Whether a rotten state, and hope of gain,
  Or to disuse me from the queasy pain
  Of being belov’d, and loving, or the thirst
  Of honour, or fair death, out pusht me first.

In these lines we get a glimpse of the Donne that has attracted most interest in recent years—­the Donne who experienced more variously than any other poet of his time “the queasy pain of being beloved and loving.”  Donne was curious of adventures of many kinds, but in nothing more than in love.  As a youth he leaves the impression of having been an Odysseus of love, a man of many wiles and many travels.  He was a virile neurotic, comparable in some points to Baudelaire, who was a sensualist of the mind even more than of the body.  His sensibilities were different as well as less of a piece, but he had something of Baudelaire’s taste for hideous and shocking aspects of lust.  One is not surprised to find among his poems that “heroical epistle of Sappho to Philaenis,” in which he makes himself the casuist of forbidden things.  His studies of sensuality, however, are for the most part normal, even in their grossness.  There was in him more of the Yahoo than of the decadent.  There was an excremental element in his genius as in the genius of that other gloomy dean, Jonathan Swift.  Donne and Swift were alike satirists born under Saturn.  They laughed more frequently from disillusion than from happiness.  Donne, it must be admitted, turned his disillusion to charming as well as hideous uses. Go and Catch a Falling Star is but one of a series of delightful lyrics in disparagement of women.  In several of the Elegies, however, he throws away his lute and comes to the satirist’s more prosaic business.  He writes frankly as a man in search of bodily experiences: 

  Whoever loves, if he do not propose
  The right true end of love, he’s one that goes
  To sea for nothing but to make him sick.

In Love Progress he lets his fancy dwell on the detailed geography of a woman’s body, with the sick imagination of a schoolboy, till the beautiful seems almost beastly.  In The Anagram and The Comparison he plays the Yahoo at the expense of all women by the similes he uses in insulting two of them.  In The Perfume he relates the story of an intrigue with a girl whose father discovered his presence in the house as a result of his using scent.  Donne’s jest about it is suggestive of his uncontrollable passion for ugliness: 

  Had it been some bad smell, he would have thought
  That his own feet, or breath, that smell had brought.

It may be contended that in The Perfume he was describing an imaginary experience, and indeed we have his own words on record:  “I did best when I had least truth for my subjects.”  But even if we did not accept Mr. Gosse’s common-sense explanation of these words, we should feel that the details of the story have a vividness that springs straight from reality.  It is difficult to believe that Donne had not actually lived in terror of the gigantic manservant who was set to spy on the lovers: