How happy were our sires in ancient time,
  Who held plurality of loves no crime!

But even then he looks forward, not with cynicism, to a time when he

  Shall not so easily be to change dispos’d,
  Nor to the arts of several eyes obeying;
  But beauty with true worth securely weighing,
  Which, being found assembled in some one,
  We’ll love her ever, and love her alone.

By the time he writes The Ecstasy the victim of the body has become the protesting victim of the soul.  He cries out against a love that is merely an ecstatic friendship: 

  But O alas, so long, so far,
  Our bodies why do we forbear?

He pleads for the recognition of the body, contending that it is not the enemy but the companion of the soul: 

  Soul into the soul may flow
      Though it to body first repair.

The realistic philosophy of love has never been set forth with greater intellectual vehemence: 

  So must pure lovers’ souls descend
    T’ affections and to faculties,
  Which sense may reach and apprehend,
    Else a great Prince in prison lies. 
  To our bodies turn we then, that so
    Weak men on love reveal’d may look;
  Love’s mysteries in souls do grow
    But yet the body is the book.

I, for one, find it impossible to believe that all this passionate verse—­verse in which we find the quintessence of Donne’s genius—­was a mere utterance of abstract thoughts into the wind.  Donne, as has been pointed out, was more than most writers a poet of personal experience.  His greatest poetry was born of struggle and conflict in the obscure depths of the soul as surely as was the religion of St. Paul.  I doubt if, in the history of his genius, any event ever happened of equal importance to his meeting with the lady who first set going in his brain that fevered dialogue between the body and the soul.  Had he been less of a frustrated lover, less of a martyr, in whom love’s

                     Art did express
  A quintessence even from nothingness,
  From dull privations and lean emptiness,

much of his greatest poetry, it seems to me, would never have been written.

One cannot, unfortunately, write the history of the progress of Donne’s genius save by inference and guessing.  His poems were not, with some unimportant exceptions, published in his lifetime.  He did not arrange them in chronological or in any sort of order.  His poem on the flea that has bitten both him and his inamorata comes after the triumphant Anniversary, and but a page or two before the Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day.  Hence there is no means of telling how far we are indebted to the Platonism of one woman, how much to his marriage with another, for the enrichment of his genius.  Such a poem as The Canonisation can be interpreted either in a Platonic sense or as a poem written to Anne More, who was to bring him both imprisonment and the liberty of love.  It is, in either case, written in defence of his love against some who censured him for it: