The Poems of John Donne, Volume 2 (of 2): Edited from the Old Editions and Numerous ManuscriptsDonne, John
General
The Poems of John Donne, Volume 2 (of 2): Edited from the Old Editions and Numerous Manuscripts
Donne, John
English poetry -- Early modern, 1500-1700
Of the twenty-eight new poems, genuine, doubtful, and spurious, added
in _1635_, this manuscript contains twenty, a larger number than I
have found in any other single manuscript. An examination of the text
of these does not, however, make it certain that all of them were
derived from this source or from this source only. The text, for
example, of the _Elegie XI. The Bracelet_, in _1635_, is evidently
taken from a manuscript differing in important respects from _O'F_ and
resembling closely _Cy_ and _P_. _Elegie XII_, also, _His parting
from her_, can hardly have been derived from _O'F_, as _1635_ gives
an incomplete, _O'F_ has an entire, version of the poem. In others,
however, e.g. _Elegie XIII. Julia_; _Elegie XVI. On his Mistris_;
_Satyre_, 'Men write that love and reason disagree,' it will be seen
that the text of 1635 agrees more closely with _O'F_ than with any of
the other manuscripts cited. The second of these, _On his Mistris_, is
a notable case, and so are the four _Divine Sonnets_ added in _1635_.
Most striking of all is the case of the _Song_, probably not by Donne,
'Soules joy now I am gone,' where the absurd readings 'Words'
for 'Wounds' and 'hopes joyning' for 'lipp-joyning' (or perhaps
'lipps-joyning') must have come from this source. One can hardly
believe that two independent manuscripts would perpetrate two such
blunders. Taken with the many changes from the text of _1633_ in which
_1635_ has the support of _O'F_, one can hardly doubt that among the
fresh manuscript collections which came into the hands of the printer
of _1635_ (often only to mislead him) _O'F_ was one.
Besides the twenty poems which passed into _1635_, _O'F_ attributes
some eighteen other poems to Donne, of which few are probably
genuine.[23] Of the other manuscript collections I must speak more
shortly. There is no evidence that any of them was used by the
seventeenth-century editors.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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