Milton On Shakespeare

John Milton will forever hold the second place in the ranking of English poets. His masterpiece Paradise Lost might be unknown today even among your college English majors, but its power and brilliance will always a “fit audience find, though few.” (PL 7, 31) Milton himself was a voracious reader, and it could be argued that his English favorite author was the one who surpassed him in greatness, Shakespeare. Shakespeare (1564-1616) was still active the year Milton (1608-1671) was born. When he was 22 years old, Milton wrote a tribute to Shakespeare, which was also the first poem he published. It appeared in the Second Folio of Shakespeare’s works in 1632:

     On Shakespeare. 1630

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones
The labour of an age in piled stones?
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
Under a star-ypointing pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,                                                5
What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Has built thyself a livelong monument.
For whilst, to the shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart                                          10
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book 
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving,
And so sepulchered in such pomp dost lie                                             15
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

In the first four lines, Milton praises Shakespeare with two rhetorical questions that effectively dismiss any reason to construct physical monuments honoring Shakespeare’s memory. Great kings and pharaohs might require “stone” monuments, so people do not forget their names, but Shakespeare himself has built something equally enduring. His “fame” endures through the plays and poems he wrote. But how was Shakespeare capable of producing what he did? Well, no one can really say where such talent or genius comes from; so instead, Milton symbolically suggests that Shakespeare is the “Dear son of memory.” Here, Milton is alluding to Mnemosyne the Titaness goddess of memory, who is the mother of the nine muses of inspiration in Greek mythology and by doing so, suggests Shakespeare has created works that exist beyond the process of time.

If the poem were to end at line 8, Milton’s effusive praise would have told us only half the story. After line 8, Milton continues to laud Shakespeare’s work, but in his adulation a current of anxiety slips to the surface. Milton, whose early ambition was to become a great poet himself, could not help but admire Shakespeare, but he also must have felt anxious writing so soon after the publication of the Second Folio, which might make any aspiring young poet doubt the quality of his own work. That doubt ripples through the second half of the poem. Unlike the first eight lines that assert in deliberate, separate sentences, each forming a unit of exuberant praise, the second half of the poem is a single sentence that accelerates the poem’s tempo by refusing to stop after each couplet and incudes self-deprecating remarks about his own abilities. It is as if after acknowledging Shakespeare’s eminence, young Milton is in a hurry to finish a poem that not only recognizes the talent of this playwright but acknowledges also his own lesser talents as a poet.

In line 9, Milton specifically compares his own efforts as a poet with Shakespeare’s. Given Shakespeare’s brilliance, writing great works came naturally to him, or so Milton presumed, but for Milton writing poetry is a grueling labor. “For whilst, to [Milton’s] shame of slow-endeavouring art,/Thy [Shakespeare’s] easy numbers flow.” Contrasting his own exertions with Shakespeare’s “easy numbers” seems to have stung Milton’s ego, but perhaps even more discouraging to the young aspiring poet Milton are all those “Delphic lines” (prophetic) that display Shakespeare’s oracular power to plumb the variety and depth of human experience. From lines 13-14, it clear that the act of reading Shakespeare’s plays astonishes Milton, but it also bereaves his imagination (fancy) by making him another “marble” monument to Shakespeare.

As the poem concludes, Milton tells us that Shakespeare is “so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie/That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.” Just shy of twenty-two and determined to be a great poet, Milton must have felt that awkward, competitive ambivalence poets can feel about a great poet they revere. Fortunately for Milton, it did not impede him, and he lived long enough to acquire the knowledge he needed to combine with his extraordinary talent to finally write the great epic, Paradise Lost, which elevated him alongside Shakespeare in the pantheon of greatest English poets.

Oh, Those Circus Animals!

      William Butler Yeats lived a long and productive life as a great poet. One of his greatest poems, “Sailing to Byzantium,” tells how his old age has rendered him “An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick.” But this diminished physical condition, at least, did not impede his creativity, as the poems in his finest collection The Tower demonstrate. Up until the last year of his life, Yeats’s creativity flowed unabated, until in this final year, his confidence was shaken as he was trying to find a theme for a new poem. Yeats struggled for weeks to find a “theme,” and then, happily, that struggle finally produced “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” (1938)

         The Circus Animals' Desertion
                                 1
I sought a theme and sought for in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

                                 2
What can I but enumerate old themes?
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride?

And then counter-truth filled out its play,
The Countess Cathleen was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy,
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough 
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Payers and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

                                    3
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that the raving slut
Who keeps the till.  Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. (1938)

The poem begins with Yeats being unable to find a theme for what he wants to write. He feels he is a “broken man,” and the “circus animals” that once inspired his imagination have now abandoned him in “old age.” This obvious writer’s block induces him to say, “I must be satisfied” with my heart,” which seems vague, and he then alludes with typical Yeatsian ambiguity to “stilted boys,” a “burnished chariot,” a “Lion and woman,” and “Lord knows what.” These unfamiliar references should not confuse the reader; after a lifetime of writing poems and plays, Yeats simply means he had assembled quite an array of characters who represent the themes he sought and found in the past. What to make of “I must be satisfied with my heart,” is a different matter, and can be understood by a similar reference later in the poem.

In stanza 2, at the beginning of section 2, Yeats surrenders to the writer’s block and admits, “What can I but “enumerate old themes?” He recalls “The Wandering of Oisin,” (1889) his narrative poem in which the Irish hero Oisin leaves his land to follow a fairy lady to a fairy land and then returns 150 years later to discover that all his friends are dead, and Ireland has been converted to Christianity. In stanza 3, Yeats sums up his play The Countess Cathleen, an Irish legend in which a woman sells her soul to the devil to get food for the starving people of Ireland. And in stanza 4, he recalls his play, On Baile’s Strand in which the mad Irish legendary hero Cuchulain dies fighting the ocean’s waves after he been tricked into fighting and killing his son.

Yeats did not know, as we do now, that what he was experiencing would be called a writer’s block. But could that block withstand the creative power that always kindled Yeats’s imagination?  And does simply enumerating “old themes” achieve what Yeats was struggling to find? After reading the poem, the answer to both is a resounding yes. With each perfectly crafted stanza Yeats arouses in the reader a profound sympathy. We feel the ache and frustration old age inflicts on the still vibrant mind of the poet who refuses to surrender his craft and creativity. We also see and feel something special that inspired Yeats when young to create poems and plays that transcend the everyday, the commonplace. In all the stanzas that follow the initial one, Yeats remembers the passion within him that fired his imagination to write those early works. In writing Oisin, he recalls how “being “starved for the bosom of his faery bride,” in The Countess Cathleen, how the “dream itself [that] had “all my thought and love” and in On Baile Strand, how the “Players and painted stage took all my love.” It is not the themes, or the characters that make his poem[s] and plays enduring works of art, but the passion that they embody.

In section 3 of the poem, Yeats begins by observing how “Those masterful images because complete/ Grew in pure mind,” as if they were the product of some Platonic, ideal realm that forges fully formed works of art into reality. But then he swerves into a question and asks, “but out of what began?” Here he delves into the genuine source of creativity, his “heart.” And though he believes at first “being but a broken man,/I must be satisfied my heart,” since his search for “new” circus animals to conduct had failed him, he discovers through the very struggle of writing this poem and sifting through his “old themes,” that inspiration and new themes must be “sought” not abstractly, but “In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart,” in the deep, everyday passions that he still feels.  

Keats's To Autumn

     The last great poem John Keats wrote was his ode “To Autumn.” Perhaps it is fitting that it was his final poem, since it is, as Harold Bloom said, “the subtlest and most beautiful of all Keats’s odes, and as close to perfection as any shorter poem in the English language.” It is also fitting that a poem of the harvest and one about the season that ends the year was his last great ode, since Keats’s own brief life would end just two years later.

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees,
   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernal; to set budding more,
   And still more, later flowers for the bees.
   Until they think warm days will never cease,
      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may fine
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
   Thy soft hair-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
   Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
   Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
   Steady thy laden head across a brook;
   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?
   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
   Among the river shallows, borne aloft
      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
   And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Even though “To Autumn” does not inspire in readers the feelings of dramatic heartbreak that, say, “To a Nightingale,” does, the poem overwhelms us with a beauty and bounty even as it is taking us toward that final season, winter. The first stanza fills the reader’s sense of sight with a lush profusion of vegetation as personified Autumn conspires with the “maturing sun” to “load,” “bless,” “bend,” “fill,” “swell,” and “plump,” the harvest that will be gathered and enjoyed. But the extraordinary richness of the imagery can also be felt, and each time we read this stanza we not only see that profusion but also feel the warmth of that “maturing sun.” And even though that “maturing sun” means also winter is coming, Keats lets us loaf for a while in this perfect setting believing too that this season of abundance will last.

After we reach the end of stanza 1, we might anticipate encountering in the next stanza personified Autumn, with her scythe gleaning vigorously the bounty of this harvest. Instead, stanza 2 invites us to imagine languorous Autumn “amid her store,” or “sitting careless on the granary floor,” or “sound asleep,/Drows’d with the fume of poppies.” “By a cyder-press, with patient look” she watches “the last oozings hours by hours.” The profusion in the first stanza has sated and intoxicated her with the bounty of the annual harvest. Interestingly, Autumn can only watch passively “the last oozings hour by hour.” She is no longer the agent of time she was in the first stanza, but like us, an observer of it. And as we read the stanza, her intoxication becomes ours; we become numb as if we too have been “Drows’d with the fume of poppies.” We are entranced by the visual and sensuous abundance of this autumnal moment and watch those “last oozing hours by hours” momentarily suspended in time.

Autumn’s trance and ours is broken in the final stanza when the speaker asks, “Where are the songs of spring: Ay, where are they?” Does Keats wants us to look back to spring (and youth) or does he want us to leap forward beyond the coming winter to next year’s spring? He does not bother to wait for an answer and poignantly cautions Autumn not to think of spring and hear instead the music of her season:

   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too-- 
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
   Among the river shallows, borne aloft
      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
   And gathering swallow twitter in the skies.

What follows is a symphony of sorrow, but also of tranquil beauty. The “wailful choir of small gnats mourn” the landscape, while sounds of the lambs, Hedge-crickets, red-breast, and swallows lighten what will be the slowly, spreading darkness of approaching winter. Here, in this closing stanza, Keats composes a music that lifts the spirit of languishing Autumn and that of the reader.

Other readers may disagree and find this in poem notes of “eternal sadness,” which makes sense, since all humans pine for that immutable youth of the mythical prelapsarian world. But in that mythical spring, nothing ripens; all remains as it is, eternally young, but forever static. In Keats’s reality, Autumn repeats its process, returns each year, swelling the earth with nature’s bounty. Even though her “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” cannot disguise the coming decay and disintegration, we still can feel in her abundance and beauty a tranquil joy. 

Late Summer Truth

      As summer begins to fall and autumn rises, the sun softens, and the green leaves mutate into brilliant yellows and reds.  Poets have often found this change from summer to autumn an inspiration for a poem.  Of course, the change of season is never really the poem’s subject, but rather a vehicle for the poet to explore the human condition.  In his poem “Blackberry Picking,” Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) recollects scenes from the final days of an August when he and others had picked the ripe blackberries.  But this August which Heaney captures is different from previous summers: it symbolizes the change from childhood to adulthood.

Late August, given heavy rain and sun

For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it

Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots

Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

We trekked and picked until the cans were full,

Until the tinkling bottom had been covered

With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned

Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered

With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush

The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.

I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair

That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

     In the first stanza, the speaker describes in sensuous images the memory of picking blackberries at the end of summer.  Filled with anticipation, he watches the blackberries “ripen” for “a full week” through “heavy rain and sun,” When eating the “first one” it soaks his palate, stains his “tongue,” and arouses his “lust” for “Picking.”  This imagery conveys the physical sense of taste, but “lust,” suggests another meaning in which the vehicle of blackberry picking evokes the tenor (metaphorical meaning) of the stanza: the loss of childhood innocence to the awakening of adulthood.  And like the great poets (e.g., William Blake) before him, Heaney knows that once the fruit of “adult experience” is tasted, there is no way to restore that innocence of childhood.  Life becomes a relentless pursuit to fill “cans” and even though one can succeed in filling those “cans,” the “briars” will scratch and “Our hands” become “peppered/With thorn pricks…”  The stanza ends with the curious phrase, “our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.”  

     Bluebeard is the French folktale of the wealthy man who married six wives and murdered each one of them.  Looking for a seventh wife, he visits a neighbor and wants to marry one of his daughters.  Bluebeard gives an elaborate banquet and afterwards the neighbor’s youngest daughter agrees to become his seventh wife.  Once back at his castle he tells her he must take a brief journey, so he gives her the keys to all the rooms in the castle.  Before he departs, he tells her she may visit all the rooms but one, which he absolutely forbids her to enter.  A short time after he is gone, she becomes increasingly curious and cannot resist the desire to visit the forbidden room.  She unlocks the door, enters and discovers the bodies of the previous wives hanging on hooks in this underground chamber. Horrified, she drops the key on the blood-soaked floor, picks it up and leaves the room.  When Bluebeard returns, she hands the keys to him, he notices blood on the forbidden room key and realizes she has entered the forbidden room.  He is just about to kill her, when her sisters and their husbands arrive and save her.  

     Now, the question is, “Why does Heaney include this allusion to Bluebeard?  The answer is twofold.  The first lies in the imagery of the second stanza.  Once the children “hoarded” the “fresh berries in the byre” a “fur” or “rat-grey fungus” gluts their “cache.”  This putrefying image accompanied with the stench of fermenting juice defiles the sweet innocence of the image of the unpicked berries.  In a sense, when children pick the fruit, they symbolically murder their own childhood purity analogous to Bluebeard murdering his innocent wives.  A second answer becomes apparent when we consider one of Heaney’s poetic methods.  Although he has written a lyrical poem, Heaney often tells or narrates a brief tale within his verse.  The speaker here is his main character who participates in the poem’s plot and discovers the inescapable truth of our inevitable decay.  But what makes this poem’s little narrative all the more interesting is the final line: “Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.”  Despite discovering the truth that innocence of youth always lapses into adulthood and decay, Heaney (and we) perennially tell ourselves tales that transform this transitory existence into an imperishable one.

Two by Donne

     When John Donne was young, he wrote some of the most extraordinarily passionate love poems in the English language (1590’s). In his great love poem, “The Canonization” Donne argues with a friend and attempts to rebut the criticisms his companion has made regarding his love affair.

               The Canonization

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love.
   Or chide my palsy, or my gout;
My five gray hairs, or ruin'd 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;
And the king's real, or his stamped face
      Contemplate; what you will, approve,
      So you let me love.

Alas, alas, who's injur'd by my love?
   What merchant's ships have my sighs drown'd?
Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?
   When did my colds a forward spring remove?
      When did the hearts which my veins fill
      Add one more to the plaguy bill?
Soldiers find wars, and lawyer find out still
      Litigious men, which quarrel move,
      Though she and I do love.

Call us what you will, we are made such by love;
   Call her one, me another fly,
We're taper too, and at our own cost die,
   And we in us find th'eagle and the dove.
      The phoenix riddle hath more wit
      By us; we two being one are it.
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
      We die and rise the same, and prove
      Mysterious by this love.

We can die by it, if not love by love,
   and if unfit for tombs or hearse
Our legends be, it will be fit for verse;
   And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
      We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
      As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs;
      And by these hymns, all shall approve
      Us canonized for love;

And thus invoke us, "You, whom reverend love
   Made one another's hermitage;
You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage,
   Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove
      Into the glasses of your eyes
      (So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize)
   Countries, towns, courts: beg from above
A pattern of your love.

     This poem can confuse readers because of Donne’s abrupt, argumentative start, abstract references, and intellectual complexity. The poem begins in what appears to be an argument between the speaker and a friend who has questioned the value or legitimacy of his relationship. He snaps at this “listener” and tell him to “shut up" and “let me love,” and wittily directs him to criticize his other faults—his graying hair, his poor financial circumstances. If those ideas won’t have him change the topic, he advises him to find himself a position at court, examine the king’s behavior or just think about anything else.

     If unable to persuade his listener to think about any else but his relationship, he tries to reason with him by asking whom or what his love has “injur’d”? Has his love destroyed commerce, flooded land, delay spring, or increased deaths from plague? As the stanza slides through the last three lines, the speaker concludes that their love affects neither wars nor civil litigation.

     After attempting to distract the listener, the speaker focuses on the power and quality of their love. Their sexual passion is uncontainable (symbolism of “fly”), though perhaps ephemeral (“We’re tapers too”), but they embody also pure masculinity and femininity (“th’eagle and the dove”). Their love fuses a perfect union in which their entire beings, bodies and souls, become one, and furnishes their love with a “Mysterious[ness].

     By the fourth stanza, their love morphs from the carnal to the spiritual. The story of their love may not be epic enough for a great tomb, but their “legend” (word also meant for life of a saint) will do nicely in “sonnets” and “pretty rooms.” Those sonnets become the “hymns” that will confirm the canonization of the love they shared. By this point in the poem, the speaker has left his listener behind, as he envisions future lovers petitioning these canonized saints for a pattern of their love to emulate. Though this is no easy poem to understand at first, after several rereading it should certainly impress if not astonish the reader with the way Donne incorporates such disparate elements and so radically transform the speaker’s tone from the opening aggressive line to the closing serene wording. But does Donne’s argument convince?

     Upon first encountering much of John Donne’s poetry, the reader will see that his poems can be confounding. All those allusions to religion, to the Bible; all the oblique references to mythology, legends, contemporary issues, politics, commerce etc. require much more patience than contemporary reading habits are accustomed to. Even the great 18th century critic Dr. Johnson noted that Donne’s poetry could present difficulty: “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.” Johnson is right that our improvement is “dearly bought” by the labor exerted in understanding Donne’s poetry. But many would not agree with his judgment that readers are “seldom pleased” by reading Donne. Fortunately, not all of Donne’s poems are weighted with “heterogeneous ideas.” For instance, there is the charming “Sweetest love, I do not go”:

Sweetest love, I do not go,
   For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
   A fitter love for me;
       But since that I 
Must die at last, 'tis best,
To use myself in jest
      Thus by feign'd deaths to die.

Yesternight the sun went hence,
   And yet is here today;
He hath no desire nor sense,
   Nor half so short a way;
      Then fear not me,
But believe that I shall make
Speedier journeys, since I take
   Moe wings and spurs than he.

Oh how feeble is man's power,
   That if good fortune fall,
Cannot add another hour,
   Nor a lost hour recall.
      But come bad chance,
And we join to it our strength,
And we teach it art and length,
   Itself o'er us to'advance.

When thou sigh'st, thou sigh'st not wind,
   But sigh'st my soul away;
When thou weep'st, unkindly kind,
   My life's blood doth decay.
      It cannot be
That thou lov'st me, as thou say'st,
If in thine my life thou wast,
   Thou art the best of me.


Let not thy divining heart
   Forethink me any ill;
Destiny may take thy part,
   And may thy fears fulfil.
      But think that we 
Are but turn'd aside to sleep;
They who one another keep
   Alive, ne'er parted be.

     In this poem, Donne wants to persuade his wife not to fear for his safe return from the journey he was about to take to France and the Low Countries with his patron Sir Robert Drury. His logic certainly could not convince the modern reader, and perhaps slightly reassured Anne who naturally would have worried given the dangers and difficulties of such a journey. Donne jests that his journey is a sort of rehearsal for the inevitability of death. He observes that the sun makes longer journeys each day, so his will be even “Speedier.” He reminds her not to add to her fear by dwelling on his absence. He urges her not to sigh or weep, since doing so makes him feel his “life’s blood” is being “decay[ed]”. Finally, he even panics a little himself and tells her that her “divining heart” might bring about the very misfortune he is trying to convince her will not occur and that she should think of their coming separation as no different from when they are “turn’d aside to sleep.” Although the couple were “parted” during his journey, Donne did return safely, and he and Anne were reunited.

     These two poems, one complex, one simple offer a glimpse into Donne’s poetry. Many of his other love poems are considerably more difficult and require a strenuous effort on behalf of a reader to attain the pleasure his verse can and does inspire. Fortunately, there are texts available with ample footnotes and helpful introductions to guide readers along on their Donnean journeys.

Two Poets, once forgotten, then rediscovered

 Edna Saint Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was among the most admired poets during her lifetime. Many of her poems explored themes of love and mortality, crafted in traditional Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet forms. But as the Modernism of T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens began to dominate poetry aesthetically and intellectually in the 1920’s, her popularity faded, and critics considered her style of writing too old-fashioned and emotional. By the 1960’s, she did regain some degree of popularity as feminists extolled her frank depiction of an independent female uninhibited by the strictures of the American puritanical culture. Both of these views are correct; many of Millay’s poems are old-fashioned and emotional, but many are also strongly feminist. Take for example “Oh, think not that I am faithful to a vow,” a sonnet that deftly employs an ironic feminist’s assertion and recalls the Renaissance poetry of John Donne, who poems were mostly forgotten until he was championed by the high priest of Modernism himself T. S. Eliot.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow! 
Faithless am I save to love's self alone. 
Were you not lovely I would leave you now: 
After the feet of beauty fly my own. 
Were you not still my hunger's rarest food, 
And water ever to my wildest thirst, 
I would desert you -- think not but I would! -- 
And seek another as I sought you first. 
But you are mobile as the veering air, 
And all your charms more changeful than the tide, 
Wherefore to be inconstant is no care: 
I have but to continue at your side. 
So wanton, light and false, my love, are you, 
I am most faithful when I most am true. 

The opening line’s assertion upends what one might normally expect on first reading the poem. We stop after the first line, wonder if we have misread it, then go back and reread it. This is surprising because it comes from a woman speaker who writing in an antiquated style (for the 1920’s), which raise the expectation of something along the lines of an Elizabeth Barrett Browning expression of love and passionate devotion. The speaker issues a second assertion in the second line, telling what in fact commands her true loyalty: “Faithless am I save to love’s self alone.” If one were to stop again and sift the meaning from these lines, it seems that the speaker might be pledging herself to some abstract or idealized concept of love. But that thought is immediately cancelled by the next line when she admits that “Were you not lovely I would leave you now”. Clearly, the physical loveliness of her lover compels her to remain, and the significance of line 2 comes into clearer focus. When she claims to be only faithful to “love’s self,” (“Faithless am I save to love’s self alone.”), she is defining love as purely an irresistible physical attraction to another. This attraction becomes the metaphors of lines 5 and 6: “Were you not still my hunger’s rarest food,/And water ever to my wildest thirst”.

At line 7, we are halfway through the sentence that constructs the sonnet’s second quatrain and have encountered the concrete example of what she means by her inverted declaration of the first line. Once again, she asserts that she would leave him. She states, “I would desert you — think not but I would! —” and then offers the most peculiar and curious reason for her not leaving, that he is “mobile as the veering air/And all your charms more changeful than the tide.” And since he is “So wanton, light and false,” she is “most faithful when” she is “most true.” But what is she “most true” to? Unencumbered by standard “male” strictures of female fidelity, Millay pledges herself to experiencing and fulfilling her carnal desires. Therefore, she persists in relishing him physically and sexually regardless of his infidelity. That she does so in the enclosed structure of a Shakespearean sonnet perhaps put off modernist critics. But the feminists of the 1960’s and 1970’s appreciated both her style and striking content.

Like Millay, John Donne’s poetry was admired during his lifetime, but fell out of fashion after his death. In his case, his poetry went largely unnoticed until the modernist poets and poetry that thought Millay’s poems “old fashioned” and sentimental found in his poetry a fascinating blending of intense passion and encyclopedic intellect. Donne composed some of the best love poems in the English language. Nevertheless, readers new to his work will find even his most melodic poems intellectually difficult because he deftly infuses his verse with theology, philosophy, law, science, medicine, mythology, and sea exploration in some rather complex syntax. A good place to begin with Donne is to sample some of his humorous verse. Here’s a poem that shows his quick mind and clever wit:

Woman's Constancy  

Now thou hast lov'd me one whole day,   
Tomorrow when thou leav'st, what wilt thou say?   
Wilt thou then Antedate some new made vow?                                                     
                    Or say that now  
We are not just those persons, which we were?  
Or, that oaths made in reverential fear  
Of Love, and his wrath, any may forswear?  
Or, as true deaths, true marriages untie,  
So lover's contracts, images of those,  
Bind but till sleep, death's image, them unloose?                                                  
                    Or, you own end to Justify,  
For having purposed change, and falsehood; you  
Can have no way but falsehood to be true?  
Vain lunatic, against these scapes I could                                                  
                    Dispute, and conquer, if I would,                                                 
                    Which I abstain to do,  
For by tomorrow, I may think so too.   

The abrupt initial question opens an aggressive interrogation the speaker employs to imagine the excuses his lover will raise as she attempts to end their “brief” affair. He anticipates an impressive array of reasons she could list to nullify the vow she made. She could claim she is already promised to another man. That they are not the same “persons” “now.” That her vow to him was made out of “fear.” That just as death dissolves the marriage bond, so too does sleep (In Donne’s time, sleep was death’s second self.) That since she has “purposed change and falsehood” she has no '“way”/choice but to follow through and leave him. The accusations the speaker predicts she might use to justify leaving him he could easily “Dispute, and conquer,” if he chooses to. But ultimately, he would not, since as the final line informs us, he might “think so too.”

This poem gives readers a sample of Donne’s humorous dexterity in verse. We read through the poem speeding inexorably toward what we think will be a knockout condemnation of the female and instead we are whiplashed by the startling last line. Millay and Donne both regained status within the cannon of poetry, Donne’s obviously more prominent, but how much will they be read in the next fifty or hundred years?  

George Herbert

     George Herbert (1593-1633) wrote some of the most moving and profound religious poetry in the English language.  In our far less religious time, some readers might question the value of what seems archaic and even irrelevant verse about a God that should be filed under myths and legends.  However, reading this poet's religious poems invites readers to explore interesting psychological depths of two of the best poets the English language has produced.  Through most of his life, Herbert pursued secular careers, before he took holy orders and became an Anglican priest in 1630.  But devoting his life to God was hardly easy, as Herbert’s “Affliction I,” demonstrates. 

Affliction

  

When first thou didst entice to thee my heart,

I thought the service brave;

So many joys I writ down for my part,

Besides what I might have

Out of my stock of natural delights,

Augmented with thy gracious benefits.

I looked on thy furniture so fine,

And made it fine to me;

Thy glorious household-stuff did me entwine,

And 'tice me unto thee.

Such stars I counted mine: both heav'n and earth;

Paid me my wages in a world of mirth.

What pleasures could I want, whose King I serv'd,

Where joys my fellows were?

Thus argu'd into hopes, my thoughts reserv'd

No place for grief or fear.

Therefore my sudden soul caught at the place,

And made her youth and fierceness seek thy face.

At first thou gav'st me milk and sweetnesses;

I had my wish and way;

My days were straw'd with flow'rs and happiness;

There was no month but May.

But with my years sorrow did twist and grow,

And made a party unawares for woe.

My flesh began unto my soul in pain,

"Sicknesses cleave my bones;

Consuming agues dwell in ev'ry vein,

And tune my breath to groans."

Sorrow was all my soul; I scarce believ'd,

Till grief did tell me roundly, that I liv'd.

When I got health, thou took'st away my life,

And more, for my friends die;

My mirth and edge was lost, a blunted knife

Was of more use than I.

Thus thin and lean without a fence or friend,

I was blown through with ev'ry storm and wind.

Whereas my birth and spirit rather took

The way that takes the town;

Thou didst betray me to a ling'ring book,

And wrap me in a gown.

I was entangled in the world of strife,

Before I had the power to change my life.

Yet, for I threaten'd oft the siege to raise,

Not simp'ring all mine age,

Thou often didst with academic praise

Melt and dissolve my rage.

I took thy sweet'ned pill, till I came where

I could not go away, nor persevere.

Yet lest perchance I should too happy be

In my unhappiness,

Turning my purge to food, thou throwest me

Into more sicknesses.

Thus doth thy power cross-bias me, not making

Thine own gift good, yet me from my ways taking.

Now I am here, what thou wilt do with me

None of my books will show;

I read, and sigh, and wish I were a tree,

For sure then I should grow

To fruit or shade: at least some bird would trust

Her household to me, and I should be just.

Yet, though thou troublest me, I must be meek;

In weakness must be stout;

Well, I will change the service, and go seek

Some other master out.

Ah my dear God! though I am clean forgot,

Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.

     Issac Walton considered “Affliction I” an example of Herbert’s “pious reflection of God’s providence” (Walton’s Lives).  No doubt as we read the poem, we see and feel Herbert’s religious belief permeating every aspect of his life.  But to narrowly define his thoughts as pious overlooks the piercing complaint his words ultimately reverberate.  The origin of that complaint surfaces subtly in the beginning of the poem when he looks back to when he was first drawn to God.  In stanza 1, Herbert, when younger, felt “entice[d]” to God, but what was it that drew him to God in the first place?  Did his desire to worship God arise of its own accord or was it produced by the “gracious benefits” that “Augmented” the “many joys” he had secured, and consequently, was his relationship based on receiving “thy gracious benefits,” then rendering “the service brave” to God?  Grateful to God for bestowing on him “gracious benefits,” Herbert states in stanza 2 that “heav’n and earth/Paid me my wages in a world of mirth.”  The word “wages” suggests a negotiable connection making devotion dependent on the quality and quantity of benefits received.  Finally, the verbs, “entice[d]” and “entwine[d],” can be read as Herbert accusing God of misleading him into this relationship, and  stanza 3 leading Herbert to think these “benefits” “argu’d [him] into hopes” that his life would be untouched by “grief or fear,” and were what “made” him “seek [God’s] face” in the first place.

     Stanzas 4 and 5 reveal that Herbert has experienced much “grief and fear,” and he blames God’s gifts of “milk and sweetness,” and the early days strewn with “flow’rs and happiness” for making him “a party unawares for wo,” unprepared to face the “years sorrow did twist and grow.”  Beset by “Sicknesses [that] cleave my bones,” and “Consuming agues [that] dwell in ev’ry vein,/And tune my breath to groans,” he fell into despair, “Sorrow was all my soul; I scare believed, /Till grief did tell me roundly, that I lived.”  As we move into stanza 6, that despair was lifted temporarily by restored health, but the “joys” and “pleasures” Herbert knew initially have forever vanished, as cherished “friends die” around him.  Through stanzas 7,8,9, Herbert feels betrayed into being a scholar at Cambridge University, that “wrap me in a gown,” which “entangled” him “in a world of strife, /Before I had the power to change my life.”  When he found the resolve to change his career, God beguiled him and “didst with Academic praise/Melt and dissolve my rage.”  That “rage” rises again in stanza 9, and he berates God for “not making/Thine own gift good, yet me from my ways taking.”  The reader should notice that Herbert has shifted to present tense verbs, which signal he is now focused on the present moment in his life. 

     Herbert is completely disoriented by all these twists and turns in his life and cannot perceive any logic in the way God has treated him.  He also fears the future, since “None of my books will show” what God has in store for him.  Most likely, he expects more sickness and sorrow, and to escape more suffering, he imagines becoming “a tree,” a tangible, safe body with a simple entity.”  Once inanimate, his limbs “should grow/To fruit or shade: at least some bird would trust/Her household to me, and I should be just.”  This last clause is particularly astonishing.  Is Herbert assuming a god like will or authority to dispense justice?  Or is he assailing God indirectly for failing to treat Herbert the way he believes he deserves?  

     The final stanza is the most intriguing in the poem.  He first purports to accept meekly and stoutly whatever God may afflict him with: “Yet, though thou troublest me, I must be meek;/In weakness must be stout.”  But then he immediately rejects this idea and asserts he will break from God and “go seek/Some other master out.”  Then, twisting back toward God once again, he cries out longingly, “Ah my dear God! (Italics mine). Now devotion surprisingly supersedes affliction, and he submits to God’s will for him.  But does he?  For the poem ends with the ambiguous “Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.”  What is the meaning of this final line?  Does the penultimate line carry through to the poem’s last word, suggesting submission to God’s will however it affects him?  Or is he, with that final line, rebuffing that will, turning inward, away from God toward an assertion of self-will?  The possibility that Herbert, on this rare occasion in his life, is exerting his independent will, should even excite the staunchest atheist who normally prefers to ignore all religious feelings and ideas.  At the very least, the inability to resolve the poem’s ambiguity enriches the experience the reader has reading and interpreting the poem.  Other poems by Herbert are unambiguous and clearly express Herbert’s intent.  But here, equivocation persists, leaving the reader to ponder Herbert’s meaning.