agree that Donne is ‘‘the master of complex, unset-
tling, prickly poems, poems that simply will not
resolve,’’ (3, 5).... Such attributes, however, do
not define his character. He is writing poems,
and a poet is precisely that man or woman ‘‘who
will say anything if the poem seems to need it’’—
‘‘for the Poet, he nothing affirmes, and therefore
neuer lyeth’’ (Sidney 184). As John Shawcross
points out, ‘‘The false specter of Romantic effu-
sion has blighted poetic criticism for a long
time—as if the poet cannot write without parallel
experience, as if all that is said is fully and firmly
believed as he or she writes’’ (57). I would go even
further than Shawcross in defending the essay by
Wimsatt and Beardsley, ‘‘The Intentional Fal-
lacy,’’ because it accepts absolutely one of the
poet’s intentions, the intention to write a poem.
This brings us back to the issue of inconsistency
between and within poems. The persona of ‘‘The
Bracelet’’ is surely inconsistent, a monument of
tergiversation: he regards his mistress’ will as
divine, but her person as less ‘‘angelic’’ than his
money, he speculates about someone recovering
the gold chain who is now a ‘‘wretched finder,’’
now ‘‘an honest man,’’ and finally the object of
what we may call a heartfelt curse.
The discourse represented by the poem is
inconsistent because its speaker is inconsistent.
Of course Donne himself was also inconsistent,
but then so are you and I, and so are most men
and women in every era... There is, then, incon-
sistency within and among Donne’s poems
because they deal with the reality of human exis-
tence, which is a tissue of inconsistencies; but the
poems as such are not inconsistent. The philoso-
pher, as Sidney reminds us, deals in abstractions
only tangentially connected to human life; the
historian is in danger of drowning in the chaotic
flood of experience: ‘‘the Historian, wanting the
precept, is so tyed, not to what shoulde bee but to
what is, to the particular truth of things and not
to the general reason of things, that hys example
draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore
a lesse fruitfull doctrine.’’ It is only ‘‘the peerelesse
Poet’’ who ‘‘coupleth the generall notion with the
particuler example’’ (164). This ‘‘coupling,’’ or
layering of inconsistencies into whatever the pat-
tern of the poem requires, is irony—‘‘irony as a
principle of structure.’’ It is the fundamental
irony of poetry that it produces consistent for-
mal structures out of the turbid swirl of incon-
sistency that constitutes human experience, that
it reveals meaning—the ‘‘precept’’—in what
may seem meaningless.
The distinction between poetic intention and
the personal life of the poet becomes more complex
in those works of Donne where we find what seems
an indisputable indicationof ‘‘parallel experience’’
providing the origin of the incidents or situation of
a poem. If the tone is even more elusive than that
of ‘‘The Bracelet’’ and falls into Gardner’s category
of ‘‘poems of mutual love’’ (liii), then critical pre-
occupation with the autobiographical features of
the poem becomes almost irresistible. There is no
better example than ‘‘The Sunne Rising.’’ The per-
sona who brashly proclaims his satisfaction at
having thrown away the opportunity for prefer-
ment in the royal court for the sake of love bears
a suspicious resemblance to the historical John
Donne, who, we may surmise, had plenty of time
to wile away in bed with his teenage bride, since he
had no place in the busy world of education, pol-
itics, and trade. The seventh line, ‘‘Goe tell Court-
huntsmen, that the King will ride,’’ cries out to be
associated with the court gossip of the years
shortly after Donne’s elopement, as retailed by
that ubiquitous busybody, John Chamberlain, in
a letter to Ralph Winwood:
The Kinge went to Roiston two dayes after
Twelfetide, where and thereabout he hath con-
tinued ever since, and findes such felicitie in
that hunting life, that he hath written to the
counsaile, that yt is the onely meanes to main-
tain his health, (which being the health and
welfare of us all) he desires them to undertake
the charge and burden of affaires, and foresee
that he be not interrupted nor troubled with
too much busines. (I: 201)
This looks like fairly solid evidence that the
poem was written sometime after the accession of
James Stuart as James I of England, when his new
subjects had become acquainted with his habits;
however, there was some notice in England of
James’ addiction to hunting when he was still
just King of Scotland. It was bruited about Lon-
don at least as early as 1591 that, despite the threat
of rebellious Earls to James’ safety, he would not
‘‘be restrained from the fields or in his pastime, for
any respect’’ (Harrison 13). The detail of a hunting
king could have been picked up from political
gossip during the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign
inEnglandaswellasduringthefirstdecadeof
James’ reign. The poem powerfully evokes certain
details of what we know of Donne’s life during the
latter time, but we cannot be sure when it was
written, and, finally, it does not matter.
We must also take into account, again, the
element of literary imitation. It is a commonplaceSong