop by association of idea or semantic nuance, not appropriateness of physical form. The image of the dying man suggests the lovers’ separation. Stoically, the poet prays that it be without tempests (tears); tempests suggest sky and moving earth, an image detailed without reference to preceding images. Astronomy follows naturally and is developed until, on the word “refined,” Donne’s mind turns to metals and alchemy: gold is the next image. The expansion of hammered gold suggests attachment in separation, and in come the famous compasses. Double meaning or intellectual (but not logical) association lead from stanza to stanza. A powerful pseudo-argument develops, convincing because of the sense of logic, and the spell holds for the duration of the poem. As Winters says, the “rational structure” is used to “irrational ends.” Donne elaborates and decorates at the expense of theme, sometimes so for that he displaces it altogether.
Doctor Johnson’s is the most concise case against Donne. In his Life of Cowley, Johnson says the poet specialized in what he calls “enormous and disgusting hyperboles,” a bad habit contracted from Donne. “Who but Donne,” he asks, “would have thought a good man was a telescope?” Applying Dryden’s term “metaphysical” to Donne and other poets of his time, he calls them “men of learning” whose “whole endeavour” was “to show their learning.” They wrote verse rather than poetry, “and very often such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than the ear.” Dryden, Johnson says, ranks below Donne in wit but surpasses him in poetry. For Johnson wit is what is “at once natural and new,” not obvious but “upon its first production, acknowledged to be just,” so we wonder how we ever missed it. In Donne the thought is new, but seldom natural; it is not obvious, but neither is it just.
Yet if we define wit as discordia concors, sensed similarity in things dissimilar, then Donne and the Metaphysicals have that—at a certain cost: “Their courtship is void of fondness, and their lamentation of sorrow.” They are neither sublime nor pathetic, they evince none of “that comprehension and expanse of thought which at once fills the whole mind.” They replace the sublime with hyperbole, “combinations of confused magnificence, that not only could not be credited, but could not be imagined.” An example from “Twickenham Garden”:
Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with tears,
Hither I come to seek the spring,
And at mine eyes, and at my ears,
Receive such balms, as else cure every thing;
But O, self traitor, I do bring
The spider love, which transubstantiates all,
And can convert Manna to gall,
And that this place may thoroughly be thought
True Paradise, I have the serpent brought.
What have we here? A storm-tossed wandering lover—a self-traitor, an alchemist, a god and an Adam. We have a serpent and a spider. We have various levels of experience and metaphor woven in a resonant, affective, but meaningless stanza—or meaningful to the exegete, who patiently teases out sacramental themes and recognizes the dramatic inversion of religious images in service of carnal passion.
Johnson does not set out to dismiss the Metaphysicals but to characterize them. Herbert and Marvell he overlooks. For Johnson, the best poems are true from any angle of approach, and Donne’s are true from only one angle. Each word is restricted by context to a single significance. Joan Bennett makes this into a virtue in her account of Donne: he impresses words and images into service in a specific way; they appear clean of conventional association, without nuance or ambiguity.
Johnson’s most telling criticism is that Donne’s allusive strategy points always away from the poem’s occasion, it does not refer back and concentrate. Readers must bring various bits of information to their reading, where ideally “every piece ought to contain in itself whatever is necessary to make it intelligible.” Again it’s clear why Eliot and the modernists fell for Donne.
The thematic concerns and radical procedures of Donne’s poetry reveal a personality as complex and controversial as the verse itself. Born in London in 1572, he was a city creature. When he had to reside outside London for a time he complained bitterly. He has in his heart no place for the pastoral. His father was an ironmonger who prospered but died when the poet was four years old. Images of metallurgy and alchemy had a special resonance for him. His mother was the daughter of John Heywood, poet, playwright, and a descendant of Sir Thomas More; it was a Roman Catholic family with, in his great-uncle Thomas Heywood, a Catholic martyr. Two uncles were Jesuit priests. Donne received a Roman Catholic education and was reared a firm recusant. For a decade, from the age of twelve, he studied at Hart Hall, Oxford, with his brother Henry; then both proceeded to the Inns of Court, referred to at the time as the “third university.” Henry gave refuge to a seminary priest and both brothers were arrested. Henry died of the plague in Newgate Prison before he came to trial. The priest was hanged, taken down and disemboweled before an appreciative crowd.
Though he harbored a dislike for the Jesuits, Donne found the transition to Anglicanism hard. To achieve preferment, he had to abandon a faith that blocked his progress. But the struggle between faith and family loyalty on the one hand, and burning ambition on the other, made him a writer different in kind from his contemporaries, more like the poets of the Continent. As Ford says, “The greatest of all these great ones have invariably about them a note of otherworldliness: they have seen Hell, they have wrestled with God, they have sounded horrors superhuman and inconceivable.” In Dante, Villon, Isaiah, St. Augustine, we find this “greatest.” And sometimes in Donne. Amour is bleached out of him, his very gender changed, by the blast of faith and the hunger and doubts it brought him. Other Metaphysicals are more or less comfortable in conscience and in their material circumstances. Donne was virtually compelled against a recusant conscience to turn Anglican and, in order to put food in his family’s mouth, to live a kind of partial truth, to take orders from the king in a church he regarded as in a sense heretical, to give sermons on themes and occasions where political interests claimed the right to use him.
Following his heart, he made certain crucial miscalculations. After military service with Essex at Cadiz, and an expedition to the Azores, as well as diplomatic missions, he was secretary to the shrewd and influential Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeperone. It was a good job that gave him insights into the devious workings of court and the state machine. At twenty-nine he fell in love with Anne More, daughter of a rich Surrey landowner whose sister was Egerton’s new wife. By the time of their clandestine marriage he had composed the Satires (1593–98), the majority of the Elegies and many of the Songs and Sonets. He had completed The Progress of the Soul and had become a member of Parliament. Egerton drove him out and they were never reconciled. For fifteen years Donne struggled to support a growing family. “John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done,” he wrote when he was dismissed. And for a long time it seemed he was right.
He was briefly imprisoned. Forced to live off the generosity of friends, he pursued his study of canon and civil law to provide himself with a livelihood. His depressions were acute: he contemplated suicide. He wrote Biathanatos, a partial justification of suicide, in 1606. In that year he removed with his growing family to Mitcham, where living might prove cheaper than in London, retaining for himself lodgings in the Strand. He made a number of valuable friends, among them Mrs. Magdalen Herbert, mother of the poet George and of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the Countess of Pembroke, and the Countess of Huntingdon. Several of them received tributes of verse.
By 1609, drawn by Dean Thomas Morton’s anti-Jesuit pamphleteering, he contributed to the debate his Pseudo-Martyr, an incitement to papists to take the oath of loyalty to the Crown. This and other pamphlets attracted the king’s attention. In the next two years the king urged him—some say, ordered him—against his secular ambition into the church. During the period of his resistance to the king he wrote the Holy Sonnets (1609–1611), an expression of faith and of his doubt of vocation. He continued to resist through 1614, when he was able briefly to return to Parliament. In 1615, after a final attempt at secular preferment, he took orders and completed his Epicede and Obsequies, probably begun in 1601. They are Donne at his most fantastic and “public.” The bulk of his religious verse was by then completed as well.
Having taken orders, he was made a royal chaplain, preaching to king and court, and his talent for sermons was such that some are still read today. He dealt too with diplomatic correspondence (a form of secular work more to his taste). He traveled. In 1617 at Paul’s Cross, outside the old St. Paul’s, which was destroyed in the fire of 1666 and replaced by Wren’s defiant thimble, he ascended to the outdoor pulpit to deliver a Sunday forenoon sermon, the commendatory sermon on the anniversary of the death of Queen Elizabeth (who had reigned for the first thirty-two years of his life). His audience that day included Sir Francis Bacon (the Lord Keeper), the Earls of Arundel and Southampton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and a throng of Londoners, from merchants to tramps, from great ladies to whores. He was a catch for the English church. Four years later he was appointed dean of St. Paul’s. Between 1619 and 1623 he wrote his three “Hymns,” almost the last of his verse; and in 1623, as a result of serious illness (he expected death), he composed the Devotions. But he survived another eight years. In 1630 he began to weaken. In 1631 he preached the sermon he knew would be his last, now known as Death’s Duel, and died in just the way he had rehearsed.
During his life, his verse circulated—it is impossible to determine how widely—in manuscript. Two years after his death the poems were published. The publisher may have felt a slightly indecency in handling the work, “so difficult and opaque it is, I am not certain what it is I print.” But the book sold rather well, running through six editions before 1670. Here, the dean—celebrity, monster of eloquence, performer, eccentric—is discovered as a man with a body that felt lust, pain and love, and a mind whose attunement to circumstance was not always easy. The American poet Allen Tate has the effrontery to speak of him as “a contemporary,” perhaps because of his lusts and religious uncertainties, and proceeds to misread him in this light. With Donne, if one misunderstands the man one misreads the poems. T. S. Eliot wanted to draw him back into the mainstream of English verse and his attempt involved a little critical distortion. But Eliot did not misread the man. Donne’s skepticism is unlike our own. His religious struggle was due to an uncertainty about the terms, not the fundamentals, of faith. His problem was not in believing, but in believing rightly, and having accepted right belief, to behave accordingly. We do Donne no justice by loading on him our doubts; nor does he (as Herbert does) offer us help with doubt. His struggle in the secular poems was to determine and resist the finitude of man’s nature; in the religious poems it was to establish finite man’s relations with an infinite God manifested in the Incarnation and celebrated in the Mass.
The poems seem logical but work by association. Mario Praz reflects on the baroque quality of the verse. Donne’s “sole preoccupation is with the whole effect”: not so much a quest for truth as for effectiveness. The poems enact, rather than argue or explore. Imagery is imported into rather than implicit in the situation. Analogies with modern techniques can be drawn, but poets who claim kinship with him do not pursue his formal ends or share the philosophical and theological verities that underpin his work. “A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility,” wrote Eliot. True, but Donne had a consistent sensibility secured by a consistent faith that provided him with an identity, however tormented. The difference between his sensibility and those of modern poets who learn from him (Eliot and Edgell Rickword excepted) is the difference between a poet turning an idea into poetry and a poet ruminating poetically on an idea. Donne’s poems generate ideas. They are concentrated, dramatic and realized.
He is inevitably the dramatic center of his poems, as actor or acted upon. He detaches himself from the experience in order to set the self in the dramatic frame. Even in the religious poems he presents a self struggling. But at times we doubt the actual—if not the dramatic—intensity of the struggle. Rickword sees it as Donne’s “intense preoccupation with the individual at the extreme tension of consciousness”; we might regard it, less charitably, as a form of posturing. Technique favors the ungenerous reading, given Donne’s unwillingness to focus long on an actual subject. His wit hops off at a tangent; he can’t resist a grandiloquent phrase or its suggestions, peripheral drama or subplot. Often the tangents are memorable.
It is worth making the case against Donne because his actual achievement has been obscured by those who praise his eccentricities, paint him as a contemporary and deprive him of his authority as a rich, even an alien, other. Donne, lover and divine, apprehends ambivalence in himself and fastens it to objects outside himself, keeping his love but forfeiting the object of his love until he finds the greater object, and in it finds self-doubt.
In the physical world he experiences now ecstasy, now disgust, an ecstasy as intense as disgust. A love of timeless pleasure in one poem becomes in another a bitterness at the ephemeral nature of all attachments. On the spiritual plane he knows both exalted joy and a deep sense of unworthiness. Idealism is checked by realism and spiritual pessimism. The city, love affairs, longing for secular preferment and later for religious grace produce a profoundly ambiguous poetry. Such perplexity occasions that “forcing of congruities” which is responsible for the best and worst in his work. Where the Augustan solves the perplexity in one way and the Romantic in another, Donne, like Crashaw, Vaughan and Herbert, leaves it unresolved, laying it with a reluctant trust on the altar of a living faith. He wrestles with idea and reality at once, and cannot lie in a single rapture in bed with his beloved the way that Marlowe can in his “Elegy.”
Songs and Sonets and Divine Poems contrast principally in dramatic form. The persistent wooer becomes the penitent object of divine wooing. As a lover Donne can be passionate and sometimes cruel, but seldom tender. In “The Jet Ring” he writes, “Circle this finger top, which didst her thumb,” revealing how small her hand, how large his own, a relative power in the relationship. In the Divine Poems the tables are turned; he experiences such treatment from his God. He is amazed that God should look his way, is “drawn to God by the mystery of his condescension” in the Incarnation. In the first of the “Holy Sonnets” he writes,
Despair behind, and death before doth cast
Such terror, and my feeble flesh doth waste
By sin in it, which it toward hell doth weigh...
giving us the sense of a man hemmed in before and behind, and like Faust weighed downward by his own guilt. God is a magnet drawing him to heaven. As in the love poems, emotion—in this case, fear born of a sense of unworthiness—stimulates thought; it is not a drug pleasing to the senses. Emotion accentuates his egotism: there is no broad typicality about his struggle, as about Herbert’s. It is too extreme. This is its dramatic virtue and its poetic bound, a bound he can transcend, as in the meditative ninth elegy, “The Autumnal,” so infused with affection and regard that it is rapt, adjusting in a tone of appreciative banter its bizarre elements into a series of aphoristically precise statements. It is also transcended in the best religious sonnets and poems, especially in “Thou hast made me,” “I am a little world,” “This is my play’s last scene” (with the “I” acquiring a sort of typicality), and in the hymns. It is found more rarely in the Songs and Sonets. “Donne’s muse ranged through almost every mood save Herbert’s and Crashaw’s serene belief in the Saviour who saves... or Marvell’s serene, almost cavalier indifference.” Yet who before Donne so weds piety and wit? The witty preacher, “He punned even with God, and inserted wit among the attributes of divinity.” And he lay prostrate before Him like a bride.