Free A Little History of Literature by John Sutherland Page A

them be united if their blood has already run together? We do not know if the young woman to whom this poem was addressed was persuaded to give in to her witty lover or not. But few objects of youthful desire can have received a finer literary compliment. And we, hundreds of years later, can enjoy it simply as a poem.
    After Donne's death and the victory of the Puritans under Cromwell in the English Civil War (1642–51), poems celebrating ‘libertine’ (immoral) love were sternly censored and discouraged. That included poems such as ‘The Flea’, since the young man and woman are clearly not married. The eighteenth century which followed – called the ‘Augustan Age’ of literature for its fashion of imitating of refined classical (Latin and Greek) models – disapproved of the intellectual recklessness of the metaphysical imagination. For them, the moral impropriety did not matter. It was just, in a literary sense, too wild.
    Samuel Johnson, the most authoritative of Augustans, complained that in Donne's poetry ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’. By that he meant, for example, linking a flea's blood with religious imagery. In another famous example Donne compared separated lovers as being like a pair of compasses, joined at the head. It was ‘indecorous’ – it lacked polish. It was all over the place. Johnson believed that poetry should follow rules, not flout them.
    Despite such objections, the reputation of the Metaphysicals has risen over the centuries since they were writing. They came to be regarded as an increasingly significant movement in the development of English poetry, not merely in themselves but for the influence they exercised on their modern successors. It was thegreat twentieth-century poet T.S. Eliot who most effectively argued for the greatness and importance of his seventeenth-century predecessors. A poet such as Donne had what Eliot recognised as an ‘undissociated sensibility’. What Eliot meant by this very strange phrase was that for Donne and his school, there were no such things as ‘poetic subjects’ which could be written about and ‘unpoetic subjects’ which could not be written about. A poet could write about fleas as lyrically as he or she could write about nightingales or turtle doves. Eliot valued metaphysical poetry for its ability to unite high and low. All life is in their verse; nothing is excluded. That was a lesson poets like himself could carry away with them.
    Even in later years, when he was respectably married and later the Dean of St Paul's in London, Donne's verse – now sacred, not libertine, in tone – is marked by breathtaking intellectual daring. Johnson's ‘violence’ of the imagination is there to the end. Literally the end. On his deathbed, Donne wrote a poem about his approaching death called ‘Hymn to God, My God, in my Sickness’. It is not a young woman he now addresses, but his Maker whom he will, in an hour or two, meet face to face. The poem is, among other things, a rehearsal for his singing for the rest of eternity in God's angelic choir – he is not in the chamber of death, but a kind of vestry, about to enter the church proper. Here are the first three verses:
    Since I am coming to that Holy room,
Where, with Thy choir of saints for evermore,
I shall be made Thy music; as I come
I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think here before;
     
Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie
Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown
That this is my south-west discovery,
Per fretum febris , by these straits to die;
I joy, that in these straits I see my west;
For, though their currents yield return to none,
What shall my west hurt me? As west and east
In all flat maps (and I am one) are one,
So death doth touch the resurrection.

    The hymn is as daring as anything Donne ever wrote. And it requires some work by the reader to follow the complex lines of