The Complete English Poems

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‘The first poet in the world in some things’, is how John Donne was described by his contemporary Ben Jonson. 

Yet it is only this century that Donne has been indisputably established as a great poet—and even, many feel, the greatest love poet of them all. Jonson went on to remark that ‘That Donne, for not keeping of an accent, deserved hanging’, yet Donne’s rhythms, once thought ‘unmusical’ are now recognized as the natural rhythms of the speaking voice; his ‘eccentricity’ as a complex self-doubt; his ‘obscurity’ the reflection of a brilliantly learned and allusive mind. Poets such as Eliot and Empson have found Donne’s poetry profoundly attuned to our modern age, while Yeats’ glowing comment will always be true: ‘the intricacy and subtlety of his imagination are the length and depth of the furrow made by his passion.’ 

This volume, superbly edited by Professor Smith, is the first complete edition to make a serious attempt to guide the reader closely through the complexities of Donne’s poetry. Considerable attention has been paid to the text, and a selection of the important manuscript variants are included. This edition is also the first to make use of the newly discovered manuscript of the verse letter to Lady Carey and Mistress Essex Rich.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.The Complete English PoemsPreface
Table of Dates
Further Reading
A Note on the Metre
Songs and Sonnets
Air and Angels
The Anniversary
The Apparition
The Bait
The Blossom
Break of Day
The Broken Heart
The Canonization
Community
The Computation
Confined Love
The Curse
The Damp
The Dissolution
The Dream
The Ecstasy
The Expiration
Farewell to Love
A Fever
The Flea
The Funeral
The Good Morrow
The Indifferent
A Jet Ring Sent
A Lecture upon the Shadow
The Legacy
Lovers’ Infiniteness
Love’s Alchemy
Love’s Deity
Love’s Diet
Love’s Exchange
Love’s Growth
Love’s Usury
The Message
Negative Love
A Nocturnal upon S. Lucy’s Day
The Paradox
The Primrose
The Prohibition
The Relic
Self Love
Song (Go, and catch a falling star)
Song (Sweetest love, I do not go)
Sonnet. The Token
The Sun Rising
The Triple Fool
Twicknam Garden
The Undertaking
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
A Valediction: of the Book
A Valediction: of my Name in the Window
A Valediction: of Weeping
The Will
Witchcraft by a Picture
Woman’s Constancy

Elegies
1. Jealousy
2. The Anagram
3. Change
4. The Perfume
5. His Picture
6. Oh, let me not serve so
7. Nature’s lay idiot
8. The Comparison
9. The Autumnal
10. The Dream
11. The Bracelet
12. His Parting from Her
13. Julia
14. A Tale of a Citizen and his Wife
15. The Expostulation
16. On his Mistress
17. Variety
18. Love’s Progress
19. To his Mistress Going to Bed
20. Love’s War
Sappho to Philaenis

Epithalamions or Marriage Songs
Epithalamion Made at Lincoln’s Inn
An Epithalamion, or Marriage Song on the Lady Elizabeth and Count Palatine being Married on St. Valentine’s Day
Eclogue 1613. December 26
Epithalamion

Epigrams
Hero and Leander
Pyramus and Thisbe
Niobe
A Burnt Ship
Fall of a Wall
A Lame Beggar
Cales and Guiana
Sir John Wingfield
A Self Accuser
A Licentious Person
Antiquary
Disinherited
Phryne
An Obscure Writer
Klockius
Raderus
Mercurius Gallo-Belgicus
Ralphius
The Liar
Manliness

Satires
1. Away thou fondling motley humourist
2. Sir; though (I thank God for it) I do hate
3. Kind pity chokes my spleen
4. Well; I may now receive, and die
5. Thou shalt not laugh in this leaf, Muse
Upon Mr. Thoms Coryat’s Crudities

The Progress of the Soul (Metempsychosis)
Verse Letters
The Storm
The Calm
To Mr. B. B.
To Mr. C. B.
To Mr. S. B.
To Mr. E. G.
To Mr. I. L. (Blessed are your north parts)
To Mr. I. L. (Of that short roll of friends)
To Mr. R. W. (If, as mine is, thy life a slumber be)
To Mr. R. W. (Kindly I envy thy song’s perfection)
To Mr. R. W. (Muse not that by thy mind thy body is led)
To Mr. R. W. (Zealously my Muse doth salute all thee)
To Mr. Rowland Woodward
To Mr. T. W. (All hail, sweet poet)
To Mr. T. W. (At once, from hence)
To Mr. T. W. (Haste thee harsh verse)
To Mr. T. W. (Pregnant again with th’ old twins)
To Sir Henry Goodyer
A Letter Written by Sir H. G. and J. D. alternis vicibus
To Sir Henry Wotton (Here’s no more news)
To Sir Henry Wotton (Sir, more than kisses)
To Sir Henry Wotton, at his going Ambassador to Venice
H. W. in Hibernia Belligeranti
To Sir Edward Herbert, at Juliers
To Mrs. M. H.
To the Countess of Bedford at New Year’s Tide
To the Countess of Bedford (Honour is so sublime perfection)
To the Countess of Bedford (Reason is our soul’s left hand)
To the Countess of Bedford (Though I be dead)
To the Countess of Bedford (To have written then)
To the Countess of Bedford (You have refined me)
To the Lady Bedford
Epitaph on Himself
A Letter to the Lady Carey, and Mistress Essex Rich, from Amiens
To the Countess of Huntingdon (Man to God’s image)
To the Countess of Huntingdon (That unripe side of earth)
To the Countess of Salisbury

Epicedes and Obsequies
Elegy on the L. C.
Elegy on the Lady Markham
An Elegy upon the Death of Mistress Boulstred
Elegy upon the Untimely Death of the Incomparable Prince Henry
Obsequies to the Lord Harrington, Brother to the Lady Lucy, Countess of Bedford
An Hymn to the Saints, and to Marquis Hamilton

The Anniversaries
An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary
To the Praise of the Dead, and the Anatomy
An Anatomy of the World
A Funeral Elegy
Of the Progress of the Soul: The Second Anniversary
The Harbinger to the Progress
Of the Progress of the Soul

Divine Poems
To E. of D. with Six Holy Sonnets
To Mrs. Magdalen Herbert: of St. Mary Magdalen
Holy Sonnets
La Corona
Divine Meditations
1. Thou hast made me
2. As due by many titles
3. O might those sighs and tears
4. Oh my black soul!
5. I am a little world
6. This is my play’s last scene
7. At the round earth’s imagined corners
8. If faithful souls be alike glorified
9. If poisonous minerals
10. Death be not proud
11. Spit in my face ye Jews
12. Whyare we by all creatures waited on?
13. What if this present were the world’s last night?
14. Batter my heart, three-personed God
15. Wilt thou love God, as he thee?
16. Father, part of his double interest
17. Since she whom I loved
18. Show me dear Christ
19. Oh, to vex me
A Litany
The Cross
Resurrection, imperfect
Upon the Annunciation and Passion falling upon one day. 1608
Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward
To Mr. Tilman after he had taken orders
Upon the Translation of the Psalms by Sir Philip Sidney, and the Countess of Pembroke his Sister
The Lamentations of Jeremy, for the most part according to Tremellius
A Hymn to Christ, at the Author’s last going into Germany
Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness
A Hymn to God the Father

Notes
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines

John Donne was born into a Catholic family in 1572. After a conventional education at Hart Hall, Oxford and Lincoln’s Inn, he took part in the Earl of Essex’s expedition to the Azores in 1597. He secretly married Anne More in December 1601 and was imprisoned by her father, Sir George, in the Fleet two months later. He was ordained priest in January 1615 and took a Doctorate of Divinity at Cambridge the same year. He was made Dean of St Paul’s in London in 1621, a position he held until his death in 1631. He is famous for the sermons he preached in his later years, as well as for his poems.

A.J. Smith was Professor Emeritus of the University of Southampton. His book include Literary Love (1983) and Metaphysical Wit (1992). He died in Salisbury in 1991.GB

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