Donne, The First Anniversary (1611):
“‘Tis all in pieces, all cohaerence gone; All iust supply, and all Relation: Prince, Subiect, Father, Sonne, are things forgot, For euery man alone thinkes he hath got To be a Phoenix, and that then can bee None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee.”
The word cohaerence is doing something it shouldn’t be able to do in 1611. Latin cohaerentia — things sticking together — but Donne is using it for the social and cosmic order, not for physical adhesion. The OED’s earliest citation for the abstract sense (“logical connection”) is 1640. Donne is either coining a meaning or using one that hasn’t been recorded yet. And Relation in the next line — is this kinship (Prince/Subject/Father/Son), or is it the philosophical sense (how things stand to each other)? Both are available in Latin relatio, but in English the philosophical sense is barely established. Donne is writing in the gap between what these words mean in Latin and what they will come to mean in English. The poem about the loss of coherence is itself incoherent — using words in senses that don’t yet exist in the language it’s written in.
Otway, The Orphan (1680):
“Till Form’s dissolv’d, the Chain of Causes broken, And the Originals of Being lost.”
Otway has given up on the gap Donne was writing in. By 1680, English has the philosophical vocabulary — “Form,” “Chain of Causes,” “Originals” are all carrying their Scholastic cargo transparently, naturalized. The result is that the lines mean exactly what they say and nothing more. Donne’s cohaerence is alive because it’s still partly Latin, still partly unassigned — it flickers between the physical and the metaphysical without deciding. Otway’s vocabulary has decided. The poem is clearer and costs less.
DMLBS cohaerentia, sense (c): ‘coherence, interrelation.’ Gerald of Wales, c.1187: rerum cohaerentia cuncta patescant — the coherence of things. Four centuries before Donne, in the abstract sense the OED dates to 1640. The OED tracks English; Donne’s readers read Latin. The poem isn’t using words in senses that don’t yet exist — it’s using them in senses that exist in the wrong language.