Under the Sign of Donne - John Donne - Critical Essay

Criticism, Wntr, 2001 by Judith Scherer Herz

Here Donne's lines are offered in defiance of death and yet are the very materials, in a species of verbal anamorphia, out of which Death is created. Rickword brought his Donne, the two-volume Muse's Library edition that he had been reading at Oxford,(24) with him to the Front in late December, 1917, barely two months past his nineteenth birthday. Its echoes are not only audible in "Trench Poets" but in several other poems published in his first volume, Behind the Eyes (1921), notably "Advice to a Girl from the War," a grim recollection of "Go and Catch a Falling Star":

   Weep for me half a day,
   then dry your eyes,
   Think! Is a mess of clay
   worth a girl's sighs?

   Sigh three days if you can
   for my waste of blood.
   Think then, you love a man
   whose face is mud

(15)

Some years after his return to England, Rickword was still thinking about Donne. "Divagation on a Line of Donne's: `My verse the strict map of my misery'," which appeared in his second collection with the Donnean title, Invocations to Angels (1928), is both a commentary on the nature of Donne's poetry and a revisiting of that battlefield scene of death:

   That tangled growth of intellect and passion,
   where thought spread sensuous, mental love's last acts,
   where doubt's exhuberance even doubt defied,
   thrust skywards in the noon-day of ambition.

   Till in a flash which humbled that rich Earth
   Donne saw Time's handiwork on the bodies of men,
   and Death, squat in each wrinkle as a trench,
   sniping the careless heads of Love and Mirth.

   He wooed God "like an angel from a cloud",
   preaching: but sometimes the more faithful pen
   revived a metaphor that had trapped a wench
   and shames the dandy in the wimpled shroud.

(89)

"The most modern of all poets,"(25) Rickwood called Donne, and it is precisely this sense of Donne's contemporaneity that links the diverse voices assembled here.

Lytton Stachey also enters the picture. He reviewed the Grierson edition, indeed before Booke did (he may well have been responsible for getting Brooke to read Donne), his own interest in Donne going back well before 1905. It was in that year that he wrote a set of poems anatomizing his despair over losing the battle to Maynard Keynes for the affections of their fellow apostle, Hobhouse. Their titles: "The Exhumation," "The Conversation," "The Speculation," "The Resolution." Strachey was a biographer and essayist, not a poet, but these poems do catch the Donne sound and image with a sort of spectral fidelity, for example, "The Exhumation," especially its concluding lines:

   Oh, what rash fancy did your spirit move
   To resurrect my long-expired love?
   What was there in that corpse that you should break
   So much thick stone asunder for its sake?

   But when you stooped your lips down, and at last
   Touched--oh, touched what?--did you not shrink aghast
   To see in one swift second disappear
   That vision, like the body of Guinivere,
   And all the rich alembic of my lust
   Turn in a moment to a little dust?(26)