calculated to drag the stones to the ground
actually provide the principle of support—a
principle in which thrust and counterthrust
become the means of stability. (732–33)
Poetic irony is thus the perfect counterpart to
D’Arcy’s notion of love as ‘‘the struggle of oppo-
sites in nature.’’ Where Brooks’ formulation per-
haps falls short is in neglecting to show how the
stability of the poem—of any work of art—is the
ultimate ironic turn of the screw. In his closing
chapter, D’Arcy observes that love only reaches
its culminating resolution—its ‘‘stability’’—in the
eternal perfection of the love of God (363–73).
Following T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards, Brooks
maintains that sentimentality is avoided by that
poetry ‘‘which does not leave out what is appa-
rently hostile to its dominant tone, and which,
because it is able to fuse the irrelevant and the
discordant, has come to terms with itself and is
invulnerable to irony’’ (732). In the realm in
which irony is the only antidote to irony—a
world of what is ‘‘hostile,’’ ‘‘irrelevant,’’ ‘‘discord-
ant’’—we have no lasting city, and no lasting
love. Thus the stability of the love poem forged
out of the clash of ironic tensions is the ultimate
ironic comment on the realm of human experi-
ence that the poem evokes.
Not only Donne’s notorious ‘‘metaphysical’’
conceits, but indeed the entire fabric of particu-
lar poems corresponds to Brooks’ ‘‘conceit’’ of
irony: a typical Donne love poem is a surprising
fusion and distillation of hostility, irrelevance,
and discord. A privileged recipient of a manu-
script of Donne’s elegy ‘‘The Bracelet’’ in the
1590s would have been struck first of all by the
poem’s topicality. The Acts of the Privy Council
contains this item for 20 August 1591:
Robert Henlack has petitioned the Council for
redress against certain men who robbed him.
He complains that while he was absent in the
night a confederacy of certain evil disposed
persons broke open his chamber door in the
house of Isabel Piggott in Thames Street and
took away goods and money to the value of
£400. Further, one Nathaniel Baxter hath since
then robbed him of £12 more, pretending that
by casting a figure he would help him to his
goods and money again. (Harrison 50)
The probable reader of ‘‘The Bracelet,’’ a
Londoner, perhaps an Inns of Court man like
Donne himself, might well recall this incident, or
one like it, when he read in Donne’s poem of
‘‘many angled figures, in the booke / Of some
great Conjurer’’ (lines 34–35); and the memory
would be reinforced by the desperate persona’s
effort to satisfy his mistress by any device short
of melting down his ‘‘twelve righteous Angels’’
(line 9) to replace her lost chain:
Or let mee creepe to some dread Conjurer,
Which with phantastique scheames fils full
much paper; Which hath divided heaven in
tenements, And with whores, theeves, and mur-
derers stuff his rents So full, that though hee
passe them all in sinne, He leaves himself no
roome to enter in. (59–64)
Allusions such as these, along with the collo-
quial texture of the language of Donne’s strong
lines, would anchor the elegy firmly in the world
of popular gossip and scandal of the last decade
of Elizabeth’s reign.
The generic designation elegy, however, which
apparently was attached to this poem and more
than a dozen others in the early manuscripts,
would have signalled to an educated Elizabethan
reader that the poet was engaged in the learned
humanist activity of imitating the classics as well as
remarking the kind of sensational ‘‘news’’ that was
the preoccupation of broadside ballads. Any rea-
sonably well-read contemporary of Donne would
recognize the reference to the love poetry, espe-
cially the elegiacs, of Catullus, Propertius, Tibul-
lus,andOvid.Beyondthemereuseoftheterm,
Donne succeeds in evoking the atmosphere of the
Roman elegy more successfully than any other
Renaissance poet known to me. Donne is less an
imitator of particular phrases, stylistic devices,
themes, or episodes of this or that poem by his
ancient predecessors than a triumphant rival, who
has recreated in toto the Roman genre and trans-
posed it into his own late Elizabethan milieu. ‘‘The
Bracelet,’’ for example, captures the mingling of
passionate desire, bitter cynicism, and wry irony
that mark the classical erotic elegy without draw-
ing on any specific classical poem. Indeed, its chief
incident, the lover forced to search the town for a
lost bracelet given him by his mistress, may par-
ody, as Grierson and Gardner point out, Soliman
and Perseda, a ‘‘foolishly romantic play’’ probably
by Thomas Kyd (Gardner 112, 116).
What emerges from this congeries—references
to the ‘‘news’’ or gossip of the day, a form modelled
on classical antiquity, allusions to contemporane-
ous popular literature—is a love poem in which
‘‘Love’s not so pure, and abstract, as they use /
To say, which have no Mistresse but their Muse’’
(‘‘Love’s Growth’’ 11–12). The ‘‘impurity’’ derives,
in large part, from the improbable me ́lange: it is a
lover who speaks the poem, but his love is shaped
by the poet’s response to a generic clash. TheSong