Let not thy divining heart Forethink me any ill, Destiny may take thy part And may thy feares fulfill; But thinke that we Are but turn'd aside to sleep; They who one another keepe Alive, ne'er parted be. Such wilt thou be to mee, who must Like th' other foot, obliquely runne; Thy firmnes makes my circle just, And makes me end, where I begunne. The poet who wrote such verses as these did not believe any longer that 'love ... represents the principle of perpetual flux in nature'. But Donne's poetry is not so simple a thing of the heart and of the senses as that of Burns and Catullus. Even his purer poetry has more complex moods--consider _The Prohibition_--and it is metaphysical, not only in the sense of being erudite and witty, but in the proper sense of being reflective and philosophical. Donne is always conscious of the import of his moods; and so it is that there emerges from his poems a philosophy or a suggested philosophy of love to take the place of the idealism which he rejects. Set a song of the joy of love by Burns or by Catullus such as I have cited beside Donne's _Anniversarie_, All Kings, and all their favorites, All glory of honors, beauties, wits, The Sun itselfe, which makes times, as they passe, Is elder by a year, now, than it was When thou and I first one another saw, and the difference is at once apparent. Burns gets no further than the experience, Catullus than the obvious and hedonistic reflection that time is flying, the moment of pleasure short. In Donne's poem one feels the quickening of the brain, the vision extending its range, the passion gathering sweep with the expanding rhythms, and from the mind thus heated and inspired emerges, not a cry that time might stay its course, Lente, lente currite noctis equi, but a clearer consciousness of the eternal significance of love, not the love that aspires after the unattainable, but the love that unites contented hearts. The method of the poet is, I suppose, too dialectical to be popular, for the poem is in few Anthologies. It may be that the Pagan and Christian strains which the poet unites are not perfectly blended--if it is possible to do so--but to me it seems that the joy of love has never been expressed at once with such intensity and such elevation. And it is with sorrow as with joy. There is the same difference of manner in the expression between Donne and these poets, and the deepest thought is the same. The _Nocturnall on S. Lucies Day_ is at the opposite pole of Donne's thought from the _Anniversarie_, and compared with Had we never loved sae kindly or Take, O take those lips away, both the feeling and its expression are metaphysical. But the passion is felt through the subtle and fantastic web of dialectic; and the thought from which the whole springs is the emptiness of life without love.