Page:The Poems of John Donne - 1896 - Volume 1.djvu/31

Rh master the fantastic hippogriff of Donne’s imagination, and make it wholly serviceable; but in his less intense works it was rather unmanageable. Yet there are very fine things here also; especially in the Epistle to Sir Henry Goodyere, and those to Lucy Countess of Bedford, and Elizabeth Countess of Huntingdon. The best of the ‘Funeral Elegies’ are those of Mrs. Boulstred. In the Divine Poems there is nothing so really divine as the astonishing verse from the ‘Second Anniversary’ quoted above. It must always however seem odd that such a poet as Donne should have taken the trouble to tag the Lamentations of Jeremiah into verse, which is sometimes much more lamentable in form than even in matter. The epigram as to Le Franc de Pompignan’s French version, and its connection, by dint of Jeremiah’s prophetic power, with the fact of his having lamented, might almost, if any Englishman had had the wit to think of it, have been applied a century earlier to parts of this of Donne. The ‘Litany’ is far better, though it naturally suggests Herrick’s masterpiece in divine song-writing; and even the ‘Jeremiah’ ought not perhaps to be indiscriminately disapproved. The opening stanzas especially have a fine melancholy clang not unknown, I think, as a model to Mr. Swinburne.