to speak few words in a low murmur, to reap no
lingering kisses on parched lips (which any
lover would regard as barbarous) to hide our
burning torches, to weave the name of friend,
and to feign many things which ingenious Love
learns.]
Secundus not only anticipates Donne’s
torch, he also describes a beloved mistress as a
source of light: ‘‘I hold thee, my Light, my Light,
I hold thee’’ (24: ‘‘Te teneo, mea Lux, Lux mea, te
teneo’’). But in fact the two previous elegies (viii
and ix) have described Julia’s wedding to another
man, and her appearance in the speaker’s bed
turns out to be only a dream:
... [Julia, I am holding you: let the Gods above
hold on to their Olympus. What am I saying?
Do I truly, Julia, hold you? Do I sleep? Or do I
wake? Is this real or is this a dream? Whether
dream or reality let’s enjoy it, let’s do it! If this
is a dream, may it last a long time, and let no
daylight, I pray, awaken me.]
Like the lover of Secundus’Somnium,the
speaker of ‘‘A most rare, and excellent Dreame,
learnedly set downe by a woorthy Gentleman,’’
which appeared inThe Phoenix Nextin 1593, is
consoled only by a dream, and unlike the resource-
ful persona of the Neo-Latin poem, he cannot even
manage to stay asleep. The pace of the poem is
leisurely: it runs to 60 stanzas of rime royal and
includes a learned disquisition on the origin and
nature of dreams worthy of Chaunticleer. After the
distraught, unrequited lover finally lapses into
sleep out of sheer exhaustion, ‘‘Slumber’’ brings
him, ‘‘To mitigate the anguish of my thought,’’
the vision of ‘‘a Ladie faire (33)’’ who, at the end
of a twelve-stanza blazon, turns out to be ‘‘the
portrait of the Saint, / Which deepe ingraued in
my hart I beare, / The Mistres of my hope, my
feare, my plaint’’ (36). The lady’s explanation for
her appearance in the gentleman’s bedchamber is
disarmingly innocent:
With vnperceiued motion drawing ny,
Vnto the bed of my distresse and feare,
She with hir hand doth put the curtaine by,
And sits her downe vpon the one side
there:
My wasted spirits quite amazed were,
To see the sudden morning of those eies,
Within the darke thus inexpected rise.
Being abrode (quoth she) I lately hard,
That you were falne into a sudden feuer,
And solitarie in your chamber bard,
From companie you did your selfe
disseffeuer,To charitie it appertaineth euer,
In duties to our neighbors for to sticke,
And visit the afflicted and the sicke. (36)
The first of these two stanzas bears an
obvious similarity to the situation at the begin-
ning of Donne’s ‘‘The Dreame,’’ including again
an emphasis upon the woman as bearer of light
into the darkness. The lady inThe Phoenix Nest,
however, is devoid of that equivocal blend of
daring and diffidence that characterizes her
counterpart in Donne’s poem. It takes several
stanzas for her to realize that her lover expects
her to cure his ‘‘feuer’’ without recourse to her
garden herbs or ‘‘closet of conserues.’’ When she
finally understands what he is asking, they argue
for several pages the standard love vs. honor
theme, with the lady defending rational self-
control against blind passion: ‘‘The argument is
dull, and nothing quicke, / Bicause that I am fake,
you should be sicke’’ (39). The lover’s only effec-
tive counter-argument is a death-like faint, which
leads the lady to relent and recall him to life ‘‘with
a kisse.’’ Unfortunatelyhis joy is so great that the
dream is broken and he awakens to ‘‘The vanitie
and falsehood of these ioyes’’ (42–43).
Perusing a volume likeThe Phoenix Nestis a
forceful reminder of the power and originality of
Donne’s love poetry. ‘‘The Dreame’’ treats exactly
the same dilemma as ‘‘A most rare, and excellent
Dreame, learnedly set downe by a woorthy Gentel-
man’’: namely, the internal clash in a man between
love and lust, between the longing to cherish with
honor and to possess with casual pleasure, between
the image of a woman as angelic, saintly, or divine
and the predatory perception of a woman as a
quarry. The poem printed inThe Phoenix Nest,
in keeping with the length of its title, spends 420
lines rehearsing a series of predictable, though
loosely strung-together commonplaces. In just
thirty lines Donne’s poem evokes a world. The
young woman who slips into her lover’s room,
listens to his blandishments, with their mixture of
wry wit and anxious pleading, and then, suddenly
panicked, draws back—she comes vividly to life in
the words of Donne’s poetic persona. There is no
need for her to speak; we should probably imagine
her hushing his expostulations with her finger at
her lips, fascinated and fearful at the same time.
She is so real that she generates a tremendous urge
to find her in history, to re-create her biography.
But what, in fact, makes her real is precisely the
comparison of the poem in which she takes shape
with the dreary litter ofPhoenix Nestsin theirSong