“Beauty, that’s colour, and proportion”: John Donne’s Marriages of Color and Number in “The Flea” and “Oh my Blacke soule”

Abstract

“Beauty, that’s colour, and proportion”John Donne’s Marriages of Color and Number in “The Flea” and “Oh my Blacke soule” Alex Taylor (bio) Key Words John Donne, Flea, Blacke Soule, numerology, marriage, love, color, colour Lyric poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries frequently use the trope of considering the beloved’s physical coloration as a means of contemplating her physical beauty or emotional state.1 We might consider, for instance, Shakespeare’s use of red complexions of various character (indicating both shame and desire) in his Venus and Adonis, his consideration of the unconventional beauty of his mistress’s “raven black” eyes in Sonnet 127, or even his more ironic use of color in Sonnet 130. This is by no means an exclusively English concern, as we see Michelangelo refiguring the tradition in his sonnet “Veggio co’ be’ vostr’ occhi un dolce lume,” when his speaker imagines himself turning ‘pallido o rosso’ (white or red) at the beloved’s will. Giovan Battista Marino also makes use of color tropes in his poem “Nera si, ma se’ bella” describing the beauty of his black beloved, when his speaker describes how her complexion conquers those of lighter skinned ladies, perhaps following the Shulamite of the Song of Songs.2 However, we seldom see this topos of the love-lyric in the early work of John Donne; in several cases, Donne uses the trope only in order to reject it. For instance, the speaker in “The Indifferent” begins the poem by claiming “I can love both fair and browne,” (1) but he quickly moves [End Page 71] away from color imagery to point to different ways of distinguishing between his potential beloveds.3 Similarly, in “The Undertaking,” the poem’s speaker boasts of having “done one braver thing / Than all the Worthies did” (1–2); what has he done that is braver than all the deeds of Hector, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Joshua, David, Judas Maccabeus, King Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey, king of Jerusalem?4 He has loved a woman spiritually, for her “lovelinesse within,” (13) and he disparages other lovers who erotically esteem a woman based only or primarily upon her physical appearance, claiming that “he who colour loves, and skinne, / Loves but [the] oldest clothes” (15–16) of merely sensory beauty. As far as I am aware, no one has ever accused John Donne of being a merely conventional poet. And yet, the narrative I have begun above might too quickly give the impression of Donne as a whole-hearted iconoclast with regards to the love-lyric tradition. Rather, to see his originality is to see his refiguring of the tradition from which he came, to see how, in T.S. Eliot’s terms, Donne’s poetry modifies the ideal order of the existing monuments of literature.5 But to see Donne’s refiguring requires that we see how, to paraphrase Julia Walker, Donne often made use of many intellectual languages, even macaronically mixing them.6 Donne took inspiration “from such diverse fields as alchemy, numerology, Mannerist art, philosophy . . . cosmography,”7 as well as theology and drama. Donne mixes such varied materials within his poetry not merely to provide allusions, even significant ones, but in order to craft a sensual and intellectual unity, a beautiful artifact not exhausted in the teaching that it may provide. A strong case can be made that numerology, as a basic element of Donne’s poetics, acts as a foundation upon which can grow other tropological fields, such as the topos of the beloved’s colors. In her book on Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Kate Gartner Frost has perceptively suggested that much of Donne’s poetry, the divine poems and amorous works alike, are structured numerologically, but her appeal to critics to take on “new habits of reading,” to see as Donne’s audience might have, has gone largely unheeded.8 Thus, even though number symbolism is used [End Page 72] not only by Donne, but also by “Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Chapman, Jonson, Fletcher, Wither, Milton, Cowly, [and] Marvell,”9 we do not yet appropriately appreciate the way in which Donne’s use of number symbolism—both...