ArtsAutosBooksBusinessEducationEntertainmentFamilyFashionFoodGamesGenderHealthHolidaysHomeHubPagesPersonal FinancePetsPoliticsReligionSportsTechnologyTravel

John Donne as a Poet of Love

Updated on May 11, 2018

John Donne as a Love Poet

DONNE AS A LOVE POET

For the enormously complex and vexed John Donne, life was love. All the other aspects of his life, it seems, were just details. Love was the supreme concern of his mind, the preoccupation of his heart, the focus of his experience and the subject of his poetry. As a self-appointed investigator, he examined love from every conceivable angle, tested its hypotheses, experienced its joys and embraced its sorrows. As Joan Bennett said, “Donne’s poetry is the work of one who has tasted every fruit in love’s orchard.

One of the popular works by John Donne is his master-piece “Songs and Sonnets.” These poems bring before us the following qualities of Donne as a love poet.

First quality of Donne as a love poet is his innovation which he gave to Elizabethan literature. He revolted with full force against the set pattern of Petrarchan tradition in Elizabethan poetry. That’s why; we never observe bleeding of hearts, cheeks like roses, lips like cherries and teeth like pearls in his poetry. However, he could not resist using conceits which he derived from the nontraditional areas of learning including law, physiology, scholastic philosophy and Mathematics. The use of conceit in “A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning”, is very prominent in which natural motion of the earth and earthquake are compared to draw the conclusion that as the rotation of the earth is far more powerful than an earthquake but does no harm, similarly the parting of true lovers is actually harmless. How beautifully he writes!

Moving of the earth brings harmes and feares,

Men reckon what it did and meant,

But trepediation of the spheres,

Though greater farre, is innocent.

Dramatic style is also derived from Petrarchan tradition. The opening of a poem is dramatic in its passion. The poem “The Funerall” has also been dealt and started in a dramatic way.

Whoever comes to shroud me, do not harme,

Nor question much.”

Second major quality of Donne as a love poet is his use of variety of themes in his poetry. He enlarged and extended the range and variety of lyrical expression. He wanted to write “What he suffered and enjoyed in the field of life.” That’s why, the combination of both the dramatic and lyrical elements was part and parcel of his poetry.

Second major quality of Donne brings before us the third major quality of Donne as a love poet and that is the inculcation of Donne’s personal experiences in love with all the shades of “Love” and “Love Making”. The poem, “The Good Morrow” is the greeting of souls of two lovers. Their genuine love can exercise the influence of making “One little room everywhere” so that the lovers can dispute the truth of meager effort of the discoverers and cartographers whose new worlds can never match the two worlds of the lovers.

“Let us possesse one world, each

Hath one, and is one.

Fourth major quality of Donne as a love poet is his use of language with special features including combination of simple words and use of odd phrases. For example, we can see: “No tear floods, nor sigh tempests, move.” Similarly, sometimes Donne tries to play upon with the words and repeats them to lay stress on his ideas. “Love so alike, that none doe slacken. None can die.

Fifth major quality of Donne’s love poetry is “Intellectual Analysis of Emotions.” He appears before us as a lawyer who advocates his point of view with strong arguments. In “Valediction: Forbidden Mourning”, he proves like an analyst that true lovers need not worry and mourning when they are going to separate from each other.

Sixth major quality of Donne’s love poems is that out of love and divine poems, love poems are specially entitled to be called metaphysical in the true sense. So many examples can be quoted in this context. “The Anniversary”, “The Good Morrow”, and “The Canonization” are the best examples of it. Donne often talks of lovers souls which come out of their bodies to negotiate with each other.

Grierson has his own views about Donne’s love poetry. He says that Donne’s poetry has three main strains in it. First, his poetry is cynical in approach. Perhaps, he believes in Shakespeare’s philosophy, “Frailty thy name woman.” In a poem, Donne claims that a beautiful woman may not be faithful. “No where lives a woman true, and faire.”

Second strain in Donne’s poetry is that it is Platonic in approach. In Platonic love, there is absence of sexual love. Donne in the poems like “Twicknam Garden”, “The Funerall”, and “The Primrose” addresses the ladies friends who were the wives of others but the lover continued to love them.

O perverse sex, where none is true but shee,

Who’s therefore true, because her truth kills mee.”

Third strain is conjugal love which means the love between husband and wife. In most of his poems, Donne addresses his wife Anne More.

Love all alike, no season knows, nor clyme,

Nor hours, days, moneths, which are the rages of time.”

J.E. Craft has criticized Donne for being harsh in his attitude towards women. But I think, J.E. Craft hasn’t got what Donne wanted to preach. Actually, Donne wants to present the idea that a woman is not merely a sex doll. However, he thinks that a woman is totally a bundle of contradictions.

To sum up, it is not easy for Donne’s reader to find an exact definition of love and single approach of Donne’s treatment towards love because all the love poems deal with different attitudes to the emotions. However, whether he is dealing with sensual or spiritual love, or the complex combination of both, Donne is always passionate in his approach. He wants to find out the place of love in this world of change and death. On the whole, we can say that Donne’s love poems display a balanced view of love. It shows us that if we indulge totally in physical love, it is only sex, and if we indulge totally in spiritual love, it is only an idea, so, real love is the combination of both body and soul. (Words: 1027)

John Donne as a Love Poet

Hello readers! Read the article and enjoy how Donne is different from others as a poet.

John Donne as a Love Poet

“Let us possesse one world, each

Hath one, and is one.”

working

This website uses cookies

As a user in the EEA, your approval is needed on a few things. To provide a better website experience, hubpages.com uses cookies (and other similar technologies) and may collect, process, and share personal data. Please choose which areas of our service you consent to our doing so.

For more information on managing or withdrawing consents and how we handle data, visit our Privacy Policy at: https://corp.maven.io/privacy-policy

Show Details
Necessary
HubPages Device IDThis is used to identify particular browsers or devices when the access the service, and is used for security reasons.
LoginThis is necessary to sign in to the HubPages Service.
Google RecaptchaThis is used to prevent bots and spam. (Privacy Policy)
AkismetThis is used to detect comment spam. (Privacy Policy)
HubPages Google AnalyticsThis is used to provide data on traffic to our website, all personally identifyable data is anonymized. (Privacy Policy)
HubPages Traffic PixelThis is used to collect data on traffic to articles and other pages on our site. Unless you are signed in to a HubPages account, all personally identifiable information is anonymized.
Amazon Web ServicesThis is a cloud services platform that we used to host our service. (Privacy Policy)
CloudflareThis is a cloud CDN service that we use to efficiently deliver files required for our service to operate such as javascript, cascading style sheets, images, and videos. (Privacy Policy)
Google Hosted LibrariesJavascript software libraries such as jQuery are loaded at endpoints on the googleapis.com or gstatic.com domains, for performance and efficiency reasons. (Privacy Policy)
Features
Google Custom SearchThis is feature allows you to search the site. (Privacy Policy)
Google MapsSome articles have Google Maps embedded in them. (Privacy Policy)
Google ChartsThis is used to display charts and graphs on articles and the author center. (Privacy Policy)
Google AdSense Host APIThis service allows you to sign up for or associate a Google AdSense account with HubPages, so that you can earn money from ads on your articles. No data is shared unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy)
Google YouTubeSome articles have YouTube videos embedded in them. (Privacy Policy)
VimeoSome articles have Vimeo videos embedded in them. (Privacy Policy)
PaypalThis is used for a registered author who enrolls in the HubPages Earnings program and requests to be paid via PayPal. No data is shared with Paypal unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy)
Facebook LoginYou can use this to streamline signing up for, or signing in to your Hubpages account. No data is shared with Facebook unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy)
MavenThis supports the Maven widget and search functionality. (Privacy Policy)
Marketing
Google AdSenseThis is an ad network. (Privacy Policy)
Google DoubleClickGoogle provides ad serving technology and runs an ad network. (Privacy Policy)
Index ExchangeThis is an ad network. (Privacy Policy)
SovrnThis is an ad network. (Privacy Policy)
Facebook AdsThis is an ad network. (Privacy Policy)
Amazon Unified Ad MarketplaceThis is an ad network. (Privacy Policy)
AppNexusThis is an ad network. (Privacy Policy)
OpenxThis is an ad network. (Privacy Policy)
Rubicon ProjectThis is an ad network. (Privacy Policy)
TripleLiftThis is an ad network. (Privacy Policy)
Say MediaWe partner with Say Media to deliver ad campaigns on our sites. (Privacy Policy)
Remarketing PixelsWe may use remarketing pixels from advertising networks such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook in order to advertise the HubPages Service to people that have visited our sites.
Conversion Tracking PixelsWe may use conversion tracking pixels from advertising networks such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook in order to identify when an advertisement has successfully resulted in the desired action, such as signing up for the HubPages Service or publishing an article on the HubPages Service.
Statistics
Author Google AnalyticsThis is used to provide traffic data and reports to the authors of articles on the HubPages Service. (Privacy Policy)
ComscoreComScore is a media measurement and analytics company providing marketing data and analytics to enterprises, media and advertising agencies, and publishers. Non-consent will result in ComScore only processing obfuscated personal data. (Privacy Policy)
Amazon Tracking PixelSome articles display amazon products as part of the Amazon Affiliate program, this pixel provides traffic statistics for those products (Privacy Policy)
ClickscoThis is a data management platform studying reader behavior (Privacy Policy)