The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume IV. Prose and Poetry: Sir Thomas North to Michael Drayton.
§ 9. The Progresse of the Soule
During the last year of his residence in the household of Sir Thomas Egerton, Donne began the composition of a longer and more elaborate satirical poem than anything he had yet attempted, a poem the personal and historical significance of which has received somewhat scant attention from his biographers. The Progresse of the Soule. Infinitati Sacrum. 16 Augusti 1601. Metempsycosis. Poema Satyricon was published for the first time in 1633, but manuscript copies of the poem, by itself and in collections of Donne’s poems, are extant. That he never contemplated publication is clear from the fact that he adopted the same title, The Progresse of the Soule, for the very different Anniversaries on the death of Elizabeth Drury.
Starting from the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis, it was Donne’s intention, in this poem, to trace the migrations of the soul of that apple which Eve plucked, conducting it, when it reached the human plane, through the bodies of all the great heretics. It was to have rested at last, Jonson told Drummond, in the body of Calvin; but the grave and dignified stanzas with which the poem opens show clearly that queen Elizabeth herself was to have closed the line of heretics whose descent was traced to the soul of Cain, or of Cain’s wife:
It would have been interesting to read Donne’s history of heresy, and characters of Mahomet and Luther, great, bad men as he apparently intended to delineate them; but the poem never got so far. After tracing through some tedious, not to say disgusting, episodes the life of the soul in vegetable and animal form, Donne leaves it just arrived in Themech,