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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Of commentaries upon Donne's prosody there would seem to be no end and of final agreement upon the details of his metrics there would seem to be no hope. Nevertheless, in still another attempt to probe Donne's technical mystery, it may be useful to recall the rather large area of agreement in principle which can now be assumed as undebatable. As opposed to Dryden's implication of a lack of metrical skill the modern student may be certain with Gosse that “what there was to know about prosody was … perfectly known to Donne.” Most careful readers, too, will accept the essential Tightness of Saintsbury's generalization that Donne's poetic manner is not of one piece. Fletcher Melton's thesis-arsis variation principle remains significantly valid despite the injudicious lengths to which it was pushed. Mario Praz has stressed the contrast between the “traditionally poetical and the normally prosiac” in Donne's poetry, and Sir Herbert Grierson has pointed out that historically the “poetic rhetoric” of Donne was continued with characteristic originality by Dryden. Arnold Stein, the most recent contributor to the literature of Donnean prosody, has written with graphic illumination of Donne's use of stress-shift and of his matching of feminine with masculine rime.1Concerning elision in Donne's poetry Stein has commented at some length:
1 Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693), in W. P. Ker, Essays of John Dryden (Oxford, 1926), ii, 19; Gosse, Life and Letters of John Donne (New York, 1899), ii, 334; Saintsbury, A History of Prosody (London, 1908), ii, 159 and 161; Melton, The Rhetoric of John Donne's Verse (Baltimore, 1906), p. 148; Praz, Secentismo e Marinismo in Inghilterra (Firenze, 1925), pp. 97–98 (cited by Pierre Legouis, Donne the Craftsman [Paris, 1928], p. 45); Grierson, Metaphysical Lyrics Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler (Oxford, 1921), p. xxv; Stein, “Donne's Prosody”, PMLA, lix (1944), 373–397; “Donne and the Couplet”, PMLA, LVII (1942), 676–696.
2 “Donne's Prosody”, pp. 389, 392–393.
3 G. Gregory Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford, 1904), ii, 352; i, 119–120, 53–54.
4 Robert Bridges, Milton's Prosody (Oxford, 1921), pp. 15 ff.
5 The rules for elision which I believe Donne followed, with perhaps certain liberties, are essentially those set forth by Bridges, pp. 19–37. Donne's principal variation is a rather consistent tendency to elide unstressed internal i, e.g., the i in medicine (Love's Growth, 1. 7); in medicinall (Love's Alchymie, 1.10); the initial i in examining (Satyre IV, 1. 28).
6 “Donne's Prosody”, p. 390.
7 Cf. Bridges, pp. 34–36.
8 Ibid., p. 36.
9 Initial truncation and feminine endings as such are not here considered metrical irregularities in the Songs and Sonets. The effect of initial truncation in stanzaic patterns where it is recurrent is quite different from that of its occasional use in rimed couplets. In the latter it thwarts the expected rhythmic pattern, in the former it is a part of the pattern. Lines whose metrical difficulties I am unable to resolve occur in these poems: The Indifferent; Song (“Sweetest love, I do not goe”); Aire and Angels; Loves exchange; Confined love; Witchcraft by a picture; The Primrose; Farewell to love; Sonnet. The Token; Selfe Love.
10 In Satyre IV alone I find very nearly as many lines irreconcilable with the decasyllabic pattern as I find resisting the established metrical norms in all the Songs and Sonets.
11 Cf. John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (New Directions, 1941), pp. 268–325.
12 “The Metaphysical Poets”, Selected Essays: 1917–1932 (New York, 1932), p. 250.
13 The resemblance between lines 1–2 of Sonnet IX of the Holy Sonnets and the opening lines of Paradise Lost would seem scarcely accidental.
14 Cf. “At a Vacation Exercise”, Il.19–20,5–6,23–26; “On Shakespeare”, Il.14–15; “Another on the same”, 1. 5.
15 Cf. James Craig La Drière, “Prosody”, Dictionary of World Literature, ed. Joseph T. Shipley (New York 1943).
16 Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, I, 52.