If he would persuade her to marriage he calls her attention to a flea--
Me it sucked first and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
He says that the flea is their marriage-temple, and bids her forbear to
kill it lest she thereby commit murder, suicide and sacrilege all in
one. Donne's figures are scholastic and smell of the lamp. He ransacked
cosmography, astrology, alchemy, optics, the canon law, and the divinity
of the school-men for ink-horn terms and similes. He was in verse what
Browne was in prose. He loved to play with distinctions, hyperboles,
parodoxes, the very casuistry and dialectics of love or devotion.
Thou canst not every day give me my heart:
If thou canst give it then thou never gav'st it:
Love's riddles are that though thy heart depart
It stays at home, and thou with losing sav'st it.
Donne's verse is usually as uncouth as his thought. But there is a real
passion slumbering under these ashy heaps of conceit, and occasionally a
pure flame darts up, as in the justly admired lines:
Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheek, and so divinely wrought
That one might almost say her body thought.
This description of Donne is true, with modifications, of all the
metaphysical poets.
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