love, a man of many wiles and many travels. He was a virile neurotic,
comparable in some points to Baudelaire, who was a sensualist of the mind
even more than of the body. His sensibilities were different as well as
less of a piece, but he had something of Baudelaire's taste for hideous
and shocking aspects of lust. One is not surprised to find among his poems
that "heroical epistle of Sappho to Philaenis," in which he makes himself
the casuist of forbidden things. His studies of sensuality, however, are
for the most part normal, even in their grossness. There was in him more
of the Yahoo than of the decadent. There was an excremental element in his
genius as in the genius of that other gloomy dean, Jonathan Swift. Donne
and Swift were alike satirists born under Saturn. They laughed more
frequently from disillusion than from happiness. Donne, it must be
admitted, turned his disillusion to charming as well as hideous uses. _Go
and Catch a Falling Star_ is but one of a series of delightful lyrics in
disparagement of women. In several of the _Elegies_, however, he throws
away his lute and comes to the satirist's more prosaic business. He writes
frankly as a man in search of bodily experiences:

Whoever loves, if he do not propose
The right true end of love, he's one that goes
To sea for nothing but to make him sick.

In _Love Progress_ he lets his fancy dwell on the detailed geography of a
woman's body, with the sick imagination of a schoolboy, till the beautiful
seems almost beastly. In _The Anagram_ and _The Comparison_ he plays the
Yahoo at the expense of all women by the similes he uses in insulting two
of them. In _The Perfume_ he relates the story of an intrigue with a girl
whose father discovered his presence in the house as a result of his using
scent. Donne's jest about it is suggestive of his uncontrollable passion
for ugliness: