Page:The Poems of John Donne - 1896 - Volume 1.djvu/28

xxiv and expression runs through the whole, even though it seems never to have found full and complete delivery in artistic form. How far this curious piece is connected with the still more famous ‘Anniversaries,’ in which so different a stage of “progress” is reached, and which ostensibly connect themselves with the life and death of Mrs. Elizabeth Drury, is a question which it would be tedious to argue out in any case, and impossible to argue out here. But the successive stages of the ‘Anatomy of the World’ present us with the most marvellous poetical exposition of a certain kind of devotional thought yet given. It is indeed possible that the union of the sensual, intellectual, poetical, and religious temperaments is not so very rare; but it is very rarely voiceful. That it existed in Donne’s pre-eminently, and that it found voice in him as it never has done before or since, no one who knows his life and works can doubt. That the greatest of this singular group of poems is the ‘Second Anniversary,’ will hardly, I think, be contested. Here is the famous passage—

which has been constantly quoted, praised, and imitated. Here, earlier, is what I should choose if I undertook the perilous task of