The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
John Donne · a body of about fifty-five love lyrics · circulated in manuscript in Donne’s lifetime, first printed in Poems, by J. D. in 1633, two years after his death, and gathered under the heading “Songs and Sonets” in the second edition of 1635 · scored on Donne’s English as the body is read, weighed most on a core of a dozen poems; read from knowledge in modern spelling, with no text in hand
Mode
Dramatic love lyric: a speaking voice in argument, addressing someone present, by turns devout, comic, cynical and grieving
Mythos
Love as a religion with its own saints and relics; the lovers as a world, two hemispheres, one microcosm; the phoenix of two made one
Phase
Waking, wooing, quarrel, parting, death and the grave, and the lovers remembered as saints by later lovers
Presentation
About fifty-five lyrics in no authorial order, almost every stanzaic poem in a stanza built for it, with line lengths mixed inside the stanza
Register
Colloquial, abrupt and learned at once, from bawdy farce to the coldest grief, with wit held under pressure throughout
Scale
Two lovers and their room, with the cosmos, the church, the court, money and law drawn in as figures for love; the family and labour absent
Governing Proposition
A man speaks to a woman, a rival, a friend or the sun, usually in the middle of an argument, and argues love toward a conclusion he does not yet have, with every kind of knowledge his age possessed called as evidence: theology, alchemy, astronomy, maps, law and money. The wager of the body is that love between equals is a world with its own laws and its own time, bodily and spiritual at once, and that the mind does not stop thinking while it loves but thinks with the love; and that the same voice can know desire’s contempt and self-deception as well as its devotion.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Donne did not print these poems. They passed in manuscript among a coterie of readers, and they survive in a large number of manuscript collections, varying among themselves. The first edition of his poems, Poems, by J. D., appeared in 1633, two years after his death in 1631, and printed the love lyrics in no evident order. The second edition, of 1635, gathered them under the heading “Songs and Sonets”, and the title has held. No poem is securely dated; the dates scholars give are inferences. No authorial order and no authorised text exist, and every modern order is an editor’s.
The work is the body of love lyrics read under that title: about fifty-five poems, as Grierson’s edition of 1912 prints them. It is bounded by the title and the genre. It excludes the Elegies, the Satires, the verse letters, the Epithalamions, the two Anniversaries and all the divine poems, the Holy Sonnets among them. “Sonnets” here means short lyrics, not the fourteen-line form. The poems are read in modern spelling, which changes no word, from the standard modernised editions, A. J. Smith’s Complete English Poems (1971) among them, with Grierson’s old-spelling text behind it.
The body is scored as it is read, and it is read unevenly. A core of about a dozen poems carries it and is weighed most: “The Good-Morrow”, “The Sun Rising”, “The Canonization”, “A Valediction: forbidding Mourning”, “The Ecstasy”, “A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day”, “The Relic”, “Air and Angels”, “The Anniversary”, “Twickenham Garden”, “The Flea” and the “Song”, “Go and catch a falling star”. Beside them stand the cynical and libertine pieces, “Woman’s Constancy”, “The Indifferent”, “Love’s Alchemy”, “Community”, “Confined Love” and “The Apparition”, and a tail of slighter conceits, among them “The Computation”, “Love’s Diet” and “The Paradox”. A few poems are of doubtful attribution, “Self Love” among them.
Movement II
The poems begin in the middle of speech. “Busy old fool, unruly sun” is how “The Sun Rising” opens; “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love” is how “The Canonization” opens; “I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I / Did, till we loved?” is how “The Good-Morrow” opens. Nearly every poem is spoken by a male lover, to a woman, a rival, a friend, the sun or the reader; “Break of Day” is spoken by a woman. The voice is a man in a room, often in a quarrel, and the reader overhears him.
This is the turn from the lyric Donne inherited: Petrarch through Wyatt and Sidney and the sonnet sequences of the 1590s, with an idealised mistress, a fluent music and a stock of fire and ice. In place of roses and stars the figures come from scholastic theology, alchemy, the new astronomy, cartography, law and money. The poem becomes an argument with premises and a conclusion. The metre is bent to the speaking voice, and the stresses fall where speech would put them, not where the beat expects them. Jonson said that Donne “for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging”; in the same conversation he called him “the first poet in the world in some things”.
The woman, in the poems that matter most, is an equal. In “The Sun Rising” the lovers’ room is the world, and the sun, rebuked for the dawn, is told its duty is to warm the bed: “This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.” The lover is “all princes I”, and time is nothing to love: “Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, / Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.” Against the lover who worships from below, these two meet as two, and their love is a world with its own laws and its own time.
Movement III
“A Valediction: forbidding Mourning” is nine quatrains of tetrameter, thirty-six lines, and argues a parting into a proof. It moves from the deaths of virtuous men to the lovers’ souls, for which absence is “A breach, but an expansion”, “Like gold to airy thinness beat”. Then come the “stiff twin compasses”, held for three stanzas without slackening, and the poem ends on the figure it has drawn: “And makes me end where I begun.” The quatrains turn as the compass turns, and the end returns to the start. In prose the compasses would be a simile; in the poem they are the knowledge.
“The Flea” is three nine-line stanzas, twenty-seven lines, and is a farce built with the same care. “Mark but this flea,” it begins, and the argument needs three acts: the plea, the plea to spare the flea, and the reversal after the killing. Between the second stanza and the third the woman kills it. The poem does not show her act; it learns of it only by its traces, “Purpled thy nail”, and the third stanza turns on what she has done. The gap between stanzas is where the woman acts. Take one stanza away and the poem has no action.
Almost every stanzaic poem in the body has its own stanza, built for it, with line lengths mixed inside it: “The Canonization” in five nine-line stanzas, each opening and closing on the word “love”; “The Sun Rising” in three of ten lines; “The Good-Morrow” in three of seven; “The Relic” in three of eleven; “The Ecstasy” in seventy-six lines of quatrains. The short lines fall where the thought turns, and the sentence runs, doubles back and lands on them. The form is a voice addressing someone present and arguing toward a conclusion it does not yet have. In some poems it is only a vessel for a clever case, and “The Ecstasy” in its middle overextends the argument.
Movement IV
“A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day”, five nine-line stanzas, is the dark summit of the body. “’Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s”: the shortest day, and a woman dead. The speaker is not mourning a loss but has become one, “every dead thing”, “re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.” The argument that elsewhere serves wooing here serves annihilation, and the speaker argues himself into nothing. It is the coldest height in English lyric, and it is reached with the same instruments as the farce of “The Flea”.
Across the body runs a religion of love, with its own saints and relics, carried through more than once. “The Canonization” ends with the lovers invoked as saints by lovers who come after them, and the two of them are the phoenix: “we two being one, are it.” “The Relic” opens a grave and finds “A bracelet of bright hair about the bone”, and foresees the lovers’ bones dug up and worshipped in a place where “mis-devotion doth command”. “The Funeral” makes the hair a relic, and the “Nocturnal” makes the dead woman the saint of the year’s midnight. “The Good-Morrow” and “The Sun Rising” build the lovers as one world, two hemispheres.
This much is built. But the deep patterns mostly arrive as conceits, turned for an argument and then put down, and few stand free of their poems. The compasses are remembered as a figure, not as a myth. The lovers are a type, never particular persons with a story, and the woman is almost never heard. The body’s mythology is real in “The Canonization”, “The Relic” and the “Nocturnal”, and elsewhere the archetype is the servant of the wit. That is the one place where the body stops short of the summit on its own terms.
Movement V
The same voice that swears constancy mocks it. The “Song”, “Go and catch a falling star”, has a world that holds no woman “true, and fair”; “Love’s Alchemy” says “Hope not for mind in women”; in “Woman’s Constancy”, “The Indifferent” and “Community” inconstancy is praised. The contradiction is not resolved, since the body has no frame of its author’s making to resolve it. What holds the devotee and the cynic together is one law: love is argued, by a speaker who claims the right to remake the world’s order in its name and uses all knowledge as evidence. Whether “The Ecstasy” is doctrine or seduction, and whether the contempt that closes “Air and Angels” is the poem’s or the speaker’s, are questions still open.
Within a generation the manner had a school. Herbert carried it into the sacred lyric, and Carew, King, Cowley, Crashaw, Vaughan and Marvell followed; Carew’s elegy named Donne king of “The universal monarchy of wit”. Then the Restoration turned to Jonson’s line and to Dryden’s. Dryden wrote in 1693 that Donne “affects the metaphysics”, and Johnson in the Life of Cowley (1779) that in this school “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”. From about 1700 the poems were cited more as a warning than read, and they slept for most of a century.
The second life came late. Coleridge annotated them; Grierson edited them in 1912; Eliot’s essay of 1921 carried them into modernist poetics; and the New Criticism took “The Canonization” as its founding exhibit, so that Cleanth Brooks named The Well Wrought Urn (1947) from it. Empson, Helen Gardner, John Carey and Marotti on the coterie followed, and feminist readings after them. The text the century reads is an editor’s reconstruction, the order not Donne’s and a few poems in doubt, but the poems themselves are whole and the core is secure. Since the revival their presence has been wide, in schools, anthologies and criticism, and the eclipse of the eighteenth century is the one break in it.
Act III · The Twelve
In the core poems the subtractive test finds almost nothing to take. “The Flea” is three stanzas because the argument needs three acts: the plea, the plea to spare the flea, and the reversal after the killing that happens between the second stanza and the third. Take any one away and the poem has no action. The nine quatrains of the “Valediction” each advance the case, from the deaths of virtuous men to the compasses, and its last line closes the circle the argument draws: “And makes me end where I begun.” “The Canonization” moves stanza by stanza from rebuke to legend. What holds the axis is the body as a whole. It has no authorial order and so no argument of its own, and a tail of a dozen slighter conceits, “The Computation”, “Love’s Diet”, “The Paradox”, “Witchcraft by a Picture”, could go with the body little changed. Weighed toward the core, as the body is read, it stands at 8.2.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: love between equals is a world with its own laws and its own time; it is bodily and spiritual at once and cannot be split into either; and the mind does not stop thinking while it loves but thinks with the love. “This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere,” says “The Sun Rising”; “Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, / But yet the body is his book,” says “The Ecstasy”. Against the Petrarchan lover who worships from below, these lovers meet as two, and absence becomes “A breach, but an expansion”. The second truth is the counter-voice. The same man knows desire’s self-deception and its contempt, “Hope not for mind in women”, and the body holds both. Held below the top because the field is love alone, the woman is almost never heard, and in some poems the wit performs a disclosure the poem does not make.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Height is reached often, and in more than one key. The dreadful: the “Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day”, “’Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s”, where the speaker is “every dead thing”, “re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not”, the coldest summit in English lyric. The tender: the gold of the “Valediction”, “Like gold to airy thinness beat”. The grand and the comic at once: the dawn rebuked in “The Sun Rising”, where “all princes I” and the sun is told its duty is to warm the bed. The uncanny: “A bracelet of bright hair about the bone”, in the opened grave of “The Relic”. “The Good-Morrow” and “The Anniversary” rise in their last stanzas. Held below the top on frequency: the cynical pieces and the tail are witty, not elevated, and in a body of fifty-odd lyrics perhaps a third reach real height.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Part of it is built. The poems make a myth of love as a religion with its own saints and relics, and carry it through. “The Canonization” ends with the lovers invoked by later lovers as saints; “The Relic” foresees the lovers’ bones dug up and worshipped where “mis-devotion doth command”; “The Funeral” makes the hair a relic; and the “Nocturnal” makes a dead woman the saint of the shortest day. “The Good-Morrow” and “The Sun Rising” build the lovers as a microcosm, two hemispheres, one world, and the phoenix of “The Canonization”, “we two being one, are it”, bears weight in that poem. What holds the axis below 8.5 is that the deep patterns arrive as conceits, figures turned for an argument and then put down, and few stand free of the poem: the compasses are remembered as a figure, not as a myth. The lovers are a type, never particular persons with a story, and the particular is too thin to take on archetypal weight.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is the Elizabethan love lyric: Petrarch through Wyatt, Sidney and the sonnet sequences of the 1590s, with its idealised mistress, its fluent music and its stock of fire and ice. The turn was nearly total. The voice became a man speaking, often in mid-quarrel: “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love.” The metre was bent to the speaking voice, line lengths mixed and stresses wrenched; the figure was taken from scholastic theology, alchemy, the new astronomy, cartography, law and money in place of roses and stars; the poem became an argument with premises and a conclusion; the stanza was invented poem by poem; and the woman became an equal, a partner in bed, or the object of open contempt. The cost was real but bounded. Jonson’s verdict that Donne “for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging” shows what the wager risked, but circulation in manuscript among a coterie sheltered it, and Sidney had already found the dramatic voice. That holds it at 9.0.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Change the form and the poems stop knowing what they know. The form is the dramatic utterance in time: a voice addressing someone present and arguing toward a conclusion it does not yet have, so that the poem knows love as thinking under pressure. Set the “Valediction” in prose and the compasses become a simile; in the poem the tetrameter quatrains turn as the compass turns, and the end returns to the start. “The Flea” makes the gap between stanzas the place where the woman acts, and the poem learns of her act only by its traces: “Purpled thy nail.” The invented stanzas fit the argument’s shape, with the short lines falling where the thought turns, and “The Canonization” frames each stanza with “love”, the word it is canonizing. Held below the top because in some poems the form is a vessel for a clever case, and the body as a whole has no form, since its order is an editor’s.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence over promise, and four centuries of it, though not continuous. Read and imitated in the seventeenth century, the poems met Dryden’s verdict that Donne “affects the metaphysics” (1693) and Johnson’s, in the Life of Cowley (1779), that in this school “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”, and these set the terms of a long dismissal. Then came Coleridge’s notes, Grierson’s edition (1912), Eliot’s essay of 1921, and the New Criticism, for which “The Canonization” was the founding exhibit: Cleanth Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn (1947) takes its title from the poem. Empson, Gardner’s dating, John Carey’s John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (1981), Marotti on the coterie and feminist readings followed. The questions stay open: whether “The Ecstasy” is doctrine or seduction, whether the misogynist close of “Air and Angels” is the poem’s or the speaker’s, sincerity against performance throughout. Held below the top because some of the yield is the pleasure of solving a conceit, which is exhausted once solved.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field is the English lyric of the 1590s to the 1630s, and behind it the European Petrarchan lyric. Intrinsic force is high: a real reorganisation of what an English lyric could be, a speaking mind arguing in a made stanza with figures drawn from all knowledge. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within a generation the manner had a school, Herbert carried it into the sacred lyric, and Carew, King, Cowley, Crashaw, Vaughan and Marvell followed, Carew’s elegy crowning Donne king of “The universal monarchy of wit”. Then the Restoration turned to Jonson’s line and to Dryden’s, and the influence slept for most of a century. Its second reach came through Grierson and Eliot, and it shaped modernist poetics and the whole method of the New Criticism. Delayed influence is credited and discounted: the eighteenth-century eclipse, and a succession in English verse after 1660 that ran through Jonson more than Donne, hold the axis at 9.0.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about four centuries. Form: the poems survive whole, but they were never fixed by their author. The text is an editorial reconstruction from posthumous prints and a large, varying manuscript tradition; a few poems are of doubtful attribution, readings differ, and the order is not Donne’s. That is a small charge: the defining form of each poem is legible and the core is secure. Presence carries the larger charge. Read and imitated through the seventeenth century, the poems were long neglected from about 1700, cited more as a warning than read, until the nineteenth century and above all the revival of 1912 to 1921. Since then their presence has been wide, in schools, anthologies and criticism. This is a text of centuries charged for long neglect; the neglect ended a century ago and the presence since is wide, so it stands at 9.1, the top of that band, below an unbroken survival of centuries.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Donne’s English, with no translation between. The command is of syntax across a made stanza: a sentence that runs, doubles back and lands on the short line, as in “The Sun Rising”: “Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, / Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.” The openings are a master’s: “Busy old fool, unruly sun”; “I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I / Did, till we loved?”; “I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost”. The conceit is managed through a whole poem, the compasses held for three stanzas without slackening. The roughness of the metre is mostly the speaking voice set against the beat, and is the making, not its lack. Charged: Jonson’s complaint holds in places, where the stress is wrenched past what the voice can bear; “The Ecstasy” in its middle and the “Valediction: of the Book” overextend the argument; and the tail is facile.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the “Song”, “Go and catch a falling star”, whose world holds no woman “true, and fair”, and the “Valediction”, whose love is “Inter-assured of the mind”; or the farce of “The Flea” and the night of the “Nocturnal”. One law governs them: love is argued, by a speaker who claims the right to remake the world’s order in its name and uses all knowledge as evidence. The cynic and the devotee obey it alike; their conclusions differ, but their method and their claim on the cosmos do not. The range is wide, from bawdy to the year’s midnight, and it is held. Charged: the law governs method more than vision, and the stances do contradict, inconstancy praised and constancy sworn, with no frame to reconcile them, since the body has no order of its author’s making. Held at 8.6, as dramatic voices rather than one mind’s settled sense.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what a body of love lyrics holds. Consciousness, fully: the mind of the lover in argument with itself. The body, in sex, in sickness (“A Fever”), in death and the grave. The sacred, in relics and canonization, the soul’s descent in “The Ecstasy” and the theology of angels. The cosmos, in the spheres, the hemispheres and alchemy. The state and the court, in kings, favourites and princes (“The Sun Rising”, “The Anniversary”); money and law, in “Love’s Usury” and “The Will”. These are integrated into one argument, love’s, and that is the limit as well as the achievement: the orders enter as figures for love more than as orders held for themselves. The family, labour, history and the natural order as lived are absent or glimpsed. That holds the axis at 7.5, the lowest of the twelve; the figure describes the form, and the body holds more of the world than most lyric bodies because its figures reach so far.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Swerve, The Living Form, The Bottomless Well, Pressure on Tradition and The Made, each at 9.0. A body of lyrics whole for about four centuries and widely present since its revival; a near-total turn from the Elizabethan love lyric to a speaking voice arguing in a stanza made for each poem; a form in which the poem knows love as thinking under pressure; four centuries of response, broken by an eclipse and renewed; a school within a generation and a second reach through modernism and the New Criticism; and a command of syntax across the made stanza.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5: consciousness, the body, the sacred, the cosmos, the court, money and law are held in one argument, but as figures for love more than as orders held for themselves, and the family, labour and history are absent or glimpsed. Above it, The Inevitable at 8.2, where the core poems resist the subtractive test but a body with no authorial order carries a tail of slighter conceits; and The Archetypal Deep at 8.3, a religion of love built in a few poems among figures that arrive as conceits and are put down.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Swerve at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0 and The Unconcealment at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 falls short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. The aggregate, at 8.7, also stands below the summit’s 9.0.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of John Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, scored as the body of about fifty-five love lyrics gathered under the heading “Songs and Sonets” in the second edition of Poems, by J. D. (1635), as Grierson’s edition (1912) prints them, weighed most on the core of a dozen poems named in the first movement. The Elegies, the Satires, the verse letters, the Epithalamions, the Anniversaries and the divine poems are outside the work. The poems are English and the original is the text; they are read in modern spelling, from the standard modernised editions (A. J. Smith’s Penguin Complete English Poems, 1971) with Grierson’s old-spelling text behind them, and modern spelling changes no word. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Quotations are short and given only where their words are certain; everything else is paraphrased. Jonson, Carew, Dryden, Johnson, Grierson, Eliot, Brooks and the later critics are cited as the record of the poems’ reception and are not part of the work. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the dates of particular poems and the span of composition, the number of manuscript collections, the total number of lines, the number of poems in Gardner’s edition, how many stanza forms recur, and whether any poem but “Break of Day” is spoken by a woman; the attribution of the doubtful poems is stated as doubtful and not settled.