Moreover, it is to conceive somewhat inadequately of Donne's complex nature to make too sharp a temporal division between his gayer, more cynical effusions and his graver, even religious pieces. The truth about Donne is well stated by Professor Norton: 'Donne's "better angel" and his "worser spirit" seem to have kept up a continual contest, now the one, now the other, gaining the mastery in his
Poor soul, the centre of his sinful earth.'
The 'evaporations' which he allowed his wit from time to time till he took orders showed always a certain 'ethical laxity' and 'cynicism' of outlook on men and women. The _Elegie XIV_ (if it be Donne's, and Mr. Chambers does not question its authenticity), the lines _Upon Mr. Thomas Coryats Crudities_, the two frankly pagan _Epithalamia_ on the Princess Elizabeth and the Countess of Somerset, to say nothing of _Ignatius his Conclave_, were all written long after his marriage and when he was already the author of moral epistles and 'divine poems'. Even Professor Norton's statement exaggerates the 'contest' a little. These things were evaporations of wit, and even a serious man in the seventeenth century allowed to his wit satyric gambols which disconcert our staider and more fastidious taste. I am quite at one with Mr. Chambers in accepting his marriage as a turning-point in the history of Donne's life and mind. But it would be rash to affirm that _none_ of his wittier lyrics were written after this date.
Donne's 'songs and sonets' seem to me to fall into three rather than two classes, though there is a good deal of overlapping. Donne's wit is always touched with passion; his passion is always witty. In the first class I would place those which are frankly 'evaporations' of more or less cynical wit, the poems in which he parades his own inconstancy or enlarges on the weaknesses of women, poems such as 'Goe and catche', _Womans constancy_, _The Indifferent_, _Loves Vsury_, _The Legacie_, _Communitie_, _Confined Love_, _Loves Alchymie_, _The Flea_, _The Message_, _Witchcraft by a picture_, _The Apparition_, _Loves Deitie_, _Loves diet_, _The Will_, _A Jeat Ring sent_, _Negative love_, _Farewell to love_. In another group the wit in Donne, whether gaily or passionately cynical, is subordinate to the lover, pure and simple, singing, at times with amazing simplicity and intensity of feeling, the joys of love and the sorrow of parting. Such are _The good-morrow_, _The Sunne Rising_, _The Canonization_, _Lovers infiniteness_, 'Sweetest love, I do not goe,' _A Feaver_, _Aire and Angells_ (touched with cynical humour at the close), _Breake of day_, _The Anniversarie_, _A Valediction: of the booke_, _Loves growth_, _The Dreame_, _A Valediction: of weeping_, _The Baite_, _A Valediction: forbidding mourning_, _The Extasie_, _The Prohibition_, _The Expiration_, _Lecture upon the Shadow_. It would, of course, be rash to say that all such poems were addressed to his wife. Some, like _The Baite_, are purely literary in origin; others present the obverse side of the passion portrayed in the first group, its happier moments. But one must believe that those in which ardour is combined with elevation and delicacy of feeling were addressed to Anne More before and after their marriage.