TWICKNAM GARDEN

CRITICAL APPRECIATION

“Twicknam Garden” is a sonorous (resonant; high-sounding) and thoughtful lyric. It was

most probably addressed to the Countess Lucy of Bedford for whom Donne had a

profound admiration. The lyric is distinguished by highly condensed feelings of sadness.

The poet is obviously in a mood of dejection. He gives vent to the anguish of his heart

which neither nature can soothe nor poetry. Only Donne’s emotion is the subject of this

lyric. There is a sort of sting in the tail or in the last two lines. Donne calls the fair sex as

the perverted sex but excepting this no scornful or bitter comments are made on

women.

DEVELOPMENT OF THOUGHT

It is remarkable that the lady to whom the poem is addressed was never in love with

Donne. The poet probably mistook her friendly regard for him for love. The poet feels

irresistibly drawn toward this “one of the most accomplished and cultured ladies” of the

seventeenth century. Her truth kills him, because he is deeply involved in her charm and

personality.

The most distinguishing feature of the poem is the atmosphere of sombre desolation that

pervades it. This cold, bleak and cheerless atmosphere is in perfect harmony with the

anguish of the poet. The poem reminds us of Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci and

Shelley’s song, A Widow Bird Sat Mourning. We find the same bleakness, loneliness, and

dry unrelenting aspect of a leaden skied winter. The poem is steeped in grim and

overwhelming despair. The poet strikes a piercing note of sadness with the very first

line.

Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with tears, the well defined and concrete images

drive home the utter despair and incurable pain of a love-lorn heart. For example the

cold hardness of a “stone fountain weeping out my tears” and “crystal phials” leave on

the mind an unforgettable impression of poignant sorrow. The frigid expression of tears

gives a unifying effect to the poem. The poet refers to tears in all the three stanzas.

Tears, in fact, control the diversity of imagery that we find in the poem.

The poem contains some of most marvellous of Donne’s “conceits”. In the first stanza we

have the startling conceit of “spider love”:

The spider Love, which transubstantiates all,

And can convert manna to gall.

Again, we have an equally brilliant conceit when Donne compares sad and poignant

memories of love to the serpent in the garden of Eden:

And that this place may thoroughly be thought,

True paradise, I have the serpent brought.

In the second stanza, the love-lorn poet yearns to be converted into the stone fountain

which would be shedding tears throughout the year. In the last stanza, ‘tears’ are called

“Love’s wine”. All these ‘conceits’ lend a peculiar charm to the lyric.

“Twicknam Garden” is a short poem, but it is one of the greatest expressions in literature

of poignant sorrow and piercing sadness.

Inspired by Lucy: - This poem was perhaps inspired by Donne’s passion for the

Countess Lucy of Bedford, a highly cultured and accomplished lady who did not feel

anything stronger than friendship for the poet. The poet has given a most powerful

expression to his frustrated (baffled) passion. His art which we can analyse to some

extent, deserves admiration.

An expression of disappointed love: - He comes to Twicknam garden in order that

the beautiful sights and sounds around him, might ease his anguish. But no, he finds

that his bleak and desolate mood does not yield to the soothing influence of the

atmosphere. On the contrary, the trees seemed to be laughing and mocking him to his

face. If the garden were as beautiful as the garden of Eden, the thought of love within

him was like the serpent to spoil the beauty of the place.

Contrast between the natural atmosphere and the poet’s mood: - Donne

expresses his mental state in a series of attractive conceits. He is a self-traitor, as he

cherishes in his bosom the spider love, which transforms everything, even the heavenly

manna can be turned into poison by it. If the garden is paradise, then his passion is the

serpent. He wishes to be a mandrake and grow there in the garden (for the mandrake is

a plant that feels pain) or a stone fountain, for he is always weeping,

Donne’s intellectual contempt for women: - In the third stanza, his intellectual

contempt for women is expressed in an intricate series of images. He is the stone

fountain and his tears are the true tears of love. Lovers should come and take away in

crystal phials these tears and compare them with those shed by their mistresses at

home. If those do not taste as Donne’s do, then they are not true tears of love. Thus he

implores lovers not to be misled by the tears their mistresses shed, for you can no more

judge woman’s thoughts by their tears than you can judge their dresses by their

shadow.

Paradoxical thought in the closing lines: - Donne ends his poem with a paradox

(anything that goes against the accepted opinion). The woman, he loves, is true and

chaste; she is quite honest, that is why Donne cannot enjoy her love. And it is the

perversity of the female sex that the only woman who is honest and true should be the

one whose honesty and truth kill the poet, otherwise, perhaps she would not be so

chaste and true. In Donne’s view, woman is a kind of plague devised by God for man.

CRITICAL COMMENTS

This poem was addressed to the Countess Lucy of Bedford—a cultured and accomplished

lady of the seventeenth century. She entertained a friendly affection for Donne the poet,

which could hardly be given the name of “love”‘. The poet, a sad and forlorn lover, finds

himself in a mood of dejection. Even nature fails to soothe his tormented soul. It is a

song of sorrow pervaded by nothing except the bleakness of despair. It expresses the

anguish of a lover’s heart who has fallen a prey to sorrow and who cannot drown it even

in nature. For its sombre atmosphere and intensity of grief, the poem has not been

surpassed by any lyric in English poetry. It is a passionate outburst of sorrow expressing

yearnings of unfulfilled love. The lady to whom it is addressed was never in love with

Donne. It is possible that Donne misconstrued her friendly regard for him. In its

poignancy of sorrow, the poem reminds us of Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci and

Shelley’s lyric, A Widow Bird Sat Mourning.

Imagery and symbolism in Twicknam Garden

Religious conceitsFirst stanzaSecond stanzaThird stanza

Religious conceits

As with most Metaphysical poetry, the real matter of Twicknam Garden lies in its imagery, here a series of brilliant conceits. Many of these conceits have religious origins, and we soon become aware of Donne's use of the ‘religion of love' language.

First stanza

If we look at the first stanza, what we find is a complex conceit woven from a number of quite different religious sources.

• The Roman Catholic belief in transubstantiation (the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ believed to occur at the Mass)
• ‘Manna' is sometimes referred to as ‘the bread from heaven', a reference to the Israelites being supplied with a mysterious food whilst they were travelling through the wilderness (Exodus 16:14-15and Exodus 16:35)
• Here the ‘spider love' is the transforming substance, but, spiders, being poisonous, make it a sort of anti-transformation: from good to bad, from bread to ‘gall'
• ‘Gall', a bitter substance, often contrasted with food that is good to eat. The Gospel of Matthew describes gall mixed with vinegar being offered to Jesus Christ to drink while he was dying on the cross (Matthew 27:34)
• The final strand of the conceit is the reference to ‘True Paradise', or Eden (Genesis 2:8), the original perfect garden.
• The thing that transformed that from good was the serpent (Genesis 3:1-5). So now Donne is the serpent, turning a perfect place into a place of expulsion, grief and absence.

Andrew Marvell's poem The Garden uses similar imagery.

Second stanza

The conceits in the second stanza are more straightforward:

• the natural image of winter being obviously consonant with his own mood of desolation 
• Mandrakes had a symbolic meaning for the time: they were little plants with a forked root, often seen as symbolising males, sometimes females, especially anatomically. They were reputed to groan as they were pulled up. Some manuscripts have ‘groane', some have ‘grow' here. Since the groaning of mandrakes was an Elizabethan commonplace, this would appear the better reading.

Third stanza

• The third stanza's conceit of tears as something to be tasted is not unusual
• Donne manages to tie in the ‘bread' image of stanza one in his reference to ‘loves wine'
• Thus we have both the bread and the wine of the Mass.

But there is a reverse in the conceit:

• Whereas before he was the false presence, now his tears are the sign of the true
• The tradition of hearts being reflected in eyes is decisively rejected in Donne's cynical ending
• The comparison is made with shadows, which in fact tell us little about the actual clothes a woman may be wearing

The poem,  Twicknam Garden, by John Donne begins with his personal predicament. The poet is writing with agony and his lacerated self finds a succinct summing-up in the first two lines of the poem:

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Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with tears,

Hither I come to seek the spring.

The poet feels so shrivelled and disconcerted that he decides in his mind to find something soothing for his afflicted nerves, and he comes into a garden, perhaps the garden of his patroness, Duchess of Bedford. The specific garden of his patroness to whom he has paid handsome tributes in many a poem, in no way sheds any significant light on the poet’s anguish that has unhinged him. The garden is not the garden of Marvell with multiple layers of meaning. In this poem, Donne’s garden is simply a place, luxurious and delighting to the tortured self of the poet. The poet expression, ‘True Paradise’ for the garden, he believes that the garden has magical property because he will receive such balms ‘as else cure everything’.

The panacea the poet presumes to discover is of no avail because in the last line of the stanza he says, “I have the serpent brought”. The image of the serpent has to be viewed in images: the image of the serpent and that of the spider love, have something   diabolical about them. The serpent in relation to paradise is the cause of the primal sin in the Garden of Eden, making Adam an exile into the world, condemned to live by the sweat of brow. The serpent is symbolic of the original sin bringing a life of travail for people. Spider love signifies something that is base and vile because the spider feeds on filth and dirt. In Donne’s poem, “Love’s Exchange” we find a similar low image for love: “Love, any devil else but you, Would for a given Soule give something too.”

In short, the deceitful nature of love impels the poet to bring in the two images: serpent and spider. The poet has at the back of his mind the disdain and indignity heaped on him by his lady-love and this unceremonious treatment at the hands of his lady-love is the cause of his disturbed state of mind. The poet lays blame at the door of love (love embodied in the mistress), and he adds another dimension to the treatment of the idea of love which has become the cause of his undoing. The lines: “The spider love, which transubstantiates all, and can convert manna to gall,” have three keywords, ‘transubstantiates’, ‘Manna’, and ‘gall’. The first two words impart scriptural reverberations to the poem.

Transubstantiation is the doctrine in Eucharist church which means that bread is the flesh of Christ and wine is His blood. It is an important ritual in church. The partaking of bread and wine recalls minding the crucifixion of Christ and Judas, one of Christ’s disciples instrumental in putting Christ on the cross. This is nothing but betrayal of love. Manna is food provided by God for Israelites during their long stay in the desert, when love and trust are not there sustaining the bond subsisting between man and man.

John Donne’s poem begins with his private emotion of grief, but the sensibility of the poet is such that instead of luxuriating himself in sorrow, he contemplates the idea of suffering with a genesis in loving a wider perspective.

In Donne, there is an affirmation of cool detachment and self-possession in the face of something that upsets him. He shows a response and congeals at worst into cold self-righteousness. Donne’s wit exhibits a cool sanity and a wary openness which goes much beyond the refusal of facile commitment or sardonic amusement at the way the world goes. He probes and sifts experiences and analyses with remarkable candour the various possibilities in a given situation without aligning himself summarily with a soft option of acceptance or rejection.

Twicknam Garden Analysis

Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with tears,

Hither I come to seek the spring,

And at mine eyes, and at mine ears,

Receive such balms as else cure everything;

But oh, self-traitor, I do bring

The spider love, which transubstantiates all,

And can convert manna to gall,

And that this place may thoroughly be thought

True paradise, I have the serpent brought.

In the first stanza of Twichknam Garden, the poet who is lovesick and is sunk in the slough of despondency keeps his wits about himself and contemplates the reality of love in multiple facets: the love that is naïve, the love that that is pure and immaculate, and the love that has a seamy side. The telescoping of images in the brief compass of the first stanza – the images of spring, balm, paradise, serpent, spider and transubstiation roll into unity under the intensity of artistic process, giving the impression of the ruin wrought by love that works in an unbridled way and knows no moderation.

‘Twere wholesomer for me, that winter did

Benight the glory of this place,

And that a grave frost did forbid

These trees to laugh, and mock me to my face;

But that I may not this disgrace

Endure, nor yet leave loving, Love let me

Some senseless piece of this place be;

Make me a mandrake, so I may grow here,

Or a stone fountain weeping out my year.

The second stanza presents an awful prospect starting the poet in the face. The poet who came to the garden in search of balm finds that his expectations are shattered and the garden becomes a menace with a sinister design, and he, therefore, wants that the garden be folded in darkness: ‘Twere wholesome for me, that winter did, Benight the glory of this place.”

The poet wants to be some senseless piece of the garden. He wants to be a mandrake or stone fountain, and this impulse of regression to the world of rocks and plants is prompted by something in the poet that he fails to come to grips with. He finds that the trees glistening with bright foliage mock him and the poet makes a very despairing disclosure:

But that I may not this disgrace

Indure, nor leave this garden…

This is a galling experience in the sense that the poet finds himself in impasse and does not know how to overcome it. He does not feel anger towards the lady-love who is not responsive to his amorous advances. He wants self-effacement by merging himself into nature without giving vent to pent-up anger to his mistress. Here this state of mind of the poet has kinship with the Astrophel of Sidney’s sonnet sequence, like many other Petrarchan and Petrarch himself, reflecting the grim plight they are in, and thus powerless to amend it. In this universe of lovers, anger is not consonant with the attitude of the poet-lover. The response is nearer to simple human respect than to reverence or hatred.

However, it is certainly not genuflection before a semi-deity in the form of a lady-love. The point worth noting in respect of Donne’s treatment of the disdainful attitude of the mistress to him is that Donne deals in all the battery of sighs and tears supposed to be flimsy stock-in-trade of the Petrarchan mode of idealizing the ‘Impossible She’. Donne’s distinctive merit lies in a finely discriminated fidelity to natural experience, and he refrains himself from the Petrarchan adulation of lady-love.

Hither with crystal phials, lovers come,

And take my tears, which are love’s wine,

And try your mistress’ tears at home,

For all are false, that taste not just like mine;

Alas! Hearts do not in eyes shine,

Nor can you more judge women’s thoughts by tears,

Than by her shadow what she wears.

Oh perverse sex, where none is true but she,

Who’s therefore true, because her truth kills me.

The third stanza is an intensification of the probing and analytic mind of Donne making an inquisition on the experience of frustration in love. This stanza abounds in hyperbole when he says that lovers with crystal vials would come to him for collecting his tears with the injunction from the poet to compare his tears with tears of their mistresses at home. The poet cannot forbear himself going into high-faulting utterances that tears of all are false that taste not just like his. He indulges himself in making extravagant claims of being pure and steadfast in love and makes a brutal exposure of sham and pretence underneath the veneer of naïveté:

Alas! Hearts do not in eyes shine,

Nor can you more judge women’s thoughts by tears,

Than by her shadow what she wears.

Though the poet appears to have spared his Lady-love the ignominy he has heaped on the rest of woman folk, he, in fact, with a remarkable sleight of hand brings his mistress in the net of wide-ranging censure of women when he says, “O perverse sexe”. The expression, ‘perverse sexe’ is also severe indictment of capricious and scorn, and this contemptuous mien of his lady-love offers an affront to him. She is a pervert because she has outraged the first primal state of nature in which love for love is an innate condition of life.

In short, the poet wants the naturalness of impulses seeking their fruition without, in the least, being impaired and warped by the massive indifference and nonchalance of the lady-love.

On the surface Twicknam Garden appears to share the strain of idealization in the Petrarchan mode in the light of the over-ceremonious gravity of manner. But there is no denying the fact that there are continual deflating touches of hard realism perceptible in the images of self-traitor, spider love, transubstantiation, Manna and gall, and it makes the poem a huge, high, comic hyperbole.

Like Donne’s poem ‘Love’s Deitie’, flouting the accepted pieties and denying the basis of courtly servitude of the Petrarchan mode, ‘Twicknam Garden’, too, asserts that an unreciprocated love is no love, and therefore, he breaks into the damaging exclamation, “O perverse sexe”