Donne and Milton
DONNE is one of the few poets we can enjoy reading with a com- mentary. The compression of his thought challenges the pursuit of his digressive images. The grating of the rhythm against the metre, like a child's obstinacy-against the impulse to place each foot in the centre of every paving-stone, is of a kind to make continual reference to variant manuscript readings an unavoidable exercise of prosodic appreciation, rather than a distraction. Donne's work cannot be fully understood without considerable knowledge. Miss Helen Gardner has this knowledge, and her commentary on the Divine Poems is admirably full. There is no doubt about the need for a new edition, and the religious poetry ought soon to be followed by the secular. Much longer notes are supplied than in the volumes of Sir Herbert Grierson.
The novelty is that the Holy Sonnets have been arranged by Miss Gardner in the order which preserves their value as a sequence. The justice of this arrangement, which is based .on two groups of manuscripts as well as the first edition of 1633, cannot be disputed. Miss Gardner has also produced a sound case for dating the majority of the sonnets before Donne's ordination, as early as 1609. The result of the new arrangement is that the sub-title Divine Meditations found in a third group of manuscripts is more than vaguely descrip- tive. The first twelve Holy Sonnets are shown to have a connected theme that is in thought derived from the method of meditation taught by St. Ignatius. Miss Gardner's analysis and comparison sometimes seem to one who is not familiar with Jesuit practice a little strained, but she avoids any hard and fast application of this illuminating discovery.
The most useful contribution after the arrangement and the com- mentary is the understanding of Donne's moral and theological position. Miss Gardner ends the supposition, if it still exists, that Donne had for long to contend in himself with his Catholic upbringing even after he had taken orders. In a masterly piece of analysis and paraphrase she clears the obscurity from the famous sonnet on the Church " Show me dcare Christ, thy-spouse." She establishes the central English orthodoxy of his " rectified devotion," in which the emphasis lay on moral rather than mystical piety. Donne, she tells us in an excellent introduction, " is not remarkable for any spiritual gifts and graces which we recognise at once as extraordinary and beyond the experience of the majority of mankind." The divine poetry is not as great as the Songs and Sonnets, but some of the Holy Sonnets, where, as Miss Gardner says, effort of will replaces ecstasy of joy or grief, achieve under immense strain an equal greatness. The Lamentations of Jeremy are altogether inferior to Milton's metrical version of some of the psalms, pious exercises rather than poetry.
The book has only one blemish to my eyes, a misprint of a date (1632 for 1623) which (on p. 132) makes the first half of a long argu- ment on the-dating of one of the hymns momentarily unintelligible— and incidentally shows how difficult it is to be accurate in dating poems. Otherwise both in editing and production this is a work of impeccable scholarship, valuable to students of Donne as well as to the general reader who wants to know more about his poetry.
The problem of editing Milton is of a different nature. Close study of the early editions and the manuscript of Book I.of Paradise Lost, on which Miss Helen Darbishire is the -greatest authority, shows that Milton took extreme care that his original views on spell- ing and punctuation should be observed by his scribes and printers. Miss Darbishire's problem has therefore been to produce such a text as Milton would probably have made had he had his sight. The vast labour of collation and scrupulous attention to trivial detail which this involves may pass unnoticed behind the clear assembly of Milton's textual principles in the introduction, and in the clean, clear and economical discussion of textual points in the appendix. Yet this edition is a triumph of scholarly book-production from every aspect. No one aware of the difference in tone, pronunciation and rhythm brought about by MiltOn's individual spelling would wish to read a less accurate text, let alone read the work in modern spelling.
Particularly interesting are Milton's Milder'', highth, hunderd, perfet, suttle, Voutsafe, feria. But Milton's spelling was not rigidly consistent even throughout Paradise Lost, and Miss Darbishire has avoided the danger of imposing an erroneous consistency on the work. We can only guess how much more labour this decision to judge each sword on its own merit, and on the basis of whether it appears in a corrected or an uncorrected sheet of the one edition, has involved. The result of this work is perhaps the most pleasantly readable and certainly the most exact and judicious text of Paradise Lost that has yet been produced. It is to be hoped that the rest of Milton's works will soon follow under the same hand.
RICHARD MURPHY.
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