Page:The Poems of John Donne - 1896 - Volume 1.djvu/29

Rh singling out the finest line in English sacred poetry—

a Dies Iræ and a Venite itself combined in ten English syllables.

Here is that most vivid and original of Donne’s many prose and verse meditations on death, as—

Here too is the singular undernote of “she” repeated constantly in different places of the verse, with the effect of a sort of musical accompaniment or refrain, which Dryden (a great student of Donne) afterwards imitated on the note “you” in Astræa Redux, and the Coronation. But these, and many other separate verbal or musical beauties, perhaps yield to the wonder of the strange, dreamy atmosphere of moonlight thought and feeling which is shed over the whole piece. Nowhere is Donne, one of the most full-blooded and yet one of the least earthly of English poets, quite so unearthly.

The Elegies, perhaps better known than any of his poems, contain the least of this unearthliness. The famous ‘Refusal to allow his young wife to accompany him as his page,’ though a very charming poem, is, I think, one