John Donne's The Progresse of the Soule: a Re-evaluation

John Donne's satiric The Progresse of the Soule is generally tagged as a highly original though unsuccessful poem of doubtful taste. What is original in the poem is what its critics apparently think made it "unsuccessful." Don Cameron Allen isolates its originality as recondite allusions to erudite materials that came to form the mock heroic episodes in a Spenserian-like allegorized epic. He then comments, "There is in literature, so far as I know, no pattern for such a poem, which is perhaps a way of saying that it could not succeed."1 The poem is not successful as an epic, obviously, because it breaks off after fifty-two stanzas. Nonetheless the poem is a skillful one, well suited to young Donne's paradoxical mind which delighted in the witty argument of opposing ideas raised by the chaotic and illogical incidents of a fallen world. It is unfortunate, moreover, that an old but unjustified stigma of "poor taste" has attached itself like an epithet to the poem since this generalization has tended to direct modem studies into the poem's curiosities rather than into a necessary re-evaluation of its artistry. If the poem is representative of the vigorously casuistic Donne of the turn of the century, the manner of presentation is accordingly unconventional, in order that the episodes of the poem breathe life into the frozen emblems popular at the time. Presenting a libertine, naturalistic view of creation and the continuing chain of life, Donne raises heretical questions in his dialectic on the emblematic pictures. Such condensed language produces a harshness somewhat like that of his satirical verse of the 1590's. It is the purpose of this study to show that Donne's narrative is carefully wrought to give macrocosmic perspective to the poem as well as to show that each episode achieves its own balance or a balance with other episodes through structure and through witty similia interlaced with aphoristic pronouncements. The poem, then, may best be described as considerations of heretical and orthodox opinions on creation derived from emblematic pictures, quickened by Donne's strong-lined poetry. Significantly, the ambiguity of the last words of the poem reveals the creative impulse behind the narrative: "TKer's nothing simply good, nor ill alone,/ Of every quality comparison,/ The onely measure is, and judge, opinion."2 If the frame of reference is agnostic, Donne is heretically suggesting that opinion furnishes men their only