wit precludes even a shadow of sentimentality:
he retains an inescapable awareness of the pro-
clivity of erotic desire for self-absorption and
special pleading. ‘‘The Dream’’ provides a striking
example.
This poem weaves conceits that challenge the
most idealistic Petrarchan manner. The beloved
mistress is no mere donna angelicata; in her intu-
ition of the speaker’s mind she is more than an
angel with implicitly divine knowledge:
As lightning, or a Tapers light,
Thine eyes, and not thy noise wak’d
mee;
Yet I thought thee
(For thou lovest truth) an Angell, at
first sight,
But when I saw thou sawest my heart,
And knew’st my thoughts, beyond an
Angels art,
When thou knew’st what I dreamt,
when thou knew’st when
Excesse of joy would wake me, and
cam’st then,
I doe confesse, it could not chuse but
bee
Prophane, to thinke thee any thing but
thee. (11–20)
This stanza is both rather grandiose in its
language and yet at the same time an example
of strictly verbal irony: to say that it is ‘‘pro-
phane’’ to think a woman less than herself, when
less means angelic, is in fact profane because the
assertion implies that a mortal creature is divine.
Both the comedy and the complexity increase in
the following stanza when the lady’s divinity is
put in doubt because of her reluctance to ‘‘act the
rest’’ of the speaker’s ‘‘dreame’’:
Comming and staying show’d thee,
thee,
But rising makes me doubt, that now,
Thou art not thou.
That love is weake, where feare’s as
strong as hee;
’Tis not all spirit, pure and brave,
If mixture it of Feare, Shame, Honor,
have;
Perchance as torches which must ready
bee,
Men light and put out, so thou deal’st
with mee,
Thou cam’st to kindle, goest to come;
Then IWill dreame that hope againe, but else
would die. (21–30)
There is a great deal here of sheer metaphys-
ical mockery of the pretensions of erotic ideal-
ism: the slangy puns on ‘‘Comming’’ and ‘‘die’’;
the outrageously phallic torch, lit only to be put
by in readiness, that suggests the woman to be
tease; and, above all, the pseudo-Scholastic spec-
ulation about how a woman is not who she is and
love ‘‘not all spirit, pure, and brave’’ except when
it is realized in the flesh. It is a seducer’s paradox
that argues for the identification of purity and
spirituality with physical consummation.
Yet there is a gentleness, even a tenderness, in
‘‘The Dreame’’ that elevates it above a mere cyn-
ical irony. The difference is apparent in the con-
trast with the bitterness of another famous poem
about a woman coming into a man’s bedroom:
‘‘They fle from me that sometyme did me seke /
With naked fote stalking in my chambre’’ (Wyatt
1–3). Readers who know Donne’s history will be
drawn to set the scene of the poem in York
House, and picture the charming intruder in the
persona’s chamber as a very young Anne More,
both daring and diffident, drawn irresistibly to,
and yet somewhat afraid of, the witty, sophisti-
cated courtier with the dubious reputation, rather
unaccountably employed by her step-uncle. The
poem’s delicate blend of wry humor and breath-
less ardor bespeaks both the love and lust of a
man who thought his mistress a goddess, but
liked his goddess to be flesh and blood—a carnal
substitute, perhaps, for the deity incarnate in the
sacrament of the Altar that the actual, historical
John Donne must have been relinquishing about
the time he met Anne More.
However,... we must remember that erotic
dreams would have represented a familiar poetic
topic for Donne and his contemporaries. ‘‘Dreams
are not unusual in the Roman love elegy,’’ Clifford
Endres observes as he comments on the strikingly
original imitation of the motif by Joannes Secun-
dus (1511–1536), who was in turn imitated by other
sixteenth-century poets, both Neo-Latin and ver-
nacular (126). As in ‘‘The Dreame,’’ the speaker of
Secundus’Somniumis concerned about the tension
between his desires to possess his beloved sexually
and the restraints imposed by social and familial
disapproval:... [Now no markets, no warehouses, no
packed theatres, no temples are privy to our
pleasures. The mother is away who imposes
law on fingers and mouths, and constrains us
Song