Then you have done a braver thing
Than all the Worthies did;
And a braver thence will spring,
Which is, to keep that hid.

It seems to me, in view of this remarkable series of poems, that it is
useless to look in Donne for a single consistent attitude to love. His
poems take us round the entire compass of love as the work of no other
English poet--not even, perhaps, Browning's--does. He was by destiny the
complete experimentalist in love in English literature. He passed through
phase after phase of the love of the body only, phase after phase of the
love of the soul only, and ended as the poet of the perfect marriage. In
his youth he was a gay--but was he ever really gay?--free-lover, who sang
jestingly:

How happy were our sires in ancient time,
Who held plurality of loves no crime!

But even then he looks forward, not with cynicism, to a time when he

Shall not so easily be to change dispos'd,
Nor to the arts of several eyes obeying;
But beauty with true worth securely weighing,
Which, being found assembled in some one,
We'll love her ever, and love her alone.

By the time he writes _The Ecstasy_ the victim of the body has become the
protesting victim of the soul. He cries out against a love that is merely
an ecstatic friendship: