This piece appeared on September 22 2006

Ever since I discovered John Donne's poetry, as a schoolgirl in the 1950s, I have been trying to work out why he is so very exciting. The short-story writer Frances Towers remarked that women reading Donne's love poems feel seduced; which was true of the girl I was, though odd, since he wrote "Hope not for mind in women" and described them as, at their best, "mummy possest". He also speculated that women might not have souls, since there is no record of God having breathed one into Eve. Nevertheless, his great love poems stir both body and mind in an electric way that resembles nothing else.

As a student, I puzzled over T. S. Eliot's dictum about the "dissociation of sensibility" that had occurred since the time of the Metaphysical poets. "Tennyson and Browning are poets and they think, but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose." What precisely does it mean, to "feel your thought"? It seemed to me that Tennyson, who was despised when I was a student, felt his thoughts much more immediately than the Metaphysicals. Christopher Ricks indeed claimed that Tennyson thought precisely with sensuous images, fusing sensation and thought. The imagery of trees in In Memoriam, for example, contained in the musical chain of stanzas, is a thought process made up of imagining the objects. Each tree changes all the other trees.

Two examples:

And if that eye which watches guilt
And goodness, and hath power to see
Within the green the mouldered tree
And towers fallen as soon as built

(XXVI);

and

Old Yew, which graspest at the stones
That name the underlying dead,
Thy fibres net the dreamless head,
Thy roots are wrapped about the bones . . .
And gazing on thee, sullen tree
Sick for thy stubborn hardihood,
I seem to fail from out my blood
And grow incorporate into thee.

(II).

These are part of a painful meditation on dissolution and the permanence of death.

The conceit of the eternal eye which simultaneously sees the green tree and the mouldered one is metaphysical in its startling intensity. But I feel it works -in conjunction with all the other living and dying trees in the poem -by making the reader imagine the tree in his/her body -the tree is grasping the dead man, its roots are grasping "the dreamless head", the poet is failing "from out my blood" and is becoming the old (mouldering) tree. This is thinking with the senses in the mind. The trees are as immediate as the odour of roses. I don't think this is almost ever true of the way Donne's poetry works -on my mind at least.

Nevertheless, I have come to see that Eliot may have meant something quite different -he confused the issue with his example of the rose odour, for reasons I shall come to. Donne does feel his thought. But what he feels -and makes us, his readers, feel -is the peculiar excitement and pleasure of mental activity itself. It isn't smelling roses. It is being aware of, and delighting in, the electrical and chemical impulses that connect and reconnect the neurones in our brains. Thought is material, according to neuroscience. I think of it in terms of Sir Charles Sherrington's description of the waking brain, the "head-mass" as "an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern, though never an abiding one . . .". The pleasure Donne offers our bodies is the pleasure of extreme activity of the brain.

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now