Andy Nguyen

Winsatt English 4IB

December 18 2012
The Poetry and Style of John Donne and Continuity in his Dynamic Life
It is always interesting to examine how a person changes throughout their life. However,
for someone who does not know them personally or have consistent contact with them, it is
difficult to do; historians, specifically biographers, are the ones that must labor to build a given
persons story for the rest of us, and though this endeavor is an important one, it is not usually
the concern of the literature student. However, in the case of John Donne, it is actually especially
important not because John Donne changed a good deal throughout his life, but really because
his enormous body of poetry reflects these changes. Indeed, his work may be the best indicators
of their occurrence.
Specifically, these changes in his outlook in life are mirrored in his poems through what
many scholars of his work label as periods namely, Early, Middle, and Late. To put it
concisely, the early period is characterized by a youthful flippancy towards social mores of the
time, especially those regarding women and sexual conduct. Bitingly satirical and always witty,
poems of this period tend to use conceits a sort of extended metaphor to something that had
utterly no relation to the subject, up until it might be regarded as a contrived link.
The middle period coincides with Donnes meeting, marrying, and living with the love of
his life Ann. Its style and content are characterized by an utterly sincere and extremely powerful
love for somebody else; often the speaker of the poem is actually directing his words of love to a
woman. Moreover the poems contain within them a reverence for love itself, specifically that
which is shared between his partner and himself; a link more powerful than any other.

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The late period has as its subject matter a reverence for God, which falls in line with
Donnes becoming an Anglican cleric. This essay will not be concerned with poems from this
period.
This division of John Donnes work into periods has been debated; the most obvious
argument against periods is that there are various strands of style that run through most all his
poetry, and those strands are all evocative of John Donne. To analyze the veracity of each of
these claims, at least to a small extent, it is important to use a couple of actual poems to see how
they fit in with the given characterizations of each of the periods and if style links exist to the
remainder of the periods.
The first poem selected for this analysis is The Sun Rising. This poem is actually
addressed towards the sun, and not in such a respectful manner for the speaker, lying in bed
with his woman, cockily chides the sun for daring to wake him and call him from his sanctuary.
He bids the sun to call others to get out of bed instead, like late schoolboys, so that he may be
left alone. For the sun could not possibly understand; the speaker emphasizes that love no
season knows, nor do the rags of time.
In the second stanza, he continues his ridicule of the sun, questioning why the sun should
think that his beams are reverend and strong when he can eclipse them with no more than a
wink. He goes further as well, comparing the sun to his lover and saying that her eyes are more
brilliant than the sun. Lastly he dares the sun to go looking for all the wonderful things in the
world, such as the Indias of spice and mine or any kings that it may see, and then to come back
and behold the bed where the speaker and his woman lies, and he will find that all those
wonderful, beautiful things lie in the bed.

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On the surface this may seem overtly Petrarchan. There is obviously some idealization
occurring here, just as Petrarchs poems had; however, where the Petrarchan tradition is
idolization (and hence objectification) of a woman and her beauty, this poem idolizes instead the
state of being in love. It is also not anguished like Petrarchan poems often are, which reach for a
woman that cannot be grasped this speaker in this poem is utterly content, and sincere about his
love in a way that Petrarchan poems are not. This contentment is further illustrated in the third
stanza, where he calls himself and his lover all states and all princes, and also says that
compared to this,/All honors mimic, all wealth alchemy. Between the two in the bed, then, is
simply all the world and all of its treasures, and when the speaker acknowledges that the sun
must warm the world, it is the same thing essentially as warming those two in the bed.
The ultimate theme of the poem is of the wonder and joy of being in love. This is
expressed through the use of the sun as a comparison and how nothing it does can hope to
compare to the brilliant love shared by the speaker and his partner.
In Loves Deity, the second poem to be analyzed here, we see a reflective poem on the
nature of love as experienced by the speaker. It begins with the speakers desire to speak with
someone who loved before the god of love was born, so that he can know somebody who
actually loved somebody who reciprocated; he feels that the god of love has cursed him with a
destiny to love someone that does not return his feelings, is obviously pained by it, and therefore
curses the god of love.
This is quite an opposite theme from what was expressed in the previous poem. Each of
the stanzas has a similar tone of despair and criticism for the all-powerful god of love, such as in
the second stanza, where this god is said by the speaker to not have the ability to match people
up properly. The speaker entertains the notion that this was probably not their intent to match up

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two people who did not both love each other neither those who made him god nor the god
himself, who did not in his young god head, [practice] it. However, ultimately the god was
inept and did nothing more than fit males to females, stating that the god did not create love, but
rather merely connections; or in the words of Donne, correspondency. It could not be love until
the feelings were reciprocated.
In the third stanza one can observe more helplessness in the face of loves awesome
power, and a recognition that the god of love seems to preside over all modern gods, even Jove
(Jupiter). Anything that the current gods can do, it falls under the vast prerogative of the god of
love; therefore, to ungod this child would be impossible and the speaker is doomed to love
her who loves not me.
The last stanza displays yet more pessimism. He knows that he has not seem the worst of
it the worst of it, in fact, is of his love showing him that he loves him too, because he believes
it must be falsehood. He has a disbelief in his loves potential to love him back since were he to
love someone who loved him back, she would be lying.
Unlike many of Donnes early poems, this one is anguished and sincere in nature, and
even mostly orthodox as well, being in iambic pentamenter. It laments the power and
hopelessness he feels of love, though it is also decidedly not Petrarchan. It lacks the bliss and
idealization of Petrarchan poems, being realistically pained instead. His despair is lightly
emphasized by the change in meter to tetrameter at the end of each stanza, reiterating the idea of
unreciprocated love.
Both of these fit best with the middle period of Donnes poetry, the one that is
characterized by an extremely powerful love. There is no evidence of satire and rejection of
society, nor is there any overt reference to the Christian god and Christianity. Both of these

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poems, therefore, reflect his maturity in love and his feeling of wonder as he explores it, with the
second poem perhaps being an experiment in what it is like to be truly anguished and in love.
However, these poems continue to have links to the remaining two periods of his work.
The reverence that he displays in The Sun Rising will show up again later in his life when he
praises God, just as the wit that is displayed in it had already appeared in earlier works. The
anguish, too, exemplified in Loves Deity, will show up many times more in his later Holy
Sonnets when he tries to understand where he lies with God and his place in the world.