[The following is from Louis Untemeyer's Lives Of The Poets and draws from Isaac Walton's early biography of Donne, The Life Of Donne]

The pendulum play of fashion has seldom been more strikingly T demonstrated than by the changing reactions to a few writers who altered the form and spirit of literature in the seventeenth century, fell out of favor within a generation, sank out of sight for almost three hundred years and, triumphantly restored, added a new dimension to twentieth-century poetry. Dryden, who disapproved of them, was the first to suggest a term for the unaffiliated group when he wrote that Donne "affects the metaphysics not only in his satires but in his amorous verses."

Samuel Johnson borrowed the word metaphysical and applied it to a school of poets who succeeded Donne. Johnson's censure was severe. In the chapter on Cowley in his Lives of the Poets (1779) Johnson betrayed his irritation by saying that "the metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavor. But, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry they only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables." Johnson then went on for almost twenty pages to show that the "metaphysicals" had lost their right to the name of poets because "they cannot be said

to have imitated anything, neither nature nor life," and that, although some "allow them to be wits," their wit was of a grotesque order, "the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together .... From this account of their compositions," continued Johnson, "it will be readily inferred that they were not successful in representing art or moving the affections. As they were wholly employed on something unexpected and surprising, they had no regard for that uniformity of sentiment which enables us to conceive and to excite the pains and the pleasure of other minds .... They wrote rather as beholders than partakers of human nature; as beings looking upon good and evil, impassive and at leisure; as Epicurean deities, making remarks on the actions of men and the vicissitudes of life, without interest and without emotion."

Reading the metaphysical poets today, such a judgment appears not merely inaccurate and intolerant but incredible. It would seem that a moving energy and ecstasy--an ecstasy heightened by anguish--must have broken through to any reader. Yet critics echoed Johnson's strictures and complained that the intellectual basis of the metaphysical poets was so overemphasized, the vocabulary so over-elaborate, and the figures of speech so intricate that the central emotion was dissipated if not completely lost. As late as its x94o edition, the Encyclopaedia Britannica was still maintaining, in the words of Edmund Gosse, that though "the influence of Donne upon the literature of England was singularly wide and deep, it was almost wholly malign."

It remained for the more "advanced" poets and critics of the twentieth century to rescue Donne and re-establish the metaphysical poetry of which he was the chief exemplar. It was recognized that the spirit in which the metaphysical poets wrote was the modern spirit, .violently troubled but anxious to keep personal order in the midst of general turmoil, and that, instead of discarding feeling for intellect, these writers felt with their minds and thought with their emotions Moreover, the metaphysical poets possessed, in the words of T. S. Eliot, "a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience." By the middle of the twentieth century it had become a commonplace to say of Donne and his followers that poetry had rarely achieved such an interfusion of sensation and a dissection of the senses, so startling a union of reasoned emotion and passionate intelligence.

The chief metaphysical poets were the ingenious, whimsical but "holy" George Herbert; the completely and often uncontrollably mystical Richard Crashaw; the radiantly rapt, nature-worshiping Henry Vaughan; the humble illuminator of the commonplace, Thomas Traherne; and, leader and inspirer of all of them, the incisive and uniquely agitating John Donne.

The life of John Donne was a long struggle between flesh and spirit, between the delight in man's body, which is "his book," and his soul, which is the undecipherable mystery. As he grew older the intensity of the conflict increased Donne's was never a single-minded passion he was alternately sensual and austere, cynical and penitential. A prey to every emotion, he was also emotion's clinical analyst. He was, by turns, a gallant, a soldier, a man-about-town, a convert, an impassioned preacher, and a flagellated human being. Izaak Walton, whose classic Life was first published with the x64o edition of Donne's Sermons, spoke of Donne's progress from sense to spirit, from pagan licentiousness to agonized purity, as a puritan's if not a pilgrim's progress; but recent commentators have derived other meanings from Donne's abject self-torture and his preoccupation with a death greater than mortal death. More than with most, Donne's life is a key to his sharply divided work.

Born in London in 1573, John Donne was the son of a wealthy iron-monger who had married the daughter of John Heywood, court musician, playwright, and nephew by marriage of Sir Thomas More. The social background may have raised Donne's hopes of attaining a career at court, but his upbringing was something less than patrician. Reared as a Catholic in a deeply religious household, an alien Roman in a land of Reform, he felt he had the blood of martyrs in his veins. He himself said, "I had my first breeding and conversation with men of a suppressed and afflicted religion, accustomed to the despite of death and hungry of an imagined martyrdom." At thirty-seven he wrote about his mother's people: "No family . . . hath endured and suffered more in their persons and fortunes for obeying the teachers of Roman doctrine." His education was consequently strict; as a child he was tutored privately, and was especially well grounded in Latin and French. At eleven he entered Hart Hall at Oxford, where he stayed three years; at fourteen he exchanged Oxford for Cambridge and became a student at Trinity College. There, studying the logic of Euclid and the rapture of the Spanish mystics, he discovered the split between ratiocination and divination, between pure reason and pure faith.

At twenty, after studying law and being admitted to practice, Donne abandoned his rigorous regimen. Although still adhering to Catholicism, he departed from orthodoxy and emerged as a lighthearted adventurer, a gay blade who was also a challenging poet. It was at this time that most of the half-sensual, half-cynical Songs and Sonnets were written, as well as the Satires and the incongruously lusty Elegies. In his mid-twenties Donne went abroad, chiefly on foreign service; with Essex at Cadiz, he also visited the Azores, Spain, and Italy. On his return, he became private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal.

It was in the Egerton household that Donne, at twenty-eight, with every prospect in his favor, brought himself close to ruin. He fell in love with Lady Egerton's young niece, Anne More, who idolized him. After a brief affair, Donne eloped with and married Anne, an act which, lacking family consent, was tantamount to abduction. Egerton was furious. He not only dismissed Donne from his service but had him arrested; the unhappy husband was kept in prison for several weeks, and it was a year before the marriage was legalized. Meanwhile, Donne's situation was desperate. He summed it up in a sentence to his mother: "John Donne Anne Donne--Undone."

For the next decade the plight of the young couple was such that Donne turned to all sorts of expedients. Harassed by poverty and hounded by debtors, he wrote spasmodically, composed pious epistles and, compelled by necessity and a growing distrust of the Roman Catholic dogma, penned bitter pamphlets against the Papists. Finally, Egerton forgave him and set aside an allowance for the support of his family. The help, however, was meager, and Donne, dependent on charity, sank into an abysmal depression. All chances of a career at court had vanished; the mere making of a living seemed more than he could manage. He thought of suicide, the "scandalous disease of headlong dying." He often had, he confessed in Biathanatos, "a sickly inclination" for it. "Methinks I have the keys of my prison in my own hand, and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine own sword."

Nevertheless, Donne survived poverty, melancholy, and the wish for release by death. He struggled along, inactive and brooding, for thirteen years. At thirty-five it seemed that he might obtain a secretaryship to Ireland, but nothing came of it. Still seeking advancement, he commended himself to various personages, but there was no response. There were short periods of employment, a little travel, and further promises that were not kept. From time to time, however, the poet was able to fulfill his function, to continue the Songs and Sonnets, and compose the first of the religious poems. At forty-two, after painful meditation and years of indecision, Donne forsook the faith of his fathers and took orders in the Anglican Church. James I, cognizant of Donne's tracts aimed at converting Roman Catholics to the Church of England, made Donne his chaplain. Lincoln's Inn accepted him as its preacher and the following year, when Donne was forty-eight, he became Dean of St. Paurs.

After a soul-searching struggle, Donne was now a famous preacher. Comfortably established, he was a fairly prosperous man. But he was scarcely a happy one. His wife, to whom he was passionately devoted, had died in her thirties after giving birth to a stillborn infant. Donne withdrew from the pleasures of the world and gave himself frantically to preaching. Filled with remorse for the follies of his youth and for his importunate treatment of Anne, he brooded over man's callousness and his own recklessness. He believed he had, wrote Hugh Anson Fausset, in John Donne: A Study in Discord, "dragged his wife away from ease to plunge her into poverty, and from life he had hurried her unsparingly to death." He threw himself into his sermons and tried to liberate his suffering in two series of religious sonnets, exaltations of sacred and profane love. Walton summed up this period of Donne's life eloquently: "He became crucified to the world and all those varieties, those imaginary pleasures, that are daily acted on that restless stage; and they were perfectly crucified to him .... Now grief took so full possession of his heart as to leave no place for joy. If it did, it was a joy to be alone, where, like a pelican in the wilderness, he might bemoan himself without witness or restraint, and pour forth his passions like Job in the days of his affliction: 'O that I might have the desire of my heart! O that God would grant the thing I long for! For then, as the grave is become her house, so would I hasten to make it mine also, that we two might there make our beds together in the dark.' '

His health failed. A trip abroad gave him a short respite, but Donne knew he was doomed. "I fear not the hastening of my death, and yet I do fear the increase of the disease." In his early riffles he meditated much on man's precarious mortality. The meditations grew into a series of "Devotions" which were a cross between sermons and essays. They were presumably written to help the afflicted, yet they were intended not so much for the caution and comfort of Donne's listeners as for his own consolation. Bead as a whole, the pages form a record of Donne's illness. Each "Devotion" is preceded by a "motto" which gives it the character of a diary: "The Patient takes his bed"; "The Physician is sent for"; "I sleep not day nor night"; "From the Bells of the Church adjoining I am daily remembered of my burial in the funerals of others"; "Now this Bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die."

Although Donne tried to bury himself in the "Devotions," he survived them by some eight years. But his vitality was ebbing--he said he had "to pay a fever every half-year as a rent for my life"--and he collapsed in his fifty-seventh year, the very year in which he was to have been made a bishop. He knew he would be a long time dying, but he prepared himself for dissolution. He had macabre fancies which grew increasingly morbid. He posed for a funeral statue which was set up in St. Paul's. He had himself painted in his shroud, his eyes shut, his lips closed, as though he were already in rigor mortis, and, when the picture was finished, he kept it at his bedside, "his hourly object until his death." He died on March 3x, x63x, and was survived by six of his twelve children.

While Donne was alive, his verse was widely circulated in manuscript, but only two poems are known to have been published during his lifetime--two elegies on Elizabeth Drury: "An Anatomy of the World" and "Of the Progress of the Soul." The first edition of his poetry, a haphazard collection, appeared after his death. Even at that time Donne suffered from the extremes of praise and prejudice which dogged his reputation for three hundred years until he was rapturously rediscovered. Donne's continual conflict between anxious hope and wordly disillusionment made him as characteristic of our age as of his. It is significant that, three centuries after his death, one of the most impassioned of contemporary novels, Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, owes its tide as well as its central theme to one of Donne's almost unnoticed "Devotions." In 1942, the forgotten words of Donne's seventeenth-century sermon were charged with new meaning:

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.

During the three-hundred-year interval Donne had been neglected or, when considered at all, condemned for his "misspent learning and excessive ingenuity," his "farfetched allusiveness," and his coruscating brilliance "which elicits amazement rather than pleasure." In The English Poets, a famous nineteenth-century compilation, Thomas Humphrey Ward spoke of Donne's "pyrotechnic display'' and complained that "we weary of such unmitigated cleverness, such ceaseless straining after novelty and surprise."

Such comments, typical of their times, showed the misapprehensions by which Donne was judged. No attempt to define the position of Donne or the precise quality of the metaphysical poets was satisfactorily made until recently, when Sir Herbert Grierson wrote an introduction to Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century. "Metaphysical poetry," said Grierson, "is a poetry which, like that of the Divina Cornmedia and the De Natura Rerum and perhaps Goethe's Faust, has been inspired by a philosophical conception of the universe and the role suggested to the human spirit in the great drama of existence. These poems were written because a definite interpretation of the riddle . . . laid hold on the mind and imagination of a great poet, unified and illumined his comprehension of life, intensified and heightened his personal consciousness of joy and sorrow, of hope and fear, by broadening their significance, revealing to him in the history of his own soul, a brief abstract of the drama of human history."

Metaphysical poetry is primarily what the term implies--beyond physics. Since, by its psychological nature, it unites thought and feeling, it combines opposites; it luxuriates in paradoxical figures of speech, intensification of images, and a stretching of the metaphor to unprecedented lengths. Mortality is often suggested by the macabre illumination and horror are simultaneously achieved in Donne's "bracelet of bright hair about the bone" and shock is immediately registered when (in "Love's Exchange") love is equated with a devil and (in "Twicknam Garden") with a spider,

· . . which transubstantiates all And can convert manna into gall.

By nature complex and questioning, such poetry puzzles in its habit of probing and plunging. It often struggles through dark and tortuous mazes, feeling its way through labyrinths of thought. However, just when the reader fears he is lost and the poet seems to have passed beyond the borders of expression, he emerges into dazzling light. Brilliance and assurance surround such a stanza as this, from "The Dream":

Dear love, for nothing less than thee

Would I have broke this happy dream.

It was a theme

For reason, much too strong for fantasy.

Therefore thou wakes'st me wisely; yet

My dream thou brok'st not, but continued'st it.

Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice

To make dreams truths and fables histories.

Enter these arms, for since thou thought'st it best

Not to dream all my dream, let's act the rest.

First of all, Donne showed his followers a new way of fusing sense and sensibility. He brought together pieces of a disordered universe and arranged them in a world of clear vision; he united complexity of thought and simplicity of language. Even Johnson admitted that if the conceits of the metaphysical poets were farfetched, "they were often worth the carriage. To write on their plan, it was at least necessary to read and think. No man could be born a metaphysical poet, nor assume the dignity of a writer, by descriptions copied from descriptions, by imitations borrowed from imitations, by traditional imagery and hereditary similes, by readiness of rhyme and volubility of syllables."

Donne carried his originality far beyond a rejection of "traditional imagery and hereditary similes." He abandoned "descriptions copied from descriptions" and threw overboard Elizabethan stereotypes of style as well as speech. Even when the most incongruous ideas were "yoked by violence together," Donne wrote in an idiom which, crammed with learning, was as straightforward as conversation. "The Canonization" dispenses with poetic proprieties. It explodes into life with the harsh exasperation of its opening line: "For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love"--an expostulation which is followed by a few argumentative but equally angry lines:

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love;
Or chide my palsy, or my gout,
My five grey hairs or ruined fortune flout

With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his honor, or his grace,

                    Or the King's real, or his stamped face

Contemplate; what you will, approve,

So you will let me love.

Bitter humor and a brusque urgency are everywhere. An ironic reproach ("Elegy VII") begins: "Nature's lay idiot, I taught thee love." Weary of conventional wooing, its elegant approaches and coy retreats ("Elegy XX"), Donne addresses his mistress with unconcealed impatience, plain talk, and rough humor:

Come, madam, come, all rest my powers defy; Until I labor, I in labor lie.

The foe ofttimes, having the foe in sight,

Is tired with standing though he never fight ....

License my roving hands, and let them go

Before, behind, between, above, below.

O, my America! my new-found-land!

My kingdom, safeliest when by one man manned.

More delicately and with easy banter Donne begins another love poem ("The Good-Morrow") in a teasing colloquial vein:

I wonder by my troth, what thou and I

Did till we loved. Were we not weaned till then?

But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

Or snorted we in the seven sleepers' den?

Twas so. But this, all pleasure's fancies be.

Resenting the morning sun after a night of love, the poet turns on the intruder with indignant humor:

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windows and through curtains call on us?

Must to thy motions lover's seasons runt

Saucy, pedantic wretch, go chide

Late schoolboys and sour 'prentices;

Go tell court-huntsmen that the King will ride;

Call country ants to harvest offices;

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Here the charge of prying--an impertinence doubled by the sun's peering through windows and protective curtains--is accentuated by Donne's sarcastic charges and scornful vocabulary: "pedantic wretch," "sour 'prentices," "country ants," "rags of time." Casually, almost carelessly, Donne heightens the pitch of poetry with the power of common speech.

Pre-eminently an innovator, Donne experimented in a style which combined ingenuousness and ingenuity. Pioneering in complicated rhythms and audacious images, he changed the very inflection of poetry; he made it difficult for any but an antiquarian to write in the conventions of the past. One of Donne's strangest poems is, at the same time, one of his most revealing. "The Flea" recounts a stock situation much favored by the Elizabethan lyrists: the ardent lover and the hesitant lady, the pursuing gallant repulsed or, at least, temporarily held off by impregnable virtue. But Donne completely alters the tone. The image is gruesome; the implications become monstrous; the metaphors have grown into coarse mockery. The conventional "flood of rubies" turns to actual blood; the elegant couch set in a blossomy bower is now the black body of a flea, whose "living walls of jet" serve as a marriage temple and a marriage bed.

Mark but this flea, and mark in this

How little that which thou deniest me is:

It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.

Thou know'st that this cannot be said

A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead;

Yet this enjoys before it woo,

And, pampered, swells with one blood made of two;

And this, alas, is more than we would do.

Oh, stay, three lives in one flea spare,

Where we almost, yea, more than married are.

This flea is you and I, and this

Our marriage bed and marriage temple is.

Though parents grudge, and you, we're met

And cloistered in these living walls of jet.

Though use make you apt to kill me,

Let not to that self-murder added be,

And sacrilege, three sins in killing thee.

Undoubtedly such a blending of the bizarre and the casuistic made Donne's critics see him as a verbal trickster, a quibbling logician, a determined sensationalist who fastens doggedly on an outlandish idea and clings to it until he has drained it of every grotesque implication. But even in so queer a mingling of the cerebral and the sensual, where the figure is aggressively forced and the wit painfully overworked, where, compared to the easily generated warmth of the romanticists, Donne seems stiff and chill, Donne is intent on freeing his theme of customary affectations. He stresses the fact that, while love is the perennial passion, it is also its own opposite; in the very union of love and loathing, Donne shows the critically active brain appraising the too willing body. This was not without precedent, for it was not uncommon to compare religious matters with sexual ones; but Donne supplied a new dramatic tension to the spiritual needs and the physical urgency of the flesh. He denies himself no experience and does justice to every detail; in Donne the realist and the amorist join to celebrate both the poetry of lust and the spiritual passion which transmutes sex. 'The Ecstasy" is perhaps Donne's most rewarding love poem, but it is only one of many in which the accumulated conceits are transcended by a superphysical fervency.

Where, like a pillow on a bed,

A pregnant bank swelled up, to rest

The violet's reclining head,

Sat we two, one another's best ....

As 'twixt two equal armies, Fate

Suspends uncertain victory,

Our souls (which to advance their state

Were gone out) hung 'twixt her and me.

And whilst our souls negotiate there,

We like sepulchral statues lay;

All day, the same our postures were,

And we said nothing all the day.

Yet, although the uplifting power of the contemplative spirit is glorified in such lines, Donne does not let the reader comfort himself with a purely disembodied emotion. Remember the body, he counsels, as the poem builds to a climax; respect the flesh for something more than its frailties.

But, O alas! so long, so far,

Our bodies why do we forbear?

They are ours, though they're not we; we are

Th' intelligences, they the spheres.

We owe them thanks, because they thus

Did us, to us, at first convey,

Yielded their senses' force to us,

Nor are dross to us, but allay.

On man heaven's influence works not .so,

But that it first imprints the air;

So soul into the soul may flow,

Though it to body first repair.

To our bodies turn we then, that so

Weak men on love reveal'd may look;

Love's mysteries in souls do grow,

But yet the body is his book.

For every poem of Donne's which seems restless and wrenched, in which the lines seem to be straining away from each other, there is always another poem in which the hitherto unrecognized likeness between unlike things comes as a logical discovery rather than a surprise, and in which, instead of being deaf to the resonance of language, Donne sounds a clear if contrapuntal sonority, often as limpid as it is lovely. Without setting out to oppose the poetic conventions, Donne avoided them; he was not against rules but indifferent to them, and the indifference made him seem difficult to those accustomed to a simple progress of ideas and a prescribed regularity of rhythm. Only after reading Spenser's "Epithalamion," for example, can we appreciate the intellectual and musical nuances of this stanza from Donne's "Epithalamion" on the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth in 1613 on February 14:

Up then, fair phoenix bride, frustrate the sun,

Thy self from thine affecti6n

Takest warmth enough, and from thine eye

All lesser birds will take their jollity.

Up, up, fair bride, and call

Thy stars from out their several boxes, take

Thy rubies, pea~s, and diamonds forth, and make

Thy self a constellation of them all,

And by their blazing signify

That a great princess falls but doth not die.

Be thou a new star, that to us portends

Ends of much wonder, and be thou those ends.

Since thou dost this day in new glory shine,

May all men date records from this, thy Valentine.

It is in the "Divine Poems" that Donne is most painfully sensitive and most painfully self-conscious. The mind is never at rest. Even as it thinks it watches its operations, pleased and a little proud of its success in in-tellectualizing. Widening the imagery of religious poetry, Donne also changed its diction; he sharpened the traditional music with unorthodox accents and acrid dissonances. Already in youth, in the midst of carnal enjoyments, Donne had been afflicted with a sense of life's cruel dichotomy, a recognition of man's self-division, of natural hunger mixed with unnatural guilt, of doubt that dulls the edge of delight. The "Divine Poems" are an enlargement of those hungers, guilts, and doubts; they smolder with contradictions and burn with the fire of a growing agony. In these poems Donne does not speak as a confident communicant with God, but as a troubled soul who is none too sure of Him.

In the religious poems the figures of speech are most violent, the sensation most inflamed. In an astonishing sonnet beginning "Batter my Heart" Donne confesses his need of God, but the religious ardor is expressed in a set of frankly sexual images. In an extended metaphor, the poet compares himself to a walled dry that yearns to open its gates to the besieger, and to a virgin who longs to give herself but must be forced before she can make the complete surrender. Here, again, is the Elizabethan theme of the eager lover and the virtuous beloved. But Donne characteristically reverses the formula as he intensifies it. The poet himself becomes the half-willing, half-resisting object; the town, the virgin body, the loving spirit, must be taken ruthlessly. It is with a series of forceful paradoxes that Donne ends:

Yet dearly I love you and would be loved fain,

But am betrothed unw your enemy:

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Similar paradoxes season Donne's sermons, which reflect the change of religious concepts from Calvin to Galileo, from medieval superstition to modern science. Elizabethan prose, as well as poetry, was not a spontaneous but a conscious art in which metaphor was not only an ornament but a compulsion. An expression of wit, the metaphor was therefore a challenging hazard: it had to find or invent a surprising but plausible relation between dissimilar things and, at the same time, control the upsurge of all the associations suggested by the ambiguous figure of speech. Donne did not discard the artifice--on the contrary, he brandished it about with a bravura flourish unheard since Marlowe but, combining intensity and introspection, he gave it voluptuousness. Although his sermons were packed with the severest admonitions, they were admired and actually applauded; his listeners felt they were hearing magnificent performances of arias which exalted God in coloratura. When they were not operatic, the preachings vibrated with orchestral sonority; no congregation could remain unstirred, no heart could fail to respond to the dark sublimity of Donne's eloquence, with its message pronounced in the solemn percussive beat of the prose.

· . . for, as God never saw beginning, so we shall never see end; but they whom we tread upon now, and we whom others shall tread upon hereafter, shall meet at once where, though we were dead, dead in our several houses, dead in a sinful Egypt, dead in our family, dead in our selves, dead in the grave, yet we shall be received with that consolation, and glorious consolation: You were dead but are alive.

Death, which became Donne's obsession, was always a leading theme. tt was there from the beginning, beneath the most licentious love song, underlying the double delight in sensation and speculation. Death had no horror for the sensual curiosity-seeker, the exhilarated being who shrank from no excess of impulse or devotion. In a justification that is reasonable and magnificently daring, Donne cried, "I have not the righteousness of Job, but I have the desire of Job; I would speak to the Almighty, and I would reason with God"--even though the answer might be death. The seventh of the "Holy Sonnets" triumphantly proclaims the victory of faith over fear with its glorious opening:

At the round earth's imagined corners, blow

Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise

From death, you numberless infinities

Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go . . .

The tenth of the "Holy Sonnets" is even more lucent; dispensing with subde complexities of thought and image, it is simple and unforgettable:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy picture be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow; And soonest our best men with thee do go--

Best of their bones and souls' delivery!

Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke. Why swell'st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die.

Such a poem might well serve as epitaph for one who, predestined to a fierce singularity, united the ecstatic and the austere in a vehemence of intellectual play and spiritual discipline.