Poetry of Contemplation: John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and the Modern Period (review)

98BOOK REVIEWS Arthur L. Clements, Poetry of Contemplation: John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and the Modern Period. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1 990. xvii + 306 pp. $49.50. by Bridget Geliert Lyons Professor Clements' study attempts to define mystical, contemplative strains in early seventeenth-century poetry analogous to the meditative traditions that Louis Martz, Barbara Lewalski, and others have made central to religious poetry of that period. For Clements, Catholic meditation with its formal tripartite structure, or its more spontaneous Protestant equivalent , are only the first and lowest steps of religious experience. The goal of the steps outlined in meditational manuals is ultimately direct communion with God (for the mystic, in this life), and the emptying out of the self. Depending mostly on modern students of the subject such as WT. Stace, Rudolf Otto, Evelyn Underhill, and especially W.H. Auden, Clements identifies as parts of the spectrum of mystical experiences the Vision of Eros (transcendent love for another person that includes the erotic), the Vision of Philia (a more communal love of others), and the "Vision of Dame Kind" — Auden's medieval term to designate a perception of nature as infused with divinity. With so many types of experience qualifying as mystical, including the "extrovertive," which perceives the One in all of the manifestations of nature, and the "introvertive," which excludes nature and the senses, it is not surprising that poets of widely differing sensibilities and timeperiods can be studied under the rubric of the "contemplative." Among the seventeenth-century poets Clements studies, Donne is perhaps the most difficult case. His religious poetry, with its self-assertions and spiritual insecurities, hardly exemplifies WT. Stace's list of characteristics of the mystical experience, including the "sense of objectivity or reality," or "feelings of blessedness, joy, peace, happiness, etc." (p. 7). Donne is most fully contemplative or mystical, according to Clements, in the most memorable of his secular love poems. These "poems of true love" (p. 19) belong in the second group identified by Grierson in his great edition of Donne, dis- BOOK REVIEWS99 tinguished from the cynical misogynistic poems of group one and the third group of Platonic or courtly compliment. In Grierson's "Group Two," including "The Good Morrow," "The Canonization," "The Exstasie," and "A Valediction: forbidding mourning," Donne elevates love to the Vision of Eros. Clements' argument is persuasive in attributing contemplativeness — an honorific label in his terms — to the poems that have long been favorites because of the very qualities praised in different language by Grierson: they express "at times with amazing simplicity and intensity of feeling, the joys of love and the sorrow of parting" (p. 19). While it may be debatable whether Clements' specific readings owe much of their value to his conceptual framework, some of these are nonetheless impressive. He shows, for example, that the middle stanzas of "The Exstasie" are the most musically sensuous, "giving 'body' to [the] poem as if in anticipation of the concluding stanzas' plea to turn to the body" (p. 31 ). While this insight does not solve the critical debates (well documented in the book's Appendix and Notes) about the poem's puzzling mixture of mystical and seductive language, it is a suggestive one. But in many instances, the author's investment in his thesis causes him to ignore the argumentative or playful tones of Donne's poetic speakers, or the self-consciousness of their hyperboles about love, in the interests of discerning the "realized Christlike natures of the lovers" in Donne's Group Two poems (p. 55). Given the fluctuations of mood and tone in Herbert's poems, Clements has even more trouble sustaining his focus on contemplation in his chapter on that poet. Some of the difficulty results from the book's history: the detailed reading of "Artillerie" (like the analysis of Donne's "Batter My Heart" in the previous chapter) was published as an article many years ago, and does not seem well integrated into the book's central concerns. Throughout the chapter, Clements pursues his topic in the face of a difficulty that he is too honest to dismiss: Herbert was not a mystic, even by Clements' multiple definitions of...