John Donne’s Love Poetry

John Donne was an English poet and a cleric in the Church of England. He is considered the

pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His works are noted for their strong,

sensual style and include sonnets, love poems and religious poems, Latin translations,

epigrams, elegies, songs, satires. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and

inventiveness of metaphor, especially compared to that of his contemporaries.  His early

career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society and he met

that knowledge with sharp criticism. Another important theme in Donne's poetry is the idea

of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and about which he often

theorized. He wrote secular poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly

famous for his mastery of metaphysical conceits.

John Donne's Songs and Sonnets do not describe a single unchanging view of love; they

express a wide variety of emotions and attitudes, as if Donne himself were trying to define

his experience of love through his poetry. Love can be an experience of the body, the soul, or

both; it can be a religious experience, or merely a sensual one. Taking any one poem in

isolation will give us a limited view of Donne's attitude to love, but treating each poem as

part of a totality of experience, represented by all the Songs and Sonnets, it gives us an

insight into the complex range of experiences that can be grouped under the single heading

'Love'

When a couple finds perfect love together they become all-sufficient to one another, forming

a world of their own, which has no need of the outside world. This idea is expressed in these

lines from The Sun Rising:

“She's all States, and all Princes, I;

Princes do play us; compared to this,

All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.”

Here Donne expresses his arrogance of love by telling the sun that he and his beloved are so

happy that the sun would be half happy as them. He states that the little room is where he and

his mistress are on the bed is the entire world for him. The poet asks the sun why it is shining

in and disturbing him and his lover in bed. The sun should go away and do other things rather

than disturb them, like wake up ants or rush late schoolboys to start their day. This poem

gives voice to the feeling of lovers that they are outside of time and that their emotions are

the most important things in the world. "The Sun Rising" denigrates the sun as simply a

lesser light compared to his lover, and their love is portrayed as more important than the

whole world. These extravagant takedowns are in keeping with his extreme comparisons and

sometimes strange metaphors. In so many things, Donne's work pushes the boundaries of

comparison and logic, creating poetic figures that are unique and memorable.

In the Sun Rising and the Canonization the lovers are closer through Physical love , Donne's

view that spiritual love can be attained through physical love ties in with the contemporary

theory of the 'chain of being'.

The reverence for woman sometimes leads Donne close to adopting the traditional attitude of

the courtly lover, who suffers through being in love with a woman, usually already married,

who disrespects him. An example of this kind of love is suggested by the references to the

symptoms of love in The Canonization:

Alas, alas, who's injur'd by my love?

What merchant ships have my sighs drown'd?

When did my colds a forward spring remove?

When did the heats which my veines fill

Add one man to the plaguy Bill?

The courtly love ideal, however, is in conflict with Donne's ideal of two well-matched and

well-balanced lovers whose souls unite to form one. In the poem Loves Deity he expresses

his contempt for the courtly ideal, which he sees as a corruption of the true nature of love.

The Canonization is a serious parody of Christian Sainthood. According to me Donne takes

both love and religion seriously and hence to get them together he uses the instrument of

paradox. The poet asks his friend to pay attention to his old welfare and he should pursue

wealth and honour for himself and that he should leave he poet and the beloved alone. The

poet and his lover take their own chances together; they are unified in their love.  The conflict

between the ‘real world’ and the lover absorbed in the world of love runs through the poem.

John Donne compares his love to the phoenix. The phoenix is not two but one and it burns

not like the tapes at its own cost but burns to live again. Its death is life. Their love is not

exhausted in mere lust. This is their claim to canonization. The Lovers in becoming hermits

find that they have not lost the world, but have gained the world in each other which is now

more intense, more meaningful world. What the poet has achieved has not come to them

passively but something which they have actively achieved. The unworldly lovers become

the most worldly of all. In the poem The Canonization, values such as wealth and glory have

no place in the world of love. This poem is an instance of the ideas that are believed to be

true, which it asserts. Their love is a beautiful example for the world that will be

immortalized, canonized, a pattern for all other love in the world. The very first lines sound
more like a line delivered on stage. “For God’s sake hold your tongue” is nearly disrespect

when following the sacred title. By the end of the poem, the reader determines that

“canonization” refers to the way that the poet’s love will enter the canon of true love,

becoming the pattern by which others judge their own love. The poet expects that the rest of

the world will “invoke” himself and his beloved, similar to the way Catholics invoke saints in

their prayers. From the lovers’ perspective, the whole world is present as they look into each

other’s eyes; this sets the pattern of love that the world can follow in the poem – The

canonization. As usual, this hyperbole also leads me to find a spiritual or metaphysical

meaning in the poem, and this perhaps has given me a sight that Donne sets out the perfection

of divine love as the only realistic model for all others.

In the poem The Sun Rising, Donne has expressed more of the passion of physical love

unlike The Canonization were his love has escalated to another level where he tried to

sublimate his love.

The Third poem I will throw light on is A Valediction Forbidding mourning – where Donne

and his beloved’s love transcends mere physicality. Indeed, the separation merely adds to the

distance covered by their love.

A good example of the state, where two lovers' souls cannot be separated, even when they are

physically far apart, is seen in A Valediction: forbidding mourning:

“If they be two, they are two so

As stiffe twin encompasses are two,

Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if th'other doe.”

This poem celebrates conjugal love; Donne gives importance to the platonic side of love.

Donne presents a number of arguments to present his love he says their love is not an

ordinary one and that their love is above dignity and asks his beloved not to cheapen it.

Donne asks his beloved not openly mourn for being separated from him. The poet and his

beloved do not fear the movements of the earth because their love is powerful. He calls other

lovers stupid, insensitive lovers because their love is a sensual one and they cannot accept

separation. For them the base of their love is their lover and they find their love incomplete

without the presence of their lover. In comparison to them Donne and his beloved have taken

a high plane and they care less about the physical factors, their love indeed is the one with the

spiritual passion. Their souls are united and fused into one. The poet then uses metaphor

involving gold, precious metal and like gold being hammered into “aery thinness” without

breaking the poet and his beloved’s love will be beaten and expanded into thin sheet like gold

i.e. beating of separation and then it will glow and glorify. Then he compares his love to the

compass. Their love is spiritual, like the legs of a compass that are joined together at the top

even if one moves around while the other stays in the centre. The beloved should remain firm

and not stray so that the poet can return home to find her again. Here in the poem, compass

denotes faithfulness which will draw the poet again and again to her, she is indeed a

stabilizing factor in his life. “Thy firmness makes my circle just, and makes me end where I

begun,” back at home. They are a team, and so long as she is true to him, he will be able to

return to exactly the point where they left off before his journey. The theme of this poem is

union of true lovers even when they are physically apart. Separation emphasises the fact that

this test is going to bring the two lovers closer.

their love has now taken a plane and has been glorified. These 3 poems by Jhon Donne that

have been prescribed for us depict the development of love. That how love has gained a

stature. In Donne, loving someone is as much a religious experience as a physical one. His

love transcends mere physicality, and thus it is of a higher order than that of more dull and

ordinary lovers.

Well, John Donne was a profoundly religious poet, with a peculiarly strong hold on and

interest in the physical things of life. He used a unique vision to view his world, creating

spectacularly unlikely comparisons that enlightened the reader on the nature of both of the

things compared, sometimes in surprising ways. He continues to be read and discussed today,

four hundred years after he lived.

Donne equates physical love and spiritual love in many of his works. To this end, Donne

often suggests that the love he has for a particular beloved in a particular poem is superior to

that of others’ loves.

Love, the most felt and discussed emotion of human mind, has been a dominant theme of all

branches of literature of all ages. But the treatment of love has been different from writers to

writers, from poets to poets. John Donne has also used ‘love’ to be an important theme of his

poetry. Since love may be different from man to man, time to time, Donne has also treated

realistically love to be different from one poem to others. And hence I think it is not very

easy to find out a simple definition of the love from Donne’s poems.

Donne’s treatment is realistic and not idealistic.

to detail the beauty and fascination of any part of the female body. Rather he describes its

effect on the lover’s heart.

While the Elizabethan love lyrics are, by and large, imitations of the Petrarchan traditions,

Donne’s love poems stand in a class by themselves. Donne is fully acquainted with the

Petrarchan model where woman is an object of beauty, love and perfection.

Donne is different from Petrarch in his attitude to love. Here is wooing, but it is of a different

type. The plea is a marriage bed and a holy temple of love.

John Donne was the first English poet to challenge and break the supremacy of Petrarchan

tradition. Though at times he adopts the Petrarchan devices, yet the imagery and rhythm, the

texture and the colour of the bulk of his love-poetry are different.

What surprises me as a reader is the variety of moods, situation and treatment of the theme of

love- sensual, realistic, violent and full of happiness of life. There is scorn, sarcasm,

bitterness and pessimism at times, but the genuineness and force of love is unquestionable.

Donne is one of the greatest of English love-poets. In fact, among all the English love poets,

he is the only complete amorist. His capacity for experience is unique, and his conscience as

a writer towards every kind of it allows of no compromise in the duty of doing justice to

each. The poetry of lust has never been written with minuter truth.
Bibilography

Donne, John. The Complete English Poems, edited by A.J. Smith. New York: Penguin

Books, 1986

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