“Chaf'd Muscatts Pores”: The Not-So-Good Mistress in Donne's “The Comparison”

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Notes

¹Representative of the majority of critics who hold this view, John Shawcross outlines the structure of the poem by enumerating the lines that describe the speaker's mistress: (lines 1–6, 15–18, 23–24, 27–28, 35–38, 49–52); the remaining lines describe the addressee's mistress.

²For example, see Guibbory 817. Professor Raine proposes that the two women are the same woman in order to explore, “under the cover of a fictitious comparison, our ambivalent attitude to the physical, the way in which mellow delight can quickly become scorching hatred” (qtd. in Variorum 549); Diana Trevino Benet comments that “The Comparison” suggests “that a woman's attractiveness or repulsiveness is the product of the male perspective” (22); and, most recently, Gregory Machacek argues that “the speaker's and the addressee's mistress are, I believe, undoubtedly the same woman; indeed, the very point of the poem is to compel in readers a belated recognition that the speaker and the addressee love the same woman” (72).

³For example, the most thorough promoter of this thesis, Machacek, explains that “when he believes she is involved with him exclusively, she seems ideal; when he considers that she is also involved with his addressee, he finds her loathsome” (72).

⁴The game of sustained anti-Petrarchan double entendre that Donne devises in this poem is one of the many poetic processes by which Donne attempted to distinguish himself and his coterie audience from the royal court environment that excluded them. In John Donne, Coterie Poet, Arthur Marotti describes the Inns-of-Court environment and its possible influence on Donne's poetry.

⁵This and all subsequent quotations from the elegy are taken from The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne. Vol. 2. The Elegies (51–52).

⁶This near repetition of the word “sweet” in the first line may also remind the reader of the first lines of Astrophil and Stella 79: “Sweet kisse, thy sweets I faine would sweetly endite, / Which, even of sweetnesse sweetest sweetner art;” (lines 1–2). However, whereas Sidney deploys the Petrarchan trope ad absurdum, Donne simply gestures at the excessive use of the term before launching with full force into his criticism of the conventional praises of women.

⁷Another example of negative double entendre occurs in the simile that likens her sweat to a pearl necklace: “And on her neck her skin such lustre setts / They seeme no sweat drops but pearle carcanetts” (lines 5–6). Although a predictable word to describe pearls, “lustre” has an early modern homonym, “luster,” or “one who lusts.” The multivalent terms such as “muskat” and “luster”—their ability to connote something lovely and something wicked simultaneously—are indicative of Donne's strategy throughout the elegy.

⁸Confusion continues due to the use of the pronoun “her,” which heretofore (and hereafter) is reserved exclusively for the good mistress. In line 14, “her” refers to the bad mistress, yet without warning or explanation, the reader finds out later that the “her head” of line 15 was supposed to have been that of the good mistress.

⁹Here, Donne may be pushing the limits of plausibility; even for first-time readers and for those still willing to see the mistresses as opposites, it is difficult for a reader to continue believing that this is a positive evaluation of the mistress. The keywords evoke God's feelings about the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (“iealousy”), Adam and Eve's act of eating it (“rauishing”), and the consequence for mankind (“dy”).

¹⁰Further close reading indicates that figures for the good mistress reflect the negativity supposedly reserved for the bad. While Mt. Etna, the largest volcano in Italy, figures the bad mistress's private parts, it is also place from whence Pluto emerged to abduct Proserpina, the goddess who served as the initial simile for the breast of the fair mistress: “Like Proserpines whight bewty-keeping chest” (24).