_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,
And if unfit for tombs or hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And, if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns all shall approve
Us canoniz'd by love:

And thus invoke us: "You whom reverend love
Made one another's hermitage;
You to whom love was peace, that now is rage;
Who did the whole world's soul contract and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes
(So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize),
Countries, towns, courts. Beg from above
A pattern of your love!"

According to Walton, it was to his wife that Donne addressed the beautiful
verses beginning:

Sweetest love, I do not go
For weariness of thee;

as well as the series of _Valedictions_. Of many of the other love-poems,
however, we can measure the intensity but not guess the occasion. All that
we can say with confidence when we have read them is that, after we have
followed one tributary on another leading down to the ultimate Thames of
his genius, we know that his progress as a lover was a progress from
infidelity to fidelity, from wandering amorousness to deep and enduring
passion. The image that is finally stamped on his greatest work is not
that of a roving adulterer, but of a monotheist of love. It is true that
there is enough Don-Juanism in the poems to have led even Sir Thomas
Browne to think of Donne's verse rather as a confession of his sins than
as a golden book of love. Browne's quaint poem, _To the deceased Author,
before the Promiscuous printing of his Poems, the Looser Sort, with the
Religious_, is so little known that it may be