SOURCE: Low, Anthony. “The Compleat Angler's ‘Baite’; or, The Subverter Subverted,” in John Donne Journal 4, No. 1 (1985): 1-12.

In the following essay, Low posits that in The Compleat Angler, Walton provides an alternate reading of John Donne's poem “The Baite.”

Donne's aversion to pastoral landscapes and to country matters in general is well known.¹ His one curious essay into pastoral, “The Baite,” has been variously interpreted: sometimes as a heavy-handed failure at conventional pastoral, sometimes as a light-hearted parody of the mode, and sometimes as an anatomy of love to which the pastoral elements are more or less accidental. Two scholars have suggested that Donne departed from his Marlovian original in a direction suggested to him by Sannazaro's Piscatorial Eclogues.² Of course, the truth is that most of Donne's critics, and especially the major book-length studies, have simply ignored the poem. Evidently, it has not seemed worthy of much...