rtain documentary evidence points to the
composition of some, of his poems in the earlier part of his life. Unless
the date of the Harleian MS. is a forgery, some of his satires were written
in or before 1593, when he was but twenty years old. The boiling passion,
without a thought of satiety, which marks many of his elegies would also
incline us to assign them to youth, and though some of his epistles, and
many of his miscellaneous poems, are penetrated with a quieter and more
reflective spirit, the richness of fancy in them, as well as the amatory
character of many, perhaps the majority, favour a similar attribution. All
alike display Donne's peculiar poetical quality--the fiery imagination
shining in dark places, the magical illumination of obscure and shadowy
thoughts with the lightning of fancy. In one remarkable respect Donne has a
peculiar cast of thought as well as of manner, displaying that mixture of
voluptuous and melancholy meditation, that swift transition of thought from
the marriage sheet to the shroud, which is characteristic of French
Renaissance poets, but less fully, until he set the example, of English.
The best known and most exquisite of his fanciful flights, the idea of the
discovery of

"A bracelet of bright hair about the bone"

of his own long interred skeleton: the wish--

"I long to talk with some old lover's ghost
Who died before the god of love was born,"

and others, show this peculiarity. And it recurs in the most unexpected
places, as, for the matter of that, does his strong satirical faculty. In
some of his poems, as the _Anatomy of the World_, occasioned by the death
of Mrs. Elizabeth Drury, this melancholy imagery mixed with touches (only
touches here) of the passion which had distinguished the author earlier
(for the _Anatomy_ is not an early work), and with religious and
philosophical meditation, makes the strangest amalgam--shot through,
however, as always, with the golden veins of Donne's incomparable poetry.
Expressions so strong as this last may seem in want of justification. And
the three following pieces, the "Dream," a fragment of satire, and an
extract from the _Anatomy_, may or may not, according to taste, supply
it:--

"Dear love, for nothing less than thee
Would I have broke this happy dream.
It was a theme
For reason, much too strong for fantasy:
Therefore thou wak'dst me wisely; yet
My dream thou brok'st not, but continue