Donne's "Extasie"

Author(s): Austin Warren

Source: Studies in Philology, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Jul., 1958), pp. 472-480
Published by: University of North Carolina Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4173244
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 EXTASIE "
DON'NE'S "C

By AUSTIN WARREN

" The Extasie " has been iinterpretedin most opposite senses,-
on the one hand, as a poem of highest spirituality expressive either
of Platonic love (that is, love without sex) or of Christian love, to
which both the soul and the body are requisite; on the other hand,
as the supreme example of Donne's dramatism and pseudo-logic,-
as the seduction of a defenceless woman by sophistical rhetoric.'
Neither view seems satisfactory, either upon examination of the
arguments adduced by the commentators, nor yet upon repeated
readings of the poem. Clearly, it is an ambitious and in some sense
serious poem; yet the conflicting impressions it makes may well be
due to a considerable incoherence in the philosophy of love implicit
in-and even overtly exposited in-the poem. A distinguished
analyst of style, who astringently upholds an idealistic interpretation
of the poem, judges its second half (verse 49 if.,) in which the shift
of argument occurs, to be "poetically less successful than the
rest "-a " poetic anti-climax," and even suggests that the second
part may have been composed at a different time.2
The Songs and Sonets are dominantly 'dramatic monologues' in
structure; ordinarily a man is addressing a woman; but "The
Extasie " is not obviously such a piece. It is, much more, narrative
and meditative-one might alinost say ' didactic '; and though it
concerns a man and a woman, the woman is not directly addressed;
she is included in the meditative 'we,' merged in that composite
one the nature of which the speaker of the poem is trying to
anatomize. Ordinarily Donne addresses the woman or the friend
specifically as thou or you; the syntax is that of speech to another.
But in this poenm,so far as the scheme provides someone addressed,
it is a hypothetical lover, equally pure, who stands at " convenient
distance "-a hypothetic observer, doubtless the poet himself. The
device recalls another poem of Donne's, " The Undertaking,"-
'Pierre Legouis, Donne the Craftsmant (1928), Gl ff., developing his
father's view in Legouis and Cazamian's Histoire de la Litt6rature Anglaise.
2Leo Spitzer, A Method of Interpreting Literature (1949), 15.

472

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 AutstinliWari'en 473

another poem in some way concerned with Platonic love and difficult
to interpret, for substantially the same reason, I think, because of
Donne's own difficulty in achieving a coherent philosophy of love.
In " The Undertaking," as in " The Extasie," he contrives to give
a formal structural completion and a tone of finality to something
which, as thought, still baffleshim.
Far less a systematic than a subtle thinker, Donne was a casuist
rather than a philosopher, whether of sacred or profane love.
Characteristically, he wrote in defense of suicide as occasionally
justifiable rather than on the large general principles to which, at
best, suicide would be a casuistic exception. Outside of casuistry,
Donne could exposit extreme, pragmatic positions: in secular
thought, Pyrrhonism and erotic naturalism (as in " Confined
Love ") ; in ecclesiastical theory a position primarily personal,
latitudinarian, and pragmatic. His Anglicanism (despite seeming
resemblances to that of Andrewes and Laud) is, practically, the
view that whatever Rome and Geneva hold in common must be
true, and that it is the virtue of the Anglican Church to offer such
a non-sectarian version of Christianity.
In theology, and in philosophy of love, Donne was a literary man,
-empathetically cognizant of many intellectual and affective po-
sitions, while lacking the gift of constructing, or steadily assenting
to, a systematic philosophy that, to his feeling, did justice to all
the positions which, successively, he had held.
In " The Extasie," there is no reason to suppose the lovers man
and wife,-indeed, if we compare the piece with Donne's Epitha-
lamia (not so very different from Spenser's in their style), the
plausibility is that they are not. Yet the tone I cannot find cynical.
The tradition of the poem begins in Provence as courtly love, moves
through Castiglione's Libro del Cortegiano and comes down to our
own time-or at least through the 19th century-as romantic love,
"Love in the Western World."
If it begins with 'Platonic love' as the Renaissance understood
that concept (i. e., love never physically consummated), it does not
so end; yet it is not, like nameable Cavalier poems-Cartwright's
or Cleveland's, for example anti-Platonic.3 Donne is exploring
the conception of a love which is first psychic and then, without
hiatus, also physical. He is, I think, reasoning with himself, trying
s William Cartwright, " No Platonic Love "; John Cleveland, "The
Antiplatonic."

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474 Donne's " Extasie "

to convince himself that there can be a love-relation which is neither

Christian and sacramental marriage nor yet the socially and
spiritually defiant naturalism he had expressed in poems like
cCommunitie."
"'The Extasie " is a strange mixture of motifs and implications.
As is often the case with Donne, the title fits but a part of the poem,
-in this instance the earlier or 'Platonic' part. 'Ecstasy'-
whether in NeoPlatonic or Christian mysticism-is the name for
a cataleptic state during which, the operations of the senses sus-
pended, and the body in a state of suspended animation, the soul
is in direct intercourse with God. In this poem, the physiological
aspect of ' ecstasy ' is defined by the image, " like sepulchral statues
lay "; that is, the lovers lie side by side like the recumbent effigies,
common in the Middle Ages, of husband and wife.
The 'ecstasy' is a mystical state. Though Grierson and others
quote Plotinus as the authority, the term and concept would, one
would suppose, be familiar to Donne from Catholic mystics like St.
Bernard, in his sermons on the Canticles, and St. Teresa. In
either case, ecstasy would be a temporary union of a soul with God,
not of one human soul with another. That one is not conscious
here, as in " The Flea," of calculated blasphemy on Donne's part
argues, I think, for Donne's associating the term not with the
religion in which he had been reared but with something literary
and philosophical,-i. e., with NeoPlatonism.
In a fashion almost unique in Donne, the poem begins with a
setting, and an out-of-door setting at that. The lovers sit-and
then lie-on a bank of violets. Why violets rather than any other
flowers, or why any flower, one asks; a question not really answered
by the recurrence of the violet in stanza ten, since any other flower
would presumably as well illustrate the fertilizing power of trans-
plantation.
The question is not easily answered. Donne's first full-length
biographer, who judges the poem an " extremely fantastic lyric,"
remarks " its obsession on the word 'violet,' " but gives up as now
"completely obscured" the meaning it " had, unquestionably, at
the time of its composition,," without making it clear whether he
4

supposes it once had, for Donne, what we now call a private sym-
bolism, peculiar to the poet's own experience, or whether the lost

4Gosse, Life and Letters of L)onne (1899), 1, 76.

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 Austin Warren 47-5

symbolism is supposed traditional, either folk-lore, or court-lore, or

church-lore. "Obsession " seems, in any case, inappropriate to an
image appearing but twice in the poem,-and upon its second
appearance a calculated aesthetic recurrence.
Though it may be partly a private symbol, I doubt that it is
strictly private, strictly a matter of personal association. Ophelia,
out of her mad nosegay, would offer violets-" but they wither'd
all when my father died." Herrick's menu for " Oberon's Feast "
includes " A pure seed-pearl of infant dew / Brought besweetened in
a blue / And pregnant violet." The epithet, which appeared in
Donne's first stanza, affiliates itself with John Gerard's remark in
his Herbal, 1597, that the violet is used in physic " amongst certain
empirics and quack-salvers, about love and lust matters, which for
modesty I omit " and with the passing comment of a modern Donne
scholar on " the traditional association of these flowers with pastoral
amours " and " the lush sensual atmosphere which their mention
provokes."5
Yet, whatever the corroboration of these historical glosses, the
first stanza adequately supplies its own interpretation; for the
setting mixes very opposite implications. The violet is a " reclin-
ing" flower,-modest, non-assertive, non-sexual; and yet " reclin-
ing" suggests also, in its context, a woman's submission to a man's
desire. The bank of violets is " swelled up " and " pregnant," like
woman after her submission; and the very first line gives us the
image of a pillowed bed.
Only with stanza eight do we reach dialectic. The first five
stanzas are all narrative, the man speaking in the past tense for
both. If this is a seduction poem, the poet has not enclosed it in
a completely dramatic framework; he has, indeed, given the reader
abundant intimation of how the love-relation, and the poem about
it, are to end. It is difficult to believe Donne capable of this
preview without consciously intending it,-without its being in-
tegral to the poem.
Stanzas two, three, and four all offer anticipations of what is to
come. II and III, closely parallel, at once limit the immediate ritual
to clasped hands and the communion of sight, omitting the kiss,
which, according to Bembo in The Courtier, is the height and
i C. M. Coffin, Donne and the New Philosophy (1937), 283; and cf.
especially Spitzer, op. cit., 57, with its quotations from Horace, Ovid, and
Petrarch.

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 Dionne's " Extw(msie
'

limit of Platonic love. At the same time these stanzas define the
natural fulfilment; the hands of the lovers are "cemented with a
fast balm "; and they name the figure of "intergrafting " while
suggesting subsequent seminal flow,-a suggestion appropriately
followed by mention of "cpropagation." "As yet "' is a definite
statement that the fulfilment is to be awaited, lies yet beyond.
The fourth stanza introduces a metaphor not subsequently re-
sumed or completed, according to which the lovers are like equally
matched armies suspended in a state of truce. MIustsuch a state,
involving conference between rival commanders, end in the sur-
render cf one to the other; or may it end in a peaceful conciliation?
" Uncertain victory " would suggest the former alternative; but it
may refer not to the doubt whether the woman shall yield to the
man but to the question ostensibly argued in the poem, whether the
state of both souls is furthered or damaged by the admission oI
physical union, a question both lovers are concerned to resolve.
Throughout the poem, with the possible exception of this military
figure, the lovers are represented as at one, as " we," between whom
no real distinctioin can be mnade. Both "meant. both spoke the
same," though neither audibly said anything.
Whether there are ecstasies which perplex and others which
unperplex, this ecstasy, at any event, conveyed insight, illumination.
The motivation of the lovers was not "sex "-not primarily sex;
though (according to a further, if negative, insight) it was not
clear what the motivation was.
The next four stanzas, with their turn to argument, may be
viewed as attempts to discern the real nature of this motivation;
and such attempts require a psychology. The general position is
that of Aquinas. What is 'simple,' all of a piece, is not subject
to dissolution, nor are compounds if, as with the heavenly bodies,
there is no contrariety between their elements.
In more detail, the argument runs: each soul has a mixture
(possibly the vegetative, the animal, and the rational,-the rational
soul transcending by including its subordinates). To mix these
mixed souls, as spiritual love can do, may be described either as
making each the other or (the preferred figure) as making both one.
Perhaps there is even an advantage to this exchange of souls,
since we see that the analogous operation of transplanting a flower
doubles or more than doubles its strength, color, and bulk: the

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 Austin Warren 477

verb "multiplies " dimly, or abstractly, echoes the suggestions of

procreation made through the imagery of the opening stanzas.
In the next stanza, " loneliness " is, I take it, not primarily the
subjective sense of isolation by the state of separateness; and
" defects " (the opposite to " excesses ") denotes the negative priva-
tion of the individual. The stronger soul which is the union and
interanimation of both lovers " controls " or provides against the
lacks of each.
Insight follows upon the establishment of this new soul. This
ecstasy does " unperplex." Whereas the lovers formerly " saw not
what did move," and whereas all individual souls " contain /
Mixture of things, they know not what," the lovers now, sharing
a single soul, know the nature of their composition. Donne
boldly and paradoxically fits the Democritean-Epicurean-Lucretian
"Atomies" (for atoms) into a completely disjunct, a Platonic-
Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysic, in asserting that the new, and
growing, soul common to both lovers is developed from atoms
which are themselves souls, and, as souls, uninvadable by change.
There was no need to use the word atomies with its materialistic
connotations, familiar to Donne from his Lucretius; but it pre-
sumably pleased him as a poet to wrest the term from its history,
to reduce it to meaning the permanent elements out of which all
life is formed, and then to assert that souls are constituted of
soul-atoms, monads.
There is possible, however, an aesthetic defense. This audacious
juxtaposition, which, to my knowledge, has no historical precedent
(though Giordano Bruno comes nearest) again keeps before us the
major theme of the poem, the relation between the body and soul,
and, in its strange way, prepares us for the major turn in the
argument. For now comes the proposal of a movement from
Platonic love to love including the body. Having proved, or at
least argued, that the union of souls is the true mode of love,
since it is the union of unchangeables, Donne shifts to argue not
the opposite, which would be a purely physical relation, nor yet
a Christian and sacramental position, but one at least classical
and humanistic: the conception that man, being composed of body
as well as soul, must love in both modes.
Catholic doctrine (here uninvoked) holds that in Paradise, after
the dissolution of this world, the soul will be reunited with its
body, glorified. Presumably at this time no species of practising

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478 Donrne's" Extasie "

Christian, Donne can none the less not remain content with
Platonic or 'angelic' love, even though he may at this time have
thought that love should begin with spiritual harmony; he puts
the case for a physical consummation on what may broadly be
called humanistic lines.
In this poem, however, it is clearly his position that love
involves both soul and body. Impossible seems any other reading
of the key word " forbear " than " abstain or refrain from " the use
of,-or any other reading of the final "when we are to bodies
gone " than that of sexual consummation. And the whole nature of
the second section seems to me to contradict the recent exegesis
which adjusts the shift to the familiar mystical pattern, whether
Plotinian or Catholic-the shift, that is, from the brief ecstasy
or rapture back to the ordinary level of disciplined devotions and
pious practices.
The arguments for the participation of the body are sundry, and
of varying character and weight,-convincing, if convincing they
are, by the use of what Newman used to call the " illative sense,"
by the accumulation of probabilities.
First, our bodies belong to us, even though they are our instru-
ments only, while we are souls,-a relation dignified by the analogy
to the relation between the heavenly bodies and the " intelligences"
which guide them.
Next, there is the argument from gratitude. The lovers met, not
as bodiless souls (i. e., angels), but through the mediation of sense
perception,-to which Donne appends the judgement, put in
alchemical terms, that the bodv is to the soul (the golden telos)
not sheer waste-" dross," but the " allay " (i. e., alloy) necessary
to give a usable degree of solidity to the gold.
Then come further analogical arguments from natural science.
The " influence " of the stars works on man through a medium, that
of the lightest medium, air (cf. "Air and Angels "); so the fact
that some sensuous medium first discovered lover to lover need not
impair, but only act as the occasion for, the confluence of soul
into soul. And the natural " spirits," begotten of the blood, are
matter as near as can be to soul. To, elucidate by a sentence from
Doctor Donne, the preacher: " The spirits in a man, which are the
thin and active part of the blood, and so are of a kind of middle
nature between soul and body,-these spirits are able to do, and they
do the office, to unite and apply the faculties of the soul to the

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 Austin Warren 479

organs of the body, and so there is a man." 6Body and soul jointly
compose man; and the interconnection of the two is metaphysically
as well as physiologically necessary-because " such fingers need to
knit / That subtle knot which makes us man."
These last two verses emerge from the argument by their insistent
image: " fingers " are bodily members, yet the delicate instrument
of touch: they are not the person or the soul which uses the fingers
as means of perception (as well as manipulation). Delicate fingers
are needed to knit so delicate, so precise, a knot as that which, by
joining a body to a soul, makes a man.
Without bodies, we would be angels; without rational souls, we
would be animals; but the gentle stress in this and the succeeding
stanza is not on contrast but on transition and intermediation: our
bodies strive towards the psychic; and our souls, those pure lovers,
must correspondingly move, by emanative descent, through the " af-
fections " and the " faculties "-the passions and the emotions, the
locomotive, the sensitive-till finally the physical senses may " reach
and apprehend." As body endeavors the ascent to soul, so soul must
endeavor the descent to the body. The reason given, the pressure
applied in behalf of this, is an analogical warning of disaster:
"Else a great Prince in prison lies."
Here is neither Platonism nor NeoPlatonism. Socrates speaks of
the body as the prison of the soul; and Plotinus conceives of
beatitude in terms of the body's spiritual release from its incorpo-
ration. But Donne, on the contrary, images the soul as imprisoned
when it is not incarnate,-when it cannot move and operate through
the body and its senses.
To a Renaissance man, and to Donne, the figure of the Prince,
the figure not of merely titular or representative but of real
and regal power, is recurrent. It is recurrent in the Songs and
Sonets, yet I recall no instance so effective; and, despite the loss
of divinity on the part of such kings as remain, it holds today, for
all registered readers, a shock of surprise and horror. That a
Prince should be in prison is a paradox, to some degree participating
in the paradoxes of the Incarnation,-the wordless Word, our God
in clouts and in a manger.
The Incarnational figure of the Prince is, at least by association
of ideas, the theme of the next stanza, in which it is urged that
"Donne's XXVI Sermons (1669-70), p. 291.

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480 Donnne-s" Extasie "
physical consummation is not necessary for the lovers themselves
but for the lovers as socially responsible persons who must, by
'revelation,' show " weak men " what love, what noble love, can be.
The implied analogy would be the distinction between natural
religion, the knowledge of the existence of God possible to men
of good will everywhere, and revealed religion, which, because of
their enfeeblement through the Fall, most men actually need.
"Mysteries " is a word which links with " reveal'd ": the numinous
or mystical part of love develops in the soul; yet even mystical
revelation, by definition unutterable, uncommunicable, must, so far
as mav, be uttered and communicated. Though an author may
be possessed of deep and subtle thoughts, yet it is only through
writing them down, or out, that he can communicate them.
The final stanza returns to the hypothetical listener,-a lover as
"pure " as our lovers are, the analyzing-evaluating lover whose
consciousness is the unifying medium of the poem. Such a qualified
observercan still " mark us," -still scrutinize us, when we consum-
mate our love, without seeing any alteration of descent.

The University of Michigan

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