by John Donne
Of merit, most, of nothing, it hath spun,
And truth, as reason’s task and theme, doth shun.
She makes a fairer flight in emptiness,
[40] Than when a bodied truth doth her oppress.
Reason again denies her scales because
Hers are but scales; she judges by the laws
Of weak comparison; thy virtue slights
Her feeble beam, and her unequal weights.
What prodigy of wit and piety
Hath she else known by which to measure thee?
Great soul, we can no more the worthiness
Of what you were, than what you are express.
On Dr John Donne, Late Dean of St Paul’s, London
By J[ohn] Chudleigh
Long since this task of tears from you was due,
Long since, O poets, he did die to you,
Or left you dead, when wit and he took flight
On divine wings, and soared out of your sight.
Preachers, ’tis you must weep. The wit he taught
You do enjoy. The rebels, which he brought
From ancient discord, giant faculties,
And now no more religion’s enemies.
Honest to knowing, unto virtuous sweet,
[10] Witty to good, and learned to discreet,
He reconciled, and bid the usurper go.
Dullness to vice, religion ought to flow.
He kept his loves, but not his objects. Wit
He did not banish, but transplanted it,
Taught it his place and use, and brought it home
To piety, which it doth best become.
He showed us how for sins we ought to sigh,
And how to sing Christ’s epithalamy.
The altars had his fires, and there he spoke
[20] Incense of love’s and fancy’s holy smoke.
Religion thus enriched, the people trained,
And God from dull vice had the fashion gained.
The first effects sprung in the giddy mind
Of flashy youth, and thirst of womankind,
By colours led, and drawn to a pursuit,
Now once again by beauty of the fruit,
As if their longings too must set us free,
And tempt us now to the commanded tree.
Tell me, had ever pleasure such a dress?
[30] Have you known crimes so shaped? Or loveliness
Such as his lips did clothe religion in?
Had not reproof a beauty passing sin?
Corrupted nature sorrowed when he stood
So near the danger of becoming good,
And wished our so inconstant ears exempt
From piety, that had such power to tempt.
Did not his sacred flattery beguile
Man to amendment? The law, taught to smile,
Pensioned our vanity, and man grew well
[40] Through the same frailty by which he fell.
O, the sick state of man, health doth not please
Our tastes, but in the shape of the disease.
Thriftless is charity, coward patience,
Justice is cruel, mercy want of sense.
What means our nature to bar virtue place,
If she do come in her own clothes and face?
Is good a pill we dare not chaw to know?
Sense, the soul’s servant, doth it keep us so
As we might starve for good, unless it first
[50] Do leave a pawn of relish in the gust?
Or have we to salvation no tie
At all, but that of our infirmity?
Who treats with us must our affections move;
To th’good we fly by those sweets which we love,
Must seek our palates, and with their delight
To gain our deeds, must bribe our appetite.
These trains he knew, and laying nets to save,
Temptingly sugared all the health he gave.
But, where is now that chime? That harmony
[60] Hath left the world; now the loud organ may
Appear; the better voice is fled to have
A thousand times the sweetness which it gave.
I cannot say how many thousand spirits
The single happiness this soul inherits
Damns in the other world, souls whom no cross
Of’the sense afflicts, but only of the loss,
Whom ignorance would half save, all whose pain
Is not in what they feel, but others gain.
Self-executing wretched spirits who,
[70] Carrying their guilt, transport their envy too.
But those high joys, which his wit’s youngest flame
Would hurt to choose, shall not we hurt to name?
Verse statues are all robbers, all we make
Of monument, thus doth not give but take,
As sails which seamen to a forewind fit,
By a resistance, go along with it,
So pens grow while they lessen fame so left;
A weak assistance is a kind of theft.
Who hath not love to ground his tears upon,
[80] Must weep here if he have ambition.
An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of Paul’s, Dr John Donne
By Mr Tho[mas] Carey
Can we not force from widowed poetry,
Now thou art dead (great Donne) one elegy
To crown thy hearse? Why yet dare we not trust
Though with unkneaded, dough-baked prose thy dust,
Such as the unscissored churchman from the flower
Of fading rhetoric, short-lived as his hour,
Dry as the sand that measures it, should lay
Upon thy ashes, on the funeral day?
Have we no voice, no tune? Didst thou dispense
[10] Through all our language both the words and sense?
’Tis a sad truth, the pulpit may her plain
And sober Christian precepts still retain,
Doctrines it may and wholesome uses frame,
Grave homilies and lectures; but the flame
Of thy brave soul, that shot such heat and light
As burnt our earth, and made our darkness bright,
Committed holy rapes upon our will,
Did through the eye, the melting heart distil,
And the deep knowledge of dark truths so teach,
[20] As sense might judge what fancy could not reach,
Must be desired forever. So the fire
That fills with spirit and heat the Delphic choir,
Which kindled first by thy Promethean breath,
Glowed here a while, lies quenched now in thy death.
The Muses’ garden with pedantic weeds
O’erspread, was purged by thee, the lazy feeds
Of servile imitation thrown away,
And fresh invention planted. Thou didst pay
The debts of our penurious, bankrupt age;
[30] Licentious thefts that make poetic rage
A mimic fury, when our souls must be
Possessed, or with Anacreon’s ecstasy,
Or Pindar’s, not their own. The subtle cheat
Of sly exchanges, and the juggling feat
Of two-edged words, or whatsoever wrong
By ours was done the Greek or Latin tongue,
Thou hast redeemed, and opened us a mine
Of rich and pregnant fancy, drawn a line
Of masculine expression, which, had good
[40] Old Orpheus seen, or all the ancient brood
Our superstitious fools admire and hold
Their lead more precious than thy burnished gold,
Thou had’st been their exchequer, and no more
They each in others’ dust had raked for ore.
Thou shalt yield no precedence but of time,
And the blind fate of language, whose tuned chime
More charms the outward sense. Yet, thou may’st claim
From so great disadvantage greater fame,
Since to the awe of thy imperious wit
[50] Our stubborn language bends, made only fit
With her tough, thick-ribbed hoops to gird about
Thy giant fancy, which had proved too stout
For their soft melting phrases. As in time
They had the start, so did they cull the prime
Buds of invention many a hundred year,
And left the rifled fields besides the fear
To touch their harvest. Yet from those bare lands
Of what is purely thine, thy only hands
(And that thy smallest work) have gleaned more
[60] Than all those times and tongues could reap before.
But thou art gone, and thy strict laws will be
Too hard for libertines in poetry.
They will repeal the goodly exiled train
Of gods and goddesses, which in thy just reign
Were banished nobler poems; now, with these,
The silenced tales o’th’Metamorphoses,
Shall stuff their lines, and swell the windy page,
Till verse refined by thee in this last age,
Turn ballad rhyme, or those old idols be
[70] Adored again with new apostasy.
O, pardon me, that break with untuned verse
The reverend silence that attends thy hearse,
Whose awful, solemn murmurs were to thee
More than these faint lines, a loud elegy
That did proclaim in a dumb eloquence
The death of all the arts, whose influence
Grown feeble, in these panting numbers lies
Gasping short-winded accents, and so dies.
So doth the swiftly turning wheel not stand
[80] In th’instant we withdraw the moving hand,
But some small time maintain a faint, weak course
By virtue of the first impulsive force.
And so, whil’st I cast on thy funeral pile
Thy crown of bays, O, let it crack a while
And spit disdain till the devouring flashes
Suck all thy moisture up, then turn to ashes.
I will not draw the envy to engross
All thy perfections, or weep all our loss.
Those are too numerous for an elegy,
[90] And this too great to be expressed by me,
Though every pen should share a distinct part,
Yet art thou theme enough to tire all art.
Let others carve the rest, it shall suffice
I on thy tomb this epitaph incise:
Here lies a king that ruled as he thought fit,
The universal monarchy of wit.
Here lie two flamens, and both those, the best,
Apollo’s first, at last the true God’s priest.
An Elegy on Dr Donne
By Sir Lucius Carie
Poets attend, the elegy I sing
Both of a doubly named priest, and king.
Instead of coats and pennons, bring your verse,
For you must be chief mourners at his hearse.
A tomb your muse must to his fame supply,
No other monuments can never die.
And as he was a two-fold priest, in youth,
Apollo’s, afterwards, the voice of truth,
God’s conduit-pipe for grace, who chose him for
[10] His extraordinary ambassador.
So let his liegers with the poets join,
Both having shares, both must in grief combine,
Whil’st Johnson forceth with his elegy
Tears from a grief-unknowing Scythian’s eye
(Like Moses at whose stroke the waters gushed
From forth the rock, and like a torrent rushed),
Let Laud his funeral sermon preach, and show
Those virtues, dull eyes were not apt to know,
Nor leave that piercing theme, till it appears
[20] To be Good Friday, by the church’s tears.
Yet make not grief too long oppress our powers,
Lest that his funeral sermon should prove ours.
Nor yet forget that heavenly eloquence,
With which he did the bread of life dispense,
Preacher and orator discharged both parts
With pleasure for our sense, health for our hearts,
And the first such (though a long-studied art
Tells us our soul is all in every part)
None was so marble, but whil’st him he hears,
[30] His soul so long dwelt only in his ears.
And from thence (with the fiercenesses of a flood
Bearing down vice) victualed with that blest food
Their hearts. His seed in none could fail to grow,
Fertile he found them all, or made them so.
No druggist of the soul bestowed on all
So catholicly a curing cordial.
Nor only in the pulpit dwelt his store,
His words worked much, but his example more,
That preached on worky days, his poetry
[40] Itself was oftentimes divinity.
Those anthems (almost second psalms) he writ
To make us know the cross, and value it,
(Although we owe that reverence to that name
We should not need warmth from an under flame)
Creates a fire in us, so near extreme
That we would die for, and upon, this theme.
Next, his so pious litany, which none can
But count divine, except a Puritan,
And that but for the name, nor this nor those
[50] Want anything of sermons, but the prose.
Experience makes us see that many a one
Owes his country his religion,
And in another, would as strongly grow,
Had but his nurse and mother taught him so,
Not he the ballast on his judgement hung,
Nor did his preconceit do either wrong.
He laboured to exclude whatever sin
By time or carelessness had entered in,
Winnowed the chaff from wheat, but yet was loath
[60] A too hot zeal should force him, burn them both,
Nor would allow of that so ignorant gall,
Which to save blotting often would blot all,
Nor did those barbarous opinions own,
To think the organs sin, and faction, none,
Nor was there expectation to gain grace
From forth his sermons only, but his face.
So primitive a look, such gravity,
With humbleness, and both with piety,
So mild was Moses’ countenance, when he prayed
[70] For them whose Satanism his power gainsaid
And such his gravity, when all God’s band
Received His word (through him) at second hand,
Which joined, did flames of more devotion move
Than ever Argive Helen’s could of love.
Now to conclude, I must my reason bring,
Wherefore I called him in his title king,
That kingdom the philosophers believed
To excel Alexander’s, nor were grieved
By fear of loss (that being such a prey
[80] No stronger than one’s self can force away)
The kingdom of one’s self, this he enjoyed,
And his authority so well employed,
That never any could before become
So great a monarch, in so small a room.
He conquered rebel passions, ruled them so,
As under-spheres by the first mover go,
Banished so far their working, that we can
But know he had some, for we knew him man.
Then let his last excuse his first extremes,
[90] His age saw visions, though his youth dreamed dreams.
On Dr Donne’s Death
By Mr Mayne of Christ-Church in Oxford
Who shall presume to mourn thee, Donne, unless
&
nbsp; He could his tears in thy expressions dress,
And teach his grief that reverence of thy hearse,
To weep lines learned, as thy Anniverse,
A poem of that worth, whose every tear
Deserves the title of a several year.
Indeed so far above its reader, good,
That we are thought wits when ’tis understood,
There that blest maid to die, who now should grieve
[10] After thy sorrow, ’twere her loss to live;
And her fair virtues in another’s line,
Would faintly dawn, which are made saints in thine,
Had’st thou been shallower, and not writ so high,
Or left some new way for our pens, or eye,
To shed a funeral tear, perchance thy tomb
Had not been speechless, or our muses dumb.
But now we dare not write, but must conceal
Thy epitaph, lest we be thought to steal,
For who hath read thee and discerns thy worth,
[20] That will not say thy careless hours brought forth
Fancies beyond our studies, and thy play
Was happier than our serious time of day,
So learned was thy chance; thy haste had wit,
And matter from thy pen flowed rashly fit.
What was thy recreation turns our brain,
Our rack and paleness, is thy weakest strain.
And when we most come near thee, ’tis our bliss
To imitate thee, where thou dost amiss.
Here light your muse, you that do only think
[30] And write, and are just poets, as you drink,
In whose weak fancies wit doth ebb and flow,
Just as your reck’nings rise, that we may know
In your whole carriage of your work, that here
This flash you wrote in wine, and this in beer.
This is to tap your muse, which running long
Writes flat, and takes our ear not half so strong.
Poor suburb wits, who if you want your cup,
Or if a lord recover, are blown up.
Could you but reach this height, you should not need
[40] To make each meal a project ere you feed,
Nor walk in relics, clothes so old and bare,
As if left off to you from Ennius were,
Nor should your love in verse call mistress those,
Who are mine hostess, or your whores in prose.
From this muse learn to court, whose power could move
A cloistered coldness, or a vestal love,
And would convey such errands to their ear,
That ladies knew no odds to grant and hear.
But I do wrong thee, Donne, and this low praise
[50] Is written only for thy younger days.
I am not grown up, for thy riper parts,