thousands despoiling the literary landscape. It is
Donne’s capacity to interact creatively with liter-
ary tradition that makes his poetry so much more
than conventional literature....
But a good poet does not have to react
against bad poems. Perhaps the most resonant
context for Donne’s ‘‘The Dreame’’ comes at the
end of the very first canto ofThe Faerie Queene.
Could any reader of poetry in the 1590s pick up
Donne’s account of a man awaking to fined the
woman of his dreams there at his bedside and not
think of the Redcrosse Knight awaking to a
demonic apparition of his beloved? There is a
striking inverted parallel insofar as Spenser’s
hero is beguiled into mistaking an evil spirit—
that is, a fallen angel—for the real Una, who
allegorically represents the Truth; while Donne’s
persona at first mistakes the real woman for a
mere ‘‘Angell.’’ Donne’s poem differs most nota-
bly from the first two bits of poetic context that
we have considered insofar as ‘‘The Dreame’’ is
not just a dream—the lady actually shows up in
the bedroom. The difference with the scene cre-
ated by Spenser is still more significant: Una
bears a grave symbolic burden as the representa-
tion of the transcendental truth and the idea of
the true Church. When the Redcrosse Knight
finally chases the counterfeit out of his room—
much unlike Donne’s persona, who urges the
lady to stay—it is as if the Truth itself has failed:
Long after lay he musing at her mood,
Much griev’d to thinke that gentle dame
so light,
For whose defence he was to shed his
blood. (The Faerie QueeneI.i.55)
It is no surprise when, several cantos later, in
the company of that very different woman, the
false ‘‘Fidessa,’’ his iron resolve fails ‘‘Poured out
in looseness on the grassy grownd, / Both care-
lesse of his health and of his fame’’ (I. vii. 7).
‘‘The Dreame’’ thus flashes a derisive smile at
Spenser’s aggressively Protestant, rigorously Neo-
Platonic idea of Truth. It also gives point to what
is clearly the superior reading of line seven: ‘‘Thou
art so truth, that thoughts of thee suffice, / To
make dreames truths; and fables histories’’ (7–8).
If the lady in Donne’s poem who enters the bed-
room is contrasted with Spenser’s Una, then
Gardner’s reading ‘‘so true’’ instead of ‘‘so truth’’
must be rejected; and the relevance of Grierson’s
citation of St. Thomas, which she dismisses,
becomes clear (Gardner 209). Donne is proposing
that truth is a flesh and blood woman, not a
Platonic abstraction. The being of God, St. Tho-
mas writes,
is not only consistent with his understanding,
but it even is his act of understanding; and his
act of understanding is the measure and cause
of every other being, and of every other under-
standing; and he is himself his own being and
understanding. Hence it follows that not only is
he truth in himself, but that he is the first and
highest truth itself.
In other words, God is truth itself because
He is absolutely and completely Himself in a way
impossible to any creature. The ironic exception
is, of course, the lady who enters the bedroom in
‘‘The Dreame’’: she is ‘‘so truth’’ that she too is
divine—but only so long as she stays:
Comming and staying show’d thee,
thee,
But rising makes me doubt, that now,
Thou art not thou. (21–23)
The woman in his bed, in his arms, is truth
itself: palpable, concrete, existential reality. Gard-
ner finds ‘‘‘so truth’ a very forced expression and
the repetition of ‘truth... truth’ unpleasing to the
ear’’ (209), but if the woman in ‘‘The Dreame’’ is
set against Una as a differing version of truth, then
Donne has provided an Aristotelian/Thomist
vision to counter Spenser’s Neo-Platonism.
To be sure, ‘‘The Dreame,’’ as well as many
other poems amongThe Songs and Sonets, offers
a very irreverent version of Thomism or more
generally of Catholic doctrine and practice. It
behooves us to recall, again, that in the course
of writing these poems Donne was moving away
from the faith of his youth. Most especially, he
was relinquishing the Real Presence of the Body
and Blood of Christ in the Sacrament of the
Altar—the ultimate manifestation of God’s
truth in the Catholic liturgy. If the poet’s reckless
marriage to Anne More was the decisive event in
his spiritual journey, then he can be said to have
surrendered the Body of Christ for the body of a
woman, the flesh and blood present on the altar
for the ‘‘divine’’ presence of the woman in the
bed. ‘‘What Donne proposes in his most ideal-
ized love lyrics,’’ writes Anthony Low, ‘‘is a
union between lovers that is essentially commu-
nal, sacred, and religious in a certain sense,
but neither Christian nor social’’ (63). While
Spenser tries to reconcile human sexual love
with a militantly Protestant, Platonically spiri-
tual version of truth, Donne attempts to forge a
dramatic account of the truth of Eros that is
ironically modelled on Catholicism at its mostSong