ABSTRACT
Coleridge has also suggested that read with a due regard to time, that is to say, giving each thought its due proportion in the utterance, the inharmoniousness of Donne's verses will disappear. We have ourselves tried to experiment, and must confess that attention to that rule has greatly smoothed their apparent ruggedness. How tender he could be in his quaint conceits is evidenced by the following verse, selected from many such, of a poem called 'The Relique;' the lines in italics are exquisitely pathetic:-
[He quotes lines 27-32 of the verse letter 'The Calme', which refers not to the Red Sea but to an episode in the 'Islands Expedition' to the Azores in 1597.]
Noble images, forcible lines, passages of surpassing power and pathos, are to be found in all his poems, although at times we have to wade through much that is tedious and pedantic, and wander through regions of almost hopeless obscurity before we come to these gems. Even to his contemporaries he appears to have been almost equally unintelligible, and Jonson prophesied that from that fault his works would perish. Coleridge has very aptly described his style in this witty quatrain:-
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