, though he knows not why he travels. He loves,
though he knows not why he loves. He must escape from that "hydroptic,
immoderate" thirst of experience by yielding to it. One fancies that it
was in this spirit that he joined the expedition of Essex to Cadiz in 1596
and afterwards sailed to the Azores. Or partly in this spirit, for he
himself leads one to think that his love-affairs may have had something to
do with it. In the second of those prematurely realistic descriptions of
storm and calm relating to the Azores voyage, he writes:

Whether a rotten state, and hope of gain,
Or to disuse me from the queasy pain
Of being belov'd, and loving, or the thirst
Of honour, or fair death, out pusht me first.

In these lines we get a glimpse of the Donne that has attracted most
interest in recent years--the Donne who experienced more variously than
any other poet of his time "the queasy pain of being beloved and loving."
Donne was curious of adventures of many kinds, but in nothing more than in
love. As a youth he leaves the impression of having been an Odysseus of
love, a man of many wiles and many travels. He was a virile neurotic,
comparable in some points to Baudelaire, who was a sensualist of the mind
even more than of the body. His sensibilities were different as well as
less of a piece, but he had something of Baudelaire's taste for hideous
and shocking aspects of lust. One is not surprised to find among his poems
that "heroical epistle of Sappho to Philaenis," in which he makes himself
the casuist of forbidden things. His studies of sensuality, however, are
for the most part normal, even in their grossness. There was in him more
of the Yahoo than of the decadent. There was an excremental element in his
genius as in the genius of that other gloomy dean, Jonathan Swift. Donne
and Swift were alike satirists born under Saturn. They laughed more
frequently from disillusion than from happiness. Donne, it must be
admitted, turned his disillusion to charming as well as hideous uses. _Go
and Catch a Falling Star_ is but one of a series of delightful lyrics in
disparagement of women. In several of the _Elegies_, however, he throws
away his lute and comes to the satirist's more prosaic business. He writes
frankly as a man in search of bodily experiences:

Whoever loves, if he do not propose
The right true end of love, he's one that goes
To sea for nothing but to make him sick.

In _Love Progress_ he lets his fanc