THE POEMS OF JOHN DONNE EDITED FROM THE OLD EDITIONS AND NUMEROUS MANUSCRIPTS, WITH INTRODUCTIONS & COMMENTARY BY HERBERT J. C. GRIERSON M.A. CHALMERS PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN VOL. I THE TEXT OF THE POEMS WITH APPENDIXES OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1912 HENRY FROWDE, M.A. PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD LONDON, EDINBURGH, NEW YORK TORONTO AND MELBOURNE PREFACE The present edition of Donne's poems grew out of my work as a teacher. In the spring of 1907, just after I had published a small volume on the literature of the early seventeenth century, I was lecturing to a class of Honours students on the 'Metaphysical poets'. They found Donne difficult alike to understand and to appreciate, and accordingly I undertook to read with them a selection from his poems with a view to elucidating difficult passages and illustrating the character of his 'metaphysics', the Scholastic and scientific doctrines which underlie his conceits. The only editions which we had at our disposal were the modern editions of Donne's poems by Grosart and Chambers, but I did not anticipate that this would present any obstacle to the task I had undertaken. About the same time the Master of Peterhouse asked me to undertake the chapter on Donne, as poet and prose-artist, for the _Cambridge History of English Literature_. The result was that though I had long been interested in Donne, and had given, while at work on the poetry of the seventeenth century, much thought to his poetry as a centre of interest and influence, I began to make a more minute study of the text of his poems than I had yet attempted. The first result of this study was the discovery that there were several passages in the poems, as printed in Mr. Chambers' edition, of which I could give no satisfactory explanation to my class. At the close of the session I went to Oxford and began in the Bodleian a rapid collation of the text of that edition with the older copies, especially of 1633. The conclusion to which I came was that, excellent in many ways as that edition is, the editor had too often abandoned the reading of 1633 for the sometimes more obvious but generally weaker and often erroneous emendations of the later editions. As he records the variants this had become clear in some cases already, but an examination of the older editions brought out another fact,--that by modernizing the punctuation, while preserving no record of the changes made, the editor had corrupted some passages in such a manner as to make it impossible for a student, unprovided with all the old editions, to recover the original and sometimes quite correct reading, or to trace the error to its fountainhead.