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Some of Donne's ‘Ecstasies’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
It is still undecided in what sense, if any, the ecstasy in Donne's most famous poem should be regarded as mystical. Even if we evade the problem of defining mysticism, there is still the question of what ecstasy meant to the poet. In “The Extasie” the word keeps its literal meaning of ekstasis or exodus of the souls of the two lovers from their bodies, for Donne tells us that they “Were gone out” so as to unite into the “abler soul” which “Defects of lonelinesse controules” (11. 43–44), and makes the discovery that sex was not the source of their love. Recent interpreters have stressed the change which comes over the poem at line forty-nine, where the lover, or as Pierre Legouis insists, the seducer, ends the literal ekstasis of the two souls with a plea for their return to the physical senses of their bodies “Else a great Prince in prison lies” (1. 68).
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References
1 “The Extasie,” 1. 14.
2 In Donne the Craftsman (Paris, 1928), pp. 75–77, and in “L'Etat présent des controversies sur la poésie de Donne,” in Études Anglaises, v (1952), 99.
3 Leo Spitzer, “Three Poems on Ecstasy” in A Method of Interpreting Literature (Smith Coll., 1949), p. 6.
4 A. J. Smith, “Donne in his Time: A Reading of ‘The Extasie’,” in Rivista di Lelteralure Moderne e Comparate, x (1957), 274. This important article is not included in the 1957 Bibliographies of either SP or PMLA.
5 “A Reading of ‘The Extasie’,” p. 265.
6 In “A Note on Donne's ‘Extasie’,” RES, xix (1943), 67.
7 In “Three Poems on Ecstasy,” pp. 12 and 15.
8 Ignatius his Conclave, ed. Charles M. Coffin. Pub. No. 53 of the Facsimile Text Society (New York, 1941), p. 2. Cf. Hadrian's animula vagula blandula, attributed to him in Aelianus Spartianus' Augustan History, p. 25.
9 William Empson, “Donne the Space Man,” Kenyon Review, xix (1957), 337–399.
10 As Marjorie Nicolson points out in Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1959), p. 330.
11 The Works of John Milton (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1932), v, 184.
12 “The Second Anniversary,” 1. 72.
13 Maurice Valency, in his Introduction to the Love Poetry of the Renaissance, In Praise of Love (New York : Macmillan, 1958), p. 237, observes that the stilnovisti poets might treat a lady as “an organizing principle sent by God himself” into the world, and so might regard her as “the soul of the world,” and thus prepare the way for Donne to treat Elizabeth Drury as he did in “An Anatomie of the World.”
14 In The Breaking of the Circle (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1950), p. 84.
15 “The First Anniversary,” ll. 68–69.
16 “A Farewell Elegie,” ll. 79–82.
17 In his Introduction to The Poems of John Donne, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), ii, xxv and xxvii.
18 LI. 20–21. In Donne and the Drurys (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1959), p. 94, Robert C. Bald notes that Donne “knew neither lady,” and spoke of their charms as “Things which by faith alone I see.”
18 See The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert and Robert Sandison, by Izaac Walton, ed. S. B. Carter (London: Falcon Educational Books, 1951), pp. 22–24. In Donne and the Drurys (pp. ix and 97) Bald mentions this story without questioning Walton's account of the incident.
20 Letter to Sir Henry Goodyere, ll. 46–48.
21 In The Poems of John Donne, ii, 42. The association of this letter with Sir Thomas Lucy is corrected by R. E. Bennett in “Donne's Letters from the Continent,” PQ, xix (1949), 75–76.
22 Letter vi in Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, by John Donne, ed. Charles E. Merrill, Jr. (New York: Sturgis & Walton, 1910), pp. 10–17.
23 Ennead VI, vii, 33 and 34.
24 Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (New York, Columbia Univ. Press, 1943), p. 276.
25 In Marsilii Ficini Opera (Paris, 1641), ii, 235. The quotation from the commentary is not given by Kristeller.
26 In The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, p. 282.
27 The lines compliment Wotton. Grierson regarded the poem as part of “a literary débat among the wits of Essex's circle” about the merits of life at court, in town, and country. In The Poems of John Donne, n, 411, he dated it not later than 1598.
28 A beginning was made in my “The Lineage of ‘The Extasie’,” in MLR, xxvii (1932), 1–7, and carried further by A. J. Smith in “The Metaphysic of Love,” RES, ix, n.s. (1958), 362–375.
29 In a passage in the Confessions, iv, iii, which Laurens J. Mills quotes in One Soul in Bodies Twain (Bloomington, Ind.: Principia Press, 1937), p. 18.
30 S. Thomae Aquinatis Summa Theologica emendata de Rubeis, Billuart et aliorum notis selectis ornata, 6 vols. (Turin, 1937), ii, i, xxviii, 1; Vol. ii, p. 162.2.
31 In “Of Friendship,” The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (Everyman ed.), I, 203.
32 Dialoghi di Amore, a cura di Santino Caramella (Bari: Laterza, 1929), pp. 30 and 289. Noting in The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, p. 278, that the “cult of friendship” was widely discussed in the Hellenistic schools of philosophy, Kristeller sees its starting point for Ficino in “this whole body of ideas” as it was expressed in Cicero's De Amicitia. On p. 281 Kristeller speaks of Ficino's conception as also being influenced by “the old Tuscan poets.”
33 Letter lxxxviii in Merrill's edition of Donne's Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, p. 211. In “Donne's Letters from the Continent, 1611–12,” p. 69, R. E. Bennett tentatively identifies the lady as Martha Garrard.
34 Letter to Lady Bedford, 1. 6. Poems of John Donne, i, 227.
35 In “The Storme,” l. 1. Poems, I, 175. A still more metaphysical example is Donne's verse letter to Mr. R. W. Poems, i, 207.
36 See p. 511 and n. 24 above.
37 See nn. 22 above and 40 below.
33 In “Donne's ‘Extasie’,” SP, LV (1958), 474.
39 In John Donne: his Flight from Medievalism (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1944), p. 181.
40 L. 39. Poems, I, 142.
41 In The Philosophy of Plotinus, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1923), ii, 142 and 144, William Ralph Inge declares that Plotinus' vision of the One, “as a description of a direct psychical experience… closely resembles the records of the Christian mystics, and indeed of all mystics, whatever their creed, date, or nationality,” and that Plotinus rightly put it “at the apex of the pyramid which ascends… from the many and discordant to the One in whom is no variableness.”
42 The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, p. 276.
43 In “The Poetry of Donne: Its Interest and Influence Today,” Essays and Studies of the English Association, collected by Guy Boas (London: John Murray, 1957), n. s. vii, 97.
44 The Book of the Courtier, by Count Baldassare Castiglione. Done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby. Anno 1561. (Everyman ed.), p. 317.
45 In “Donne in his Time,” p. 265.
46 By Mary Paton Ramsay in Les Doctrines Médiévales chez Donne (London, 1917), p. 242.
47 The Prayers of John Donne, Selected… by Herbert H. Umbach (New York: Bookman Associates, 1951). The same point is made, with several other illustrations, by Itrat Husain in The Dogmatic and Mystical Theology of John Donne (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1938), pp. 121–122.
48 Helen Gardner, “John Donne: A Note on Elegy V, ‘His Picture’,” in MLR, xxxix (1949), 336.
49 In A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), pp. 91–92.
50 Dogmatic and Mystical Theology of Donne, pp. 141 and 143.
51 The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. 10 Vols., 1953–1960), viii, 232.
62 The word is used in the sense in which Jerome Zanchius explained in De Operibus Dei (Neustadt, 1591), iii, i, 1, that the Greek word was used in the Septuagint to render the Hebrew word which is translated as “a deep sleep” in the Authorized Version's translation of the account of the creation of Eve in Genesis ii.21. Zanchius noted that the same word was used in the Septuagint of the visions of the Prophets and Apostles, especially of Paul: “& de se ait Paulus Act. 22. se fuisse in , & vidisse Christum sibi dicentem: Festina, & c.”
53 Summa Theologica, ii, ii, clxxv, 3; Vol. iv, 250–252. 54 Summa Theologica, ii, i, xxviii, 3; Vol. ii, 164–165.
55 The Dogmatic and Mystical Theology of Donne, p. 127.
56 In Mysticism (2nd éd., London: Methuen, 1911), p. 94. In The Philosophy of Plotinus, ii, 149, Inge added Meister Eckhart, and quoted St. John of the Cross at length against perversions of belief in mystical experience through the bodily senses.
57 In De la Demonomania des Sorciers (Paris, 1580). Cf. Robert Burton's explanation of the “oracles” of the “Indian priests and the witches of Lapland” in the Anatomy of Melancholy, I, i, 1. 4 (Everyman éd., I, 140), as “ecstasy.”
58 The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, I, 94.
59 In Of Wisdome. Three Bookes Written In French by Peter Charron Doctr of Lawe in Paris. Translated by Samson Lennard (London, 1640), pp. 32–35. Charron professed scepticism about demoniacal ecstasy and described the human kind as “doubtelesse… no separation of the Soule but only a suspension of the parent and outward actions thereof.”
60 The Book of the Courtier, pp. 319–320.
61 Dialoghi d'Amore, p. 275. In Renaissance Theory of Love (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958), p. 94, John Charles Nelson says that Leone regarded direct knowledge of divine beauty as “impossible in this life.”
62 In the rejected conclusion to Book in of The Faerie Queene. The Works of Edmund Spenser. A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw and others, 11 vols. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1932–57), iii, 181–182.
63 Godfrey of Bulloigne: or the Recovery of Jerusalem. Done into English by Edward Fairfax (Dublin, 1726). Canto xvi, stanza 19; p. 477.
64 In A Method of Interpreting Literature, pp. 19 and 17.
65 The Works of Abraham Cowley (11th ed., London, 1710, 2 vols.), i, 167.
66 In “Donne and Love Poetry of the Seventeenth Century.” Seventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), p. 76.
67 In Donne's Poetry: Essays in Literary Analysis (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954), p. 30.
68 As E. M. W. Tillyard does in “A Note on Donne's ‘Extasie’.”
69 Summa Theologica, I, cxix, 3; Vol. I, 744.2. Though this point is not made in Grierson's notes to the poem, he cites the Summa, i, lxx, 3, to illustrate lines 56–59 in the light of Aquinas' theory of the direct illumination of men's souls by the heavenly bodies.
70 Summa Theologica, I, lxxxviii, 3; Vol. I, 506.1.
71 The Book of the Courtier, pp. 321 and 318.
72 Examples are given in “The Lineage of ‘The Extasie’.” See n. 28 above.
73 Dialoghi del Sig. Speron Speroni, di nuovo ricoretti (Venice, 1606), p. 19 (misnumbered 21): Adunque non Amor solamente, ma noi ancora siamo Centauri, & Amore non pure è misto di huomo, & di brutto, ma d'infiniti contrarij, che sono uniti in lui solo, che troppo è lungo il contarli, & noi per proua li conoscete. Basti al présente, che sia Centauro, che fa gl'amanti Hermafroditi, dando allé parti di cotal misto la lor douuta félicita.
74 In J. E. Shaw's words in Guido Cavalcanli's Theory of Love. The ‘Canzone d'Amore’ and Other Related Problems (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1949), pp. 11–12.
75 In “The Love Poetry of John Donne.” Seventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson, p. 100.
76 The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Phyllis B. Bartlett (New York: MLA, 1941), p. 59. Miss Bartlett notes (p. 431) Chapman's fondness for quoting this Aristotelian tag, but does not trace it to any source.
77 Stanza 103,11. 1–6. Poems, p. 79. Following a suggestion of Leslie H. Rutledge, Miss Bartlett refers to Aristotle's treatment of touch as the first (primum) of the senses in De Anima, ii, ii. But Aristotle thought of touch as first only in the sense that it was the basic faculty which man and all animals have in common. Aquinas, who more than once quoted the Aristotelian passage on touch as the prime sense, did not think of it as anything but the lowest in the hierarchy of the senses, though he recognized that the intellectual faculties of the soul depended upon its sensitive faculties. (Summa Theologica, I, lxxvi, 5; Vol. I, 486.)
78 The approximate date of the series is given as roughly between 1600 and 1615 by Fabrizio Clerici in Allegorie dei Sensi di Jan Breughel (Florence, Electa Editrice, n.d.).