JOHN DONNE .sx WHOEVER wanders among the tombs of a church where the dead of many centuries lie together must be struck by a contrast between the effigies of late Elizabethan or Jacobean date and those of earlier times .sx About earlier monuments there is a sentiment of finality and peace .sx The pomps and passions of life are not forgotten ; crowns , spurs , chains of honour , straight cloaks - all the insignia of power and splendour are commemorated , but such things are solemnized and purged of vanity by a recognition of the fact of death :sx these are the tombs of men for whom death had a meaning to which in life they gave assent .sx But the figures on those of the late Renaissance express rather the restlessness of existence , a desperate clinging to those possessions which the sculptor elaborates above the buried .sx There they lie , these men and women , flounced and ruffled ; puffed out and pinched into grotesque likenesses to the creations of some pigeon-breeder's fancy ; often painted like wax-works , so that they suggest neither energy nor repose ; boasting of their wealth by extravagant ornaments , of their fertility by graduated rows of kneeling children , of their virtue and descent by long inscriptions and armorial embellishments .sx Everything about them evokes a distracted age , violently envious and arrogantly acquisitive , which could hold out little to steady a mind sensitive tosuch distractions .sx Here and there the slanting figure of a doctor of divinity or law in a long gown and soft four-cornered hat , taking a nap upon his elbow , seems to rest contented ; but the majority of these monuments express little beyond an avidity for the world .sx If mortality is expressed in them at all , it is by a morbid insistence upon physical corruption ; as in those two-storeyed tombs , where the man , decked in fine clothes , lies above , and underneath him a skeleton or a body drops into ragged decay .sx There are , of course , exceptional instances in which meditation upon mortality takes a more imaginative and less charnel direction .sx One of the most striking is to be seen in St. Paul's Cathedral .sx It is of older date than the building , and the only monument which survived the fire of 1666 .sx Niched in the wall and carved in marble of a soft mistiness , stands , almost at full height , the long figure of a man wrapped in a winding-sheet .sx The sheet is gathered into a frill , like a wreath upon the head , leaving the lean face bare .sx His eyes are closed and sunken ; his beard is trimly pointed ( the hair above the straight lips being brushed up from them ) , and his features are sharpened and smoothed in death .sx The folds of the drapery are flat , showing the huddled knees and drooping arms beneath .sx Thus swathed and narrowed , like some great white chrysalis stiffened in a winter's death , stands the effigy of John Donne , poet , preacher , satirist , courtier and " worthy , " waiting for the day which called forth the most magnificent of his sonnets - .sx At the round Earth's imagin'd corners , blow .sx Your trumpets , angels , and arise , arise .sx From death , you numberless infinities .sx Of souls , and to your scattered bodies go .sx II .sx It may seem perverse in a critical study to begin at the grave instead of at the cradle ; but with Donne the manner of his death leads us to the centre of the subject .sx Usually the way in which a man leaves life is of as little importance towards understanding him as his entrance into it ; but Donne's " impressive and scenic departure " is characteristic both of his imagination and of his relation to his age .sx Just as his monument shows a taste for contemplating death curiously common to his contemporaries , and yet is distinguished from theirs , so his writings upon death and kindred subjects are marked by an imaginative intensity which raises them above the half-fascinated , half-frightened obsessions of the dying Renaissance .sx If he fixes his gaze upon the King of Terrors , it is to stare him out of countenance ; if he dwells upon the physical humiliations of decay , it is to catch a glorious fear , transcending the cold tremors of self-stimulated disgust .sx In Donne's love-poetry , too , it is a singular exultation or rebound from what is physically humiliating that is most characteristic .sx It seems as though he must first fix these ugly facts , and utter .sx words , words , which would tear .sx The tender labyrinth of a soft maid's ear .sx More , more than ten Sclavonians scolding , more .sx Than when winds in our ruin'd abbeys roar ; .sx and that then , as though his imagination needed to be stretched upon the rack of realism , his ethereal faculty is suddenly released , and in a phrase , a line , a verse ( rarely for a longer space ) - .sx Thinner than burnt air flies the soul .sx If we grant this to be the condition of a peculiar poetic gift , we need not be continually surprised to find the same man at once the harshest of English satirists ( Swift not excepted ) and the most spectral of love-poets .sx But before discussing Donne's lyrics , it will be well to examine further his complex relation to his times , by the light of this elaborate disrobing for death - how deeply impressive to his contemporaries we can judge from Izaak Walton's famous monograph , which , in so far as it is a biography , is but a prelude to a requiem , a corridor , prettily decorated with pictures of the author's fancy , conducting us to that large room where the Dean lies such " an unconscionable time a-dying .sx " Edmund Gosse , to whose interesting book a reader who would store himself with further information must be referred , has shown how incomplete Walton's monograph is as a portrait , and how untrustworthy are its statements .sx Fate , which is seldom more ironical than in the coupling of hero and biographer , excelled itself , when it bound by the tie of a dog-like and distant admiration simple old Izaak to the Dean ; when , after landing such homely , classifiable fish as the Judicious Hooker and Dr. Saunderson , it set him playing at the end of his placid line so many-tinted and fabulous a dolphin .sx Gosse at the close of his biographical chapters discusses those dramatic preparations .sx He comments upon the profoundly Renaissance attitude of the principal actor thus :sx " It was a piece of public tragedy , performed in solemn earnest , with an .sx intention half-chivalrous , half-hortatory , by a religious humanist whose temper was of the sixteenth century , and not of the realistic , busy , semi-democratic seventeenth century into which he had survived .sx So Sir Philip Sidney died at Arnhem , with musicians performing his own poem of " La Cuisse Cassee " at his bedside .sx So Bernard Palissy died in the Bastille , defying Henry III to his face in a dramatic defence of his convictions .sx This was the Renaissance relation to life , which was , after all , only a stage , on the boards of which a man of originality and principle must nerve himself to play le beau role to the last moment , in a final bout with veritable death , armed with scythe and hour-glass , a skeleton only just unseen , but accepted as something more than a mere convention .sx After Donne's day the increase of Rationalism , a decay of the fantastic and poetic conception of existence , and perhaps a certain invasion of humour into daily life , made such a death impossible .sx " Here Gosse puts us once and for all on the right track in criticizing Donne ; " even in 1631 , " he adds , the manner of his death " was old-fashioned enough and unintelligible enough to attract boundless attention .sx " Donne , as his death-bed proves , was in many ways a belated Elizabethan - and so far he was out of sympathy with his contemporaries ; but at the same time , intellectually and in his taste , he was so much in harmony with them that his poetry peculiarly delighted those who were most representative of the new age .sx His sensitiveness to the influence of surroundings , his restless intellect , and his divining vanity , which formed him for a subtle sycophant and a rare companion , all combined to make a Jacobean of him , and to induce him to draw his sound gold ingot into wiry ingenuities .sx And this discord between his temperament and his taste -that rage for novelty , pungency and ingenuity at allcosts which he , in common with the select whose praise he desired , caught blowing down the wind of change - can alone account for the erratic quality of his work .sx Not only his success but his failure can never be foreseen .sx It is not safe to leave one poem unread , however repellently unpromising it may appear .sx You cannot tell from underneath what scrap-heap of scholastic rubbish the spring of Helicon will not make its way , or after how many knockings of flinty conceits together , the spark of genius will not fly at last , bright- .sx As lightning , which one scarce dares say he saw , .sx 'Tis gone so soon .sx The occasion of his inspiration is constantly incongruous .sx Cut from their context , who would not have supposed these lines , for instance , part of some grave seraphic poem by the mystical Dean ?sx But if my days be long , and good enough , .sx In vain this sea shall enlarge , or enrough itself ; for .sx I will through the wave and foam , .sx And shall , in sad lone ways a lively sprite , .sx Make my dark heavy poem light , and light .sx For though through many straits and lands I .sx roam , .sx I launch at Paradise , and I sail towards home .sx But no ; they are taken from a laboured and licentious satire , which bored its author into silence long before it reached completion , a satire in which the descent of the vegetable soul of Eve's apple was to have been traced through her , through her daughter , through an ape , a sprat , a whale , a bird , an elephant , a mouse , via Calvin and a few heretics , until it should be finally lodged in the body of Elizabeth ; and that magnificent apostrophe , which quoted might describe the spirit of Shakespeare or of Donne himself at his brightest and best , .sx This soul to whom Luther and Mahomet were Prisons of flesh , .sx refers literally to this very apple and its tedious migrations .sx These are but two examples of frequent inadequacy in the occasions of his splendid thoughts .sx Often they are mere explosions in a void , failing to ignite what follows , and only connected with what precedes them by the frigid manoeuvres of intellectual agility .sx In the first Anniversary lines like .sx She , she is dead :sx she's dead :sx when thou know'st this , .sx Thou know'st how wan a ghost this our world is , .sx so full of the desolation of bereavement , are but a moment of emotion in the midst of contorted and exaggerated rant , inspired by the off-chance of attaching a rich patron .sx These two Anniversaries , written in commemoration of a girl Donne had never seen , shocked by their stupendous flatteries and hyperboles even his contemporaries , who relished above all things in poetry that peculiar mental excitement , so characteristic of him , which strains the barely conceivable to the point of bursting into the palpably absurd .sx Ben Jonson remarked that such sentiments addressed to the Virgin might have been in keeping with the subject ; but that such adulation should be lavished on the sixteen-year-old daughter of a pushing merchant disgusted all , except the fond , vain old father .sx But it brought Donne the thing he wanted ; he was soon in possession of comfortable quarters in Drury House .sx The general disapproval troubled him however ; these were his first published poems ; what he had written earlier had only circulated in manuscript .sx He excused himself for asserting that Death .sx Can find nothing after her , to kill .sx Except the world itself , so great as she , .sx and much else of the same kind , by saying that not having known the young lady personally , he could not tell that these assertions were untrue , and he explained that in any case he had purposely written about her as though she had been the ideal woman .sx III .sx This second excuse is something more than a quibble , and brings us back to the significant fact of Donne's Elizabethan characteristics , and of his consequent isolation in an age to which nevertheless , by taste and habits of mind , he was so intimately allied .sx