After the detail of these thousand pages, with their exhaustive bibliographical analyses, lists of textual variants, and summaries of critical opinion, we are left pretty much where we were in the first place in regard to Donne’s Elegies. Allying themselves with the view, expressed over recent years by such scholars as Arthur Marotti and Harold Love, that “scribal publication” functioned alongside the printed book as an important and legitimate means of textual transmission in the seventeenth century, the editors persuade us that the Westmoreland manuscript, in the hand of Donne’s long-standing acquaintance Rowland Woodward, is the best copy-text and that its ordering of the seventeen poems is probably authorial. They are rightly cautious about dating any of the poems more firmly than to somewhere in the 1590s, a few possibly later. Unfortunately, being compilers rather than initiators of critical discussion, they have no independent answers to the most perplexing questions: how confident can we be about the tone of any of these poems, and the degree of seriousness to be accorded them?

What are we to say, for example, when confronted with the opening lines of “The Comparison”?[1]

As the sweet sweat of roses in a still,
As that which from chafed musk cat’s pores

doth trill,
As the almighty balm of th’early east,
Such are the sweat drops on my mistress’

breast.
And on her neck her skin such lustre sets,
They seem no sweat drops, but pearl carcanets.
Rank sweaty froth thy mistress’ brow defiles,
Like spermatic issue of ripe menstruous boils.

“My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun” looks milksop stuff beside this: it carries anti-Petrarchanism to Swiftian extremes. Our first instinct is to be simply disgusted, but, consulting the commentary, we find various critics asserting that Donne is merely employing rhetorical tropes, that he is parodying imitations of Petrarch, that he is criticizing the evasiveness of conventional praise of physical beauty, that his attractive mistress and his rival’s ugly one are in fact the same woman seen from different aesthetic perspectives, that the poem is culpably misogynist, and that, on the contrary, it is proto-feminist in its exposure of the reductiveness of idealized female beauty. Disgust, it seems, is too naïve; once we understand the literary tradition and cultural milieu to which the poem belongs, proper appreciation will follow. But where, amid this babble of voices, shall wisdom be found?

“Elegy” in the Renaissance could include pastoral, funerary, and didactic poetry as well as the paradoxical and often scabrous love-poem, descending principally from Ovid, to which Donne’s elegies seem to belong. The 1590s were a boom time for Ovidian poetry in English, witnessing, among other items, Marlowe’s translations of the Amores (banned in 1599, when many copies were publicly burnt), his Hero and Leander, and Shakespeare’s narrative poems and sonnets—for which he was compared to Ovid by Francis Meres in 1598. The earlier, humanist emphasis on the morally edifying qualities of classical literature had given way, by this stage, to a racier and more lascivious curiosity. Donne, as a young man about town and, like his scribe Woodward, a member of Lincoln’s Inn, might feel this was a profitable strain to exploit—the fashionable tone at the Inns seems to have been the classic undergraduate one of witty and smutty flippancy. The speaker of Donne’s elegies often reminds us of Iago, reducing love to “a lust of the blood and a permission of the will”; it has often been suggested (albeit unprovably) that the Shakespeare play which most resembles these poems, Troilus and Cressida, was performed at one of the Inns.

Intriguingly, in Elegy 11, “On his Mistress,” Donne may allude to some of Shakespeare’s plays. The situation, in which the girl proposes to flee her parents’ wrath disguised as a page-boy accompanying her lover, recalls Julia’s stratagem to follow Proteus in Two Gentlemen of Verona, while the closing mention of a nurse who is startled out of bed at midnight by the girl’s fears for her lover’s safety evokes Romeo and Juliet. The biographical criticism of a bygone age debated whether the addressee of this poem, as of many others, was Donne’s future wife Ann More, and, if so, applauded her bold cross-dressing proposal (“Here was a wife fit for a poet!”—George Gilfillan, 1860), but we assume, perhaps wrongly, that the literary borrowings make a basis in fact much less likely. The speaker is not enthusiastic about his lady’s suggestion:

Be my true mistress still, not my feigned

page… .
Dissemble nothing, not a boy, nor change
Thy body’s habit, nor mind’s; be not

strange
To thy self only; all will spy in thy face
A blushing womanly discovering grace.

Here is another central paradox of these poems: the speaker urges constancy and assumes an essential selfhood of the kind which seems unattainable, both in the ceaselessly metamorphic universe of Ovid, and in the vertiginously relativistic world of postmodernism. Yet the voice of the Elegies, as we pass from poem to poem, is itself radically unstable. Indeed, in “Change” and “Variety” the transitoriness of the natural world is cited as a justification for infidelity in love: “Change is the nursery/ Of music, joy, life, and eternity.” This exalted sentiment reminds us of Spenser’s Mutability Cantos, yet it is the culmination of a poem which takes for granted, again like Iago, that women are no better than foxes or goats in their promiscuity. In the face of such incongruities, do we conclude that Donne is being insincere, that his sincerity is more inclusive than ours, or, as Lionel Trilling long-ago urged, that authenticity of poetic utterance is a more reliable concept than sincerity? We are all too familiar with the suggestion that “the self” is a mere externally constructed device in the early modern period, that Donne is a quick-change artist who dons a succession of masks and emits ventriloquial impersonations but who himself remains faceless and voiceless. This is sometimes dignified as “dramatic,” and one would normally want to say that it cheapens our conception of drama, but there is more warrant for it in these poems than in many. One does feel that Donne is trying out attitudes and stances, often unpleasant ones. He mocks the “silly [i.e., naïve] old morality” which would make his lover’s bracelet an emblem of emotional security (“The Bracelet”); he tries to argue himself into bed by maintaining that the most loyal military “service” is the begetting of future soldiers (“Love’s War”); he advises a friend to marry the hideous Flavia, who “hath yet an Anagram of a good face,” because at least there will be no chance of her cuckolding him (“The Anagram”).

One of the best-known examples of elusive tone occurs in Elegy 8, “To his Mistress going to bed,” which William Empson, in a series of essays, made a litmus-paper test of Donne’s honorable intentions. In this poem, having compared the woman to America, his “newfound land,” virgin territory ripe for exploration, the speaker urges her to

Cast all, yea this white linen hence,
Here is no penance, much less innocence.
To teach thee, I am naked first: why then
What needst thou have more covering than

a man?

Empson rejected the reading of the second line here quoted, which is found in about one-third of the sixty-seven seventeenth-century manuscripts of the poem and in Helen Gardner’s edition (1965), preferring the reading of the majority of manuscripts, of the first printed appearance of the poem in the 1669 edition, and of Grierson’s edition of 1912: “There is no penance due to innocence.” Empson wanted this to be what Donne wrote because he was convinced that Donne was a heretic who, in this poem, was imaging himself and the girl as prelapsarian innocents beyond the sanctions of religion, and was protesting that sex was naturally pure and good. The other reading, he felt, makes Donne into a cynical libertine.[2] Empson’s argument remains unproven; he gives far too much weight to this poem alone, ignoring the extent to which the reading he condemns aligns it with others in the group. Moreover, since he believes that Donne himself altered the line, he concedes, in effect, that both attitudes are attributable to the author—or should we say the speaker? Empson reads the poem as straight autobiography, but, as mentioned earlier, this is not an unproblematic assumption.

I must confess that I have a test-case of my own: Elegy 13, “The Autumnal.” This seems to me the only really great poem among the group. It is basically in praise of an older woman, honoring the beauty of mellow age with wonderful grave tenderness. Donne risks the accusation of bad taste here and there, but the wit is so controlled that it turns the marks of age into trophies:

Call not these wrinkles, graves; if graves they

were
They were Love’s graves; for else he is

nowhere.
Yet lies not Love dead here, but here doth sit
Vowed to this trench, like an anachorit,
And here, till her, which must be his death,

come,
He doth not dig a grave, but build a tomb.

As in Keats’s ode, autumn is here the perfect moment of fruition just before the ravages of winter. John Carey, in his book John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (1981), cites in this context a sermon in which Donne said that “in Heaven it is always Autumn.” Thus, when the speaker turns from the specter of physical decay at the end of the poem, he declares his loyalty to a more graceful decline, but also perhaps to an intimation of immortality:

I hate extremes; yet I had rather stay
With tombs, than cradles, to wear out a day.
Since such love’s natural lation is, may still
My love descend, and journey down the hill,
Not panting after growing beauties, so,
I shall ebb out with them, who homeward go.

(“Lation” is an astronomical term denoting the movement of a body from one place to another.) The punctuation of these lines, their slippery enjambments and expressive caesuras, carry us gently “down the hill” as they ebb out towards their own home. One’s instinct is, like Empson’s, to see a real-life situation here, and to acclaim the poem’s sincerity. There appears to be warrant for this. Izaak Walton, Donne’s first biographer, says that the poem was addressed to Mrs. Magdalen Herbert, mother of George Herbert, whom Donne met when he was approaching forty, i.e., about 1612; she was four or five years his senior. Walton’s dating has however been contested, and the poem is now frequently assigned to c. 1600, when Donne would have been about twenty-eight and Mrs. Herbert thirty-two, making a factual basis less likely. Moreover, some critics assure us that the poem is satirical, mocking the faded beauty it ostensibly celebrates.

In the end, the Elegies are experiments in rhetoric, and whilst, for Donne as for Shakespeare, that does not automatically entail insincerity, it refuses to make sincerity the touchstone of excellence. We are seldom reminded as forcefully as by these poems that in the Latin poetry which underlies them the idea of rhetorical figuration is itself imaged as the application of cosmetics.

Notes
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1. The edition under review prints the poems in the spelling of the manuscript. For convenience, I have modernized the spelling in quotations. Go back to the text.
2. Empson states his case in the essay “Donne in the new edition” reprinted in the first volume of his Essays on Renaissance Literature, but there is also an important unreprinted piece, “‘There is no pennance due to innocence’” in The New York Review of Books of December 3, 1981. Go back to the text.