But O alas, so long, so far,
Our bodies why do we forbear?

He pleads for the recognition of the body, contending that it is not the
enemy but the companion of the soul:

Soul into the soul may flow
Though it to body first repair.

The realistic philosophy of love has never been set forth with greater
intellectual vehemence:

So must pure lovers' souls descend
T' affections and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great Prince in prison lies.
To our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love reveal'd may look;
Love's mysteries in souls do grow
But yet the body is the book.

I, for one, find it impossible to believe that all this passionate
verse--verse in which we find the quintessence of Donne's genius--was a
mere utterance of abstract thoughts into the wind. Donne, as has been
pointed out, was more than most writers a poet of personal experience. His
greatest poetry was born of struggle and conflict in the obscure depths of
the soul as surely as was the religion of St. Paul. I doubt if, in the
history of his genius, any event ever happened of equal importance to his
meeting with the lady who first set going in his brain that fevered