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Readers of Rupert Brooke will almost certainly have made the acquaintance of Donne the poet, admirers of Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith will with equal certainty have dipped into the excellent selections which that versatile writer has made of Dr. Donne's sermons.

But to search for a reason why everyone should read Donne we need go no further than George Saintsbury's words:

"For those who have experienced, or who at least understand, the ups-and-downs, the ins-and-outs of human temperament, the alternations not merely of passion and satiety, but of passion and laughter, of passion and melancholy reflection, of passion earthly enough and spiritual rapture almost heavenly, there is no poet and hardly any writer like Donne."

Our appetite for Donne was probably first whetted by Izaak Walton, who wrote so admirable a biography of him. His personality intrigues us from the start, his Marlowesque thirst for experience, experience of the intellect and experience of sensation, finds a sympathetic echo to-day in the minds of most of us. He knew a good deal about medicine, law, astronomy and physiology, as well as theology: he joined the expedition of Essex to Cadiz in 1596: he was ever adventuring in science, in love and in travel. At the age of forty-two, poverty-stricken and a failure, he took Orders and became one of the greatest preachers we have ever had. He poured his whole soul into his sermons, and held his congregations spellbound with his gorgeous prose, "perhaps never equalled for the beauty of its rhythm and the Shakespearean magnificence of its diction": he dwelt mainly on the subject of Sin (about which he knew a good deal from experience), Death, God, Heaven and Infinity. Listen to this on Eternity: "And all the powerfull Kings, and all the beautifull Queenes of this world, were but as a bed of flowers, some gathered at six, some at seven, some at eight, All in one Morning, in respect of this Day. In all the two thousand yeares of Nature, before the Law given by Moses, and the two thousand yeares of Law. … In all this six thousand, and in all those, which God may be pleased to adde, … in this House of his Fathers, there was never heard quarter clock to strike, never seen minute glasse to turne." Or this personal confession (rarest of delights in sermons): "I throw my selfe downe in my Chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a Flie, for the ratling of a Coach, for the whining of a doore; I talke on, in the same posture of praying; Eyes lifted up; knees bowed downe; as though I prayed to God; and, if God, or his Angels should aske me, when I thought last of God in that prayer, I cannot tell; Sometimes I finde that I had forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A memory of yesterdays pleasures, a feare of to morrows dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine eare, a light in mine eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a Chimera in my braine, troubles me in my prayer. So certainely is there nothing, nothing in spirituall things, perfect in this world."

"If Donne," says Robert Lynd, "had written much prose in this kind, his Sermons would be as famous as the writings of any of the saints since the days of the Apostles."

If only more sermons contained such human touches as the following, the modern church-goers would be more plentiful:—

"I am not all here, I am here now preaching upon this text, and I am at home in my Library considering whether S. Gregory, or S. Hierome, have said best of this text, before. I am here speaking to you, and yet I consider by the way, in the same instant, what it is likely you will say to one another, when I have done, you are not all here neither; you are here now, hearing me, and yet you are thinking that you have heard a better sermon somewhere else, of this text before."

But as an example of his highest power of eloquence and impassioned imagination I will quote a passage that can challenge any passage in the whole range of English prose:

"The ashes of an Oak in the Chimney, are no Epitaph of that Oak, to tell me how high or how large that was; It tels me not what flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust of great persons graves is speechlesse too, it sayes nothing, it distinguishes nothing: As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldest not, as of a Prince whom thou couldest not look upon, will trouble thine eyes, if the winde blow it thither; and when a whirle-winde hath blowne the dust of the Church-yard into the Church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the Church into the Church-yard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again, and to pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the noble flowre, and this the Yeomanly, this the Plebeian bran. … "

But it is Donne the poet, the Donne who wrote

"Her pure and eloquent blood

Spoke in her cheeks and so distinctly wrought,

That one might almost say her body thought,"

the Donne of

"I long to talk with some old lover's ghost,

Who died before the God of Love was born,"

of

"I wonder by my troth what thou and I

Did till we loved?"

of the

"Bracelet of bright hair about the bone,"

that attracts the ordinary man and woman of to-day.

In spite of repeated incentives to listen, we turn deaf ears to sermons: towards poetry we are inclined to be perhaps too kind.

Donne is all the more important as a poet because he treats of the universal passion of love in more phases than any other poet. He was the complete experimentalist in love, both in actual life and in his work. He is frankly in search of bodily experiences:

"Whoever loves, if he do not propose

The right true end of love, he's one that goes

To sea for nothing but to make him sick."

He is brutal:

"For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love."

He is inconstant:

"I can love any, so she be not true."

He bewails the inconstancy of women:

"Though she were true when you met her,

And last till you write your letter,

Yet she

Will be

False, ere I come, to two or three."

His passion for sheer ugliness carries him away time after time:

"Had it been some bad smell, he would have thought

That his own feet, or breath, that smell had wrought."

Or again:

"And like a bunch of ragged carrots stand

The short swollen fingers of thy gouty hand."

In his Elegies he tells stories of his conquests dramatically, in full detail, satirically, sensually. In Jealousy we are given an exact picture of the deformed husband who,

"Swol'n and pampered with great fare,

Sits down and snorts, cag'd in his basket chair"

—so that the poet and his mistress perforce have to "play in another house," away from those "towering eyes, that flamed with oily sweat of jealousy."

In The Perfume we see the girl's "immortal mother, which doth lie still buried in her bed, yet will not die," who, fearing lest her daughter be swollen, embraces her and names strange meats to try her longings: we see

"The grim-eight-foot-high-iron-bound-serving-man

That oft names God in oaths, and only then."

But the scent that the lover uses gives him away and so he is by her "hydroptic father catechized."

There is a good deal of frank naturalism in the elegy entitled To his Mistress Going to Bed, but it is healthily coarse, though scarcely quotable even in these times, which is a pity.

"There is no penance due to innocence."

But playing as he does on all the notes of all the different sorts of love, Donne gives the impression of one who attained in the end an abiding love for one person, Anne More, his wife.

In The Ecstasy we see him crying out against passionate friendship:

"But O alas, so long, so far,

Our bodies why do we forbear?"

and makes an unanswerable point in this verse:

"So must pure lovers' souls descend

T'affections and to faculties,

Which sense may reach and apprehend,

Else a great Prince in prison lies.

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 the book."

And in The Anniversary he retracts all that he had once said about inconstancy:

"Here upon earth we are Kings, and none but we

Can be such Kings, nor of such subjects be.

Who is so safe as we, where none can do

Treason to us, except one of us two?

True and false fears let us refrain;

Let us live nobly, and live, and add again

Years and years unto years, till we attain

To write three-score: This is the second of our reign."

There are few lovelier lyrics than Break of Day:

"Stay, O sweet, and do not rise;

The light that shines comes from thine eyes;

The day breaks not, it is my heart,

Because that you and I must part.

Stay, or else my joys will die

And perish in their infancy."

Or, to take a complete poem, none shows Donne in truer, finer light than 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 waked'st me wisely; yet

My dream thou brokest 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.

As lightning, or a taper's light,

Thine eyes, and not thy noise waked me;

Yet I thought thee

—For thou lovest truth—an angel, at first sight;

But when I saw thou saw'st my heart,

And knew'st my thoughts beyond an angel's art,

When thou knew'st what I dreamt, when thou knew'st when

Excess of joy would wake me, and earnest then,

I must confess, it could not choose but be

Profane, to think thee anything but thee."

There is enough nastiness, eccentricity, coarseness, roughness and extravagance in Donne to put off many fastidious readers: but his faults lie open to the sky: his beauties are frequently hidden, but they are worth searching for.

And yet—a word of warning—let George Saintsbury give it: "No one who thinks Don Quixote a merely funny book, no one who sees in Aristophanes a dirty-minded fellow with a knack of Greek versification … need trouble himself even to attempt to like Donne."

We read Donne, then, for his fiery imagination, for his deep and subtle analysis, for his humanity, for his passion, for his anti-sentimentalism, for his eager search "to find a north-west passage of his own" in intellect and morals, for the richness and rarity of the gems with which all his work, both prose and poetry, is studded, for his modernity and freshness. We read Donne as a corrective of lazy thinking: he frees us from illusion.