Page:Works of Sir John Suckling.djvu/16

 are thoroughly in the ingenious and far-fetched manner of Donne. The opening of the third of the set of verses, entitled 'Sonnets,' is practically borrowed from Donne's fine lines:

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

Less directly imitated, but still an immediate effect of the type of simile for which Donne was responsible in English poetry—the simile worked up with care from the physical and mechanical science of the day—is the description of the clock in lover's hearts, to which are devoted the lines beginning, 'That none beguiled be by Time's quick flowing.' In the spirit of Donne, but with a more graceful command of phrase, are the lines,

'Tis now, since I sat down before That foolish fort, a heart,'

with their close description of the siege and its abandonment.

However, if Suckling made his most ambitious attempts in this fashionable style, he did not achieve his greatest successes in it. It is the chief characteristic of the poets of the school of Donne that their artificiality, if the paradox is admissible, is a spontaneous part of their nature. They are naturally involved in expression, and diffuse in thought; their style seems to be naturally hard and monotonous. Few of them possessed that force of imagination which, in Donne's case, survived, if it did not always conquer, the tortures to which it was submitted by its owner. The fervent piety of George Herbert redeems much of the triviality which marks its outpourings; but, beyond question, his frame of mind, in which the highest aspirations translated themselves into quaint plays on words and out-of-the-way analogies from Nature, was no artistic pose, but a natural mood. Suckling, in his 'metaphysical' excursions, stands outside the group which indulged in poetical distortions of wit, pious or profane. He may be dull, he is frequently barren, but he is never involved. His idea is clear to himself, and if he elaborates it, he does so without raising a cloud of words and confused images