But since this title honour hath been us’d,
Our weak credulity hath been abus’d.
We have fallen from our high estate; the golden laws of nature are repealed.
So through the glass of Donne’s poetry, now darkly clouded, now brilliantly clear, we see pass in procession the many women whom he loved and hated – the common Julia whom he despised; the simpleton, to whom he taught the art of love; she who was married to an invalid husband, “cag’d in a basket chair”; she who could only be loved dangerously by strategy; she who dreamt of him and saw him murdered as he crossed the Alps; she whom he had to dissuade from the risk of loving him; and lastly, the autumnal, the aristocratic lady for whom he felt more of reverence than of love – so they pass, common and rare, simple and sophisticated, young and old, noble and plebeian, and each casts a different spell and brings out a different lover, although the man is the same man, and the women, perhaps, are also phases of womanhood rather than separate and distinct women. In later years the Dean of St. Paul’s would willingly have edited some of these poems and suppressed one of these lovers – the poet presumably of “Going to Bed” and “Love’s Warr”. But the Dean would have been wrong. It is the union of so many different desires that gives Donne’s love poetry not only its vitality but also a quality that is seldom found with such strength in the conventional and orthodox lover – its spirituality. If we do not love with the body, can we love with the mind? If we do not love variously, freely, admitting the lure first of this quality and then of that, can we at length choose out the one quality that is essential and adhere to it and so make peace among the warring elements and pass into a state of being which transcends the “Hee and Shee”? Even while he was at his most fickle and gave fullest scope to his youthful lusts, Donne could predict the season of maturity when he would love differently, with pain and difficulty, one and one only. Even while he scorned and railed and abused, he divined another relationship which transcended change and parting and might, even in the bodies’ absence, lead to unity and communion:
Rend us in sunder, thou cans’t not divide,
Our bodies so, but that our souls are ty’d,
And we can love by Letters still and gifts,
And thoughts and dreams;
Again,
They who one another keepe alive
N’er parted be.
And again,
So to one neutrall thing both sexes fit,
Wee dye and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.
Such hints and premonitions of a further and finer state urge him on and condemn him to perpetual unrest and dissatisfaction with the present. He is tantalized by the sense that there is a miracle beyond any of these transient delights and disgusts. Lovers can, if only for a short space, reach a state of unity beyond time, beyond sex, beyond the body. And at last, for one moment, they reach it. In the “Extasie” they lie together on a bank,
All day, the same our postures were,
And wee said nothing, all the day... .
This Extasie doth unperplex
(We said) and tell us what we love,
Wee see by this, it was not sexe,
Wee see, we saw not what did move: ...
Wee then, who are this new soule, know,
Of what we are compos’d, and made,
For, th’ Atomies of which we grow,
Are soules, whom no change can invade.