Romaneroticelegyis,asPaulVeynesays,‘‘oneof
the most sophisticated art forms in the entire his-
tory of literature’’ (1), and in Donne it collides with
the crude Petrarchanism of so much of the poetry
and drama of the Elizabethan age. This is a lover
who, as he addresses the beloved, is acutely aware
of the world of business and boredom, of perfidy
and peril, of avarice and ambition, of vileness and
violence—all that from which love is so often
sought as an escape. The scene of Donne’s elegy
is thus littered with elements that are ‘‘hostile,’’
‘‘discordant,’’ and ‘‘irrelevant’’ to the conventional
sense of love: it is irony that brings these antago-
nistic forces together in a single poetic structure.
For despite the disparate elements jostling about
among its lines, ‘‘The Bracelet’’ attains not only
unity but even dramatic cogency. Whether it
amuses or appalls, attracts or repels, the voice
of this poem is alive and consistent with human
experience, because its exasperated speaker is
so credibly torn between two familiar human
motivations: lust and greed. The first of these
impulses is sufficiently strong that we infer that
he will, however reluctantly, submit to the
demand of his imperious mistress:
But thou art resolute; thy will be done;
Yet with such anguish, as her only son
The mother in the hungry grave doth
lay,
Unto the fire these martyrs I betray.
The harsh flirtation with blasphemy evoked
by the echo of the Our Father (‘‘Thy will be
done’’), by the hyperbolic term ‘‘Martyrs,’’ and
by the hinted reference to the Blessed Virgin at
the burial of Christ undercuts the familiar ideal-
ism of the Petrarchan deifying of the beloved
by a mockingly excessive solemnity. This lover
laments the loss of his money more than a mother
the death of her child, more than Mary the death
of Jesus; and yet the mistress is divine—her ‘‘will’’
must ‘‘be done.’’ The angry tone of this reluctant
erotic worshipper reveals that his devotion can
hardly be spiritual, especially since he has already
observed that his very act of appeasement will
serve only to diminish her favor:
But shall my harmless angels perish?
Shall
Ilosemyguard,myease,myfood,myall?
Much hope which they would nourish
will be dead.
Much of my able youth, and lustihead
Will vanish; if thou love, let them alone,
For thou wilt love me less when they are
gone;The final irony of course is, that despite his
compulsive yet reluctant yielding to a less than
ideal mistress, the speaker of the poem still can-
not relinquish his attachment to his ‘‘angels.’’
The woman disappears from the last twenty-
four lines in the persona’s obsessive brooding
over the ‘‘wretched finder’’ (91) of the bracelet:
But, I forgive; repent thee, honest man!
Gold is restorative; restore it then:
But if from it thou be’st loth to depart,
Because ’tis cordial, would ’twere at thy
heart.
This feverish, fickle preoccupation with the
hypothetical possessor of the bracelet is an ironic
mirror image of his odi et amo relationship with
his rather dubious mistress.
This is a bitterly cynical vision of love as
possessive passion: the parallel between the irre-
sistible desire for the erotic favor of a woman,
whose chief attributes seem to be greed and
arrogance, and the lover’s own grasping avarice
is a finely distilled solvent for the amorous ideal-
ism prevalent in a literary culture dominated by
love-sonnet sequences. The final comic irony
arises from the absurdity of the speaker’s own
situation: he is, after all, no better off than the
deluded Petrarchist whom he implicitly scorns.
Like the saturnine speaker of ‘‘Loves Alchymie,’’
he has seen through the sham of love, knows that
women are hardly human much less divine; but
for all his blase ́sophistication he is still as frus-
trated, every bit as much a slave to passion as
Astrophil. Here again, without imitating a par-
ticular classical poem, Donne has succeeded in
capturing the flavor of the Roman erotic elegy.
‘‘I myself,’’ writes Paul Veyne,
believe that Propertius, or rather the Ego he
brings on stage, does not so much suffer from
the pangs of jealousy as regard the chains of
passion as something dreadful. Indeed, the
ancient Roman considered the effects of pas-
sion a form of tragic fate, a form of slavery, a
special form of unhappiness. (2)
This reflection gives the alternate titles of
Donne’s poem that refer to the bracelet as a
‘‘chaine’’ rather more resonance: the persona is
surely bound to his mistress by the ‘‘lost chain.’’
Here among the love poems of John Donne
we find a very acrid view of love, but we find very
little about John Donne himself. In a qualified
way I wish to endorse the perception of Judith
Scherer Herz that ‘‘in his poems... Donne is rarely
there, indeed in some poems never there,’’ and ISong