Donne: Surrey : Donne : Like á king's favorite, or like a king. Satire II, 70. Now he comes, will he cóme? Alas, no, no. To this world, ére this world do bid us go. A Litany, 180. It is possibly well enough to call attention to the fact that there could never be any danger of confusing Donne's verse with that of Fraunce, Wyatt, or anyone else who may or may not have influenced him, or been influenced by him, for the reason that he extends throughout a poem what is to be found in only one or two lines of a poem by another. What he [Donne] did was to unite the vicious peculiarities of others, to indulge habitually in what they indulged in only occasionally.' If Garnett and Gosse consider word-accent, or the measure of a verse, it is impossible to understand how they can say, 'These satires might almost be written by the same hand; it is difficult to distinguish a page of Marston from a page of Donne. 92 It is necessary to cite only a single example, and that from Marston's First Satire, and first 'page,' to distinguish him from Donne : Lett'st thou a superscribed letter fall? And from thyself unto thyself dost send, 3 And in the same thyself, thyself commend? 3 Alden finds 'In some of... [Marston's] satires,-notably the First of the Scourge,-[that] the rhythm is more impossible than anything in Donne's satires.' In Marston, however, the rugged 1Collins, The Poems of Lord Herbert, etc., p. xxiii. 2 English Literature, an Illustrated Record, etc., London, 1904 (4 vols.), ii, 272. A. H. Bullen, The Works of John Marston, (3 vols.) London, 1887, iii, 263, 8-10. Rise of Satire, p. 131. ness is caused by crowding unelidable syllables into the line; while in Donne, it is caused by accent-shifting. Concerning the source of this special feature of Donne's style, it may yet be learned that Dryden, Gray, Johnson, Gosse, Coleridge, Saintsbury, Schelling, and Brumbaugh, all are correct in their suppositions, and that the range of 'originality' and 'four different and widely divergent national types' is not sufficiently broad. Walton tells us that '[Donne] left the resultance of 1400 authors, most of them abridged and analyzed with his own hand':1 and that these included English, Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish, we have much reason to believe. It is safe, also, to suppose that many of these authors were poets and that no feature of their verse escaped his keen eye. 1 Donne was as familiar with Latin as with English, and one example will suffice to show how he subsequently may have carried over into the expression of original thought a movement first acquired in translation. Any example will do if it may be translated so as to give arsis-thesis variation of words, and more especially of syllables. Here is the best example I have been able to find : Tibi aras, tibi occas, tibi seris, tibi idem metis.2 We can easily understand how Donne would have put this into English heroic lines, the first with a feminine ending: For yourself you plow, for yourself yoù harrow, Compare the translation from Plautus with some of Donne's lines, and the identical movement is at once recognized: They felt themselves turn beasts, felt myself then Satire IV, 130. That they themselves break, and do themselves spill. The Progress of the Soul, 117. Elegy... Prince Henry, 1. Look tó mě fáith, and lóok tó mý făith, God. 1 Life, p. 48. 'Plautus, Mercator, I, i, 70. That quaint prose which was presented on page 130, and which was there put in verse form, may here be repeated, together with the original, or rather with the Latin out of which Donne twists it : ... 'And yet Qui in seipso aruit, in nobis floret, says St. Gregory, as wittily as St. Augustine, . . . that world which finds itself truly in an autumn, in itself, finds itself in a spring in our imagination.' Or, again : That world which finds itself Trúly ín an aútumn ín itsélf, In oúr imáginátion. This very movement, this arsis-thesis variation of words and syllables in the same line, or group of lines,-is the feature of Donne's verse that suggests a new term to poetics: Donne's Measure, or Rhythm. XIII. It may be shown that Donne's Influence in the Matter of Rhythm did not Found a School. Having gone over the verse of the so-called Metaphysical School of poets, I find only sporadic instances of the thing which stands out boldly on every page of Donne. The most striking example is that from Crashaw, already quoted, in which 'his' and 'brass' appear in arsis-thesis variation. Without attending so strictly to the metrical side of Donne's verse, Carpenter has reached the right conclusion : [Donne's] influence is widely diffused, but he does not form a school. Indeed, some of those who show the attraction of his genius most are themselves in partial reaction against what is bizarre and extravagant in the rhythms and in the art of Donne.1 Saintsbury partially corroborates this opinion: 'The influence of John Donne was even more potent [than that of Jonson], 1 Eng. Lyr. Poetry, lviii. though it is extremely difficult to understand the precise manner in which it was exercised.1 Collins undertakes to show in what manner Donne's influence may be detected: The style of Donne is . . . marked by certain distinctive peculiarities which no intelligent critic would be likely to mistake, and his influence on contemporary poetry was unquestionably considerable . . . Where Herbert most reminds us of Donne is not so much in his lyrics as in his poems written in the heroic measures the poem 'The Idea is very much in his friend's vein, as well as written in a measure which Donne perhaps invented, and which was certainly a favourite with him.'2 Collins suggests others, of Herbert's poems, as resembling those of Donne, but none come nearer than The Idea, of which the first three stanzas may now be given : All Beauties vulgar eyes on earth do see, For though th' Ideas of each several kind Since from his thoughts and presence he doth bar That the least beauty near him is a star.3 The conceits in these lines are somewhat suggestive of Donne ; and the strophic form was also employed by him; but the rhythm, the word-accent,-shows that Herbert was not influenced by Donne in this particular. 'Donne's influence was no doubt great; that it was not irresistable we may conclude from the fact that when he set himself to break up smooth versification by new rules of accent, and to depart from the iambic of his predecessors, he was not able to 1 A Short Hist. of Eng. Lit., p. 365. 2 The Poems of Lord Herbert, etc., pp. xxiii, xxiv. 3 Ibid., p. 109. * Donne wrote only in the iambic measure. 4 effect a revolution; nor was he successful in using the instrument which he had invented. . .1 It was an experiment; it was not copied by his admirers; perhaps we should never have heard of it if Milton had not admitted something of Donne's principles of rhythm into the structure of his unmatched blank verse, stateliest of all measures next to Virgil's... One may perhaps trace the influence of Donne, but the thought, not the expression is what attracts.' 2 "Something new in English literature begins in Donne, something which proceeded, under his potent influence, to colour poetry for nearly a hundred years. The exact mode in which that influence was immediately distributed is unknown to us, or very dimly perceived. To know more about it is one of the great disiderata of literary history.' 93 XIV. A Group of Additional Points. (1.) In all his verse Donne employed only the iambic movement; and there are but few lines, mostly in the strophic poems, which require "direct attack ”—(fehlender Auftackt). (2.) Some light has been thrown upon Donne's 'excess,' 'secret,' 'measure,' and 'rule.' (3.) A reasonable explanation has been offered of Jonson's saying, and of Coleridge's quatrain. (4.) The slight intimation we have had, by way of examples, shows that the alterations in Donne's verse have been made in the effort to 'smooth' it; and that Donne restored will be even more 'rugged' than Donne deformed,—until one's ear is cultivated to the point of appreciating Donne's Measure. (5.) Of more than minor importance is the fact that we can now determine the relative authenticity of the various Mss. of Donne. 1 Ellis' remark in regard to whether or not Donne's Satires are more generally admired since Pope 'translated' them, may also be applied to this statement: 'Every reader is able to form his own judgment on the truth of this opinion.' (Specimens of Early English Poets, 4th ed., London, 1811, ii, 383.) |