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Donne's Epic Venture in the "Metempsychosis"

Although investigations of Renaissance aesthetic are currently in vogue, no one has yet tried to account for the appearance of Donne's Metempsychosis at the head of the first edition of his Poems in 1633. The fact that the poem was given the place usually assigned either to the poet's masterpiece or to his earliest production of note (Milton put the "Nativity Ode" at the head of his 1645 Poems) has remained an indifferent curiosity. Obviously a set of stanzas inscribed "16 Augusti 1601" comes too late to qualify as the most significant of Donne's juvenilia. Equally obviously, to most twentieth-century eyes, the Metempsychosis has seemed no major work, undeserving of a place of recognition. But if the merits of this fragment of 520 lines have gone unsought, its presumed defects, by contrast, have been extensively remarked in our time. Scholars and critics of Donne have been at pains to prove this work, rather than the formerly disdained Anniversaries, his principal poetic blunder. It is true that the Metempsychosis is unfinished, but Donne soon got in arrears also with the "yearly rent" of the Anniversaries. This has never been held against him. Nor can the incompleteness of a work from the Renaissance, a heyday of overweening projects, bar it from serious consideration. There is more to the critical history of the Metempsychosis. In particular, it is an illustration of two truths that no honest scholar or critic would deny: first, that we tend to find in a poem only what we expect to find, and that therefore we must resist the impulse to turn working hypotheses into critical conclusions without clear warrant from the text itself; and, second, that no one (or almost no onethe exceptions are few) can be brought to admire what he does not understand. I propose to reopen judgment on Donne's Metempsychosis by way of surveying what has been concluded about it and on what grounds. Then I shall discuss the questions of poetic form and source materials (on which I find a number of new things to be said). I shall try to elucidate the artistry and contents of this poem beyond the state of understanding at present. If I do not manage to raise the esteem of the Metempsychosis, I hope at least to make it a more intelligible-and hence more tolerablefailure.