The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, Vol. 3: The Satyres. Ed. by Gary A. Stringer and others

Abstract

‘On a high hill’, Donne wrote in Satyre3, ‘Ragged and steepe Truthe dwells; and he that will | Reach it, about must, and about go | And what th’hillls sodainnes resists, win so.’ Or, as this third and latest volume of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne argues, so he first wrote—for following the ‘original version’ of the poem which I have just quoted it prints a ‘revised version’, which here reads rather differently: ‘on a huge hill | Cragged, and steepe truth stands, and hee that will | Reach hir, about must, and about goe; | And what the hills suddenness resists, winn soe.’ Copy-text for the ‘original version’ is here the manuscript to which the Variorum project gives the siglum NY3, more familiarly known as the Westmoreland manuscript, now in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, W in the system of sigla first proposed for Donne by his first serious editor, H. J. C. Grierson, and Δ19 in Peter Beal’s otherwise standard Index- and CELM-accustomed listing; copy-text for the ‘revised version’ is the Variorum’s DT1, now MS 877 in the Library of Trinity College Dublin (where formerly it was classified as G.2.21), TCD to Grierson and those who followed him, and Δ14 to Beal. The two manuscripts here providing copy-text are traced back in the edition’s stemma, ‘respectively, to the lost original holograph (LOH) and a single revised holograph (LRH)’ (p. 97); they are collated historically, too, against forty other texts, that include twenty-eight manuscripts, fifty-four lines of a once full but now incomplete twenty-ninth, all seven seventeenth-century editions/issues of Donne’s collected Poems, and four further witnesses in which ‘brief snippets of the poem appear’ (p.97).