dialogue between the body and the soul. Had he been less of a frustrated
lover, less of a martyr, in whom love's

Art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations and lean emptiness,

much of his greatest poetry, it seems to me, would never have been
written.

One cannot, unfortunately, write the history of the progress of Donne's
genius save by inference and guessing. His poems were not, with some
unimportant exceptions, published in his lifetime. He did not arrange them
in chronological or in any sort of order. His poem on the flea that has
bitten both him and his inamorata comes after the triumphant
_Anniversary_, and but a page or two before the _Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's
Day_. Hence there is no means of telling how far we are indebted to the
Platonism of one woman, how much to his marriage with another, for the
enrichment of his genius. Such a poem as _The Canonisation_ can be
interpreted either in a Platonic sense or as a poem written to Anne More,
who was to bring him both imprisonment and the liberty of love. It is, in
either case, written in defence of his love against some who censured him
for it:

For God's sake, hold your tongue, and let me love.

In the last verses of the poem Donne proclaims that his love cannot be
measured by the standards of the vulgar:

We can die by it, if not live by love,