Donne's "dialogue of one"

New Criterion, Jan, 2007 by Paul Dean

But there is a catch: "to vex me, contraries meet in one." The oneness of the two individuals is at the same time an admission that they are two; Dualism threatens the Platonic vision, and Donne, as Carey points out, was temperamentally no Dualist, returning obsessively to the image of the circle. In Christian terms these contradictions become, in a literal way, the Cross. (Donne's poem with that title is a nimble assembly of the cruciform symbols omnipresent in daily life.) In secular terms the lovers' unity balances out the contrary impulses both in themselves and in the world; it is, in the extraordinary phrase of "The Ecstasy," a "dialogue of one." It is about power, but not always the brutally exploitative power of Carey's reading; the lovers are monarchs who accept each other's rule, and can become secular saints, patterns of devotion, "canonized for love." When this is threatened, as in "Twickenham Garden" or the "Valediction of Weeping," chaos may come again.

All of this is gathered up in "The Ecstasy," whose title evokes a quality of religious wonder as well as of sexual fulfilment. The lovers' bodies are in suspended animation: "Pictures in our eyes to get [beget]/Was all our propagation. Our souls ... hung 'twixt her and me." The end of their love is "not sex" because their creativity, like their communication, has a purely spiritual aspect:

   When love, with one another so
   Interinanimates two souls,
   That abler soul, which thence doth flow,
   Defects of loneliness controls.

"Interinanimates"--in which the love both gives life to the soul of the beloved, and makes it non-animate--is a stroke of genius, but even that pales beside this astounding observation about the bodies of lovers: "They are ours, though they are not we." Has anyone ever managed to say more in eight monosyllables? Sexual attraction is a means to an end, the end being the completion of each person through the willing offer of the other. D. H. Lawrence would have applauded this (we remember the great phrase about Tom Brangwen in The Rainbow: "he knew he did not belong to himself"), and a version of it underlies the Christian doctrine of the Atonement; Christ is the lover who offers himself for his creatures and invites their self-offering in return. Love of any kind is incarnational: "Love's mysteries in souls do grow,/ But yet the body is his book." When, at the end, the speaker urges, "To our bodies turn we then," some have heard the tone of a smart seducer, as in Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress." That seems to me a crass misreading of what Donne imagines.

In line with his policy of using the poems as "background," Stubbs has no extended treatment of this masterpiece, which is even belittled by Sanders in a rare lapse of judgment. Interestingly, it was the only poem by Donne for which Ezra Pound felt any admiration--he did not share Eliot's enthusiasm, which reminds us that there was more than one Modernism. I do not feel Stubbs can plead that he is a biographer and not a critic (though that's true enough, alas); a reader new to Donne surely needs to be shown what he can do, what his concerns are, how the various parts of his life and personality coalesce. The repeated refusal to read closely is a central weakness of Stubbs's book.