For God’s sake, hold your tongue, and let me love.

In the last verses of the poem Donne proclaims that his love cannot be measured by the standards of the vulgar: 

  We can die by it, if not live by love,
    And if unfit for tombs or hearse
  Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
    And, if no piece of chronicle we prove,
      We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
      As well a well-wrought urn becomes
  The greatest ashes as half-acre tombs,
      And by these hymns all shall approve
      Us canoniz’d by love: 

  And thus invoke us:  “You whom reverend love
    Made one another’s hermitage;
  You to whom love was peace, that now is rage;
    Who did the whole world’s soul contract and drove
      Into the glasses of your eyes
      (So made such mirrors, and such spies,
  That they did all to you epitomize),
      Countries, towns, courts.  Beg from above
      A pattern of your love!”

According to Walton, it was to his wife that Donne addressed the beautiful verses beginning: 

Sweetest love, I do not go
For weariness of thee;

as well as the series of Valedictions.  Of many of the other love-poems, however, we can measure the intensity but not guess the occasion.  All that we can say with confidence when we have read them is that, after we have followed one tributary on another leading down to the ultimate Thames of his genius, we know that his progress as a lover was a progress from infidelity to fidelity, from wandering amorousness to deep and enduring passion.  The image that is finally stamped on his greatest work is not that of a roving adulterer, but of a monotheist of love.  It is true that there is enough Don-Juanism in the poems to have led even Sir Thomas Browne to think of Donne’s verse rather as a confession of his sins than as a golden book of love.  Browne’s quaint poem, To the deceased Author, before the Promiscuous printing of his Poems, the Looser Sort, with the Religious, is so little known that it may be quoted in full as the expression of one point of view in regard to Donne’s work: 

  When thy loose raptures, Donne, shall meet with those
      That do confine
      Tuning unto the duller line,
  And sing not but in sanctified prose,
      How will they, with sharper eyes,
      The foreskin of thy fancy circumcise,
  And fear thy wantonness should now begin
  Example, that hath ceased to be sin! 
      And that fear fans their heat; whilst knowing eyes
          Will not admire
          At this strange fire
      That here is mingled with thy sacrifice,
          But dare read even thy wanton story
          As thy confession, not thy glory;
  And will so envy both to future times,
  That they would buy thy goodness with thy crimes.

To the modern reader, on the contrary, it will seem that there is as much divinity in the best of the love-poems as in the best of the religious ones.  Donne’s last word as a secular poet may well be regarded as having been uttered in that great poem in celebration of lasting love, The Anniversary, which closes with so majestic a sweep: