Radical Consistency: A Reading of Donne's ‘Communitie’

LINDSAY A. MANN Radical Consistency: A Reading of Donne's 'Communitie' 'Onely this rests, All, all may use.' Despite accumulating evidence of continuity in Donne's career the common interpretation of Donne's treatment of love and marriage still depends on the drawing ofa sharp contrast between the sceptical sensuality of 'Jack' Donne's 'early' poems and the asceticism associated with 'Dean' Donne's religious poetry and prose, with some of the more mature and suffering of the love poems (usually associated with Donne's marriage) providing an uneasy hyphen which serves to emphasize the dichotomy, This dichotomized reading of Donne's career issues in or is sustained b}1 marked differences of opinion in the interpretation of the basic intention and essential implications of Donne's treatment of love. These conflicting opinions have led to illuminating attempts to discriminate and analyse in detail degrees and kinds of seriousness and wit, but fundamental contradictions remain. ' We have by now learned that Renaissance poets did not write autobiographies; but the critical problem is whether Donne's individual poems are subjective, lyric expressions of feelings and convictions, or objective and perhaps satiric representations of prevailing seventeenthcentury attitudes.2 The possibility that Donne's libertine poems are ironic representations ofa distorted point of view must be examined. This approach requires the recognition of a dramatic ironic speaker in the poems - one who does nol speak with Donne's voice but who represents attitudes Donne is exposing as inadequate or perverse. The expression of sceptical, libertine view~ I in some of Donne's earlier works appears to contrast with his direcl censure of such views in his later homiletic writings; but his later com·1 ments are so consistent and detailed that their specific bearing on the poems must be considered. Donne's intentions may be essentially thel same in both poems and homiletic prose, though expressed througji different techniques: the prose comments directly and doctrinally or distorted views that the poems represent through the satiric and ironi technique of a perverse dramatic speaker or character. Here I should like to consider Donne's representation of libertinism in an early poem, ther turn to whatever light Donne's other poems and prose might cast upon it and draw conclusions about the basic intentions of his writings, botl; early and late. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 50, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1981 0042-0247/81/0500-0284$01,50/0 IC UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS DONNE'S 'COMMUNITIE' 285 I COMMUNITIE Good wee must love, and must hate ill, For ill is ill, and good good still, But there are things indifferent, Which wee may neither hate, nor love, But one, and then another prove, As wee shall finde our fancy bent. If then at first wise Nature had Made women either good or bad, Then some wee might hate, and some chuse, But since shee did them so create, That we may neither love, nor hate, Onely this rests, All, all may use. If they were good it would be seene, Good is as visible as greene, And to all eyes it selfe betrayes: If they were bad, they could not last, Bad doth it selfe, and others wast, So, they deserve nOf blame, nor praise. But they are ours as fruits are ours, He that but tasts, he that devours, And he that leaves all, doth as well: Chang'd loves are but chang'd sorts of meat, And when hee hath the kemell eate, Who doth not fling away the shell?' his poem expresses the prevailing current of libertine naturalist feeling ,at is represented in one form or another in many of Donne's earlier 'orks.4 Described neutrally, the poem presents a moral argument which, roceeding through a series of logical or mock-logical steps, concludes ,at sexual conduct is free of moral or spiritual considerations: it is ndifferenl.' This conclusion is reached by an appeal to 'wise Nature['s]' riginal creation of women, yet it grows out of and issues in a provocavely contemptuous view of women as sexual objects for men's use, and othing more. The logic of the poem is inescapable and inescapably perverse: What is indifferent may...