love poems in English, can be just as direct: ‘doing’ means exactly what you suspect it does.
Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short;
And done, we straight repent us of the sport:
Let us not then rush blindly on unto it,
Like lustful beasts, that only know to do it:
For lust will languish, and that heat decay.
But thus, thus, keeping endless holiday,
Let us together closely lie and kiss,
There is no labour, nor no shame in this;
This hath pleased, doth please, and long will please; never
Can this decay, but is beginning ever.
Although Jonson was a poet of the city, his work on dramatic masques and his huge fame brought him many courtly and noble connections; and he is the master of a kind of poetry, and indeed a sensibility, which runs through English life in particular from the Tudor period to our own day. The so-called ‘country house poem’ was a very particular and artificial confection: the poet oils up to the landowner by suggesting that his land willingly and desperately gives itself to him. The oaks wish to be cut down to provide, the deer are all too keen to be sliced up into venison steaks, and so on. It’s a conceit at once charming and completely ridiculous. Jonson’s pioneering poem ‘To Penshurst’ was written to compliment Sir Robert Sidney, the Earl of Leicester, on his estate in Kent. Jonson paints a picture of a harmonious countryside, of plentiful order and moderation, which has the lush vividness of a Rubens landscape, and whose sensibility uncurls all the way down to Downton Abbey. It’s ridiculous, idealised, and yet it bites into something in the English psyche too:
The lower land, that to the river bends,
Thy sheep, thy bullocks, kine, and calves do feed;
The middle grounds thy mares and horses breed.
Each bank doth yield thee conies; and the tops,
Fertile of wood, Ashore and Sidney’s copse,
To crown thy open table, doth provide
The purpled pheasant with the speckled side;
The painted partridge lies in every field,
And for thy mess is willing to be killed.
And if the high-swollen Medway fail thy dish,
Thou hast thy ponds, that pay thee tribute fish,
Fat aged carps that run into thy net,
And pikes, now weary their own kind to eat,
As loath the second draught or cast to stay,
Officiously at first themselves betray;
Bright eels that emulate them, and leap on land
Before the fisher, or into his hand.
Then hath thy orchard fruit, thy garden flowers,
Fresh as the air, and new as are the hours.
The early cherry, with the later plum,
Fig, grape, and quince, each in his time doth come;
The blushing apricot and woolly peach
Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach.
And though thy walls be of the country stone,
They’re reared with no man’s ruin, no man’s groan;
There’s none that dwell about them wish them down;
But all come in, the farmer and the clown,
And no one empty-handed, to salute
Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit.
Some bring a capon, some a rural cake,
Some nuts, some apples; some that think they make
The better cheeses bring them …
Jonson’s enormous and capacious talent fathered an entire school of poets – the so-called ‘tribe of Ben’. His rival and friend John Donne influenced only a few others. His was an odder, knottier and more intense genius, though today, perhaps because of that, he is far better known. Donne can perplex modern readers because he is both a great poet of love and eroticism, and a great religious poet. At times the two seem to mingle, apparently without curdling. But an urgent, vivid belief in God and redemption coexisted in an argumentatively religious society with equally urgent, vivid and profane urges. Donne wrote about sex and love in his youth, and then about Christ and the Church as he aged, but he wasn’t two men. All through his life he was able to deploy a kind of intellectual avidity, a nervy restlessness that tore at whatever he was doing and thinking. This famous example may be the greatest poem about lovemaking ever written. He’s urging his mistress to rip her clothes off:
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