Matrix of Love in John Donne's Work2/22/2023 Lover’s blood flowing in the body of an insect, God assaulting the human heart with a battering ram and love as a means of attaining saint like immortality, John Donne’s works are interspersed with out-of-the-box imagery and metaphors. His strange and playful intelligence were the reasons for his success in the literary world. The metaphysical touch in his poetry was what became a point to ponder for the modern day scholars and became a large influence on the posterity. Whenever the word “Renaissance” rings in our ears, we can think of no other but John Donne. John Donne is one of the most celebrated poets, scholar and an Anglican cleric of his time. His writing style reflected the experiences of his life. The poetry during his time of youth consisted of lyrics, love poems and erotic verses. On the other hand, the poetry in his old age shifted its theme from amorous to religious which are a perfect showcase of his intellectual makeup. His works were rife with:
Moreover, his sonnets are another hallmark of his literary legacy. It addressed the themes of mortality, humble penance, divine judgment and God’s mercy for his creation. What makes his works stand out among the pool of other writers is his ability to draw comparisons between man’s quest for self-immortalization and personal aggrandizement. His works revolve around many themes but the most prominent among them all is love. Love is a genre that has been treated differently by different writers in several periods. In case of Donne, Love seems to plunge into every philosophy that he embarks upon. He has stretched love on various spectrums such as divine love, erotica, love between man and wife etc. For him, Love was the supreme concern of his literary focus. Most importantly, he fabricates love with a rare candor and novelty. Even more significantly, his poetry creates a sense of wholeness and unity often considered as a metaphysical quest for transcendence. Erotic love: For instance, in his poems such as “the flea’, “to his mistress in bed” and “love’s progress”, he defines the erotic fervor towards his lover. In the latter The poem depicts the request of a speaker to his lover to undress herself and join him in bed. He wants to make love to her and claim her as his as he believes it’s the only way to validate his romantic feelings towards his lover. He tries to convince his lover through a crescendo of arguments which exerts comic exuberance throughout the poem. The aphrodisiac language such as “bed time”, “unlace yourself” , “breastplate” and “behind, above and between” heightens the effect of eros in the poem. Moreover the imagery of the poem where the speaker is asking his lover to flash herself before him is both raunchy and humorous. Likewise in “Love’s progress”, he provides a peculiar overview of his lover’s mouth as an erogenous zone; a house ware of temptation for sex. Erotic love in Donne’s works deals with bawdy images and meaty desires; an appetite for physicality of relationships between a man and a woman. Divine Love: Divine love relates to experiencing love beyond the sexual realms. It is associated with elevated sense experiences, spiritualism and virtue. John Donne’s works under this theme revolve around relationship between man and god, mortality, Day of Judgment and religion etc. some religious writings use erotic terms and setting yet their underlying purpose is spiritualism and humility in the face of the divine. In “canonization”, the speaker depicts love as an approach that can transcend saintliness. He believes that his love for his lover and the poetry that imbibes it will be a perfect example for the aspiring lovers. Then in “at round earth’s imagined corners”, the poet describes the doom’s day and prepares himself for it. He highlights the idea that God’s wrath and power is great but his mercy and benevolence is even greater and this ray of hope is a revival of a new spirit in him. His sonnet is basically an appeal to God to forgive his sins and bestow His mercy upon him. The following verse presents an awe-inspiring spectacle of the man-God relationship. Through Donne’s concept of divine love, it can be opined that the love for a bigger thing (divine love i-e God) controls the love for all the other things in life (love for animate and inanimate things). John Donne had lived a life of exposure and experiences. His take on love in his literature stands tall in evidence to this fact. Conjugal love and ovidian love: Then comes the Conjugal love. It is the love between a married couple. Donne has described a few imageries which lend an air to Ovidian love as well (something that the poet always peppered his poetries with). Ovidian love is characterized by gentleness and superiority. It describes love as a force that can become a reason of one’s strengthening of character. In “Good morrow”, the speaker explains the complex nature of love. He believes that even erotic love can produce effects of enlightenment and excitement like a religious love. Themes like Religious vs. secular and physical vs. spiritual are woven fine. The speaker extrapolates the philosophy of “two bodies, one soul” at large. If our two loves be one, or, thou and I 21Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.[1] Although poems like valediction and the flea too describe the romantic bond of a couple but a few of his poems like Good morrow solely deals with the immortalization of love between two people; something that transcends beyond the worldly boundaries. Platonic love: It is kind of a love that where the beloved is seen as a spiritual idea. It is a non-sensuous experience where the lover seems to be devoted in his cause. In “Ecstasy”, the out of the body experience is described in which two souls unite in a different universe. Their souls seem to sync well with the rhythm of their love. He finds peace in the spirituality but at the end he states that in order to have physical relation as well as offspring, they would have to make their bodies unite which is another clever strategy of the writer to turn their love from spiritual to sensuous Conclusion: John Donne was an illuminating name of the Elizabethan Era. If we put his works in context with the conditions of the times, we see that his works expound upon the cogent philosophy of love, humanism and fraternity. From lustful yearnings to divine salvation, Donne successfully brought the idea home that human nature itself is a world of its own; to understand it, one has to dive deep into the ocean of intellect so as to gauge out the pearls of wisdom. Since his poems cover almost every aspect of love (from sexual to spiritual and everything in between) in one piece of work, it often becomes difficult to dissect them. however, these moods auspiciously represent the shifts and tussles in the writer’s feelings and thoughts. Linguistically speaking, his poems are not static. His profundity of coming up with new vocabulary to express new ideas is extraordinary. The verses in his poetry and sonnets flow artistically to generate a literary landscape of their own. It has a constant on which his works move and that is desire. The swerving effects of desire can be felt candidly when analyzing his works. Broadly speaking, Donne’s poetry has been divided into two categories—love poetry and religious poetry. Love is a recurrent theme in his poetry where he expresses a longing for intimacy with the beloved and desires a union that cures “the defects of loneliness”(The Extasie). While Donne’s love poems, songs and sonnets were composed in 1590s, the impact of religion is seen towards the latter part of his life after he was ordained as an Anglican priest under pressure from King James. It is because of his unmatched literary skills that impressed us and we still continue to remember him today. https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/john-donne/the-good-morrow Rabiya Mazharis a 19-year-old undergraduate student of English literature with psychology at GC University, Lahore. she is a freelance writer and a journalist at Blueblood International newspaper. Rabiya is an enthusiastic and devoted person.
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