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)