Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/179

Rh of the soul to God. He elaborates in many of the Songs and Sonnets two radically inconsistent ideas, one the inherent fickleness of woman, the other the mystical identity of the souls of lovers. But often he simply ransacks his multifarious knowledge to discover new and startling conceits in which to express his bizarre and subtle moods. For it is a mistake—towards which I venture to think Mr Courthope tends—to let the intellectual and abstract element in Donne's poetry blind one to the passionate feeling it expresses. No love-poetry of the closing sixteenth century has more of the sting of real feeling in it except Shakespeare's. There is nothing quite like Donne's love-poems in the language, except, perhaps, some of Browning's.  Passion seems to affect both poets in the same way, not evoking the usual images, voluptuous and tender, but quickening the intellect to intense and rapid trains of thought, and finding utterance in images, bizarre sometimes and even repellent, often of penetrating vividness and power. The opening of one of Donne's songs affects us like an electric shock, jarring and arresting—

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

or —

"I long to talk with some old lover's ghost            Who died before the God of love was born,"

or—

"Twice or thrice had I loved thee              Before I knew thy face or name,               So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame,               Angels affect us oft and worshipped be";