Donne's "dialogue of one"

New Criterion, Jan, 2007 by Paul Dean

The modern critical tradition about Donne was inaugurated by T. S. Eliot in his essay "The Metaphysical Poets" of 1921, modified ten years later by "Donne in Our Time." On both occasions Donne was created in Eliot's own image, first as a radical modernist, a sort of Jacobean Laforgue, second as an orthodox churchman and "no sceptic." Eliot's later position influenced Helen Gardner's pietistic editions of Donne and was fiercely attacked by William Empson in a sequence of challenging essays. All this Stubbs ignores, as he ignores the strengths and weaknesses of Samuel Johnson's remarks on the Metaphysicals in his essay on Cowley, and the brilliant marginalia of Coleridge (also ignored by Eliot, though not by Carey). Coleridge annihilates the objections of Johnson--and indeed of Ben Jonson, who denounced Donne for "not keeping of accent," in other words, failing to observe the rules of meter. Johnson had conceded that "to write on their [the Metaphysical poets'] plan, it was at least necessary to read and think." "In poems where the writer thinks, and expects the reader to do so," Coleridge retorted, "the sense must be understood in order to ascertain the metre." Furthermore, Coleridge anticipates, and answers in advance, all the post-Eliot agonizing about Donne's religious sincerity:

   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 a matter of tactics, and attempts to distinguish the "sincere" from the "ironical" often look anachronistic as well as naive; the implied understanding of irony is too exclusively negative. Of course, Donne's speakers can on occasion be sneering and misogynistic, but there are other possibilities. Stubbs overlooks Wilbur Sanders's brilliant but neglected John Donne's Poetry (1971). Sanders defines irony as "the acceptance of human experience as essentially communal and open to common interpretation ... a willingness to have one's feelings observed from many other viewpoints besides one's own." To want the widest perspective is the reverse of blase. Stubbs does recognize that "love poetry" is an inadequate description of the range of the Songs and Sonets, and that in a few of them Donne can "record or imagine a love without nervousness," akin to "a moment of sunrise," "a point of trust at which he found that if one loved and was loved enough, it was actually impossible to cheat or be cheated on." At such moments the language of religion comes naturally to Donne; many critics have felt there is less spiritual depth in his formal religious poems than in his secular ones--indeed, one sometimes wonders how meaningful that distinction is.

Donne's theological studies had made him intensely aware of the transitional temper of the time: the Reformation was pushing Catholicism to the margins, alchemy was being discredited by the rise of empirical science, monarchical government was under question. Where, amidst such flux, was permanence to be found? The great lovepoems, such as "The Good Morrow" "The Sun Rising," "The Canonization," "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day," and "The Ecstasy," exalt the lovers into monarchs--indeed, into deities of an alternative universe given coherence by their relationship. Empson saw this, but concluded that Donne was courting charges of blasphemy. Not necessarily; it is a bold, neo-Platonic application of the doctrines of the Trinity (the two lovers and their love itself) and the Incarnation (divine love rooted in the human body). The seeds were there in the medieval courtly love conventions. Sex--a word which Donne first used in its modern sense in "The Ecstasy"--is an expression of transcendent union, each partner being simultaneously a microcosm of the world, and the world of the other: "so to one neutral thing both sexes fit."