First we loved well and faithfully,
  Yet knew not what we lov’d, nor why;
  Difference of sex no more we knew
  Than our guardian angels do;
      Coming and going, we
  Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals;
      Our hands ne’er touch’d the seals,
  Which nature, injur’d by late law, sets free: 
  These miracles we did; but now, alas! 
  All measure, and all language I should pass,
  Should I tell what a miracle she was.

In The Funeral he returns to the same theme: 

  Whoever comes to shroud me do not harm
      Nor question much
  That subtle wreath of hair that crowns my arm;
  The mystery, the sign you must not touch,
      For ’tis my outward soul.

In this poem, however, he finds less consolation than before in the too miraculous nobleness of their love: 

  Whate’er she meant by it, bury it with me,
      For since I am
  Love’s martyr, it might breed idolatry,
  If into other hands these relics came;
      As ’twas humility
  To afford to it all that a soul can do,
      So, ’tis some bravery,
  That, since you would have none of me, I bury some of you.

In The Blossom he is in a still more earthly mood, and declares that, if his mistress remains obdurate, he will return to London, where he will find a mistress: 

As glad to have my body as my mind.

The Primrose is another appeal for a less intellectual love: 

                  Should she
  Be more than woman, she would get above
  All thought of sex, and think to move
  My heart to study her, and not to love.

If we turn back to The Undertaking, however, we find Donne boasting once more of the miraculous purity of a love which it would be useless to communicate to other men, since, there being no other mistress to love in the same kind, they “would love but as before.”  Hence he will keep the tale a secret: 

  If, as I have, you also do,
    Virtue attir’d in woman see,
  And dare love that, and say so too,
    And forget the He and She.

  And if this love, though placed so,
    From profane men you hide,
  Which will no faith on this bestow,
    Or, if they do, deride: 

  Then you have done a braver thing
    Than all the Worthies did;
  And a braver thence will spring,
    Which is, to keep that hid.

It seems to me, in view of this remarkable series of poems, that it is useless to look in Donne for a single consistent attitude to love.  His poems take us round the entire compass of love as the work of no other English poet—­not even, perhaps, Browning’s—­does.  He was by destiny the complete experimentalist in love in English literature.  He passed through phase after phase of the love of the body only, phase after phase of the love of the soul only, and ended as the poet of the perfect marriage.  In his youth he was a gay—­but was he ever really gay?—­free-lover, who sang jestingly: