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Moloney, Michael F.
1973.
Donne: Songs and Sonets.
p.
207.
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Donne and the Couplet
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2021
Extract
The early Elizabethan conception of a line of poetry is best illustrated by Puttenham, who compares it to a day's journey in which the traveler rests twice, at noon and at night.” The end-stopped line which results from this conception gives increased importance to the rime; indeed, Puttenham considers it the equivalent of classical “currantnesse” of foot, which “passed the whole verse throughout, whereas our concordes keepe but the latter end of every verse.” Rime is even placed above meter: “your concordes containe the chief part of Musicke in your meetre.” The preference is clearly for rich heavy rimes, with an echo. For this reason monosyllables are most desirable; since “in them, if they finish the verse, resteth the shrill accent of necessitie, and so doth it not in the last of every bissilable, nor of every polisillable word.” Rime is not merely good or bad; it has its own decorum: some words an i figures are suitable for one style but not for others, and the same is true of “concord and measure.?” Thus rimes which fall on the last syllable are “sweetest and most commendable”; those falling on the penultimate syllable are “more light and not so pleasant”; and those upon the antepenultimate syllable are “most unpleasant of all, because they make your meeter to light and triviall, and are fitter for the Epigrammatist or Comicall Poet.” ? Light endings are for light verse; even Daniel seems to agree with this opinion when he says that feminine rimes are “fittest for Ditties.”
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References
Notes
1 A Defence of Rhyme: Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Gregory Smith (Oxford, 1904), ii, 382.
2 Conversations with Drummond: the Works, ed. Herford and Simpson (Oxford, 1925), i, 148.
3 Elizabethan Critical Essays, ii, 78.
4 Elizabethan Critical Essays, ii, 80-81, 86. Puttenham is heartily contemptuous of the rabble who have “their eares so attentive to the matter, and their eyes upon the shewes of the stage, that they take little heede to the cunning of the rime.”
5 Ibid., ii, 80. Of course Spenser uses polysyllabic rime-words, and Harington prefers them, declaring that they are sweeter than monosyllabic rimes (A Briefe Apologie of Poetrie; Elizabethan Critical Essays, ii, 221). But it is not the sweetness that Puttenham is worrying about; it is the possible lightness at the end of the line.
6 Ibid., ii, 159.
7 Ibid., ii, 84.
8 Ibid., ii, 383. “J. D.,” who in his preface to Joshua Poole's The English Parnassus borrows extensively from Daniel's Defence, also echoes this opinion: “avoid faeminine rhythms such as charity and parity . . . which in a verse of ten syllables or Heroick, speaks a certain flatnes derogatory from the Majesty thereof: and if any where they may be allowed, it is in Ditties and Sonnets; and there hardly, Poesie being now arrived to such purity and perfection” (1677 edition, sig. 6a, verso).
9 Elizabethan Critical Essays, ii, 79.
10 Ibid., ii, 86. Puttenham's contempt for feminine rimes is in part explained by his concern that the ear obtain its full rich measure of “delight”: “for that the sharpe accent falles upon the penultima or last save one sillable of the verse, which doth so drowne the last, as he seemeth to passe away in maner unpronounced” (ii, 74).
11 Elizabethan Critical Essays, ii, 382.
12 According to Puttenham, “This cadence is the fal of a verse in every last word with a certaine tunable sound, which, being matched with another of like sound, do make a concord . . . accent . . . is chiefe cause of the cadence” (ii, 83). And Daniel asks, “Againe, who knowes not that we can not kindely answere a feminine number with a masculine Ryme” (ii, 379)? “J.D.,” in the preface to Joshua Poole's The English Parnassus, echoes Daniel in this opinion as in others. He quotes Daniel's examples even, as he also does to illustrate the effect of trochees in an iambic line (1677 edition, sig. a5 verso and a6).
13 All references to Donne's verse are to Grierson's two-volume edition (Oxford, 1912); the references are to volume, page, and line, respectively. When illustrations are not from the Satires, the title is given; otherwise, not.
14 Donne the Craftsman (Paris, 1928), p. 86.
15 Ibid., p. 87. In The Extasie, a poem which Legouis appears to have spent some time on, “body” occurs several times, always stressed on the first syllable. And in The Litanie we find: “Thou in thy scatter'd mystique body wouldst” (i, 341, 85).
16 P. 87.
17 Puttenham recognizes with disapproval “wrong ranging the accent” and change of spelling, “which be commonly misused and strained to make rime” (“Of Ornament,” Chapter xi: ed. Willcock and Walker, 1936, p. 162). To him, as to M. Legouis, it would be more conceivable that a poet intended to distort his pronunciation than that he took a liberty with his meter.
18 Elizabethan Critical Essays, ii, 334-338.
19 Tottel's Miscellany, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., 1928), pp. 35-36.
20 Tottel's Miscellany, p. 39.
21 Keats also rimes, without stress-shift, “fish” and “purplish” (Endymion, ii, 110-111).
22 The riming by assonance in some modern poetry is probably a symptom of this same taste. So too the riming of masculine and feminine endings, and only the weak endings.
23 Cf. Milton's Samson Agonistes:
24 This combination of feminine ending and runover is another device familiar in the relaxing—or as some say, “disintegrating”—Jacobean blank verse: cf. The Tempest, v, i, 195-196; The Winter's Tale, i, ii, 424-426, 444-445, 455-456, 458-460.
25 Before leaving this section I should say a word about the scansions I have used. They are not entirely arbitrary, as some of them may perhaps seem; but are based on a prosody of Donne's verse, for which I have gathered and analyzed the materials. I publish these scansions, though I cannot defend them here, because there has been an almost complete silence on the important subject of how—not generally, but specifically—individual lines in Donne should be read.
26 See J. V. Fletcher, “Some Observations on the Changing Style of The Faerie Queene,” SP, xxxi (1934), 152-159.
27 Gascoigne, no doubt recognizing the un-English daintiness of some mellifluous vocables, introduced patriotic considerations: “the more monasyllables that you use the truer Englishman you shall seeme” (Elizabethan Critical Essays, i, 51).
28 For other examples, cf. i, 157, 90; i, 167, 240; i, 169, 41; i, 170, 56-58.
29 The Songs and Sonets have many trochaic lines which recur at regular places in the stanza. For examples in the other poems of five-stress trochaic lines, cf. i, 155, 33; i, 165, 176; i, 166, 201; i, 167, 238-239; i, 169, 21; i, 170, 63; i, 321, 6; i, 329, 11. For a six-stress trochaic line, see i, 171, 90.
30 Something of the same effect may be seen in Elegy XI: i, 99, 108-110 and in The First Anniversary, i, 244, 430-432.
31 Elizabethan Critical Essays, i, 47-48. Cf. Horace, Ars Poetica, 311: “verbaque provisam rem non invita sequentur.”
32 Elizabethan Critical Essays, i, 157.
33 Elizabethan Critical Essays, i, 160.
34 Poems and Minor Translations (1875), p. 55.
35 Elizabethan Critical Essays, ii, 364; cf. 381.
36 It is interesting to contrast the attitude of Puttenham, who was more concerned about the externals of verse: cf. note 4.
37 Elizabethan Critical Essays, ii, 331; cf. Nashe, Ibid., ii, 242; cf. Joseph Hall, on translating Persius into English, in the “Postscript” of Vergidemiarum.
38 Conversations with Drummond, ed. Herford and Simpson, i, 132.
39 Ibid., i, 143.
40 Professor Morris Croll interprets this movement so, and thinks that the unifying force was the renewed study of Silver-Age Latin, especially Seneca and Tacitus. In this literature, says Croll, Muretus found “the single and significant word to express at the same time his poetical, his moral, and his literary philosophy” (“Muret and the History of ‘Attic’ Prose,” PMLA, xxxix, 293). Croll's account, to be found in this and several other articles, is the best available. See also his “Juste Lipse et le Mouvement Anticicéronien,” Revue du Seizième Siècle, ii (1914), 200-242; “ ‘Attic Prose’ in the Seventeenth Century,” SP, xviii (1921), 79-128; “Attic Prose: Lipsius, Montaigne, Bacon,” Schelling Anniversary Papers (New York, 1923), 117-150; “The Baroque Style in Prose,” Studies in English Philology in Honor of Frederick Klaeber (University of Minnesota Press, 1929), 427-456. See also George Williamson, “Senecan Style in the Seventeenth Century,” PQ xv (1936), 321-352; “Strong Lines,” English Studies, xviii (1936), 152-159.
41 Philosophical Works, ed. Spedding (1857), iii, 283.
42 Quoted by Croll, “‘Attic Prose’ in the Seventeenth Century,” p. 125. Cf. Tacitus, Annales, xiii, iii: “Ingenium amoenum et temporis eius auribus accommodatum.”
43 “The Baroque Style in Prose,” pp. 452-453.
44 The reverse also is true, for in first-century Latin (where, incidentally, the influence of the schools of declamation made itself felt in poets as widely different as Juvenal and Lucan) there is likewise a “wholesale invasion of prose by the poetic element.” J. Wight Duff, A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age (New York, 1927), p. 20.
45 See Sermones, i, iv, 8; x, 1, 44, 56-59; Epistolae, ii, i, 64 ff., 157-60; Ars Poetica, 263 ff.
46 Lines 99-102.
47 Lines 36-40.
48 This important and overlooked bond, linking Persius and Donne (and Hall and Marston), I hope to demonstrate more fully in future publication.
49 Croll, “Attic Prose: Lipsius, Montaigne, Bacon,” p. 137.
50 “Of Books,” Essays, ii, x (Modern Library edition, p. 363).
51 By this I mean nothing so ridiculous as that the intellectual attitude and style both suddenly changed; but that a wearied and impatient taste made easier the acceptance of a style better accommodated to the ear and mind of the times.
52 Works, ed. Spedding, iii, 293, 405.
53 Croll, “‘Attic Prose’ in the Seventeenth Century,” p. 114.
54 Montaigne, apparently working by himself, was pursuing a similar course of development.
55 See Croll's excellent summary, and his bibliography of ancient and modern accounts of the Stoic style, “‘Attic Prose’ in the Seventeenth Century,” pp. 109 ff.
56 Ibid., pp. 115-116.
57 Quoted by Williamson, “Senecan Style in the Seventeenth Century,” p. 330.
58 A study of the standards used by contemporary critics of verse and critics of prose would probably reveal a surprisingly close relationship. Jonson, it is interesting to remember, said “that he wrott all his (verses) first in prose, for so his master Cambden had Learned him” (Herford and Simpson, i, 143).
59 Cf. his prose letter (Hayward, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, London and New York, 1929, pp. 448-449), especially, “the knowledge buried in Books perisheth, and becomes ineffectual, if it be not applied and refreshed by a companion, or friend.” Cf. also E. Gosse, Life and Letters of John Donne (London, 1899), i, 168-169, 175.
60 One can find passages where the thoughts are not quick and penetrating, but accumulative; and the emotions, instead of being restless and dynamic, are calm and resolved. But this state of mind, and therefore the poetry that reflects it, is rare in Donne. It occurs only in the most fervent expressions of single-minded love (profane), and in the few poems where his fitful wrestling spirit surrenders to the sweet calm of resignation: as Holy Sonnet XVII, a few bits of The Litanie, the first stanza of Hymne to God my God in my Sicknesse, and all of the beautiful poem that begins, “Wilt thou forgive that sinne where I begunne.”
61 One may accept Professor Grierson's description of Donne's thought as generally “a record of intense, rapid thinking” (The Poems of John Donne, ii, xxxiii), “passionate ratiocination” (Metaphysical Lyrics, [Oxford, 1921], p. xxxv).
62 See for instance i, 262, 383-393.
63 As in the passage about Truth on a hill, i, 157, 75-88. Note also how in dramatic passages the abrupt style reveals the natural order of ideas.
64 This curt style seems to come closer than the loose style to reproducing the effects of prose. Duff finds this true in Seneca's Tragedies, where “the short pointed sententiae both in form and expression resemble his prose” (A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age, p. 248).
65 As i, 169, 35-63. But note the curt bits. Donne, like many of the prose writers, finds it natural to combine both styles.
66 The phrase is Ben Jonson's: see the Discoveries, ed. J. E. Spingarn, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1908), i, 47.
67 Essays, i, xxv (Modern Library edition, p. 134).
68 Mayne's Elegy on Donne: Grierson, i, 383, 20-24.
69 Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, ed. C. E. Merrill, Jr. (New York, 1910), p. 170; cf. Gosse, i, 171.
70 Seneca is aware of the psychological reasons: see Epistle 114 to Lucilius.
71 Croll (“Juste Lipse et le Mouvement Anticéronien,” p. 225) calls the use of parentheses a conspicuous sign of Lipsian imitation.
72 Epigrammatic effects are more dependent on the meter and the force and compression of his thought. But occasionally they derive from the accumulative force of his paragraphs, and these effects are similar to the endings of many stanzas in the Songs and Sonets.
73 Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, p. 442.
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