ABSTRACT
Rhys supposes that Donne’s extreme unevenness follows from his attempts to ‘assimilate reflective ideas to the primary emotions’, which failed partly because ‘he was not able to perceive where the line between the song of passion confessed and the doctor’s diagnosis should be drawn’, but more because he tried to use in his verse ‘not the philosophical results of thought…but the processes themselves’. Moreover Donne could not equate ‘his own amorous superpropensities’ with ‘his struggling religious instincts’; Rhys quotes lines 6172 of ‘The Ecstasy’ to prove it, albeit with due acknowledgement of a remarkable attempt: Tf the lyric could ever succeed in fusing subjective, introspective subject-matter, and yet keep true pitch, one would say that Donne of all men was the poet to accomplish it.’ Then Donne was fatally impeded by his wit, which is ‘quick of thought and subtle to a degree’ and yet ‘juggles with ideas and words, and surprises by its caracoles’, in a way that must inhinit spontaneous inspiration. Nonetheless, ‘At his best his achievement is surpassingly fine-finer than we perceive at once.’
