G. M. Hopkins
1. Heaven-haven
2. The habit of perfection
3. God’s Grandeur
4. The Starlight Night
5. Spring
6. The Lantern Out of Doors
7. The Candle Indoors
8. The Sea and the Skylark
9. The Windhover
10. Pied Beauty
11. Hurrahing in Harvest
12. The Caged Skylark
13. In the Valley of the Elwy
14. Duns Scotus’s Oxford
15. Brothers
16. Inversnaid
17. As kingfishers catch fire
18. Binsey Poplars
19. Peace
20. Felix Randal
21. Spring and Fall
22. Ribblesdale
23. To What Serves Mortal Beauty?
24. Carrion comfort
25. No worst there is none
26. To seem the stranger lies my lot
27. I wake and feel the fell of dark
28. Patience, hard thing My own heart let
me have more pity on
29. Thou art indeed just, Lord
30. The fine delight that fathers thought
Thomas Hardy
1. The Darkling Thrush
2. The Ruined Maid
3. The Self-Unseeing
4. In Tenebris I
5. In Tenebris II
6. A Church Romance
7. The Man He Killed
8. The Convergence of the Twain
9. A Thunderstorm in Town
10. The Going
11. Afterwards
12. The Haunter
13. The Voice
14. The Year's Awakening
15. Your Last Drive
16. The Walk
17. After a Journey
18. Beeny Cliff
19. At Castle Boterel
20. The Phantom Horsewoman
21. Where the Picnic Was
22. The Shadow on the Stone
23. He Never Expected Much
Seamus Heaney
1. The Turnip-Snedder
2. A Shiver
3. Polish Sleepers
4. Anahorish 1944
5. To Mick Joyce in Heaven
6. The Aerodrome
7. Anything Can Happen
8. Helmet
9. Out of Shot
10. Rilke: After the Fire
11. District and Circle
12. To George Seferis in the Underworld
13. Wordsworth’s Skates
14. The Harrow-Pin
15. Poet to Blacksmith
16. Midnight Anvil
17. Súgán
18. 1 The Sally Rod
19. 2 A Chow
20. 3 One Christmas Day in the Morning
21. The Nod
22. A Clip
23. Edward Thomas on the Lagans Road
24. The Lift
25. Höfn
26. The Tollund Man in Springtime
27. The Blackbird of Glanmore
Songs of ourselves
1. Frances Cornford Childhood
2. Emily Dickinson Because I Could Not
Stop For Death
3. Elizabeth Bishop One Art
4. Alfred, Lord Tennyson Song: Tears, Idle
Tears
5. Stephen Spender My Parents
6. Fleur Adcock For Heidi With Blue Hair
7. Grace Nichols Praise Song For My
Mother
8. Charlotte Mew The Trees Are Down
9. Philip Larkin The Trees
10. Allen Curnow Country School
11. James Fenton Cambodia
12. Siegfried Sassoon Attack
13. Boey Kim Cheng Reservist
14. Gwendolyn MacEwen You Cannot Do
This
15. Wilfred Owen Anthem For Doomed
Youth
16. A E Housman My Dreams Are Of A Field
Afar
17. Stevie Smith A Man I Am
18. R S Thomas Here
19. Charlotte Mew A Quoi Bon Dire
20. Robert Browning Meeting At Night
21. A E Housman Because I Liked You Better
22. William Allingham A Dream
23. Ruth Pitter Time's Fool
24. Emily Brontë Cold In The Earth
25. Hone Tuwhare Friend
26. James K Baxter Elegy For My Father's
Father
27. Seamus Heaney Follower
28. A C Swinburne From The Triumph of
Time
29. Oscar Wilde From The Ballad of Reading
Gaol
John Donne
1. Elegie: To his Mistris Going to Bed
2. The Flea
3. The Good-Morrow
4. Song: 'Goe, and catche a falling starre'
5. The Undertaking
6. The Sunne Rising
7. Song: 'Sweetest love, I do not goe
8. Aire and Angels
9. The Anniversarie
10. Twicknam Garden
11. Loves Growth
12. The Dreame
13. A Valediction: forbidding mourning
14. The Extasie
15. The Relique
16. The Expiration
17. 1 ' As due by many titles I resigne'
18. 2 ' Oh my blacke Soule! now thou art
summoned'
19. 3 ' This is my playes last scene, here
heavens appoint’
20. 4 ' At the round earths imagin'd
corners, blow'
21. 5 ‘ If poysonous mineralls, and if that
tree'
22. 6 ‘ Death be not proud, though some
have called thee'
23. Holy Sonnet: 'Batter my heart, three
person'd God; for, you'
24. Holy Sonnet: 'Since she whome I lovd,
hath payd her last debt'
John Donne 1572-1631
John Donne was born in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, in 1572. He was 31 when Elizabeth died, by
which time he had written much of his poetry. So it is as true to see him as an Elizabethan poet as a
seventeenth-century one.
John Donne’s family
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His father was an ironmonger in London
His mother was the daughter of a dramatist, Thomas Heywood
They were Roman Catholic, when the country as a whole had becomeProtestant. Many Catholics
had a difficult time, as they were suspected of being in league with England's enemy, Spain.
Donne was 12 when the Spanish Armada was defeated.
An uncle of Donne was condemned to death for being a Catholic Jesuitpriest.
Donne’s brother Henry was imprisoned for hiding a Catholic. Whilst in prison awaiting trial, Henry
died of jail fever in 1593.
John Donne at university
The young John Donne was sent to Hart Hall (later Hertford College) at Oxford University when he was
only 11. If he had waited till he was 16 or older, he would have had to take the oath of allegiance to
Elizabeth as Head of theChurch of England, something which Catholics were forbidden to do. So his
astute parents wanted him to enter university before he needed to take the oath. He may have gone on to
Cambridge afterwards for further study.
John Donne as a law student
Many young men of the time received their higher education at one of London's Inns of Court. Today,
Inns of Court are where London barristers have their chambers (offices). In Donne's day, young men
studied for the law there, under instruction from senior lawyers. They also seem to have had a good time.
By all accounts, Donne was something of a dashing young man, very witty, quite a ladies’ man. He wrote
poetry, witty and sometimes quite risqué, which was circulated in manuscript. None of this poetry
(nowadays gathered together asSongs and Sonnets, Epigrams and some of the Elegies and Satires) was
published till after his death, but the handwritten collection was certainly known about.
Donne knew the cost of being a Catholic from his uncle and brother - and from the fact he never received
a degree from Oxford or Cambridge. He had been instructed by Jesuit priests whilst he was younger.
However, at some point in the 1590s he decided to stop being a Catholic. We can only guess at what
happened: perhaps he realised he would have no career if he continued. At any rate, it must have cost
Donne some heartache to leave the religion of his family.
John Donne - A Catholic imagination
Donne’s poetry, especially his religious poetry, still shows something of a Catholic imagination, and the
sense of guilt is quite pervasive. Critics argue whether the guilt was due to his temperament or caused by
leaving Catholicism. Some of Donne's later poetry is full of thoughts of death.
John Donne - A practising Anglican
At some point, Donne became a practising Anglican. Why was this?
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Was it the only way for him to have a career?
Was it a genuine change of conviction, perhaps through the influence of his wife?
Did he see Anglicanism as a true middle way between the extremes of Catholic
and Puritan beliefs and therefore a genuine way of avoiding religious conflict?
We cannot be sure. Later he was involved in trying to persuade Catholics (‘recusants’ as they were often
called) to become Anglicans, and wrote several anti-Catholic pamphlets. A number of people, including
King James I, believed he would make a good Anglican clergyman.
John Donne's employment
A legal training was seen as a good way into politics and the court. Donne was ambitious and in 1598 he
was appointed Secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, an influential post.
He had previously sailed with the Earl of Essex's expedition against the Spanish at Cadiz, which wiped
out a treasure fleet and burned the town. It may have been the connections made then that got him this
desirable job.
John Donne in love
Egerton's household included a pretty young niece, Ann Moore. Donne and she fell in love. She was
under age, and there seemed little prospect of Donne being allowed to marry her, had he asked her
uncle's permission. So in 1601 they married secretly. This sounds very romantic, but it lost Donne his job
when her father, the Keeper of the Tower of London, heard about it, and even had him put in prison for a
while.
John Donne, Ann Donne, ‘Undone’
In the end, the matter of Donne’s marriage went to court. Fortunately, the court found them to be legally
married, but from then on, for much of the marriage, Donne's career was on the rocks. Famously, he
wrote:
John Donne, Ann Donne, undone
They had little money of their own, until eventually Ann's father gave Donne her dowry. For two years
they lived at Loseley, near Guildford, where relatives gave them a house; then at Mitcham, a small village
south of London.
John Donne - A family to support
What made John and Ann Donne’s financial state worse was their growing family. Ann had a child nearly
every year. Donne had to find what jobs he could. Clearly the two were devoted to each other, but there
were considerable strains on them both and Ann was frequently ill. Donne had a room off the Strand in
London, both to stay in touch with the world and also to study in quiet. He still wrote a little poetry
privately.
One possibility open to Donne was to become a clergyman. He seems to have resisted this idea for some
time, possibly because he thought he could do better in public life, or because he still felt some reluctance
as an ex-Catholic. At one point, he was introduced to the new king, James I, who seems to have liked
Donne's intelligent and witty conversation. Donne asked to become Ambassador to Venice but the king
made it clear that the only favour he would do him was to make him a successful clergyman.
Dr Donne
Donne’s final political effort was to become a Member of Parliament for Taunton in 1614. However in
those days MPs were not paid and that particular Parliament only sat for about nine weeks. So in 1615,
Donne was ordained a priest in the Church of England. King James insisted that Cambridge University
should make Donne a Doctor of Divinity at the same time so from then onwards he was known as Dr
Donne.
John Donne - Dean of St Paul’s
James I made Donne a Royal Chaplain and chaplain to Lincoln's Inn, so he could stay in London. Donne,
however, was ambitious and asked several friends to help him become a dean, (the senior clergyman of
a cathedral). In 1621, he was successful, but, sadly, too late for Ann who had died giving birth to a
stillborn child in 1617. He was made Dean of St Paul's in London. The churchwas not the present one,
which was built only after the Fire of London in 1666 had destroyed the old St Paul's.
John Donne - An effective preacher
Donne became a very effective preacher. During his lifetime, his Devotions upon Emergent
Occasions were published, consisting mainly of meditations, many about death and dying. Donne himself
suffered frequent bouts of ill health and was near death several times. One of the meditations later
became well known through one of its phrases: ‘For whom the Bell Tolls’, used as the title of a modern
novel by Ernest Hemingway. The same meditation contains the equally famous phrase ‘no man is an
island’. He also wrote a number of devotional or religious poems. After his death, many of his sermons
and other meditations were printed.
John Donne's death
Donne died on March 31, 1631, after a prolonged bout of ill health. At the time, he was much better
known as a preacher than a poet. In 1633 his poems were first collected and printed, probably without
authorisation, as his family tried to stop the publication thinking some of the love poems would hurt his
reputation. To-day we focus on his poetry and have to be reminded that he wrote an equal amount of
prose material.
John Donne’s influence
Donne’s poetry influenced the younger poets who came to be known as theMetaphysicals. It then
suffered a decline in popularity until the twentieth century, when Donne came to be seen as one of
English literature's standard authors.
A man of warm affections, Donne loved to think that his soul could hold communion with distant
friends in a rapt trance such as that in which the solitary mystic, striving to shut out every impression
of sense, sought to transport his soul into direct communion with the great soul of the universe. It
may have been but a half-belief, a pleasing self-imposture, but that it was earnest, we cannot doubt.
there is a strange, though by no means unexampled, division between the two periods of his life and
the two classes of his work. Roughly speaking, almost the whole of at least the secular verse belongs
to the first division of the life, almost the whole of the prose to the second. Again, by far the greater
part of the verse is animated by what may be called a spiritualized worldliness and sensuality, the
whole of the prose by a spiritualism which has left worldliness far behind. The conjunction is, I say,
not unknown: it was specially prevalent in the age of Donne's birth and early life. It has even passed
into something of a commonplace in reference to that Renaissance of which, as it slowly passed from
south to north, Donne was one of the latest and yet one of the most perfect exponents. The strange
story which Brantôme tells of Margaret of Navarre summoning a lover to the church under whose flags
his mistress lay buried, and talking with him of her, shows, a generation before Donne's birth, the
influence which in his day had made its way across the narrow seas as it had earlier across the Alps,
and had at each crossing gathered gloom and force if it had lost lightness and color. Always in him are
the two conflicting forces of intense enjoyment of the present, and intense feeling of the contrast of
that present with the future. He has at once the transcendentalism which saves sensuality and the
passion which saves mysticism. Indeed the two currents run so full and strong in him, they clash and
churn their waves so boisterously, that this is of itself sufficient to account for the obscurity, the
extravagance, the undue quaintness which have been charged against him. He was "of the first order
of poets"; but he was not of the first among the first. Only Dante perhaps among these greatest of all
had such a conflict and ebullition of feeling to express. For, as far as we can judge, in Shakespeare,
even in the Sonnets, the poetical power mastered to some extent at the very first the rough material
of the poetic instinct, and prepared before expression the things to be expressed. In Dante we can
trace something of the presence of slag and dross in the ore; and even in Dante we can perhaps trace
faintly also the difficulty of smelting it. Donne, being a lesser poet than Dante, shows it everywhere. It
is seldom that even for a few lines, seldomer that for a few stanzas, the power of the furnace is equal
to the volumes of ore and fuel that are thrust into it. But the fire is always there--overtasked,
overmastered for a time, but never choked or extinguished; and ever and anon from gaps in the
smouldering mass there breaks forth such a sudden flow of pure molten metal, such a flower of
incandescence, as not even in the very greatest poets of all can be ever surpassed or often rivalled.
For critical, and indeed for general purposes, the poetical works of Donne may be divided into three
parts, separated from each other by a considerable difference of character and, in one case at least, of
time. These are the Satires, which are beyond all doubt very early; the Elegies and other amatory
poems, most of which are certainly, and all probably, early likewise; and the Divine and Miscellaneous
Poems, some of which may not be late, but most of which certainly are. All three divisions have
certain characteristics in common; but the best of these characteristics, and some which are not
common to the three, belong to the second and third only.
It was the opinion of the late seventeenth and of the whole of the eighteenth century that Donne,
though a clever man, had no ear.
two of the well-established strains of complaint against Donne: over-intellectuality and moral
impropriety. Masson's working assumption is apparent in the sentence: 'The peculiarity by which they
[the 'Metaphysicals'] are associated is that they seemed to regard verse less as a vehicle for pure
matter of imagination, or for social allusion and invective, than as a means of doctrinal exposition or
abstruse and quaint discourse on any topic whatsoever'. Added to his conviction that Donne and his
followers were not doing what he conceived of as the purposes of poetry, he found in the school 'an
inordinately particular recognition of the fact of sex'. He distinguishes this from 'the perception of love
as an influence in all human affairs'
What he did was to unite the vicious peculiarities of others, to indulge habitually in what they indulged
in only occasionally. He was not, for example, the first to substitute philosophical reflection for poetic
feeling, as his contemporaries, Samuel Daniel, Sir John Davies, and Fulke Greville, were
simultaneously engaged in doing the same thing. He was not the first to indulge in abuse of wit, in
fanciful speculations, in extravagant imagery, or in grotesque eccentricities of expression. But, in
addition to uniting these vices, he carried them further than any of his predecessors or
contemporaries had done, and, aided by the spirit of the age, he succeeded in making them popular.
We find little to admire and nothing to love. We see that far-fetched similes, extravagant metaphors,
are not here occasional blemishes but the substance. He should have given us simple images, simply
expressed; for he loved and suffered much: but fashion was stronger than nature.
T.J. Backus, like Collins, saw the seventeenth century as producing a style of writing
in which intellect and fancy played a greater part than imagination or passion…that tendency to
intellectual subtilty which appears in the prose and verse of the Elizabethan writers, and occasionally
extends its contagion to Shakespeare himself, became with [the Metaphysicals] a controlling principle.
As a natural consequence, they allowed ingenuity to gain undue predominance over feeling.
Of Donne he remarked:
His ideal of poetical composition was fulfilled by clothing every thought in a series of analogies, always
remote, often repulsive and inappropriate. His versification is singularly harsh and tuneless, and the
crudeness of his expression is in unpleasant contrast with the ingenuity of his thinking.
Donne was…by far the most modern and contemporaneous of the writers of his time. He rejected all
the classical tags and imagery of the Elizabethans, he borrowed nothing from French or Italian
tradition. He arrived at an excessive actuality of style, and it was because he struck them as so novel
and so completely in touch with his own age that his immediate coevals were so much fascinated with
him.
ELEGY XX.
TO HIS MISTRESS GOING TO BED.
by John Donne
COME, madam, come, all rest my powers defy ;
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
The foe ofttimes, having the foe in sight,
Is tired with standing, though he never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven's zone glittering,
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breast-plate, which you wear,
That th' eyes of busy fools may be stopp'd there.
Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime
Tells me from you that now it is bed-time.
Off with that happy busk, which I envy,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown going off such beauteous state reveals,
As when from flowery meads th' hill's shadow steals.
Off with your wiry coronet, and show
The hairy diadems which on you do grow.
Off with your hose and shoes ; then softly tread
In this love's hallow'd temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes heaven's angels used to be
Revealed to men ; thou, angel, bring'st with thee
A heaven-like Mahomet's paradise ; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know
By this these angels from an evil sprite ;
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann'd,
My mine of precious stones, my empery ;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee !
To enter in these bonds, is to be free ;
Then, where my hand is set, my soul shall be.
Full nakedness ! All joys are due to thee ;
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are like Atlanta's ball cast in men's views ;
That, when a fool's eye lighteth on a gem,
His earthly soul might court that, not them.
Like pictures, or like books' gay coverings made
For laymen, are all women thus array'd.
Themselves are only mystic books, which we
—Whom their imputed grace will dignify—
Must see reveal'd. Then, since that I may know,
As liberally as to thy midwife show
Thyself ; cast all, yea, this white linen hence ;
There is no penance due to innocence :
To teach thee, I am naked first ; why then,
What needst thou have more covering than a man?
Donne draws on the Neoplatonic conception of physical love and religious love as being two manifestations of the
same impulse. In theSymposium (ca. third or fourth century B.C.E.), Plato describes physical love as the lowest rung
of a ladder. According to the Platonic formulation, we are attracted first to a single beautiful person, then to beautiful
people generally, then to beautiful minds, then to beautiful ideas, and, ultimately, to beauty itself, the highest rung of
the ladder. Centuries later, Christian Neoplatonists adapted this idea such that the progression of love culminates in a
love of God, or spiritual beauty. Naturally, Donne used his religious poetry to idealize the Christian love for God, but
the Neoplatonic conception of love also appears in his love poetry, albeit slightly tweaked. For instance, in the bawdy
“Elegy 19. To His Mistress Going to Bed” (1669), the speaker claims that his love for a naked woman surpasses
pictorial representations of biblical scenes. Many love poems assert the superiority of the speakers’ love to quotidian,
ordinary love by presenting the speakers’ love as a manifestation of purer, Neoplatonic feeling, which resembles the
sentiment felt for the divine.
Particularly in Donne’s love poetry, voyages of discovery and conquest illustrate the mystery and magnificence of the
speakers’ love affairs. European explorers began arriving in the Americas in the fifteenth century, returning to
England and the Continent with previously unimagined treasures and stories. By Donne’s lifetime, colonies had been
established in North and South America, and the riches that flowed back to England dramatically transformed English
society. In “The Good-Morrow” and “The Sun Rising,” the speakers express indifference toward recent voyages of
discovery and conquest, preferring to seek adventure in bed with their beloveds. This comparison demonstrates the
way in which the beloved’s body and personality prove endlessly fascinating to a person falling in love. The speaker
of “Elegy 19. To His Mistress Going to Bed” calls his beloved’s body “my America! my new-found land” (27), thereby
linking the conquest of exploration to the conquest of seduction. To convince his beloved to make love, he compares
the sexual act to a voyage of discovery. The comparison also serves as the speaker’s attempt to convince his
beloved of both the naturalness and the inevitability of sex. Like the Americas, the speaker explains, she too will
eventually be discovered and conquered.
Angels symbolize the almost-divine status attained by beloveds in Donne’s love poetry. As divine messengers,
angels mediate between God and humans, helping humans become closer to the divine. The speaker compares his
beloved to an angel in “Elegy 19. To His Mistress Going to Bed.” Here, the beloved, as well as his love for her, brings
the speaker closer to God because with her, he attains paradise on earth. According to Ptolemaic astronomy, angels
governed the spheres, which rotated around the earth, or the center of the universe.
John Donne’s poem, Elegy 19. To His Mistress Going To Bed is a sexually charged, orgasmicdrenched work of twenty-four rhyming couplets. The language he uses throughout has a visceral power,
with subtlety and allusion completely abandoned in favor of blatant and unmasked copulation between
two lovers. Though the title leaves little doubt of the subject of the poem, it honestly took me by surprise
that Donne is so continually suggestive and at times assaultive in his account of their coupling.
Instead of using metaphors to alleviate the forthrightness of his subject, Donne chooses to be far more
direct and unambiguous about the act being performed. In lines like, “Off with that happy busk, which I
envy,” (1. 9) and “Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,” (1.33) there is essentially no doubt of what is
occurring. His use of similes, as with “…like heaven’s zone glistering,” (1.5) and “A heaven like Mahomet’s
paradise;” (1. 21) cut right to the heart of the poet’s intent, comparing his lover’s body to celestial bodies of
the blessed afterlife. The meaning is clear: the narrator has found heaven here on Earth, in the naked
beauty of his mistress and in her embrace.
The tone, though overtly sexual and electric, is whimsical and frenetic, witty and even a bit messy.
Donne’s rhyming lines tend to be afterthoughts, with the meat of the poetic flavor coming at the beginning
of the stanzas. For example, in lines 31-34, his endings are, “free” and “be,” then “thee” and “be,”
suggesting a lack of interest in keeping the rhyme scheme fresh or even interesting. He seems to have
chosen the rhyming couplets intentionally, as a way of catering to the closed form without exerting
excessive thought or energy on it. His interest lies in the raw energy of female flesh and its effect on the
narrator, rather than ingenious stanza endings or clever rhymes. Immediacy of emotion and passionate
fervor appear to be the point of the poem, even if it comes at the expense of his stanza structure.
His style is brisk, fiery, and full of titillating imagery that is unrelenting and wholly unapologetic. It is the
brashness of the language and the lack of seduction involved in the scene that stands out most for me. I
like the fact that Donne is not interested in wooing his lover, only in getting her clothes off of her body as
quickly as possible and joining their dual nether regions into one without delay. His references to angels,
Greek gods and earthly souls illustrate a narrator outside of the realm of pure physical beauty and swept
up into bodily delights that ascend to the very heavens. Donne’s narrator begins with pure lust, but
climaxes with soul-enriching, orgiastic delights that have previously been uncharted by him or any other.
“O my America!” indeed.
In "Elegy XIX," Donne characteristically combines secular and heavenly aspects of
love in an attempt to seduce his mistress: "Now off with those shoes, and then safely
tread/In love's hallowed temple, this soft bed" (17-8). In these lines, Donne is
conparing the couple's bed to a temple and by association, the acts that he wants to
perform there will be sacred, even though they are expressions of secular lust and
desire. In order to seduce his mistress, he catalogs her clothing, comparing her clothes
to stars--"0ff with that girdle, like heaven's zone glistering,/But a far fairer world
encompassing" (5-6)--and to angel ' s clothing - - "In such white robes, heaven ' s
angels used to be/Received by men; thou, angel, bring' st with thee/A heaven like
Mahomet's paradise" (19-21). Her clothing is so beautiful because it contains a beauty
that is even greater than the articles of clothing themselves, and, thus, by praising her
clothing he is lauding her beauty. In addition to this cataloging of clothing, he also
analyzes her body and uses comparison to praise her physical form that is slowly
revealed as the clothing comes off. "Your gown going off, such beauteous state
reveals/As when from flowery meads th' hill's shadow steals,' (13-4).
After he praises her clothing and her body, he asks her to give his roving hands the
right to touch her. At thie point, he continues his comparison, linking her to a newfound kingdom, a "mine of precious stones" (29) and "books' gay coverings" (39). He
stresses that she is like a kingdom that is -safeliest when one man manned" (28),
insinuating that this woman should allow him and only him into her bed because she
is more worthy if she is monogamous. He carries this theme through by comparing
women to "mystic books, which only we/(Whom their imputed grace will
dignify)/Must see revealed" (41-2), stressing that a woman such as his mistress is a
gem that should be reserved for men like himself who know how to appropriately
appreciate L~ey,~va~ue ~;~ Other men can "read" her covering but only the speaker
has the ability to "read" her nakedness, just like a layman can appreciate a pretty book
cover but does not know how to read the pages of the book. And to prove to his
mistress that he has her best interests in mind, he takes off his own clothing to set an
example for her.
Grierson argues that passion in Donne's poetry "is purified and enriched by being
brought into harmony with his whole nature, spiritual as well as physical. It has lost
the exclusive consciousness of itself which is lust, and become merged in an entire
affection, as a turbid and discolored stream is lost in the sea" (33). This passage
reflects Grierson's privileging of closure and unity. He praises Donne' s work for its
ability to resolve the conflict between love and lust which results in a unified vision
of love. He acknowledges Donne's playfulness, but praises how adept he is at moving
between this playfulness and a skillful use of words to convey a serious message that
has real import. This gaiety, in fact, lessens the negative impact of his sometimes
bawdy words, and thus balances the pull between secular passion and
transcendental love.
Even though Hunt does not think that Donne effectively resolves the conflict
between the two views of love, he nonetheless appreciates Donne' s use of extended
metaphor throughout the Elegy. Donne's comparison of love to war "freshens this
stale conceit by exploiting its latent dramatic possibilities. He makes the beginning of
the poem a call to battle, a vigorous challenge delivered in a tone of swagger and
arrogance" (Hunt 19). Donne compares his mistress to the riches of a colonized land,
a comparison which allows the speaker to address "the mistress in the specific role
of an explorer who is requesting a royal patent ('license') which will permit him to
discover a new land, explore its unknown riches, conquer it, and having established
himself as its autocratic monarch, bring it under the firm mastery of his civil
authority" (Hunt 20). Thus, the sexual conquest of the mistress becomes a praising of
colonialiem and when juxtaposed with this colonialism, the act of seduction assumes
grand proportions and importance. Hunt praises Donne's metaphors because they
intellectualize and philosophize the sexual experience, a New Critic characteristic
which poststructuralist theorists will interrogate. In her article "Donne's 'Elegy 19':
The Busk Between a Pair of Bodies," Sandy Feinstein negotiates this movement
between text, history, reader, and criticism byanalyzing the meaning of the busk in
Donne's poem. She explains the importance that was placed on fashion in Donne's
time and illustrates the struggles that surrounded the busk which was a metal object
that "was placed in the lining of the Basquine (tight fitting bodice), in the busk
pocket" (64) and was "one of the primary means to create the stiff, erect, masculine
visual effect that was achieved by flattening the chest and stomach and elongating
the waist" (64). Some men did not want women wearing busks because they allowed
women to control their bodies, but other men favored them because they served to
control the woman's body. The busk therefore both threatens and sustains the
hierarchical order which devalued and deprivileged women. She analyzes the
struggles over the busk through twentieth century feminist eyes because modern
readers of the poem will need to be made aware of the history of the busk as well as
its significance to women today. This balancing act can only be achievedby
historicizing the past and the present in terms of a struggle for the future. Achsah
Guibbory analyzes Donne's language of love by historicizing both the Renaissance
and the postmodern conception of love. She writes that "for modern reader,
accustomed to distinct separations between private and public, love and politics may
seem strange bedfellows" (811). She argues that love itself is political because it
always already involves power relationships between men and women. To claim that
Donne was merely being playful when he objectified and seduced women in his
poems is, according to Guibbory, a repression of the underlying political struggles for
power that occurred _and are still occuring between men and women. Guibbory
claims that Donne,s misogyny is a response to a female monarch and to the possible
threat to male superiority that she posed. Thus, even as Donne is supposedly
glorifying the female body, he in fact is expressing a revulsion of the very form that
threatens patriarchy. In Elegy XIX, then, "Donne transfers power from the woman,
desired and praised, to the man who hopes to possess her" (Guibbory 821).
It is in these various contexts and traditions that we must see Donne's reference to the
"busk" in "Elegy 19." In his poem, moreover, the word "busk" is particularly rich in
meaning. Donne uses the word as a noun, referring specifically to the article of
fashion that so worried Gosson. Even so, the potential puns may have suggested
themselves to Donne, considering the poem is concerned with "getting ready" and that
it acts as "bait" to catch the Lady--or vice versa, the Lady's bait to catch him.
In "Elegy 19" the significance of the busk is manifold. On the one hand, and most
obviously, it introduces Donne's running pun and theme of "erection," a preoccupation
that might be said to culminate in the witty "flesh upright" of line 24. Busks are
straight, erect, and hard, being constructed of wood or whalebone. As the three
illustrations show, they are phallic. That the busk comes between "two bodies" (the
bodice) is precisely what the narrator hopes to achieve. For the Lady's protective
attire, he would substitute himself, one "body," and join the other "body"--the Lady-with his own "busk." The bodice as "breastplate" in line 7 might recall the iconic
images of Minerva, goddess of war, an image that is appropriated by the queen in the
painting Queen Elizabeth and the Three Goddesses (1569); and even after her death,
as represented in the painting, Truth Presents the Queen with a Lance (1625),
Elizabeth is shown wearing a woman warrior's breastplate.(47) Donne's narrator
would have the Lady "unpin that spangled breastplate" (line 7), the "bodies" that
protects her own body from "invasion"; this reference may also be a contemporary
allusion to the iron corsets popular at the time. In short, the narrator would have her
relinquish her seemingly armorial defense; then, joined to him, he and she would be a
new "pair of bodies"--for which his own fleshly busk would be ready to serve.
Perhaps, too, Donne knew the bawdy toast, "To both ends of the busk," explained by
David Kunzle as a reference to the "two points of sexual interest which seemed all the
more vulnerable, the heavier the armor in between."(48)
The narrator's "envie" might not be surprising since the busk is "ever hard" and "ever
ready" as well as "nigh" to where he would gladly be. Donne explicitly says, it "still
can be," unlike the less constant reality of male virility. The busk is "omni-potent,"
while the narrator is not. The narrator is dependent on what Thomas M. Greene refers
to as "the other," against which he argues the poet defines himself.(49) The "busk," on
the other hand, is not dependent on an "other" to be "still" or "stand," that is "to be,"
but it is dependent on another to fulfill its function, to create an erect and flattened
torso. It is "happy" not only for its situation but for its literally infinite control; it
makes no effort to be what it is or where it is. And not even the Lady can weaken its
state and power, and though it clearly can be discarded, it suffers not at all from
rejection.
Critics have argued about the masculine narcissism and phallocentricity of this
poem.(53) Although, as is usual in Donne's poetry, the woman is given no voice, she
is here given a challenging presence, albeit one of haute couture
The last question posed by the narrator is therefore provocative and telling: "What
needst thou have more covering than a man." As I have been arguing, it was in part
the "covering" that enabled women to assert their presence, that blurred
distinctions, however artificially, however temporarily, however superficially. The
irony of this "covering" is exploited by Donne who may at once suggest the high and
low end of the hierarchy of male and female control, or lack of control, when it
comes to sexuality. On the one hand, the "covering" could be the appropriation of
masculine eroticism by women made possible by devices such as busks and
breastplates, devices that enabled a woman to control her body's shape, function,
and even access. On the other hand, the "covering" may remind the reader that men
and women are little different from animals whose instincts drive the male to
"cover," or mate with, the female, and the female to let him. The horse, for whom
the term "cover" specifically applies in animal husbandry, represented "carnal
nature, passion, and irrationality of appetite" in emblematic and allegorical
literature.(62) Donne may have been more than a little aware of the implicit
antitheses of the questions. Though in the end the narrator may be the only one we
know for sure is naked, it is a nakedness that dresses itself in questions about the
body and the part it plays in defining the sexual roles of men and women--questions
that are left as unanswered and provoking as the one that finally closes the
poem.(63)
The poem falls into two sections


ll.1-24 deal with the undressing
ll.25-48 with nakedness.
Donne is obviously impatient, re-iterating the opening ‘Come’, as well as the commands ‘Off with ...’ in
ll.5,11, 15, 17, and other similar exhortations. He wants action, not sleep.
Lines 1-24
Just as the Elizabethans itemised each part of a woman's anatomy in the conventions of their love poetry,
so Donne, in mockery, itemises each article of clothing that needs removing. It is not long before we
realise how much more extensive a lady's wardrobe was in those days, and how many layers of clothing
she wore







The girdle (or ‘zone’) is followed by
That spangled breastplate’ and by
The corset (‘busk’)
Only then can the gown come off
Headpiece
Then shoes
This leaves her in her under-dress or petticoat which he then likens to the white robes of angels,
rather than of ghosts.
Lines 25-48
The final nakedness is preceded by some energetic foreplay: ‘Licence my roving hands’. The imagery is
of exploration and discovery. She is his possession, ‘My kingdom’. Finally she is about to slip off her final
undergarment, and ‘Full nakedness!’ is celebrated. Theological imagery ofrevelation is used, as well as of
being given grace to receive it. This poetic strip-tease, however, stops just where all teases stop, without
the full knowledge of whether she has actually ‘cast all ... this white lynnen hence’. All we know at the end
is that the poet at least is naked in anticipation of their love-making.
nticipation
There is something in Going to Bed of the ecstasy of love: the anticipation of sex is exciting, and the
celebration of nakedness. There are not, in fact, too many poems in the English language which do this:
most poets are more modest than Donne. There is a certain irony that later Donne became a
notedclergyman and preacher. No wonder his immediate family were not happy about these early poems
being printed soon after his death. The two things that link love and religion in Donne's life are passion
and imagery.
Completeness
The other theme, born out by the imagery, is that of the completeness of the lovers' world. They occupy
the same space as they do in The Sunne Rising: the bed in the room. Within that space he is king and
she is



‘My kingdom’
‘My Emperie’
In the language of post-colonial literature, she is his colony ‘my America!’- one of the first
references to that country in English poetry.
The two main focuses of imagery in Going to Bed are the religious and the geographical. As in Aire and
Angels, the woman in her underclothes is likened to an angel (1.19), who brings the joys of Paradise
described in Muslim tradition. He also plays with the idea of ghosts (‘Ill spirits walk in white’), by saying
that we can distinguish one from the other by which part of our anatomy goes ‘upright’, a frankly erotic
play on words.
Love’s temple
The bed becomes ‘loves hallow'd temple’. Donne has used the temple image inThe Flea, for a
more bathetic effect. The woman's nakedness is likened to ‘souls unbodied’. This idea is explored in The
Anniversarie also: the bliss of the soul is finally to escape the body at death. Here the bliss of the body is
to escape clothes (ll.33-34). The language is religious: the Bible talks of death in terms of bodies being
clothed, in 1 Corinthians 15:53-54 and in 2 Corinthians 5:2-4, where nakedness is also mentioned.
A mystery
Then in the religious imagery we have references to ‘Themselves are mystick books’. Many men have
this sense that women are mysterious beings. A similar image to bodies as books comes in The Extasie.
In any religion where asacred book is central, book imagery frequently takes on religious overtones.
Amystery, in religious terms, is something hidden which cannot be completely grasped through human
reason. Instead, understanding needs to come throughrevelation, and the revelation is given by ‘imputed
grace’ (l.42). Men cannot earn a revelation of women, whether the revelation be simply of her nakedness
or of her ‘mystery’. The woman has to ‘impute’ it.
More on imputed?
Covering
The last religious image in this dense theological dialectic concerns the idea of ‘covering’ (l.48). To ‘cover’
can mean to clothe the body or to put or lay something over an object to protect or hide it. It is also used
of horses when a stallion ‘covers’ (mates with) a mare. Donne takes these meanings and produces a
complex image which works at three levels:






The literal: clothes as covering
The sexual innuendo: that a man ‘covers’ a woman in intercourse
Donne may also be referring to the teaching of Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:6that a woman should
cover her head as a sign of submission to her husband’s authority and protection. Here, however,
the poet is asking the woman to remove her clothing, saying he will be her ‘covering’ instead.
The tone of Going to Bed is joking yet passionate, or at least, intense and energetic. As usual,
Donne is full of arguments, and he strings these along in an amusing commentary. Given the
topic, the language is bound to be full of sexualinnuendoand puns.Childbirth features in ‘Until I
labour, I in labour lie’, where the second ‘labour’ means being in the agony/anticipation of
childbirth, waiting for the birth to happen. This links up with the ‘Midwife’ at the end, neatly tying
the poem up.
The sexual innuendo of ‘tir'd with standing’, ‘still can stand’, and ‘flesh upright’ is obvious, as are
the roving hands in all their directions.
There is some attempt to make the language sensual in a way not usual with Donne: the softness
of the lines 16-20, and the nature image going with ‘beautious state’, for example.
All Donne’s elegies are written in non-stanzaic form, basically as iambicpentameters rhyming as couplets.
It is a very basic poetic form, but suitable for longer poems, a famous example being
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Donne tends to package his sense into couplets, ll.19-23 being a rare
exception, moving the form towards the later development of the heroic couplet. And, of course, this
enables the poem to finish with a neat couplet to round it off.
THE FLEA.
by John Donne
Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deny'st me is;
Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea, our two bloods mingled be;
Confess it, this cannot be said
5
A sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead,
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pampered swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas is more than we would do.
tetrameter
pentameter
tetrameter
pentameter
tetrameter
pentameter
tetrameter
pentameter
pentameter
Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, nay more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, we'are met,
And cloistered in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to this, self murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.
tetrameter
pentameter
tetrameter
pentameter
tetrameter
pentameter
tetrameter
pentameter
pentameter
Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?
In what could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thou
Find'st not thyself, nor me the weaker now;
'Tis true, then learn how false, fears be;
Just so much honour, when thou yield'st to me,
Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee.
10
15
20
25
tetrameter
pentameter
tetrameter
pentameter
tetrameter
pentameter
tetrameter
pentameter
pentameter
The speaker tells his beloved to look at the flea before them and to note “how little” is that thing that she denies him.
For the flea, he says, has sucked first his blood, then her blood, so that now, inside the flea, they are mingled; and
that mingling cannot be called “sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead.” The flea has joined them together in a way
that, “alas, is more than we would do.”
As his beloved moves to kill the flea, the speaker stays her hand, asking her to spare the three lives in the flea: his
life, her life, and the flea’s own life. In the flea, he says, where their blood is mingled, they are almost married—no,
more than married—and the flea is their marriage bed and marriage temple mixed into one. Though their parents
grudge their romance and though she will not make love to him, they are nevertheless united and cloistered in the
living walls of the flea. She is apt to kill him, he says, but he asks that she not kill herself by killing the flea that
contains her blood; he says that to kill the flea would be sacrilege, “three sins in killing three.”
“Cruel and sudden,” the speaker calls his lover, who has now killed the flea, “purpling” her fingernail with the “blood of
innocence.” The speaker asks his lover what the flea’s sin was, other than having sucked from each of them a drop of
blood. He says that his lover replies that neither of them is less noble for having killed the flea. It is true, he says, and
it is this very fact that proves that her fears are false: If she were to sleep with him (“yield to me”), she would lose no
more honor than she lost when she killed the flea.
Form
This poem alternates metrically between lines in iambic tetrameter and lines in iambic pentameter, a 4-5 stress
pattern ending with two pentameter lines at the end of each stanza. Thus, the stress pattern in each of the nine-line
stanzas is 454545455. The rhyme scheme in each stanza is similarly regular, in couplets, with the final line rhyming
with the final couplet: AABBCCDDD.
Commentary
This funny little poem again exhibits Donne’s metaphysical love-poem mode, his aptitude for turning even the least
likely images into elaborate symbols of love and romance. This poem uses the image of a flea that has just bitten the
speaker and his beloved to sketch an amusing conflict over whether the two will engage in premarital sex. The
speaker wants to, the beloved does not, and so the speaker, highly clever but grasping at straws, uses the flea, in
whose body his blood mingles with his beloved’s, to show how innocuous such mingling can be—he reasons that if
mingling in the flea is so innocuous, sexual mingling would be equally innocuous, for they are really the same thing.
By the second stanza, the speaker is trying to save the flea’s life, holding it up as “our marriage bed and marriage
temple.”
But when the beloved kills the flea despite the speaker’s protestations (and probably as a deliberate move to squash
his argument, as well), he turns his argument on its head and claims that despite the high-minded and sacred ideals
he has just been invoking, killing the flea did not really impugn his beloved’s honor—and despite the high-minded and
sacred ideals she has invoked in refusing to sleep with him, doing so would not impugn her honor either.
This poem is the cleverest of a long line of sixteenth-century love poems using the flea as an erotic image, a genre
derived from an older poem of Ovid. Donne’s poise of hinting at the erotic without ever explicitly referring to sex, while
at the same time leaving no doubt as to exactly what he means, is as much a source of the poem’s humor as the silly
image of the flea is; the idea that being bitten by a flea would represent “sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead” gets
the point across with a neat conciseness and clarity that Donne’s later religious lyrics never attained.
THE GOOD-MORROW.
by John Donne
I WONDER by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved ? were we not wean'd till then ?
But suck'd on country pleasures, childishly ?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den ?
'Twas so ; but this, all pleasures fancies be ;
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.
And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear ;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone ;
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown ;
Let us possess one world ; each hath one, and is one.
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest ;
Where can we find two better hemispheres
Without sharp north, without declining west ?
Whatever dies, was not mix'd equally ;
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die.
Few come close to such a thorough expression of love as John Donne. In his poem, ‘The Good
Morrow,’ Donne fully employs the numerous devices of poetry to relay his speaker’s endearing
message to his lover. He uses elements of structure, figurative language, point-of-view, and tone to
creatively support his speaker in the endeavor. However, not all aspects of the poem are clear due to
the astute allusions and references by the learned Donne. Examples of these unclear elements are
found in the first stanza’s ‘seaven sleepers den’ phrase, the second stanza’s exploration imagery, and
the final stanza’s hemispherical imagery. On the surface, these references may seem to be carelessly
included and non-supportive of the central theme. But we will come to see that these references do
much to further support the speaker’s message. We will come to discover that Donne’s ‘The Good
Morrow’ is poem that efficiently uses devices to maximize the poetic potential of the verse, and
contains erudite allusions and references that further support the speaker’s message to his beloved.
‘The Good Morrow’ is interestingly structured to aid the speaker in his message. The poem is divided
into three stanzas, each of which includes seven lines. In addition, each of these stanzas is further
divided into a quatrain and a triplet. In the book, John Donne and the Metaphysical Gesture, Judah
Stampfer notes that each ‘iambic pentameter quatrain is rounded out, not with a couplet, but a triplet
with an Alexandrine close a, b, a, b, c, c, c.’ (142). This division is not solely reflected in the rhyme
scheme, but also in the verse. For example, the quatrain is used to reveal the speaker’s state of mind,
while the triplet allows the speaker to reflect on that mindset (Stampfer 142). In addition, the first
stanza strategically uses assonance to reinforce the word ‘we.’ This is done by a repetition of the long
e sound. For example, all of these words are from the first stanza: we, wean’d, countrey, childlishly,
sleepers, fancies, bee, any, beauty, see, desir’d, dreame, thee. As you can see, this is not merely
coincidence, but an ingenious strategy to further emphasize the union of the two lovers. However,
Donne uses assonance for the opposite effect in the last stanza. Instead of focusing on the couple, the
speaker focuses on himself by reinforcing the word ‘I.’ This is done by a repetition of the long i sound.
For example, all of these words can be found in the third stanza: I, thine, mine, finde, declining, dyes,
alike, die. True, there are instances of the long e sound in the third stanza, but the long i sound
predominates. Due to this, there is an obvious opposition to what the speaker says, and to what the
musicality of the poem suggests. From a musical perspective, instead of being primarily focused on
the union, the speaker appears to be more concerned with himself. However, this view will change as
we further discuss the poem.
Donne’s use of figurative language, along with the point-of-view and tone of the speaker, enhance his
poem. First of all, sexual imagery is present in the first stanza. For example, words such as ‘wean’d’
and ‘suck’d’ elicit breast images. These loaded terms also help identify ‘countrey pleasures’ as a
metaphor for breasts. Another example of metaphor is the word ‘beauty’ in line 6, which actually
represents the woman. Metaphysical conceits are also present in the poem. An example is the
hemispherical imagery representing the lovers in the final stanza. In the second stanza, there is an
example of hyperbole when the speaker says ‘makes one little roome, an every where.’ This is an
obvious exaggeration and a physical impossibility. There is also use of paradox in the poem. For
example, when the speaker says: ‘true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest.’ Obviously, this phrase is
paradoxical as hearts cannot rest in faces. An example of metonomy can be found in the last stanza
when the speaker states: ‘My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares.’ The speaker does not mean
that his face literally appears in his lover’s eye, but that she is aware of him. There are also two
allusions in the poem, one with the ‘seaven sleepers den,’ the other with the ‘hemispheares,’ both of
which are explained in greater detail later in the paper. Furthermore, there is a superb example of
symbolism in the poem. This can be found once in the poem itself, and in the title”good morrow.’ This
not only represents the physical sunrise, but also symbolizes the birth of the awakened individual. In
addition, the point-of-view of the speaker is from the first-person perspective. Although there are two
individuals involved in the poem, only the male speaker is heard. And finally, the tone is casually
intimate. Clues to the informal atmosphere of the poem can be found by glancing at the coarse
language used by the speaker, such as: ‘suck’d,’ ‘snorted,’ and ‘got.’ Despite the coarseness, the
speaker is clearly infatuated with the women being addressed.
Fig. 1. Plato’s Cave Allegory. (‘Allegory’)
The phrase ‘seaven sleepers den’ introduced in the first stanza could be interpreted in more than one
way. The most direct event this phrase might be alluding to is a ‘Christian and Mohammedan legend of
the seven youths of Ephesus who hid in a cave for 187 years so as to avoid pagan persecution during
the dawn of Christianity’ (Bloom). Amazingly, these youths did not die, but slept for the entire period
(‘Good’). So the speaker could be comparing the period prior to the realization of their love to the
‘seaven sleepers’ in that they both ‘snorted’, or slept (OED), in what appeared to be a seemingly
infinite amount of time. But except for line 4, there are no other references that take the analogy
further. There is, however, another possibility. In his article, ‘Plato in John Donne’s ‘The Good
Morrow’,’ Christopher Nassaar proposes that this reference may be more accurately alluding to Plato’s
Cave Allegory (20-21; Fig. 1). In Book VII of The Republic, Plato, through Socrates, describes a world
in which mankind has been imprisoned in a cave since birth. These ‘prisoners’ are chained at the legs
and neck, and can only see the shadows on the wall caused by themselves and other objects that
block the firelight (Plato ‘Book’). So everything the prisoners believe to be real is in fact an illusion.
They are mistaking ‘shadows of shadows for reality’ (Nassaar 20). The analogy continues with a
prisoner being released and ascending from the cave into the outside world, where he eventually
comes to discover God, the true reality of the world, and the illusionary nature of the cave (Plato
‘Book’). Donne’s speaker is then comparing his life before love with the confinement of Plato’s
prisoners. Basically, when compared against their present love, ‘all past pleasures have been merely
‘fancies,’ and the women he ‘desir’d, and got’ were only a ‘dream’ of this one woman’ (‘Good’). Then
when he finally ascends from the cave, he discovers the superior reality of his beloved, and desires
not to return to the lust-ridden cave of his past.
The purpose of the exploration imagery in the second stanza is to further reveal the speaker’s
preference of his new relationship over worldly desires. In the triplet of the second stanza, the speaker
states:
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let Maps to other, worlds on worlds have showne,
Let us possesse one world, each hath one, and is one.
This apparent digression actually further supports the Platonic association of the first stanza. First of
all, we must remember that the earthly pursuits of Elizabethan England were much different than from
the present. One of the primary public interests was the ongoing exploration of the world. Although
this had been going on for some time, it was in the ‘Elizabethan-Jacobean era’ that exploration ‘saw
its really great florescence’ (Rugoff 137). And ‘with the Thames the most popular of local
thoroughfares and with sailors scattered throughout the city, the average Londoner of Elizabeth’s day
could hardly help knowing something of ships and sea travel’ (Rugoff 129). However, many people
from this era knew of the Americas, but few had ever been there. Any knowledge they did have was
second-hand and intangible, which left Elizabethans with a distorted perception of the New World.
Therefore, these ‘new worlds’ represent a sort of dream, and the desire to pursue these dreams is
directly related to the illusions of the cave. The speaker views this popular pastime as a tool to placate
slaves, and not an activity for an enlightened individual, such as himself. There is no need for him to
search for ‘new worlds’ since he has already found it in the union of him and his beloved. ‘In
possessing one another, each has gained world enough’ (Bloom).
The hemispherical imagery in the third stanza could be interpreted as both spatially acute, and related
to a farcical Platonic view on the origin of humanity. Donne ‘collapses his geographical metaphor into
the tiny reflection of each lover’s face in the other’s eye’ (Holland 63). So while maintaining the
expansive, world-filling, declaration of his love in the second stanza, the speaker states that this world
of love is contained within their eyes. However, this view proves more difficult to support upon viewing
the following lines. This is because Donne’s speaker metaphorically describes the pair as two separate
‘hemispheares.’ Now it is possible that these two ‘hemispheares’ could represent the eyes. However,
since the speaker is talking about the couple, it would have been more accurate to mention four, not
two. Also, the cardinal point imagery is not clear when using this interpretation. On the other hand,
the hemispherical imagery also alludes to an odd speech by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium
(Holland 64). In his speech, Aristophanes relates an amusing legend of humanity’s origin. Basically,
Aristophanes stated that at the beginning of time, human beings took the form of a sphere. Each
‘individual’ had four legs, four arms, and a single head with a face on either side. The story goes that
as a penalty for angering the gods, Zeus divided each human being into two separate beings. But
although they were distinct individuals, they were still spiritual halves endlessly seeking to reunite as
a whole. This natural instinct to reunite the halves is Aristophanes’ explanation of love (Plato
Symposium 18-23). So Donne’s speaker believes he has found his other half in his beloved, and
together they form the original whole. Furthermore, the cardinal point imagery is cleared up with this
interpretation. For example, the speaker states: ‘Where can we finde two better hemispheares/
Without sharpe North, without declining West” The speaker is saying that in their new united spherical
world, ‘North’ and ‘West’ are absent. The relationship will not be frigid, or ‘sharpe,’ nor will it wane, or
be ‘declining.’ Instead, their relationship will be one of warmth and everlasting love. So now that we
have discussed the various elements included in the poem, what exactly does it mean’
‘The Good Morrow’ is a chronological and spatial poem through which the speaker reveals his growing
maturity and awareness of his love as a response to his awakening, and reinforces this union in the
musicality of the poem. The poem is chronological in that it progresses from a symbolic infant stage in
the first stanza, to the morning of the present in the second, and finally in the last stanza, to an
immortal outlook of their relationship in the future. The poem is spatial in that love is initially
represented as being confined to ‘one little roome,’ or a cave, to expanding to fill an entire ‘world,’
then contracting all this love into a powerful force that is contained in the eyes of the pair. The poem
can also be viewed as a maturing of the speaker in that he progressed from a life of physical lust, to
love, and finally longing to be eternally fused with his beloved. Also, the speaker becomes increasingly
aware of his love for the woman. In the beginning, he was engrossed in other women, but he came to
realize that these women were just reflections of what he was truly chasing, the one real woman. In
addition, the poem is centered on a theme of awakening. The poem begins with the speaker having
been figuratively asleep in a cave, as in Plato’s analogy. But his woman finally releases him and he
emerges into the sunlight, ‘the good morrow,’ a new man growing increasingly aware of his love.
Furthermore, the speaker reinforces this union through the musicality of the verse. The focus actually
begins on the couple with sounds that reinforce ‘we,’ but ends with sound that reinforces ‘I.’ This
represents the union of the two halves into the one ‘I.’
Overall, we have seen how Donne used poetic devices and learned references to support the speaker.
First, we analyzed the unique structure and musical elements within the poem. Then we examined
how Donne used figurative language, point-of-view, and tone to create a more believable speaker.
Next, we took a closer look at ‘seaven sleepers den’ phrase, and saw how it has roots in both Christian
mythology and Platonic allegory. After that, we gained a better understanding of Donne’s use of
exploration imagery in the second stanza. Then we investigated the farcical Platonic basis for the
hemispherical imagery in the third stanza. And finally, we examined the poem from a holistic
perspective and recognized how all of these various elements contributed to the overall message. So
we have come to discover that Donne’s ‘The Good Morrow’ is poem that efficiently uses devices to
maximize the poetic potential of the verse, and contains erudite allusions and references that further
support the speaker’s message to his beloved.
Song: Goe and catch a falling starre, John Donne
GO and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.
If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true and fair.
If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet,
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.
John Donne’s “Song: Go, and Catch a Falling Star” (1633) is a perfect example of Donne’s
earlier playfulness with metaphysical conceits and female sexuality. As a younger poet, before
Donne became an Anglican Theological Doctorate famous for his sermons, John Donne was a
rather ‘maiden-obsessed’ Jacobean poet with a reputation for sonnets about the women of
London. John Donne’s “Song: Go, and Catch a Falling Star”, is an example of some of the
humorous works Donne would come up with for the drunken jokers of English taverns to recite
when out of favor with the ladies.
John Donne (1572 – 1631) was a metaphysical lyrical poet famous for his use of the
metaphysical conceit: a strange and interesting comparison between two subjects when they, in
fact, have very little in common at all. These comparisons are so outrageous that in doing so,
Donne’s poetry could almost be considered metaphysical ‘humor.’ A classic example of
Donne’s work, “The Flea” (1633), shares much of the style and banter of “Song: Go, and Catch a
Falling Star”. In “The Flea”, Donne attempts to persuade a woman to make love with him by
describing a bedbug that had bitten them both, and then comparing that insect to a wedding
bed. In Donne’s argument, because their blood was consequently mingling within the insect,
was that they were already unified in a symbolic sanguine marriage, and so the physical act of
love between them now would be of little consequence to the woman’s principles. This same
sense of humor, the one that made John Donne such a historical poet, is what a reader would find
in Donne’s “Song: Go, and Catch a Falling Star.”
John Donne’s “Song: Go, and Catch a Falling Star” is a metaphysical conceit of the unnaturally
small frequency of fair and virtuous women in the world. Donne uses the fantastic and
impossible examples of catching falling stars; pregnancies with mandrake roots; and hearing
mermaids singing to describe just how hard it is to find a beautiful woman who will stay true and
loyal to her husband. Donne describes in the second and final stanza of “Song: Go, and Catch a
Falling Star” how if one were to search the world for a thousand days and nights, seeing many
strange and wonderful things, they would still not find a single faithful woman. Donne even
goes so far as to state in the last stanza that if he were to know where that perfect woman was,
even if she was next door, she would already be false with several men before he even managed
to walk the few steps to reach her.
In interpreting John Donne’s poem, “Song: Go, and Catch a Falling Star”, it would be quick to
assume he holds some religiously pious distain for women who, by Biblical nature, where liars
and deceivers. True, it seems to be something of a sermon for young clergymen to be weary of
the female seductress and, true, he probably did write it when he was still stinging from an
unfaithful young lover he had when he was himself a young man of reputation, but its
entertaining wit and imaginative conceit almost dictates a humorous jest at female
stereotypes. After all, what lover, after finding a partner unfaithful, doesn’t go through a phase
of distaining the offending sex. John Donne, in his classic style, avenges himself with a sonnet
sharp enough to draw blood, yet still softly touched with humor so to keep it in circulation well
after his death.
“Song: Go, and Catch a Falling Star,” is one of John Donne’s most famous early poems about
female nature. Its lines of witty stereotypical prose would serve as a rallying banner for betrayed
young men throughout London; striking at those femme-fatal’s of the gentleman’s heart. Yet,
the female reader should not loose any love for Donne. He was, after all, a young poet whose
satirical works were his main focus in his early period. In the end, however, he did marry his
loving wife, Anne, to whom he stayed passionately involved until her death in 1617, and never
remarried even though they had a large family of eleven children together.
Donne titled this poem Song, which should be considered when determining its tone. He
intended the poem to be sung to a pre-existing "air or melody." The fact that it was composed as
lyrics explains the two-syllable lines that precede the final line of each stanza. Words that might
sound bitter and cynical seem less so when put to music even if we don't know the tune. The wit
and humor are reminiscent of American country-western songs that wail of lost loves, straying
dogs, and pick-up trucks that break down. If the song is played backwards, the wife or lover
comes back home, as also does the dog; and the motor vehicle runs just fine.
In the first verse, the speaker or singer addresses an unspecified interlocutor, assigning him seven
impossible tasks to perform. No way can a person "catch a falling star" or "Get with child a
mandrake root."
The mandrake is a European herb with a forked root often taken to resemble human legs. It was
the subject of numerous superstitions. The plant was variously believed to be an aphrodisiac, a
cathartic, a poison, and a narcotic. In Othello, Iago plays on the latter meaning when he says:
"Not poppy nor mandragora/ Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world / Shall ever medicine thee to
that sweet sleep." In Donne's song, the operative interpretation is that of legs. But achieving
"oneness" and procreating with a vegetable root is about as likely as catching a falling star.
Similarly impossible are the demands that the interlocutor tell where past years have gone,
explain how the Devil's feet happen to be cloven, how to hear the song of mermaids, avoid the
sting of envy , and finally to find any condition or situation of life that rewards honesty. The
speaker's attitude is cynical, but not to be taken seriously.
In the second verse or stanza, the focus narrows to feminine virtue. The audience are instructed
to set out on a quest to find evidence of the strange and miraculous - a woman who is both true
and fair. Presumably, faithful women may be found among the homely and unattractive, but
those gifted with beauty will have more opportunities for infidelities and will capitalize on them.
The concluding verse tells the person addressed: if he is able to locate one fair and virtuous
woman, please inform the speaker so that he can make a holy pilgrimage to whatever shrine she
inhabits. Then he countermands that instruction saying he would not even walk next door to see
such a woman because, although she may have been virtuous before,
by the time the speaker gets the message from his confidant she will have been false two or three
times.
The poem is written in melodious iambic tetrameter except for the single-foot lines. The rhyme
scheme is ababccddd. Lines 5 and 6 of each verse end in feminine or two-syllable rhymes with
the final syllables unaccented. The extravagance of his hyperbole ("ten thousand days and
nights") and the witty wording of his images counteract the poet's feigned cynicism and
disillusionment. Amazing that he can communicate so clearly with tongue tucked deeply into
cheek.
Donne's writing parallels his career. His early poems, written when he was a libertine known as
"Jack the Rake, have this poem's playful attitude and are variations of the La Donna e Mobile
theme of woman's fickleness.
Those written after his falling in love and eloping with Anne More treat love with sincerity and
seriousness. Examples are his famous Valediction Forbidding Mourning and The Canonization.
Later, having become a clergyman, he wrote his Holy Sonnets in which he turned the language
of his stage-one poems into religious directions. A prime example is his Sonnet 14, which
begins:
Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend
and concludes
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
One would be hard pressed to find another poem by a clergyman in which the Divinity is
addressed in the same manner that one of such persuasion might instruct a dominatrix. is Poem
'Go and catch a Falling Star' describes his cynical attitude towards women and the duality of
good and bad characteristics that all human beings are born with. The poem starts by challenging
the reader to catch a falling star. The falling star can signify something bright and beautiful that
has come to an end and how difficult it is hold on to this goodness for ever. It could also suggest
to the reader to try and make a wish and see if it comes true. In fact for him it is as difficult to
catch a falling star as it is to 'get with child a mandrake root' which shows the stark contrast of
getting a child which is something innocent and joyous to a mandrake root which is used in
witchcraft to wish death on someone. Again the contrast of living and the positive is contrasted
with death and negativity.
He asks 'who cleft the devil's foot' which is a question he poses to God, as if to imply that He
created evil in the devil himself. 'Teach me to hear mermaids singing, or to keep off envy's
stinging,' is the next line which again shows the beauty and innocence of a mermaid and her song
which contrasts with envy and the stinging the same beauty can cause. This could be a
comparison of a woman and her beauty and the ugly emotions she could hide under that 'beauty.
He continues to ask 'What wind serves to advance an honest mind' which suggests that no
amount of wind can blow goodness or honesty into a person.
The next line 'ride ten thousand days and nights, till age snow white hairs on thee' challenges the
reader to travel far and wide and experience 'strange wonders' in order to find a woman 'true and
fair' This is his cynicism about the character of a woman and how difficult it is to find someone
who is genuine and trustworthy. He concludes by saying that if you are lucky to find a woman
like that 'yet she will be false, ere I come, to two or three.' This shows that for him that woman
will only be good for a short while after which the falseness will show through. The satirical
aspect of his belief is seen in the last line 'ere I come, to two or three' which implies that for a
while she might be good but after a while she will show her true colours.
The cynical attitude of John Donne about life, about religion and about women is shown
throughout this poem. 'Go and catch a falling star' summarises this attitude by suggesting that all
things remain good only for a short while after which they have to come down the pedestal.
In his poem, Go and Catch a Falling Star, John Donne demonstrates the impossibility of finding
the perfect female. The poem, with its quiet yet bitter cynicism of women, reflects the underlying
theme of many of Donne's other works in which he blames the evilness of women for his pain
and heartbreak.
The first stanza of the poem is a list of impossible tasks, all of which Donne compares to finding
an honest, good woman. The poem begins with a strong yet impossible command: "Go and catch
a falling star". Already Donne has demonstrated something that is basically impossible. He does
not use fallen but "falling," showing that hope is not all lost and that although the star (often a
symbol of hope and faith) is falling, it has not completely hit the ground yet.
So, while Donne asks the impossible he still exhibits hope. He then states to "Get with child a
mandrake root." The mandrake is a poisonous and narcotic plant that was formerly falsely used
for its roots, which has been said to resemble the human flesh, to promote conception.
Supposedly, when pulled from the ground it would let out an awesome shriek and cause death to
the person who uprooted it. By using "child" and "mandrake root," Donne exemplifies the
deception of the root and the impossibility of getting a child from the root.
Also, the mandrake reflects the lethality of women perceived by Donne. In the third and fourth
line, Donne orders the reader to tell him exactly everything about the past and who split the
Devil's hoof. Both, including his desire to hear mermaids sing, are mysteries that are impossible
to solve. Also, the devil's hoof and mandrake root resemble each other with 3 prongs each,
symbolizing the multiplicities and deception of women which is furthered by Donne's mention of
mermaids, creatures that are women only from the waist up and lure men to death with their
beautiful voices (similar to the Sirens in The Odyssey).
Donne's bitterness is revealed in the sixth to ninth lines, "Or to keep off envy's stinging an honest
mind." The envy he speaks of is the envy of others that lust after another man's woman, and he
argues that it is impossible for jealous ones not to torment and compete with the man they are
envious of. Donne also implies that honesty is never awarded because he has not found a wind
that has brought prosperity to the honest mind, something he believes to be impossible to find. In
modern day terms, "Nice guys finish last."
In the second stanza Donne implies that no matter howlong and far one searches, the perfect
woman will never be found. He achieves this by comparing finding that woman to a "strange
sight" and uses the paradoxical concept of "Things invisible go see." He is telling the reader to
go see something invisible, which is obviously impossible and extremely mocking, much like his
first stanze. He then says to the reader that he can "Ride ten thousand days and nights" until his
hair turns gray but when he comes back, he will tell tales of all the strange wonders that befell
thee," but he will not have found a woman that is both true and fair.
Donne's diction mocks that of a fairy tale. By using "ten thousand day and nights" and "snow
white." Donne plays with a fairy tale tone in the second stanza, obviously to reflect his telling of
an imaginary journey but also to add to his argument that a true and fair female is only found in
make-believe stories and tall tales and to find one would be unrealistic.
In the third stanza, Donne shows a slight hint of optimism but quickly recedes back to his cynical
state of mind, dismissing women as highly deceptive creatures. He begins by saying to the
reader, "If thou find'st one, let me know." If, by any small chance, the perfect woman is to be
found, Donne wants to be the first to know because "such a pilgrimage were sweet." Any flash of
hope exhibited by Donne quickly dies in the next lines. The reader sees his thinking pattern when
he hastily changes his mind - "Yet do not; I would not go." Donne explains that although a true
and fair woman was to be found he wishes to take no part in seeing her because from the time
she is found to the time it takes to write a letter, she will have slept with two or three men.
Donne goes far enough to say that "Though at next door we might meet", meaning even if she
lives right next door, she probably will have been "false" with at least two or three men already.
By comparing the time frame of writing a letter to how long it takes for the woman to cheat,
Donne displays his extreme lack of faith in the female sex.
By pairing objects that normally would have never been associated together like "a falling star"
and "a mandrake root" or "the devil's foot" with the song of mermaids, Donne juxtaposes these
conceits and illustrates both the beauty and treachary of women. Also, Donne uses a mocking
tone by handing the reader a multitude of impossible tasks and a journey of ten thousand days,
all the while knowing the reader will return with nothing. Bitterness is revealed through Donne's
diction of blunt commands like "go:, "get", "teach" and "tell". Donne uses metaphysical
comparisons to stress the impossibility of finding a "true and fair" woman.
THE UNDERTAKING.
by John Donne
I HAVE done one braver thing
Than all the Worthies did ;
And yet a braver thence doth spring,
Which is, to keep that hid.
It were but madness now to impart
The skill of specular stone,
When he, which can have learn'd the art
To cut it, can find none.
So, if I now should utter this,
Others—because no more
Such stuff to work upon, there is—
Would love but as before.
But he who loveliness within
Hath found, all outward loathes,
For he who color loves, and skin,
Loves but their oldest clothes.
If, as I have, you also do
Virtue in woman see,
And dare love that, and say so too,
And forget the He and She ;
And if this love, though placèd so,
From profane men you hide,
Which will no faith on this bestow,
Or, if they do, deride ;
Then you have done a braver thing
Than all the Worthies did ;
And a braver thence will spring,
Which is, to keep that hid.
4-line stanzas in alternating trochaic and iambic tetrameter and trimeter, rhyming
abab cdcd, etc.. The poem uses the skin=soul's clothing metaphor to advance the
thesis that finding virtue in the shape of one's beloved is rare enough to deserve
secrecy to avoid the mockery of profane men. This makes love a religion (see
"Canonization") and the search for love a pilgrimage (see "Good Morrow" and "Song"
above).
He starts off by saying that he's done a worthy thing, but it's even better to not brag about it. Then in
the second stanza, he says that it's foolish and "madness" to brag about it, because it's much like
bragging about having the skill to cut a specular stone when specular stones don't exist anymore.
Then he says that it wouldn't matter if he bragged about because people wouldn't heed what he says
and simply go on loving as they have been doing, which is to place more importance on outward
appearances than inner virtue.
In the next stanza, he says that a man who loves someone for who they are will not care about outward
appearances. Anyone who pays more attention to someone's skin or the color of their skin simply loves
the "oldest clothes" of inner virtue, which do not amount to much.
If you love them, despite what anyone else says, and you don't brag about the great deed you've done,
then you've done a "braver thing/ Than all the Worthies did."
The Undertaking is in two parts. The first part speaks in general terms and consists of the first four
stanzas; this first part has two sub-parts: statement and proof. Donne states (first stanza) that (1) he has
done something braver than all the Worthies did and (2) by keeping that something hid, he thereby did
something even braver than doing something braver than all the Worthies did. The proof takes two
courses, the first of which is contained in the second and third stanzas, and the second of which is
contained in the fourth stanza. In the first course of the proof, he examines the fact that he is keeping
this something hid, and he makes this examination by means of similitude: uttering this would be as
useful as teaching someone how to cut the specular stone. Although the full meaning of this argument
depends on the second part of the poem, it will be useful here to examine the correspondences of the
terms. “Prophane men” believe that it is just as im- possible to find “vertue” or “lovelinesse” in women
as it is to find the specular stone. Thus, teaching a man to love only “lovelinesse within” is just as
useless, so most men believe, as imparting the skill of cutting the specular stone. Therefore, even if the
poet “should utter this,” men “would love but as before.” Donne’s use of the word “love” moves toward
the specific argument involved in the second course of proving. The second course (the fourth stanza)
relates to the first part of the statement (the one braver thing than all the Worthies did). The second
course of proving has a double argument: the first is an implied contrast between the men who “love
but as before” and the man “who lovelinesse within/ Hath found”; the second is a contrast between
finding loveliness within and without.
As the poem moves toward the specific, the smoothness of the movement is aided by the subtle shift
from “he who” to “you.” The second part of the poem (the last three stanzas) is expressed in one
sentence of the syntactic structure the Ramists called “connective axiom.” All connective axioms have
two parts: condition and consequent. In this case, the condition (fifth and sixth stanzas) is in two parts: I.
if you (a) see virtue attired in women (the metaphor “attir’d” is related to the metaphor “oldest
clothes”-seeing virtue in women is related to finding the specular stone) and (b) dare loe that (related to
the skill of cutting the specular stone) by (1) admiting it to yourself and (2) forgetting the “He” and “She
(related to finding loveliness within and loathing “all outward”); and if you hide this from profane men
who (a) would not believe you (for, to them, “no more/ Such stuffe t worke upon, there is), or (b) if they
do believe you, would place no value on what you’ve done and are doing (for they love “colour” and
skin″). The consequent has two parts. You will then have done (1) a braver thing than the Worthies did,
and (2) by keeping it hid, a braver thing than that-for you will be doing something the Worthies didn’t do
(keeping their bravery hid). This last stanza has the effect of revealing the complete argument of
the poem; its structural correspondence to the vague first stanza increases this effect. Finally, Donne
used the third part of rhetoric, elocution, to intensify the visibility and relatability of all parts of a poem.
Although the speaker in John Donne "The Undertaking" has generally been regarded as a
straightforward spokesman for the poet, various textual problems in the poem point to an ironic
distance between the two. The presence of internal contradictions in the speaker's argument along with
his undistinguished use of literary cliché suggest that Donne was deliberately setting up a sententious,
Polonious-like character as a target for the laughter and mockery of the knowing sophisticate.
The first three stanzas of the poem approximate a poetic stance that is not unlike that of Donne's
other poems. The boasting tone of stanza one modifies a lover's insistent enthusiasm with
paradoxical reserve ("I have done one braver thing . . . to keepe that hid."). The speaker then
goes on to develop an analogy between specular stone and love, which concludes that describing
his love to others would be as pointless as teaching them to cut selenite, because his experience,
like the stone is so rare.
The fourth stanza, however, contradicts the analogy, since, in contrast to the previous discussion
of the rarity of love, it assumes that anyone who finds "lovelinesse within" is able to find love.
Either love is not as rare as selenite, in which case stanzas two and three are preposterous, or else
stanza four misrepresents the availability of the experience. This contradiction provides a clear
indication of the logical unreliability of the speaker's argument.
Another indication of the ironic distance between poet and speaker can be found in the use of
language and literary tradition. Even in the first stanza, long before the later logical contradiction
can begin to make the reader wary, the speaker is close to a traditional lover's stance. Although
there is a witty juxtaposition between the tone of boasting in line I and that of reserve in 4, the
effect of keeping the love hidden is to imitate the practices of the courtly lover of medieval
tradition who was forbidden to publicize his love. Even more predictable, however, is the
speaker's treatment of "vertue." Woman as "vertue'attir'd" is a commonplace that goes back at
least as far as Homer's Arete (whose name meant virtue in the Odyssey, Book 7) and the virtuous
woman of Proverbs (31.10-31). Spenser's fifteenth sonnet sounds the typically Elizabethan note:
But that which fairest is, but few behold, her mind adornd with vertues manifold.
The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt ( 1912 ; rpt.
London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961 ) p. 565.
It is difficult to believe that Donne would have been satisfied to have his speaker adopt a
straightforward echo of this theme unless such talk was designed to reflect [back] on the tedious
sententiousness of the persona.
Conventional use of the courtly lover's hiding of his love leads to another contradiction towards
the end of the poem. We might assume that the conflict between the speaker's claim that he has
kept his brave deed hidden and his public announcement of this in the poem is merely part of the
literary tradition. As the poem concludes, however, this paradox recurs with increasingly
ridiculous insistence. The speaker asks that the reader-listener dare love virtue attired in woman
"and say so too" (19) but immediately thereafter this love must be hidden from "prophane man."
The speaker concludes that this apparently simultaneous revelation ("say so too") and hiding
(from the profane) is, like his own act, a "braver thing/ Then all the Worthies did," and that this
revelation-hiding is itself to be hidden. Even if one were to argue that the reference is to the
hiding of the revelation, this is an obvious contradiction of the logical premise ("If . . . you . . .
say so . . . Then you have done. . . ."), since once the listener keeps "that hid" he can't "say so." In
addition, the final hiding is of the fact that the profane have had the love hidden from them
which might suggest the paradoxical revelation of the love only to those who will deride it. In
any case, this is the effect of the poem, which, by publishing the speaker's remarks reveals
everything to all readers, including the profane.
This combination of conventional use of theme and language, along with various kinds of inner
contradictions in the logical development of the speaker's argument, suggests then, an ironic
distance between speaker and poet. The logical subtleties and the conventional banalities can be
seen as the failings of dramatic character invented by Donne more as an object of scorn than as a
serious spokesman for spiritual or Platonic love.
THE SUN RISING.
by John Donne
BUSY old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run ?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Thy beams so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think ?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay."
She's all states, and all princes I ;
Nothing else is ;
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus ;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.
Critics of John Donne's "The Sun Rising" often note that the poem's displacement of the
outside world in favor of two lovers' inner world serves to support its overall theme: the
centrality of human love amidst a permanent physical universe. In an essay entitled
"John Donne," Achsah Guibbory supports this reading of the poem, stating, "The world
of love contains everything of value; it is the only one worth exploring and possessing.
Hence the microcosmic world of love becomes larger and more important than the
macrocosm" (135). "[T]he lovers' room," Toshihiko Kawasaki observes similarly, "is a
microcosm because it is private and self-contained, categorically excluding the outer
world" (29). As evident in this criticism, Donne's lovers seem to transcend the limits of
the physical world by disregarding external influences, coercing all things to rotate
around them instead. In Thomas Docherty's words, "[the lovers] become the world and
occupy the same position of centrality as the sun. They become, in short, the still point
around which all else is supposed to revolve, and around whom all time passes [. . .]"
(31). They create a miniature world that is more important than the larger universe
within the realm of their bedroom, and their bodies are the gravitational center.
Expanding upon the criticism of this poem in his analysis of Donne's poetry, James S.
Baumlin concludes that "The Sun Rising" must not be interpreted literally. Rather,
Donne's displacement of the outside world, in favor of the lovers' inside "microcosm," is
a rhetorical technique used to argue for the strength and energy of mutual love.
"Actually," Baumlin writes,
[. . .] the reader knows that the world does not literally go away, that the sun's orbit does
not contract to the bedroom of the lovers; but as one reads, one observes how the
beliefs, emotions, and values of the lovers themselves undergo a sea change.
Hyperbole may lack the power to change the external physical world; still it changes the
private world of the lovers, a world of emotion and experience that proves stubbornly
resistant to logic, though marvelously—miraculously—open to language. (241)
Indeed, this analysis is valid if readers assume with Baumlin that while the poem's logic
operates inadequately, its rhetoric works "miraculously." But, is the persona's reliance
on language to transcend the physical world able to succeed? Or, does the language of
"The Sun Rising," like the logic, fail to communicate the theme that many scholars have
recognized?
The rhetoric of Donne's persona does seem, upon a first reading, to locate the lovers at
the center of the universe successfully while it subordinates all surrounding objects. And
the poet's use of hyperbole is convincing enough if readers immediately assume that
Donne intended to oppose logic and to define the universe's purpose through the
transcendent qualities of language. Yet the inconsistencies in rhetoric that the poem
manifests, what one scholar has deemed "a tangle of contradictions and reversals,"
make this commonly accepted interpretation unstable (Brown 110). While Donne's
speaker may dislocate the outside world only for the extent of "The Sun Rising," he is
still unsuccessful at convincing critical readers that internal love can symbolically
replace the physical world if logic is subordinated to language. The persona establishes
several binary oppositions and seems to favor a certain hierarchy within the rhetorical
structures he creates. As the poem progresses, however, he begins to misspeak,
seemingly forgetting the earlier language of his discourse. Ultimately, the persona's
reorganization of language, his attempt to push rhetoric beyond the limits of logic, fails;
for, upon condensing the world around his lover and himself, he calls back those objects
that he initially excluded. The poem dismantles itself through the inherent contradictions
of the persona's rhetoric, leaving the reader unconvinced that language permits love to
transcend the outside world.
In the first stanza of "The Sun Rising," Donne's persona creates several binary
oppositions that indicate the poem's ultimate but unsuccessful argument: love exists
independently from and superior to the physical world. The persona, questioning the
sun, asks contentiously,
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run? (1-4)
The substantial oppositions present in these lines are confinement versus openness
and eternity versus momentariness. As for the former, the persona objects to the sun's
intrusion "Through windows" and "through curtains." Windows and curtains separate
him and his lover from the outside world, from the knowledge that their love exists within
a mundane, physical realm. And if the "Busy [and] unruly" sun permeates these modes
of exclusion it will undermine his desired confinement, devitalizing his love as it intrudes
upon his room.
His reasoning leads into the other significant opposition of the poem's introduction:
eternity / momentariness. The "lovers' seasons" are placed against the sun's seasons,
and the persona's disputatious tone suggests his efforts to subordinate everyday,
natural motions to ceaseless love. He continues, "Love, all alike, no season knows, nor
clime, / Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time" (9-10). All in all, the
introductory stanza of "The Sun Rising" reveals the persona's motive to engage in
mutual love within a confined realm that is free from the time constraints of the physical
universe.
While in the first stanza the persona declares the physical world's inferiority to love, he
also suggests the social sphere's necessary absence from his microcosm. He
rhetorically pushes the sun away, telling it to "go chide / Late schoolboys, and sour
prentices, / Go tell court-huntsmen, that the king will ride" (5-7). Indeed, the sun is
commanded to seek these individuals because its search will render the persona free
from its "motions." Yet he also demands the sun to pursue these people because he
knows its "chid[ing]" and "tell[ing]" will keep them away from his room. The first stanza,
then, presents a figurative opposition to everything in the outside world—from the sun
and the "ants" to children and the king—in order to convince the audience that the
language of love is capable of consummating this act (8).
However, the persuasive language of the first stanza begins to break down early in the
second stanza, as the persona seems to forget the love ideals that he is seeking. In
particular, his celebration of love's eternity versus his condemnation of the outside
world's momentariness loses its potency, for he is overtly unable to escape time
constraints—even through the use of language. Remarking on the simplicity of escaping
the sun's intrusive beams, the persona states, "I could eclipse and cloud them with a
wink, / But that I would not lose her sight so long" (13-14). By closing his eyes, he
excludes the external world from his internal world of love. This aspect of his rhetoric is
still convincing, for readers can understand that the eye acts like the window of the first
stanza, separating an internal sphere from an outside sphere; and, the "wink"—the
curtain—prevents the sun from intruding. However, readers cannot be convinced that
the persona continues to favor (or, can continue to favor) the ideal of love's eternity. The
assertion "so long" at the end of line fourteen demonstrates that he is unable to create a
language that is independent from the physical world. As he defined it earlier, his
internal world of love knows no "hours, days, months, which are the rags of time," but in
expressing his fear that closing his eyes would cause him to lose sight of his love for a
certain amount of time—for "so long"—he tacitly admits that his microcosm must obey
external rules. His inside sphere and the outside world have a "tomorrow late" and a
"yesterday," and through admitting this the persona evinces the inability of rhetoric to
transcend the physical, momentary world and to exist apart from external influence (16).
The last two lines of the second stanza and the first two lines of the third stanza
continue to manifest the persona's language dismantling itself. Besides the eternity /
momentariness opposition that breaks down because of the persona's inability to
dismiss time constraints from his world of love, lines nineteen and twenty also
demonstrate his failure to exclude the social world from his microcosm, an important
opposition that he develops in the first stanza. After telling the sun a second time to
depart and engage with the social sphere, he comments, "Ask for those kings whom
thou saw'st yesterday, / And thou shalt hear, all here in one bed lay" (19-20). Whereas
earlier the persona commands the sun to leave because he wishes to live with his lover
uninfluenced by time (which, as discussed, is an unsuccessful endeavor) and to remain
uninterrupted by the outside, social world, here the poet claims that the social sphere is
in his bed.
Perhaps disclosing this weakness of his rhetoric more distinctly, the persona states of
his lover and of himself, "She is all states, and all princes, I, / Nothing else is" (21-22). In
"John Donne, Undone," Thomas Docherty, comments on the first line of this passage:
"Sexual relation fades into commercial relation here, and the female herself becomes
mediated as a symbol of the market-place itself, [. . .]" (32). Indeed, the persona follows
the putative seventeenth-century social paradigm of female inferiority when he claims
that his lover is territory while he is the prince of that territory. Again, he is unable to
utilize a language that can transcend the external world; in this instance, a dominant
social ideology pervades his rhetoric, and his world of love cannot escape the outside
structure once again.
Before the third stanza begins, two of the binary oppositions that the persona
establishes in the first stanza have broken down. While he attempts to engage in a
convincing discourse on the potency of love, the persona's rhetorical attachments to
eternity and to social exclusion work within governing structures that he is unable to
avoid; therefore, his argument for these ideals is not firmly grounded. He endeavors to
use language in order to assert love's superiority to the external world, but by
acknowledging time limitations and the social sphere he ultimately supports the
structures that he hopes to undermine. The last stanza of "The Sun Rising"
consummates the destruction of his attempt. As previously mentioned, the persona
establishes a confinement / openness opposition, favoring to be enclosed within a
microcosmic world of love. However, this idea is dismantled when the persona
summons everything in the external world to his room:
In that the world's contracted thus;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere. (26-30)
Here, the most evident contradiction in the persona's reasoning is his contraction of the
external world into his internal world. As noted earlier, he claims that love knows no time
and exists independent from external influence. Through this assertion, the persona
confines himself and his lover willingly, expelling the sun and rejecting the cultural
sphere with the notion that his love surpasses these aspects of the physical world. Yet
the buttress of his final argument, which he presents syllogistically, is the assumption
that his microcosmic world of love is the whole world. In lines twenty-seven and twentyeight the persona reasons that since the sun is obligated to illuminate the world, it must
shine on him and his lover; thus, he thinks that his microcosm is everything. His bed, he
asserts in the final line, is the center of the universe; his walls are its borders.
The persona's argument ends with the assumption that the entire physical world
occupies his microcosm. He and his lover are the center of this new sphere, and their
love transcends the physical limitations of the outside world. But upon critical analysis,
this rhetoric is unconvincing. He brings openness into his closed world, implicitly
subverting his ideal to remain isolated from outside influence. Throughout the
progression of "The Sun Rising," Donne's persona has made claims that undoubtedly
break down as he continues to speak. In the final instance, the confinement that he
favors in his internal world of love, as opposed to the openness of the macrocosm, is
undermined because he insists that the external world exists within his microcosm.
Ultimately, the persona's attempt to utilize a language that will communicate love's
transcendent qualities is a failure—not a "sudden creative power" as Lisa Gorton
asserts with other critics—because the structures that he hopes to escape are
inherently incorporated in that language (par. 17). He tries to embrace the ideals of
eternity, social solitariness, and confinement; however, in this verbal enterprise, he
incorporates the ideas that he is reacting against into his rhetoric. As a result, his
argument loses force—his language is unsuccessful.
Lying in bed with his lover, the speaker chides the rising sun, calling it a “busy old fool,” and
asking why it must bother them through windows and curtains. Love is not subject to season or
to time, he says, and he admonishes the sun—the “Saucy pedantic wretch”—to go and bother
late schoolboys and sour apprentices, to tell the court-huntsmen that the King will ride, and to
call the country ants to their harvestingWhy should the sun think that his beams are strong? The
speaker says that he could eclipse them simply by closing his eyes, except that he does not want
to lose sight of his beloved for even an instant. He asks the sun—if the sun’s eyes have not been
blinded by his lover’s eyes—to tell him by late tomorrow whether the treasures of India are in
the same place they occupied yesterday or if they are now in bed with the speaker. He says that if
the sun asks about the kings he shined on yesterday, he will learn that they all lie in bed with the
speaker.
The speaker explains this claim by saying that his beloved is like every country in the world, and
he is like every king; nothing else is real. Princes simply play at having countries; compared to
what he has, all honor is mimicry and all wealth is alchemy. The sun, the speaker says, is half as
happy as he and his lover are, for the fact that the world is contracted into their bed makes the
sun’s job much easier—in its old age, it desires ease, and now all it has to do is shine on their
bed and it shines on the whole world. “This bed thy centre is,” the speaker tells the sun, “these
walls, thy sphere.”
Form
The three regular stanzas of “The Sun Rising” are each ten lines long and follow a line-stress
pattern of 4255445555—lines one, five, and six are metered in iambic tetrameter, line two is in
dimeter, and lines three, four, and seven through ten are in pentameter. The rhyme scheme in
each stanza is ABBACDCDEE.
Commentary
One of Donne’s most charming and successful metaphysical love poems, “The Sun Rising” is
built around a few hyperbolic assertions—first, that the sun is conscious and has the watchful
personality of an old busybody; second, that love, as the speaker puts it, “no season knows, nor
clime, / Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time”; third, that the speaker’s love affair
is so important to the universe that kings and princes simply copy it, that the world is literally
contained within their bedroom. Of course, each of these assertions simply describes figuratively
a state of feeling—to the wakeful lover, the rising sun does seem like an intruder, irrelevant to
the operations of love; to the man in love, the bedroom can seem to enclose all the matters in the
world. The inspiration of this poem is to pretend that each of these subjective states of feeling is
an objective truth.
Accordingly, Donne endows his speaker with language implying that what goes on in his head is
primary over the world outside it; for instance, in the second stanza, the speaker tells the sun that
it is not so powerful, since the speaker can cause an eclipse simply by closing his eyes. This kind
of heedless, joyful arrogance is perfectly tuned to the consciousness of a new lover, and the
speaker appropriately claims to have all the world’s riches in his bed (India, he says, is not where
the sun left it; it is in bed with him). The speaker captures the essence of his feeling in the final
stanza, when, after taking pity on the sun and deciding to ease the burdens of his old age, he
declares “Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere.”
Song: Sweetest love I do not go, John Donne
SWEETEST love, I do not go,
For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
A fitter love for me ;
But since that I
At the last must part, 'tis best,
Thus to use myself in jest
By feigned deaths to die.
Yesternight the sun went hence,
And yet is here to-day ;
He hath no desire nor sense,
Nor half so short a way ;
Then fear not me,
But believe that I shall make
Speedier journeys, since I take
More wings and spurs than he.
O how feeble is man's power,
That if good fortune fall,
Cannot add another hour,
Nor a lost hour recall ;
But come bad chance,
And we join to it our strength,
And we teach it art and length,
Itself o'er us to advance.
When thou sigh'st, thou sigh'st not wind,
But sigh'st my soul away ;
When thou weep'st, unkindly kind,
My life's blood doth decay.
It cannot be
That thou lovest me as thou say'st,
If in thine my life thou waste,
That art the best of me.
Let not thy divining heart
Forethink me any ill ;
Destiny may take thy part,
And may thy fears fulfil.
But think that we
Are but turn'd aside to sleep.
They who one another keep
Alive, ne'er parted be.
in this poem, the narrator was travelling to a foreign country on a personal trip. It was only quite natural
that his wife would be anxious to know. He assured her that he did not undertake this journey simply
because he had grown tired of her nor because he had found a new love in a foreign country, which he
considered worthier than her. However the fact of the matter was that one fine day, death would
separate them eternally. So starting as of now, she should train herself to get use to this eternal
separation. In this way his regular journey abroad would be the frequent rehearsals of death which
would eventually lessen her suffering of his real death.
Donne further assured his love by comparing his travels to the movement of the sun across the sky. He
pointed out that this present journey abroad would be of a much shorter duration than the journey of
the sun from dawn to dusk. By all means she might as well expect his return at any moment she deemed
fit. Donne also urged his beloved to divert her mind from her negative thoughts of this physical
separation but relish each and every moment of happiness of the present. In happy moments like these,
time should not be wasted in thinking of future mishaps. He further urged her not to weep as her grief
would cause him much sorrow and pain. She was the best thing that ever happened to his life.
After he conveyed his love and passion, he boldly encouraged her to bid him good luck on his journey
abroad and to console herself by acknowledging the fact that the bond between true lovers is united by
a match made in Heaven; where only the bodies separates and not the hearts. In this context, Donne’s
poem can also be called a fine example of metaphysical poetry as he talks of love as an emotion which
goes beyond the physical. At the end of the poem, Donne has managed to convince his point of view to
his beloved lady and by doing so he has managed to assure and reaffirm her of his true love.
Air and Angels, John Donne
TWICE or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name ;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be.
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing did I see.
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too ;
And therefore what thou wert, and who,
I bid Love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.
Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
And so more steadily to have gone,
With wares which would sink admiration,
I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught ;
Thy every hair for love to work upon
Is much too much ; some fitter must be sought ;
For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scattering bright, can love inhere ;
Then as an angel face and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
So thy love may be my love's sphere ;
Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air's and angels' purity,
'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.
This is a demanding poem, which discusses various theories about love. However, it is very
clever and well worth the effort. There are two main difficulties:

Donne uses ideas about angels and incarnation which would have been familiar to the
Elizabethans but not necessarily to us.
More on incarnation: see The Extasie

Donne draws on the idea that there is an inequality between men's and women's love.
This discussion has been going on for centuries, but until the last two centuries, women's
voices were virtually never heard. That meant that male opinions predominated and male
love was often presented as superior. Today this may sound very sexist. However, we
need to look carefully at what Donne is actually saying here.
Love and angels
The main analogy in this poem is between masculine love and angels.
Nowadays angels are often seen as feminine but traditionally they have tended to be viewed as
masculine. In Donne’s day it was believed that angels needed some medium through which to
manifest themselves to humans. That medium was the element of air, which was regarded as the
purest of the four elements (the others being earth, water and fire), though Donne’s references to
‘a voice’ and ‘a shapelesse flame’ suggest other ways for angels to make themselves known.
Donne's argument is that love also needs an incarnation in which to manifest itself, just as does
the soul (l.7). Otherwise, it remains invisible: ‘Some lovely glorious nothing I did see’ - an
unusual oxymoron. So his first attempt to find a suitable manifestation was the woman’s body.
She, as a physical being, must be the outward expression of his love. This suggests typical
Elizabethan love poetry, in which every detail of the lady's body is listed as an object for
admiration: ‘thy lip, eye, brow’.
However this proves inadequate so he switches his analogy to a ship: ‘love’s pinnace’. His
approach has loaded so much on to the woman's body (ship), that it has capsized. The medium of
incarnation must have been wrong. What, then, is the right medium?
Women’s love
The answer is the woman's love itself. Just as air is not as pure as the angel it manifests, neither
is the woman's love as pure as his, but it is the only way for it to show itself. This can, of course,
be interpreted in several different ways – and Donne enjoys this ambiguous, paradoxical,
possibly teasing, kind of ending. Is the poem, then, a put-down for women? Or does it mean that
love simply cannot exist materially unless both a man and a woman are fully in love with each
other i.e. a complete manifestation? Or that without a woman's love, a man's love is just an idea?
Investigating Aire and Angels



How do you read Aire and Angels?
o Is it a sexist statement about men's love?
o Or is it a statement about the need for mutuality?
Can you define what, for Donne, is the experience of being in love?
How does the poem make you think about:
o What sexual love is?
o How we express that love in language?
There are several themes present in the poem “Air and Angels” by John Donne and each carries a
particular meaning. While giving a summary of all of the themes in “Air and Angels” by John Donne is
nearly impossible given the multiple possible interpretations, at the least, it is best to identify the
themes that are most prominent, including love and the world of the flesh versus spirit worlds. The
influence of Shakespeare, particularly his sonnets, are clear in “Air and Angels” as many of the same
themes are explained and explored. In the poem, “Air and Angels” love is represented as being
something higher than human thought and comprehension.
In “Air and Angels’ love is something that transcends the flesh and the human body is merely a vessel
for this potent emotion. Love in this poem is not represented as a feeling that is strictly based on
outside or shallow perceptions of beauty but rather, it is projected onto the object of the affection in a
pure and spiritual sense. Through using specific images and compounding themes and meaning
throughout the poem “Air and Angels” by John Donne, the reader gets the sense that even though the
speaker seems to have a notion of the power of love, he is not quite able to grasp it or give it the form
and shape he seems to desire.
These ideas of form and shapelessness as a theme in “Air and Angels” by John Donne are interwoven
by language that is at once “earthly” and heavenly. This poem accomplishes its task of questioning the
relationship between the ethereal and intangible nature of a “pure” emotion by placing the idea of love
in a number of different contexts. It is at once compared and contrasted and interposed onto the
human form, then is placed in connection with the heavy connotations associated with ballasts and
boats, and then, by the end, it is “freed” because it is associated with angels who are thought to be in
their most pure form when appearing as air.
The mix between this world of the flesh and the world of the pure spirit of love are constantly playing
off and one another as earthly and heavenly or supernatural images are juxtaposed. The form that a
pure emotion like love takes is the central question and is explored in different ways throughout the
poem. The best way to examine this meaning would be to look at the very structure which is at once a
unified thought process yet is broken into two distinct ideas. There are two sections to the poem, each
with its own separate theme and use of language. The first fourteen lines encapsulate the need for
emotion to be placed in flesh and relies heavily on the use of “earthly” terms such as “limbs of flesh”
and “parent” as well as the fuller sense that the poet is attempting to “ground” his thoughts to the
mere earth-bound before launching into a discussion of higher things as the poem moves forward and
branches out to include the metaphysical.
At the beginning of the second set of fourteen lines, the poem still retains a beginning that is firmly
rooted in the “real” by invoking nautical terminology such as “ballasts” and “pinnace” which at once
puts the poem in a sort of grounded and earth-bound context yet all the while is developing the idea
that love cannot be attained through such average modes. The images of heavy “human” items such
as the ballasts and boats are set against the following lines, which are important quotes from “Air and
Angels” the poem by John Donne, “Extreme, and scattering bright, can love inhere; /Then as an angel
face and wings.” The narrator goes on to speak of love and angels as something that are of the air
and not bound to the weighty matters of the flesh and society.
The beginning of the poem is rather difficult to decipher, which is in many senses, the meaning of the
poem; that beauty is difficult to grasp and put into form. By the end of “Air and Angels” however,
there seems to be a resolution to the question of such formlessness when the narrator decides in one
of the quotations from “Air and Angels” by John Donne, “As is ‘twixt air’s and angels’ purity, / Twixt
women’s love, and men’s, will ever be” since here he concludes that love is just what he thought it
was from the beginning—an idea without boundaries, much like air—formless and supernatural even
though we may try to put it into the terms of flesh and reality. In some ways, there is actually a
conflict and resolution to the poem since the narrator at once declares in the first section quote, That
it assume thy body, I allow/And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow” yet by the end of his thoughts he is
left with the resolution that there is no way to fix the flesh to the formlessness or “shapelessness of
flame” which is, in this case, love.
THE ANNIVERSARY.
by John Donne
ALL kings, and all their favourites,
All glory of honours, beauties, wits,
The sun it self, which makes time, as they pass,
Is elder by a year now than it was
When thou and I first one another saw.
All other things to their destruction draw,
Only our love hath no decay ;
This no to-morrow hath, nor yesterday ;
Running it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.
Two graves must hide thine and my corse ;
If one might, death were no divorce.
Alas ! as well as other princes, we
—Who prince enough in one another be—
Must leave at last in death these eyes and ears,
Oft fed with true oaths, and with sweet salt tears ;
But souls where nothing dwells but love
—All other thoughts being inmates—then shall prove
This or a love increasèd there above,
When bodies to their graves, souls from their graves remove.
And then we shall be throughly blest ;
But now no more than all the rest.
Here upon earth we're kings, and none but we
Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be.
Who is so safe as we? where none can do
Treason to us, except one of us two.
True and false fears let us refrain,
Let us love nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write threescore ; this is the second of our reign.
“The Anniversary” by John Donne is about a couple who are celebrating their first year together in a
relationship. The underlying conceit of the entire poem is the metaphor of royalty, where the speaker
addresses his lover, and himself, as if they were royal kings and nobles. At the same time, divine imagery
and death images permeates the poem, but that is not the focus of our discussion here. The question
under scrutiny in this paper is: how does Donne use royal imagery to convey the idea of a passionate
love? There is no doubt that there are religious, divine images within the poem and that there is
constant reference to death and decay, but the opening line of “all kings” immediately suggests that the
central theme is indeed royalty.
The opening line immediately declares that “All kings” and all the “glory of honours, beauties, wits/ The
sun itself” have aged by one year ever since the speaker met his lover. This suggests that the two lovers
have been together for one year, and yet, unlike the kings and glories, and even the sun which brings life
and time, the two lovers have not aged in their love. There is a reference to kings in the beginning of the
poem, setting the stage for later metaphors. “All other things to their destruction draw/ Only our love
hath no decay” is a grandiose statement by the passionate speaker who proudly declares that while
everything may decay and rot away, his love will not and does not decay. This love appears to be divine
and everlasting. “This no to-morrow hath, nor yesterday” declares that his love will last forever because
it has no tomorrow, and that it does not look back to yesterday, and this idea is corroborated where
despite time and the love running forwards together, “it never runs from us away”, suggesting that the
love will never run away, but instead “truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day”, being eternal and longlasting. There is little reference to royalty apart from the first two words in the stanza, yet it can be said
that the arrogant phrasing of the words and the proud and loquacious declarations of the speaker
remind the reader of a kingly declaration or an announcement.
The persona then turns to talk proudly about death, where death would unite the two lovers in the
grave, and thus “death were no divorce”. The love that the speaker feels for his lover is so strong that
only death can physically separate them, and even more, on a spiritual level, death cannot even
separate them metaphysically, as death is not considered a divorce, at least to the speaker. The
metaphor of princely royalty once again emerges: “as well as other princes, we/ —Who prince enough in
one another be” suggests that the two of them should have princely pride and love, different from other
people, whose love is not pure, noble and royal as their love is. The theme of death is strong in this
second stanza, where “eyes and tears” fed with “true oaths, and with sweet salt tears” have no choice
but to physically disappear into the grave. Yet, the spiritual element saves the love: “But souls where
nothing dwells but love”, a reference to his own higher level spiritual love, suggests that the loving souls
are freed from the prison of the body, and then can still be reunited. This concept sounds very
unbelievable and somewhat illogical, in contrast to the arguments and very structured build up in the
poem by Donne, but Donne is merely using as a poet, the poetic license, in order to manipulate spurious
theories and twist theology to suggest that spiritual love is the best and has an underlying meaning
beyond the grave.
With death “then we shall be throughly blest”, but that is not the key idea, because when they are dead,
they are merely having a spiritual love just like all other lovers who have died, “now no more than all the
rest”. This is not different nor spectacular, since many have already died in love. “Here upon earth we're
kings, and none but we/ Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be” refocuses the final stanza back into
the present, on earth, and utilises the imagery of kingship and royalty. On earth, and still alive, both the
speaker and his lover are royalty and subjects at the same time. This kind of love may be subject to
treachery, but that is not possible, because since both of them love each other, “treason” is out of the
question. The word “treason” was chosen because of the royal metaphor and analogy, where if any one
of the two lovers cheats, being both subjects and royalty at the same time, then treason has been
committed against their state. “True and false fears let us refrain” is an honest, proud declaration of
loving without fear, and then the final declaration is the intention of keeping their reign long and long,
“to write threescore”, loving “nobly” and living nobly. The royal metaphor clearly shows that the
elements of kingship are apparently present in the couple’s relationship, and also that the speaker
wants them to love each other just like royalty do, in what he sees as a passionate love just like a closed
and unified society.
In conclusion, Donne conveys passionate love in terms of royalty by comparison, proud declarations and
the interconnectedness and weaving with death, spiritual love and other elements, hence making
royalty into an overarching metaphor for noble, kingly love. This poem is about two people forming a
society, with themselves as kings and subjects all at once – a very interesting take on love.
It is the celebration of a love that is a year old. It has not been affected by any changes. It is love
triumphant, resisting decay which invades everything else in the world. But the poet cannot keep out
the image and thought of death. Death will sever the lovers. Love has crowned them kings, but kings too
die, and they will be a prey to death. Those eyes of theirs, which have been fed with true oaths, and
those ears of theirs, which have been fed with sweet-bitters, will be closed in death. But it does not
mean the annihilation of their love. Their love will survive while their bodies crumble into dust in the
grave. In heaven they will love again, and they will be blest like other spirits. This consummation is to be
reached after they have loved nobly and lived on earth for three score of years. And their love in heaven
as blest spirits is described by the poet as the reign.
None of the mellifluous expression of the Elizabethan is here-none of their “taffeta phrases, silken terms
precise.” Donne writes in a simple and direct manner. The thought-process may be a little complicated,
for the poet passes quickly from one thought to another, from one image to another, each being not
necessarily related to the other. The Elizabethan sonnet-writers speak the sentiment of Petrarch, having
established a cult of woman-worship, and partaking as they do in the diffused poetry of the age, they
have sometimes the accents of the poets-but they are lacking in passion. They can just write smooth and
fluent verse. Here we see all the difference between Donne and the Elizabethans. He infuses passion
into poetry, and introduces the personal note; and in his love-poetry so unlike that of the Elizabethan he
expresses the varying moods and sentiments, sometimes these moods and sentiments being personal,
even going down to stark realistic representation. It is the complexity of mood and feeling in his lovepoetry, which is something new.
In The Anniversary we may note the different phases he passes through. First, the passing of a year,
since the lovers met and began to love. Has it effected any change in them? The sun itself has changed
in the course of a year-and kings and all their favorites, honor, beauty, wit have all changed. With the
very idea of change, wrought by time, Donne begins with kings and their favorites. Now this is not
fortuitous. The lovers are just like kings in their love. They have the coveted position of kings. But kings
are mortal too. The poet thinks decay and death that affect all things in the world. Here the quick
transition of thought is to be noted. Love that seems to be constant-and even eternal-makes him thinks
of death. The haunting image of death recurs again and again in Donne’s poetry. It is a sort of obsession
with him. It is the macabre that possesses his mind the dissolution that is wrought by death. So in this
poem he goes into details-each of the lovers rotting away in different graves, the eyes that beamed
loves and ears that devoured words or love being now sealed in dust. From the idea of death the poet
soon rises to the idea of love that is eternal, and it is the love that is lodged in the soul, and therefore it
must be imperishable. The metaphor of kings is carried on again. After they have lived on earth as kings
by right of their love, where none can do treason to the other (they are both kings and subjects in their
love, and a subject can be guilty of treason to his kings- and so here the question of treason does not
arise at all), their souls will ascend to heaven where they will be blessed spirits and their love can know
no changes. Ideas which seem to be contrary-death and eternal of love-are combined here, and
developed dialectically. Now this is the way of Donne.
Most of us use anniversaries to celebrate. This poem, too, is a celebratory one, on the completion
of the first year of a relationship. It would be most obvious to think of Donne's marriage, which
was deep if costly. The celebratory language is in terms of the royalty of love. In a way, this is an
extension of the theme of the microcosm of the lovers’ world, boldly proclaimed in The Sunne
Rising. If the lovers' world consists of only two inhabitants, then they are both royalty, the King
and Queen of their own little universe.
Investigating The Anniversarie


Pick out the words that suggest royalty in The Anniversarie
How does Donne compare the lovers' royalty with that of ordinary kings?
Love’s timelessness
The other thing that anniversaries make us think of is the passing of time. Love and time were
typically seen as enemies in Elizabethan poetry. There was a great fear of ‘mutability’, of the
temporariness of things – and the word ‘temporary’ comes from the Latin word ‘tempus’, which
means ‘time’. Donne boldly defies this: their love is outside time. It has a timeless quality, unlike
everything else from kings to the sun itself. ‘Only our love hath no decay’ is a typical Donne
statement, drawing attention to the uniqueness of his experience of love. So, like heavenly time
(cf. Hebrews 13:8), it has no yesterday or tomorrow; it is eternally present.
Death the leveller
However, death is a reality, and Donne does not flinch from thinking about it, since love and
death might be seen as even greater enemies. However, for him, death is a leveller, though not so
much in the conventional sense of everyone being brought down to the grave. In stanza two he
acknowledges this in passing, but goes on to stress the opposite: everyone being ‘throughly blest’
(l.21) by entering heavenly life. Their souls will have been liberated from their bodies. The
image of the body as the soul's grave (1.20) is more Platonic than Christian, it should be noted.
The second of our raigne
Death, therefore, does not threaten, but it is nothing to be celebrated, since in heaven their love
will not be unique. So, at the end of the poem, he turns back to the unique present: let us live
nobly, with no fear or jealousy, for the next sixty years. The final clause; ‘this is the second of
our raigne’ returns us confidently to the here and now.
Investigating The Anniversarie


What gives the sense of confidence to The Anniversarie?
Compare this to The Sunne Rising
o What is similar?
o What are the essential differences?
TWICKENHAM GARDEN.
by John Donne
BLASTED with sighs, and surrounded with tears,
Hither I come to seek the spring,
And at mine eyes, and at mine ears,
Receive such balms as else cure every thing.
But O ! self-traitor, I do bring
The spider Love, which transubstantiates all,
And can convert manna to gall ;
And that this place may thoroughly be thought
True paradise, I have the serpent brought.
'Twere wholesomer for me that winter did
Benight the glory of this place,
And that a grave frost did forbid
These trees to laugh and mock me to my face ;
But that I may not this disgrace
Endure, nor yet leave loving, Love, let me
Some senseless piece of this place be ;
Make me a mandrake, so I may grow here,
Or a stone fountain weeping out my year.
Hither with crystal phials, lovers, come,
And take my tears, which are love's wine,
And try your mistress' tears at home,
For all are false, that taste not just like mine.
Alas ! hearts do not in eyes shine,
Nor can you more judge women's thoughts by tears,
Than by her shadow what she wears.
O perverse sex, where none is true but she,
Who's therefore true, because her truth kills me.
Religious conceits
As with most Metaphysical poetry, the real matter of Twicknam Garden lies in its imagery, here
a series of brilliant conceits. Many of these conceits have religious origins, and we soon become
aware of Donne's use of the ‘religion of love’ language.
First stanza
If we look at the first stanza, what we find is a complex conceit woven from a number of quite
different religious sources.
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

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
The Roman Catholic belief in transubstantiation (the transformation of bread and wine into the
body and blood of Christ believed to occur at the Mass)
‘Manna’ is sometimes referred to as ‘the bread from heaven’, a reference to the Israelites being
supplied with a mysterious food whilst they were travelling through the wilderness (Exodus
16:15 and Exodus 15:35)
Here the ‘spider love’ is the transforming substance, but, spiders, being poisonous, make it a
sort of anti-transformation: from good to bad, from bread to ‘gall’
‘Gall’, a bitter substance, often contrasted with food that is good to eat. The Gospel of Matthew
describes gall mixed with vinegar being offered to Jesus Christ to drink while he was dying on
the cross
The final strand of the conceit is the reference to ‘True Paradise’, or Eden (Genesis 2:8), the
original perfect garden.
The thing that transformed that from good was the serpent (Genesis 3:1-5). So now Donne is
the serpent, turning a perfect place into a place of expulsion, grief and absence.
Andrew Marvell's poem The Garden uses similar imagery.
Second stanza
The conceits in the second stanza are more straightforward:

the natural image of winter being obviously consonant with his own mood of desolation

Mandrakes had a symbolic meaning for the time: they were little plants with a
forked root, often seen as symbolising males, sometimes females, especially anatomically. They
were reputed to groan as they were pulled up. Some manuscripts have ‘groane’, some have
‘grow’ here. Since the groaning of mandrakes was an Elizabethan commonplace, this would
appear the better reading.
Third stanza
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

The third stanza's conceit of tears as something to be tasted is not unusual
Donne manages to tie in the ‘bread’ image of stanza one in his reference to ‘loves wine’
Thus we have both the bread and the wine of the Mass.
But there is a reverse in the conceit:



Whereas before he was the false presence, now his tears are the sign of the true
The tradition of hearts being reflected in eyes is decisively rejected in Donne's cynical ending
The comparison is made with shadows, which in fact tell us little about the actual clothes a
woman may be wearing.
Investigating Twicknam Garden


Donne is hoping to be cured in the first four lines.
o In what way?
o Cured of what?
In what ways does Donne take conventional love imagery and turn it upside down?
'Twickenham Garden' is a meta-physical poem in the sense that the main focus is about love and
the fact that Donne cannot receive any back from the girl he has fallen in love with. In this poem
love is mentioned continually throughout in different contexts. In the first stanza Donne is
describing his state of misery and loneliness and the inner turmoil he suffers from falling in love with
a woman he cannot have. The first line: "Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with teares" is showing
his sate of mind, he feels as though his heart had been 'blasted' with the sighs he utters when he is
alone and depressed. The metaphors Donne uses to express these feelings are meta-physical
because they deal with feelings and other none physical attributes like a broken heart. The line "O,
selfe traytor" shows that he himself is not happy with the fact he has fallen in love with a married
woman, He feels as though his heart has betrayed him. The final line "True Paradise, I have the
serpent brought" makes it seem as though as he walks through this lush garden that plants wither
and die, as he walks past as if he is some kind of bad disease on this 'paradise'. The Second Stanza
The second Stanza is about him feeling sorry for himself and his 'condition'. The metaphysical side of
his love and feeling of self -pity are openly paced in this stanza and this adds to the effect of the raw
emotion he writes about in this stanza. The first two lines "'Twere wholsomer for mee, that winter
did Benight the glory of this place," is saying that his current state of mind and emotion would be
more suited to the cold barren landscape of winter rather then the lush colourful garden he is in.
The line "These trees to laugh, and mocke mee to my face:" is an addition to the preference of
winter by his mood. He is trying to tell us about how he feels at odds with nature and how he feels
that all these happy summer moods going around seem to be mocking him. After this there is the
line "Love let mee Some senseless peece of this place bee:" He is addressing love as if it is a real
person and asking it to make him into one of the inanimate garden
LOVE'S GROWTH.
by John Donne
I SCARCE believe my love to be so pure
As I had thought it was,
Because it doth endure
Vicissitude, and season, as the grass ;
Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore
My love was infinite, if spring make it more.
But if this medicine, love, which cures all sorrow
With more, not only be no quintessence,
But mix'd of all stuffs, vexing soul, or sense,
And of the sun his active vigour borrow,
Love’s not so pure, and abstract as they use
To say, which have no mistress but their Muse ;
But as all else, being elemented too,
Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do.
And yet no greater, but more eminent,
Love by the spring is grown ;
As in the firmament
Stars by the sun are not enlarged, but shown,
Gentle love deeds, as blossoms on a bough,
From love's awakened root do bud out now.
If, as in water stirr'd more circles be
Produced by one, love such additions take,
Those like so many spheres but one heaven make,
For they are all concentric unto thee ;
And though each spring do add to love new heat,
As princes do in times of action get
New taxes, and remit them not in peace,
No winter shall abate this spring’s increase.
The poem begins with the speaker stating that his love is not as pure as he once thought it to be. Love is
a mixture of many different things. It is not a simple idea that can be applied to the idealized feelings
that go along with love at times. Love can have its happy times, which Donne relates to the spring,
where love “is growne.” Yet love experiences trouble sometimes as well, which Donne relates to the
winter. Although he does not paint a perfect image of love, he revels in the realistic image because even
though love must weather the winter, when it does, it is made stronger in the spring. In examining the
meaning further, I wanted to look at individual quotes closer:
"I scarce believe my love to be so pure as I had thought it was…"
The concept of purity approached in a few different ways. The purity he speaks of is examined first by
admitting in this line, a misinterpretation that the speaker has made about his own love’s purity. He
explains that it is not as pure as he once thought it was. The assumptions that could be drawn from this
therefore, are that his love has strayed from one of these definitions or simply that he has contemplated
the very universal concept of love and decided that he has been wrong about his past definition of love.
"No winter shall abate the spring’s increase."
The point he makes earlier about love being a mixture of the good times and the bad is completed by
juxtaposing the spring and winter seasons. He uses the contingencies of individual relationships in
comparison with the universals of the seasons to make his point. The analogy of spring and winter to
good times and bad times, respectively, in a relationship is Donne’s way of describing love as a mixture,
or “medicine.” He leaves the poem on a very upbeat and hopeful note with this final line. He admits that
even though a relationship may have its problems, the positive moments can outweigh the negative and
even strengthen the love. The quarrels and “winters” of a relationship allow for “spring” to strengthen
the love further.
THE DREAM.
by John Donne
DEAR love, for nothing less than thee
Would I have broke this happy dream ;
It was a theme
For reason, much too strong for fantasy.
Therefore thou waked'st me wisely ; yet
My dream thou brokest not, but continued'st it.
Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice
To make dreams truths, and fables histories ;
Enter these arms, for since thou thought'st it best,
Not to dream all my dream, let's act the rest.
As lightning, or a taper's light,
Thine eyes, and not thy noise waked me ;
Yet I thought thee
—For thou lovest truth—an angel, at first sight ;
But when I saw thou saw'st my heart,
And knew'st my thoughts beyond an angel's art,
When thou knew'st what I dreamt, when thou knew'st when
Excess of joy would wake me, and camest then,
I must confess, it could not choose but be
Profane, to think thee any thing but thee.
Coming and staying show'd thee, thee,
But rising makes me doubt, that now
Thou art not thou.
That love is weak where fear's as strong as he ;
'Tis not all spirit, pure and brave,
If mixture it of fear, shame, honour have ;
Perchance as torches, which must ready be,
Men light and put out, so thou deal'st with me ;
Thou camest to kindle, go'st to come ; then I
Will dream that hope again, but else would die.
In John Donne’s poem “The Dream,” the narrator is woken from a dream by the person who he claims to
have been dreaming about. Like in the more popular Donne poem “The Flea,” the narrator attempts to
cajole the woman into coming to bed with him by talking about the poetic conceit (the dream, the flea)
and how it relates to them. Unlike in “The Flea,” however, Donne uses some very complex imagery to
describe the dream and the waking and to form his arguments for her staying.
Although nothing in “The Dream” uses the feminine pronoun to describe the one who wakes the
narrator, the imagery of an angel and the cajoling tone all point to a feminine character. Because of this,
Donne’s romantic reputation, and his use of the female pronoun in other similar poems the following
explication assumes that the unnamed person who wakens the narrator is a woman.
Dearest, for nothing worth less than you
Would I have woken up from this dream;
For reality was stronger than fantasy.
The clause is an explanation from the narrator that reality (her in his room) is stronger than fantasy and
simply the reality of her being there woke him up. In the actual poem, this clause reads “For reason,
much too strong for fantasy.” It’s an odd juxtaposition – why “reason” and not “reality,” the more exact
opposite of fantasy – that hints at a pun. According to Merriam-Webster OnLine, the entry for reason
includes an archaic definition meaning “treatment that affords satisfaction,” the very sort of treatment
the narrator is looking for.
Therefore, it was wise [good] that you woke me; yet
You didn’t end my dream, but you [yourself] are the continuation of it
You are so true that the thought of you
Is enough to make a dream true, and fables [factual] history;
Enter my arms, for since you thought it was best,
For me not to dream, let us act [out] the conclusion of that dream.
The narrator, glad to be awoken by the person he was dreaming about, starts off by complementing her
and attempts to bring her into his bed. He tells her she is so true that she makes dreams into reality and
histories into fables.
Although it’s not a theme he uses often, the idea of a woman altering history appears in one other
Donne poem: The Damp. In “The Damp” Donne challenged the wooed to “…like a Goth and Vandal rise,
/ Deface records and histories,” (lines 13-14) –to make different choices then what she made in the past.
In each poem, Donne uses this image to portray women as have remarkable power over reality and
perceptions of reality.
At the end of the stanza, much like the quip that was in his usage of reason, Donne again makes a
reference to the activities occurring in the dream but in a less veiled way. “Let’s act out the rest,” (line
10) as the line was originally written, coupled with his calling her back into his arms, gives away the
sexual nature of this dream.
As lightning, or the light of a candle,
Your eyes, and not your noise woke me;
The abstraction of the woman’s eyes fits perfectly into both the Petrarchan tradition, where Laura’s
eyes are often described as stars, and also to the more contemporary Philip Sidney. In Sidney’s sonnet
“7,” Sidney describes Stella’s unveiled eyes as “sunlike, should more dazzle then delight” (line 8). With
this metaphor of eyes and light being a common one, it’s not surprising to see it here. But, in other
poems, Donne uses eyes and light to express something else. In Elegy IV: Julia, Donne describes Julia as a
“This she Chimera that hath eyes of fire, / Burning with anger —anger feeds desire—” (lines 15 – 16). In
each of these Donne poems, eyes inspire desire through a burning light, candle and fire, and create
desire. In “The Dream,” Donne happily moves from fantasy to reality when those eyes wake him. In Julia,
he describes the burning anger within the subject that creates desire within her.
Yet I thought you
-for you love truth- were an angle when I first saw you [after I woke up];
But when I saw that you saw [what was in] my heart,
There is irony in the lines “Yet I thought thee / —For thou lovest truth—an angel, at first sight” (lines 13
– 14). Donne positions her love for truth right next to his flattery. By doing this, he is able to use the
hyperbole of thinking her an angle, while at the same time saying “this is true and I’m telling you this not
to flatter you, but because you love truth.”
And that you knew my thoughts better than an angel has the ability to do,
When you knew what I was dreaming, when you knew when
An excess of joy would wake me, and then you came,
I must admit, it would be nothing but
Profane to think of you as anything but yourself.
Going beyond calling her an angel, Donne says that she knew what he was dreaming, so exactly, that she
was able to wake him up at the very moment before he could experience an “excess of joy,” his
euphemism for a nocturnal emission. And her ability to do that proves that she knew him better than an
angle would and to call her such would be calling her something less than she already is.
Coming and staying showed you to be yourself [revealed your intentions]
But rising [leaving my arms] makes me doubt, what your real intentions are.
The toughest and last stanza of the poem begins with the easiest lines to paraphrase. She came into
Donne’s room and woke him from an erotic dream. In the previous stanza he said she knew the precise
moment to wake him and, for him, this means she was interested in playing out that dream in reality.
But as she gets up to leave, he questions why she is leaving.
Love becomes weak with fear [hesitation]
And if this fear [hesitation] is a mixture of shame, then have honor
Like torches, which must be ready for
Men to light and put out, so you deal with [treat] me;
The original text for this section reads “That love is weak where fear's as strong as he; / 'Tis not all spirit,
pure and brave,” (lines 14 – 15). When viewed through the Petrarchan tradition it lends itself to an
interpretation based upon the personification of Fear and Love, with the former becoming stronger as
the latter becomes weaker. But this doesn’t mesh with the implied question of the two previous lines:
Why is she leaving?
When viewed through this question, it becomes an answer. Love, the woman’s resolve to express the
emotion of love through a physical act, weakens as she is confronted with the reality of the social mores
and taboos regarding sex outside the confines of marriage. Donne recognizes this along with the sense
of shame that would accompany a fallen woman and almost sardonically lets her off the hook by saying
“Fine, if this makes you feel shame then find the honor in the fact that you are treating me in the way
men treat torches.” It’s a bit bitter but it aligns her shame with a normal thing even an honorable man
would do.
You came to kindle, then you go to leave; and then [now] I
Will dream that hope [of you coming] again, or die.
If before Donne almost let her off the hook, he attempts to drive it home now: He lets her go but not
without an “I’ll die without you parting shot.” It is not, however, in the same sardonic spirit as before.
Instead, he is returning to the same power of altering history and waking him up with her eyes. It is the
classic “without you I am nothing,” concept from the troubadours.
Verbal foreplay
This is a good example of one of Donne's more erotic poems. It is playful in the sense that we
have a sort of verbal foreplay situation: playful, but with a serious desire for sexual union
afterwards. The poem teases us, too, as readers: is the poet going to get his wish? Or will he have
to go to sleep again and just dream he is making love to his lady?
The poem plays with ideas of truth, sexual desire and dreams. He is clearly having an erotic
dream when his lady friend wakes him for some reason. Is she going (i.e. leaving him), or is she
coming (to have sex)? If the latter, then ‘My Dreame thou brok'st not, but continued'st it’. In
other words, she can ‘make dreams truths’, so she is a true lover.
Like an angel
This leads him to liken her to an angel. Angels appear in dreams (Matthew
1:20 for example); are dressed in white, as she would be in her nightgown; and we call our loved
ones angels. But angels have their limits (1 Peter 1:12). They cannot read people's thoughts. She,
however, must have read his dream, waking him before it reached its climax to prevent ‘excess
of joy’ waking him instead. So she must be human after all, and not an angel. He is ‘prophane’ to
think that, since he sees her literally as a real person and doesn't spiritualise her into a sacred
object.
A win-win situation
Then he wonders if that's why she woke him – perhaps she was creeping away? That would be to
allow thoughts of ‘Feare, Shame, Honor’ to creep in and suggest ‘That love is weake’. He then
plays with the idea of light, as he did in l.11. Truth and light are seen as complementary. So she
has come in truth to ‘kindle’ light. But of course, these words have sexual overtones: torches are
something of a phallic symbol; ‘kindle’ suggests arousal; and ‘coming’ and ‘ die’ have colloquial
meanings of intercourse. So in the end, he resolves his doubt with a win-win situation: either you
go and I finish my dream of love-making; or we really make love.
The ultimate joke is, of course, we don't know if this a real situation, or just a fantasy one for the
purposes of writing a poem. This is thus an excellent example of the play of literature, its
joyfulness, where the truths of dreams, literature and real life tease one other.
A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING.
by John Donne
AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
5
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove
The thing which elemented it.
10
15
But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.
20
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
25
30
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
35
Summary
The speaker explains that he is forced to spend time apart from his lover, but before he leaves, he
tells her that their farewell should not be the occasion for mourning and sorrow. In the same way
that virtuous men die mildly and without complaint, he says, so they should leave without “tearfloods” and “sigh-tempests,” for to publicly announce their feelings in such a way would profane
their love. The speaker says that when the earth moves, it brings “harms and fears,” but when the
spheres experience “trepidation,” though the impact is greater, it is also innocent. The love of
“dull sublunary lovers” cannot survive separation, but it removes that which constitutes the love
itself; but the love he shares with his beloved is so refined and “Inter-assured of the mind” that
they need not worry about missing “eyes, lips, and hands.”
Though he must go, their souls are still one, and, therefore, they are not enduring a breach, they
are experiencing an “expansion”; in the same way that gold can be stretched by beating it “to
aery thinness,” the soul they share will simply stretch to take in all the space between them. If
their souls are separate, he says, they are like the feet of a compass: His lover’s soul is the fixed
foot in the center, and his is the foot that moves around it. The firmness of the center foot makes
the circle that the outer foot draws perfect: “Thy firmness makes my circle just, / And makes me
end, where I begun.”
Form
The nine stanzas of this Valediction are quite simple compared to many of Donne’s poems,
which utilize strange metrical patterns overlaid jarringly on regular rhyme schemes. Here, each
four-line stanza is quite unadorned, with an ABAB rhyme scheme and an iambic tetrameter
meter.
Commentary
“A Valediction: forbidding Mourning” is one of Donne’s most famous and simplest poems and
also probably his most direct statement of his ideal of spiritual love. For all his erotic carnality in
poems, such as “The Flea,” Donne professed a devotion to a kind of spiritual love that
transcended the merely physical. Here, anticipating a physical separation from his beloved, he
invokes the nature of that spiritual love to ward off the “tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests” that
might otherwise attend on their farewell. The poem is essentially a sequence of metaphors and
comparisons, each describing a way of looking at their separation that will help them to avoid the
mourning forbidden by the poem’s title.
First, the speaker says that their farewell should be as mild as the uncomplaining deaths of
virtuous men, for to weep would be “profanation of our joys.” Next, the speaker compares
harmful “Moving of th’ earth” to innocent “trepidation of the spheres,” equating the first with
“dull sublunary lovers’ love” and the second with their love, “Inter-assured of the mind.” Like
the rumbling earth, the dull sublunary (sublunary meaning literally beneath the moon and also
subject to the moon) lovers are all physical, unable to experience separation without losing the
sensation that comprises and sustains their love. But the spiritual lovers “Care less, eyes, lips,
and hands to miss,” because, like the trepidation (vibration) of the spheres (the concentric globes
that surrounded the earth in ancient astronomy), their love is not wholly physical. Also, like the
trepidation of the spheres, their movement will not have the harmful consequences of an
earthquake.
The speaker then declares that, since the lovers’ two souls are one, his departure will simply
expand the area of their unified soul, rather than cause a rift between them. If, however, their
souls are “two” instead of “one”, they are as the feet of a drafter’s compass, connected, with the
center foot fixing the orbit of the outer foot and helping it to describe a perfect circle. The
compass (the instrument used for drawing circles) is one of Donne’s most famous metaphors,
and it is the perfect image to encapsulate the values of Donne’s spiritual love, which is balanced,
symmetrical, intellectual, serious, and beautiful in its polished simplicity.
Like many of Donne’s love poems (including “The Sun Rising” and “The Canonization”), “A
Valediction: forbidding Mourning” creates a dichotomy between the common love of the
everyday world and the uncommon love of the speaker. Here, the speaker claims that to tell “the
laity,” or the common people, of his love would be to profane its sacred nature, and he is clearly
contemptuous of the dull sublunary love of other lovers. The effect of this dichotomy is to create
a kind of emotional aristocracy that is similar in form to the political aristocracy with which
Donne has had painfully bad luck throughout his life and which he commented upon in poems,
such as “The Canonization”: This emotional aristocracy is similar in form to the political one but
utterly opposed to it in spirit. Few in number are the emotional aristocrats who have access to the
spiritual love of the spheres and the compass; throughout all of Donne’s writing, the membership
of this elite never includes more than the speaker and his lover—or at the most, the speaker, his
lover, and the reader of the poem, who is called upon to sympathize with Donne’s romantic
plight.
."A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" is a lyric poem. Some scholars further classify it as a metaphysical
poem; Donne himself did not use that term. Among the characteristics of a metaphysical poem are the
following:




Startling comparisons or contrasts of a metaphysical (spiritual, transcendant, abstract) quality to a
concrete (physical, tangible, sensible) object. In "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," Donne
compares the love he shares with his wife to a compass. (See Stanza 7 of the poem).
Mockery of idealized, sentimental romantic poetry, as in Stanza 2 of the poem.
Gross exaggeration (hyperbole).
Presentation of a logical argument. Donne argues that he and his wife will remain together
spiritually even though they are apart physically.

Expression of personal, private feelings, such as those Donne expresses in "A Valediction:
Forbidding Mourning."
Publication Information
......."A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" was first published in 1633, two years after Donne died, in a
poetry collection entitled Songs and Sonnets.
Summary With an Explanation of the Title
.......In 1611, John Donne wrote "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" to his wife, Anne More Donne, to
comfort her while he sojourned in France on government business and she remained home in Mitcham,
England, about seven miles from London. The title says, in essence, "When we part, we must not mourn."
Valediction comes from the Latin verb valedicere, meaning to bid farewell. (Another English word derived
from the same Latin verb is valedictorian, referring to a student scholar who delivers a farewell address at
a graduation ceremony.) The poem then explains that a maudlin show of emotion would cheapen their
love, reduce it to the level of the ordinary and mundane. Their love, after all, is transcendant, heavenly.
Other husbands and wives who know only physical, earthly love, weep and sob when they separate for a
time, for they dread the loss of physical closeness. But because Donne and his wife have a spiritual as
well as physical dimension to their love, they will never really be apart, he says. Their souls will remain
united–even though their bodies are separated–until he returns to England.
John and Anne More Donne
.......John Donne (1572-1631) was one of England's greatest and most innovative poets. He worked for a
time as secretary to Sir Thomas Edgerton, the Keeper of the Great Seal of England. When he fell in love
with Anne More (1584-1617), the niece of Edgerton's second wife, he knew Edgerton and Ann's father–
Sir George More, Chancellor of the Garter–would disapprove of their marriage. Nevertheless, he married
her anyway, in 1601, the year she turned 17. As a result, he lost his job and was jailed for a brief time.
Life was hard for them over the next decade, but in 1611 Sir Robert Drury befriended him and took Donne
on a diplomatic mission with him to France and other countries. Donne's separation from his wife at this
time provided him the occasion for writing "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning."
.......Anne bore him twelve children–five of whom died very young or at birth–before she died in 1617.
Figures of Speech
Metaphor
.......Donne relies primarily on extended metaphors to convey his message. First, he compares his
separation from his wife to the separation of a man's soul from his body when he dies (first stanza). The
body represents physical love; the soul represents spiritual or intellectual love. While Donne and his wife
are apart, they cannot express physical love; thus, they are like the body of the dead man. However,
Donne says, they remain united spiritually and intellectually because their souls are one. So, Donne
continues, he and his wife should let their physical bond "melt" when they part (line 5).
.......He follows that metaphor with others, saying they should not cry sentimental "tear-floods" or indulge
in "sigh-tempests" (line 6) when they say farewell. Such base sentimentality would cheapen their
relationship. He also compares himself and his wife to celestial spheres, such as the sun and others
stars, for their love is so profound that it exists in a higher plane than the love of husbands and wives
whose relationship centers solely on physical pleasures which, to be enjoyed, require that the man and
woman always remain together, physically.
.......Finally, Donne compares his relationship with his wife to that of the two legs of a drawing compass.
Although the legs are separate components of the compass, they are both part of the same object. The
legs operate in unison. If the outer leg traces a circle, the inner leg–though its point is fixed at the center–
must pivot in the direction of the outer leg. Thus, Donne says, though he and his wife are separated, like
the legs of the compass, they remain united because they are part of the same soul.
Paradox
.......In the sixth stanza, Donne begins a paradox, noting that his and his wife's souls are one though they
be two; therefore, their souls will always be together even though they are apart.
Simile
.......Stanza 6 also presents a simile, comparing the expansion of their souls to the expansion of beaten
gold.
Alliteration
.......Donne also uses alliteration extensively. Following are examples:
Whilst some of their sad friends do say (line 3)
Dull sublunary lovers' love (line 13)
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit (line 14)
That our selves know not what it is, (line 18)
Our two souls therefore, which are one (line 21)
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
Thy firmness makes my circle just, / And makes me end where I begun (lines 35-36)
.
.
Theme
.......Real, complete love unites not only the bodies of a husband and wife but also their souls. Such
spiritual love is transcendent, metaphysical, keeping the lovers together intellectually and spiritually even
though the circumstances of everyday life may separate their bodies.
Rhyme Scheme and Meter
End rhyme occurs in the first and third lines of each stanza and in the second and fourth lines. The meter
is iambic tetrameter, with eight syllables (four feet) per line. Each foot, or pair of syllables, consists of an
unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The first two lines of the second stanza demonstrate
this metric pattern:
....1...... .
..2........... ....3.................4
So LET..|..us MELT..|..and MAKE..|..no NOISE
....1............ ..2........... ....3........ .........4
No TEAR-..|..floods NOR..|..sigh-TEMP..|..ests MOVE
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
By John Donne
Text and Stanza Summaries
1
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:
Summary, Stanza 1
Good men die peacefully because they lived a life that pleased God.
They accept death without complaining, saying it is time for their
souls to move on to eternity. Meanwhile, some of their sad friends at
the bedside acknowledge death as imminent, and some say, no, he
may live awhile longer.
2
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Summary, Stanza 2
Well, Anne, because I will be in France and other countries for a
time while you remain home in England, we must accept our
separation in the same way that virtuous dying men quietly accept
the separation of their souls from their bodies. While the physical
bond that unites us melts, we must not cry storms of tears. To do so
would be to debase our love, making it depend entirely on flesh, as
does the love of so many ordinary people (laity) for whom love does
not extend beyond physical attraction.
3
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Summary, Stanza 3
Earthquakes (moving of th' earth) frighten people, who wonder at
the cause and the meaning of them. However, the movements of
the sun and other heavenly bodies (trepidation of the spheres)
cause no fear, for such movements are natural and harmless. They
bring about the changes of the seasons.
4
Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
Summary, Stanza 4
You and I are like the heavenly bodies; our movements–our
temporary separations–cause no excitement. On the other hand,
those who unite themselves solely through the senses and not also
through the soul are not like the heavenly bodies. They inhabit
regions that are sublunary (below the moon) and cannot endure
movements that separate.
5
But we by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
Summary, Stanza 5
By contrast, our love is so refined, so otherworldly, that it can still
survive without the closeness of eyes, lips, and hands.
6
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.
Summary, Stanza 6
The point is this: Even though our bodies become separated and
must live apart for a time in different parts of the world, our souls
remain united. In fact, the spiritual bond that unites us actually
expands; it is like gold which, when beaten with a hammer, widens
and lengthens.
7
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.
Summary, Stanza 7
Anne, you and I are like the pointed legs
of a compass (pictured at right in a
photograph provided courtesy of
Wikipedia), used to draw circles and arcs.
8
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Summary, Stanza 9
One pointed leg, yours, remains fixed at the center. But when the
other pointed leg, mine, moves in a circle or an arc, your leg also
turns even though the point of it remains fixed at the center of my
circle. Your position there helps me complete my circle so that I end
up where I began.
9
Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
Summary, Stanza 10
Donne continues the metaphor begun in Stanza 7, in which he
compares himself and his wife to the legs of a compass. Because
the leg of Anne's compass remains firmly set in the center of the
circle, she enables the leg of her husband's compass to trace a
circle and return to the place from which he embarked.
John Donne
14. The
Extasie
WHERE, like a pillow on a bed,
A Pregnant banke swel'd up, to rest
The violets reclining head,
Sat we two, one anothers best.
Our hands were firmely cimented
With a fast balme, which thence did spring,
Our eye-beames twisted, and did thred
Our eyes, upon one double string;
So to'entergraft our hands, as yet
Was all the meanes to make us one,
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.
As 'twixt two equall Armies, Fate
Suspends uncertaine victorie,
Our soules, (which to advance their state,
Were gone out,) hung 'twixt her, and mee.
And whil'st our soules negotiate there,
Wee like sepulchrall statues lay;
All day, the same our postures were,
And wee said nothing, all the day.
If any, so by love refin'd,
That he soules language understood,
And by good love were growen all minde,
Within convenient distance stood,
He (though he knew not which soule spake,
Because both meant, both spake the same)
Might thence a new concoction take,
And part farre purer then he came.
This Extasie doth unperplex
(We said) and tell us what we love,
Wee see by this, it was not sexe,
Wee see, we saw not what did move:
But as all severall soules containe
Mixture of things, they know not what,
Love, these mixt soules, doth mixe againe,
And makes both one, each this and that.
A single violet transplant,
The strength, the colour, and the size,
(All which before was poore, and scant,)
Redoubles still, and multiplies.
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
When love, with one another so
Interinanimates two soules,
That abler soule, which thence doth flow,
Defects of lonelinesse controules.
Wee then, who are this new soule, know,
Of what we are compos'd, and made,
For, th'Atomies of which we grow,
Are soules, whom no change can invade.
But O alas, so long, so farre
Our bodies why doe wee forbeare?
They are ours, though they are not wee, Wee are
The intelligences, they the spheare.
We owe them thankes, because they thus,
Did us, to us, at first convay,
Yeelded their forces, sense, to us,
Nor are drosse to us, but allay.
On man heavens influence workes not so,
But that it first imprints the ayre,
Soe soule into the soule may flow,
Though it to body first repaire.
As our blood labours to beget
Spirits, as like soules as it can,
Because such fingers need to knit
That subtile knot, which makes us man:
So must pure lovers soules descend
T'affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great Prince in prison lies.
To'our bodies turne wee then, that so
Weake men on love reveal'd may looke;
Loves mysteries in soules doe grow,
But yet the body is his booke.
And if some lover, such as wee,
Have heard this dialogue of one,
Let him still marke us, he shall see
Small change, when we'are to bodies gone.
45
50
55
60
65
70
75
The Extasie is one of Donne's best known and most important love poems, and has been widely
discussed and analysed by various critics. It is certainly a poem you should know and
understand, since it deals fully with Donne's metaphysics of human love. It is also one of the
longest of his love poems, and you need to see how the argument is structured.
In an ecstatic state
This does not mean it is just a philosophical poem. Far from it. The word ‘ecstasy’ means a very
heightened experience so that you feel almost out-of-body, which is presumably why the name
was given to the drug. True ecstasy does not need to be drug-induced, however, and Donne
describes fully the ecstatic state he experienced through true love, just as another metaphysical
poet, Richard Crashaw, describes spiritual or religious ecstasy in his Hymn to St Teresa.
he ecstasy of love
The ecstasy of love is clearly the major theme of The Extasie. Donne looks at the outward
manifestations of it and its inner meaning. In fact, the understanding he gains is that
We see, we saw not what did move
In other words, a revelation has come of what true love is, which is quite different from his
perception before. There is a place for sex and the physical, but only as an expression of a union
of souls.
Union
This idea of union also runs throughout the poem, and suggests also The nature and
completeness of the lovers' world. People may come by and look and learn, but the lovers don't
need others. Their ecstatic union leaves no room for anyone or anything else. But the world has
to include their bodies, else a ‘Prince’ lies in prison. The ‘prince’ idea is found in other poems by
Donne on this theme, as The Sunne Rising.
Investigating The Extasie


Try to define Donne's idealism in The Extasie
o How does it express itself in the poem?
Do you feel idealistic about love and the possibilities of it?
o Do you take heart from Donne's poem?
 or does it seem irrelevant to your own experience?
The two main strands of imagery are horticultural and military, with some sexual images also.
Horticulture
The horticultural imagery is most important in the discussion on transplanting and also in ‘to'
entregraft our hands’ (l.8). Both processes suggest union:


the plant to new soil
the graft, to a new stock.
We actually talk, too, of ‘propagation’ in horticulture, as the poet does in l.12. The word is
ambiguous here, for ‘propagation’ is also used to mean ‘making pregnant’.


Pregnancy is suggested directly in l.2, and ‘pillow’ could suggest that, as well as the more
general association with sexual activity (l.1).
Conversely, ‘The violets reclining head’ (l.3) would suggest modesty, as violets symbolise
modesty.
Military
Military imagery comes with the idea of two armies negotiating a truce (l.13-17), quite an
extended simile. The image suggests not so much former hostility, as great strength on both
sides. This is an equal match. The military imagery is picked up in ll.54,55; and l.68.
Scientific references
As is typical of Donne, there are many scientific references too:





‘concoction’(l.27)
‘mixture of things’(l.34)
‘Atomies’(l.47)
‘drosse… alloy’(l.56)
‘blood’(l.61).
Behind much of this is the same question: what fusion can be made which will result in an
unchangeable final state (‘whom no change can invade’)?
Investigating The Extasie


Read through the first ten lines of The Extasie
o These lines contain a riot of images
 What others can you see besides those mentioned already?
There is also an imagery of language in the poem
o Can you trace this through, and say what its significance is?
The argument of the poem
The argument of the poem falls into three sections:



The physical signs of the lovers' ecstacy (ll.1-20)
Its philosophical meaning (ll.21-48)
An invitation to return to the body: the need for incarnation (ll.49-76)
Lines 1-20
The lovers have reached a state where they feel their souls have, as it were, left their bodies:

‘our soules....hung 'twixt her and mee’

while their bodies ‘like sepulchrall statues lay’.
There was a union, but it was a soul-union, not physical union, apart from


‘Our hands were firmly cimented’
and ‘did thred/ Our eyes, upon one double string.’
Their only ‘propagation’ was seeing each reflected in the other's eyes.
Lines 21-48
Donne imagines what some bystander would make of them. Certainly it would be a purifying
experience for such a person. And for them, too, it has answered some questions about love and
sex. In the first place, the ecstasy has been a union of souls, not of bodies.
Like a transplant
It is like transplanting. Donne was writing before organ transplants were even dreamed of, but
plants were regularly transplanted to get better and better plants. The net result of their two souls
being transplanted into one another is a single new soul which ‘Defects of lonelinesse
controules’. It is fulfilled, where ‘no change can invade’.
Lines 49-76
So how are they to understand their bodies and physical sexuality?



Firstly, we cannot be defined by our bodies: ‘They are ours, though they are not wee’.
Yet we must be thankful to them. Donne refuses to belittle the part our bodies play.
There always has to be an incarnation.
More on Incarnation?
Souls cannot exist without bodies:
Soe soule into the soule may flow,
Though it to body first repaire
(‘repaire’=travel).

The body consists of ‘affections’ and ‘faculties’, emotions and senses, and this is the only way for
even ‘pure lovers soules’ to manifest themelves,
Else a great Prince in prison lies
he simply says.

So there is an ‘invitation to sex’ at the end, but it is almost for the benefit of others, not
themselves. It is to be a revelation:
so
Weake men on love reveal'd may looke
like writing invisible thoughts down into a material and visible book. For the lovers
themselves, it really will not make much difference ‘when we'are to bodies gone’.
The language of The Extasie is an amazing combination of emotionally charged and philosophic
language, in which the poet undertakes a patient argument to analyse the lovers' state of being.
So there are all sorts of markers that an argument is being conducted:




‘If any...’(l.21)
‘(We said)’ (l.30)
‘We see by this’(l.31)
‘Wee then’(l.45) etc.
The argument is quite technical:


‘We are the intelligences, they the spheare’(l.52) (see Aire and Angels for a discussion of this);
‘As our blood labours to beget/ Spirits, as like souls it can’ (11.61-2).
This technicality suggests the theory of the day, which, whilst outdated to us, nevertheless still
works as imagery, even if not science!
Emotional
The language is also emotionally charged:



‘Sat we two, one anothers best’ (l.4)
‘as yet was all the meanes to make us one’(l.9)
‘And we said nothing, all the day’(l.20).
This is so simply put, yet what an extraordinary state it is describing. When was the last time you
sat with someone for even an hour without saying anything to them and yet being in harmony
with them? The ending, too, is extraordinarily simple after such a complex argument. Donne is
not trying to impress or convince, but to bring to a quiet and satisfied resolution.
Although The Extasie is a long poem, its structure is quite simple, much simpler than the typical Donne
poem, being a series of iambic tetrameter quatrains, rhyming abab. The iambic tetrameter form is a
favourite form for many of the metaphysical poets, especially Andrew Marvell, though Donne tends to
avoid it (though note A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning). Some editions actually print the poem as
quatrains. The sentence structure adheres fairly strictly to the quatrain form, which again makes the
argument that much easier to follow. There are no ‘neat’ solutions, since there are no rhyming couplets,
so when two lines fit together perfectly, as do ll.71 and 72, it is a consonance of thought rather than of
sound.
John Donne : The Relique
When my grave is broke up againe
Some second ghest to entertaine1,
(For graves have learn’d that woman-head
To be to more then one a Bed)
And he that digs it, spies
A bracelet of bright haire about the bone,
Will he not let’us alone,
And thinke that there a loving couple lies,
Who thought that this device might be some way
To make their soules, at the last busie day2,
Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?
If this fall in a time, or land,
Where mis-devotion doth command,
Then, he that digges us up, will bring
Us, to the Bishop, and the King,
To make us Reliques; then
Thou shalt be a Mary Magdalen3, and I
A something else thereby;
All women shall adore us, and some men;
And since that at such time, miracles are sought,
I would have that age by this paper taught
What mirades wee harmelesse lovers wrought.
First we lov’d well and faithfully,
Yet knew not what wee lov’d, nor why,
Difference of sex no more wee knew,
Then our Guardian Angells doe;
Comming and going, wee
Perchance might kisse, but not between those
meales;
Our hands ne’r toucht the seales4,
Which nature, injur’d by late law5, sets free:
These miracles wee did; but now alas,
All measure, and all language, I should passe,
Should I tell what a miracle shee was.
John Donne (1572-1631) P. 1633
FOOTNOTES
1
refers to practise of digging up graves for reuse
; 2 Judgement Day ; 3 Mary Magdalene, out of whom Jesus
cast seven demons and who stood by his cross, was depicted
by painters as having golden hair ; 4 also suggests the sexual
organs ;5 human and social laws
The Relic” is a lyric poem consisting of three stanzas of eleven lines each. As with numerous other
English Metaphysical lyrics, the stanza form and rhyme scheme are unusual and perhaps unique. The
pattern of five rhymes in each stanza is aabbcddceee, while the meter of lines is complex and somewhat
irregular but basically iambic and effectively supplements the poem’s thematic development. The four
weighty iambic pentameter lines that conclude each stanza reinforce a change of tone from flippant or
cynical to serious.
The Relique is a typical metaphysical poem written by the master of the school John Donne
himself. It has sharp wit, irony, short pithy statements in a style full of allusions, conceit and
epigram.
It is a characteristically metaphysical love poem combining levity and seriousness to the core. It
is a hypothetical situation, where the spectral voice of the lover assumes that his and his
beloved's graves are broken open and their skeletons are displayed and projected as the ultimate
romantic icon. The persona, however, subtly undercuts this canonization by referring to their
rather inhibited relation abiding all the social customs of the big brothers and doing everything as
par calculations and never doing anything from the bottom of the heart. The canonization is thus
struck by a kind of grotesque note in the poem.
In “The Relic,” John Donne conducts a grand compliment to the woman he loves by way of holy
and hopeful imagery. The poem is based upon the central image of a holy relic used to reference
a simple lock of his loved-one’s hair, a lock which, “At the last busy day” of Final Judgment,
will pull him and his love together, as their bodies re-assimilate upon holy disinterment. (ln.10)
The piece goes on to present additional images, primarily religious, as in completes the concepts
of reincarnation, profound love, and miracle.
The first stanza’s images are essential merely poetic devices of metaphor and metonymy. The
“second guest” to be entertained by the grave “bed” which he once possessed are basically
metaphors. (lns.2, 4) They suggest, however, that the stay in the grave is not indefinite; guests
leave eventually, sleepers in beds wake up (even lovers leave beds eventually: a more fitting
parallel because of the “women-head” polygamous suggestion). (ln.3) Thus already there is some
suggestion of Christian mythology of reincarnation.
The second stanza is where the religious imagery congeals to set the holy tone for the entire
work. Donne hopes, upon his digging-up, if this event occurs in a superstitious, idolatrous land,
“where mis-devotion doth command,” that the digger will take his and his lover’s remains to “to
the Bishop and the King” (thereby pegging Roman Catholicism, by association, as superstitious)
to be made into “relics.” (lns.13, 15, 16) By this elevation of their base remains, they in turn are
elevated (in the idolatrous society) to holy status—a status which Donne feels they deserve. They
will then become “Mary Magdalen” and he “something else thereby.” (lns.17, 18) This religious
allusion and his association “thereby” to it suggests perhaps that his lover is akin to a whore,
though one forgiven, and that he is guilty as well and forgiven as well. (ln.18) It is tempting to
suppose, at this point, that he and the women to whom he writes this poem had sexual relations,
relations which her Roman Catholic upbringing has caused undue (in Donne’s opinion) guilt in
her. The “harmless miracles” which the lovers “wrought” then could be an effort to both elevate
this relationship of ‘sin’ as well as show its simple kernel. (ln.22)
Yet the third stanza opens with an enumeration of these miracles, and the foremost of them is
chastity: “Difference of sex no more we knew,/ Than our guardian angels do.” (ln.25) They
never, then, “touched those seals/ Which nature, injured by late law, sets free:” those of virginity
or chastity. (lns.29-30) So the conciliatory tone of the poem is now nothing but celebratory or
complimentary; there is no persuasion going on here; though Donne feels the freedom of sexual
abandon to be injured by laws of chastity, he knows also that such resistance is miraculous and
holy. The way is paved for the ‘Grand Compliment’ of the piece, where he expresses language
and quantification’s inability to express “what a miracle she was.” (ln.33) He abandons the
poem, almost anti-climatically, with a sense that this image of her miraculous nature must be
expressed by not expressing it, by not ‘nailing it down’ in language or measure (meter).
Therefore, what begins as a poem suggestive of base and worldly matters, where sexuality is set
up to be lauded in spite of Roman Catholic prudery, closes with a ‘double-cross’ of
transcendence. The religious imagery of the piece, at first suggestive of Judgment, death,
idolatry, forgiven sin, gives way to direct, non-imaginative language, where only the satisfying
“meal” of a kiss intrudes its poetic device on the stanza. (ln.28) The holy transcends into the
woman who is the subject, thereby making her, in effect, transcend the transcendent; though he
could speak of death, Judgment, idolatry, and their actions on the earth with holy imagery, when
the time comes to speak of “what a miracle she was,” no words, images, or verse will suffice.
(ln.33) By not lauding, and explaining why, more praise than is possible is rained upon the lucky
woman, Donne’s love.
THE EXPIRATION.
by John Donne
SO, so, break off this last lamenting kiss,
Which sucks two souls, and vapours both away ;
Turn, thou ghost, that way, and let me turn this,
And let ourselves benight our happiest day.
We ask none leave to love ; nor will we owe
Any so cheap a death as saying, "Go."
Go ; and if that word have not quite killed thee,
Ease me with death, by bidding me go too.
Or, if it have, let my word work on me,
And a just office on a murderer do.
Except it be too late, to kill me so,
Being double dead, going, and bidding, "Go."
The expiration - parting :.
Just a basic over-view: the poem is, on the surface, about death and the parting of two souls. But the
"parting of two souls" can also be interpreted as a physical distance taken between two people perhaps one is travelling away from their lover, etc. There are a variety of possibilities. The focal point is
the idea of one's last breath also being one's soul leaving their body as death encompasses them.
"vapors" is a word with quite a different meaning to today's; rather than simply relating to gasses, as
one would now think, it deals with ghosts, spirits, and the above-mentioned "last breath = soul".
The idea of death also links to matters of a sexual nature, re: "little death". "Double dead", etc.
The Expiration," another poem of the "parting is such sweet sorrow" variety. There, the speaker says it
would be just for his love to kill him, since he is "a murderer" for killing her by leaving. Killing him turns
out to be impossible, however, because he is "double dead, going, and bidding go" (line 12). Clearly, in
love, opportunities for death abound.
II. “As due by many titles, I resign”
By John Donne (1573–1631)
AS due by many titles, I resign
Myself to Thee, O God! First I was made
By Thee and for Thee; and when I was decay’d,
Thy blood bought that, the which before was Thine.
I am Thy son, made with Thyself to shine;
Thy servant, whose pains Thou hast still repaid;
Thy sheep, Thine image; and till I betray’d
Myself, a temple of Thy Spirit Divine.
Why doth the devil then usurp on me?
Why doth he steal, nay, ravish that’s Thy right?
Except Thou rise and for Thine own work fight,
Oh, I shall soon despair, when I shall see
That Thou lov’st mankind well, yet wilt not choose me,
And Satan hates me yet is loth to lose me.
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John Donne’s religious poetry is very diverse and interesting, ranging from apostrophes, prayers, to even
sonnets. This poem “As Due by Many Titles I Resign” is in a sonnet form, with the first two stanzas
comprising four and four lines telling the main story, and then the third stanza introducing the volta, or
the turn, and finally the couplet adding the final interesting and paradoxical ending to the sonnet. This
paper argues for the interesting religious paradoxes that appear within this sonnet. Donne’s persona/
speaker is talking and praying to God, and within his arguments there are many interesting religious
paradoxes that appear, and these are Christian beliefs that are true within themselves. What then, are
these paradoxes?
The first paradox is: Donne is a human being, made by God and for God, and yet he is being bought by
God or has to be bought by God. How can God buy something which is His back? First and foremost, “I
resign/ Myself to thee, O God” has an air of surrender, as Donne’s persona prays and says that he
surrenders himself wholly to God. Then having surrendered himself to the Lord, the speaker says that
“First I was made/ By Thee; and for Thee” where it is clear that according to Christian beliefs, man was
made by God and for the glorification of God. It is also according to Christian theology and belief that
when sin sets in, the only saving grace or salvation for mankind is God himself: “when I was decay'd/ Thy
blood bought that, the which before was Thine” suggests that key Christian idea, that when decay,
associated with death, decline and degeneracy, sets in, only Jesus’ saving blood can buy Donne’s
speaker back. This is reflected in the Bible via the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The paradox is
that God apparently has to buy something that originally belongs to Him back, paying with His blood.
The second paradox is that Donne, speaking through his speaker and persona, is son, servant, sheep and
spirit, all at once. First, he seems to suggest that he is the “Son of God”, where this title reminds us of
Jesus Himself, who was called the Son of God and the Son of Man. “I am Thy son, made with Thyself to
shine” could also be suggestive of the fact that all human beings can be considered God’s children, and
that they make God their father “shine” with their actions, where the play on words is with the word
“son”, which can be either son, or sun. Hence, it seems that Donne’s speaker is a son of God, or even the
Son of God. Yet at the same time, he is also a servant of God, through his religion as well as his religious
position and posts. “Thy servant, whose pains Thou hast still repaid” is a clear reference to the speaker’s
subservient position vis-à-vis God, and that since God has bought his life, the speaker is merely a servant
who owes his life to God for being bought. In fact, slaves in ancient history all owed their lives to their
masters. At the same time, it is also clear that the speaker is like a sheep, where the true meaning seems
to be that Jesus is the shepherd and the persona is the sheep. “Thy sheep, Thine image” also suggests
common Christian theology and philosophy of the “Lamb of God”, and also that man was made in God’s
image. Before the speaker “betrayed” God, he could also be considered a spirit: “temple of [God’s] Spirit
divine” because man was made in God’s image. It is therefore clear that the speaker is son, servant,
sheep and spirit all at once, paradoxical but true according to the Bible. There are many religious
references within every line of the second stanza, all reflecting Christianity and the interesting
paradoxes that form the core and heart of belief.
The volta and the sudden change in the direction of the sonnet brings about the next key idea of the
image of the devil raping and ravishing the speaker/ persona. There is an idea of theft and the stealing
of God’s hard and holy work. “Why doth the devil then usurp on me?” is the sudden volta in the sonnet,
that questions why the devil wants to steal and take away God’s work, “Why doth he steal, nay ravish,
that's Thy right?” There seems to be a sudden begging on the part of the speaker, where he begs
“Except Thou rise and for Thine own work fight/ O! I shall soon despair”, suggesting that the power of
the devil is rather strong, and that God should rise and fight to defend his creation, which is under attack
from the devil. There is a sense of deep despair and worry and the atmosphere is now very tense. This
leads on to the last and most interesting paradox: the paradox that despite troubles, God leaves it alone
and does not come to the speaker/ persona’s aid.
“That Thou lovest mankind well, yet wilt not choose me,And Satan hates me, yet is loth to lose me.”
The ultimate paradox or irony is that God loves mankind but will not save his people actively, and yet
Satan hates mankind, and does not want to lose anyone. Looking at it from a human, simple and limited
perspective, Satan has to work harder and try to steal people away from God whereas God seems more
comfortable to leave things as they are and give people freedom to choose between good and evil. In a
literary sense it is possible to argue that the sonnet ends with a paradoxical sigh, due to the recognition
that God has given man free choice to make their own decisions.
In summary, there are many paradoxes in this one single sonnet. Firstly, the speaker is a human being
made by God and for God, yet he has to be bought back by God, who made him. One could suggest that
God has given men free will, and they seem to have abused it. The second paradox is that Donne’s
speaker is son, servant, sheep and spirit, all at once, where it seems that everyone plays multiple roles
and cannot be simply labelled. Yet the ultimate ironic but true paradox is that God loves mankind but
will not save his people actively, and yet Satan hates mankind, and does not want to lose anyone. This
sonnet by Donne is full of religious references and Christian theological and philosophical paradoxes
indeed.
“As due by many titles
I resigne” seems to both mock and embrace man‟s inability to secure his own salvation.
Donne‟s language seems to examine the efficacy of both Calvin‟s insistence on the
inability of man to effect his own salvation and the traditional Roman Catholic
insistence that faith and good works affect salvation.
Donne‟s language associates the relationship between God
and man in romantic, almost sexual terms. The soul is cleansed of sin only when it has
been ravished by God; Donne likewise associates the ascent to heaven with being
ravished. “O! might those sighs” romanticizes man‟s spiritual relationship, with the
poet‟s desire to transform impure profane love into a more pure divine love. Donne
seeks to punish himself, rather than asking God to punish him as he did in “Batter my
heart.” The idolatrous mourning he wasted on profane love must be replaced by the
fruitful mourning of repentance, replacing also his earthly love with divine love for
Christ. Having been “ravished” by God, he must turn away from the pleasures of the
flesh, abandoning the lovers he idolized. Romantic love provides relief of coming ills
only in “past joys,” while repentance offers him the chance for salvation through the love
of Christ.
. “As
due by many titles,” rather than espousing these Calvinistic doctrines and accepting
them as a valid means of Protestant salvation, instead questions their practicality.
Donne asks, “Why doth the devil then usurpe on mee” (l. 9)? If the speaker is truly
God‟s
image, and Christ‟s sacrifice has indeed rectified his sins, why is the devil allowed
control over him? This sonnet suggests that such Calvinistic theology is not acceptable,
that it should not be possible to be taken by the devil when God has already worked to
effect grace and salvation upon mankind as a whole. If this truly presents “states of soul
attendant upon the Protestant drama” (265), as Barbara Lewalski asserts, then it is a
state of soul unsatisfied with the Protestant drama of salvation, and the lack of
assurance that the soul with obtain grace.
As this sonnet shows, Donne is finds no security in the doctrines of
Protestantism. He was made by and for God, so why should God refuse to fight “for
Thine owne worke” and allow the devil to have him? Donne himself suggests a need for
reassurance that is lacking in this Calvinistic doctrine of grace and expresses frustration
and anxiety that God has “allowed” him to be taken over by Satan.
I am thy sonne, made with thy selfe to shine…
Why doth the devil then usurpe on mee?
Why doth he steale, nay ravish that‟s thy right?
Except thou rise and for thine owne worke fight,
Oh I shall soone despaire….
ll. 5-12
The poem is an exhortation to action on the part of God; the poet demands that
God grant him salvation since he “was made/By thee, and for thee” (ll. 2-3). Donne is
uncertain that God is even on his side, much less fighting to keep his soul from eternal
damnation. The language of the poem makes it seem as though God might be indifferent
towards his creation: “…thou lov‟st mankind well, yet wilt‟not chuse me” (l. 13). Man
can
be damned simply because he had not been “chosen” by God, regardless of the fact that
he was made by God and redeemed by the crucifixion (ll. 2-4). Donne‟s language in the
sonnet speaks to an anxiety regarding the Protestant means of salvation. Donne is
clearly unhappy with the lack of assurance in his own salvation—an assurance,
according to John Carey, that was supplied more readily by the Catholic Church and its
sacraments (Carey 57). He states:
Donne, in abandoning the Catholic for the Protestant church, had entered
the realm of doubt, and had he not made this move the „Holy Sonnets‟
could never have been written. They are the fruit of his apostasy. For all
their vestiges of Catholic practice, they belong among the documents of
Protestant religious pain, and their suffering is the greater because they
are the work of a man nurtured in a more sustaining creed. (57)
As Carey notes, Donne has “cut himself off” from the assurance of salvation that
came with Catholic traditions, and must now work through his doubt and anxiety.
In the first lines of the sonnet, Donne‟s language reflects an insistence that he
should be assured salvation and that grace has been bestowed already.
…First I was made
By Thee; and for Thee, and when I was decay‟d
Thy blood bought that, the which before was Thine.
I am Thy son, made with Thyself to shine,
Thy servant, whose pains Thou has still repaid,
Thy sheep, Thine image, and—till I betray‟d
Myself—a temple of Thy Spirit divine.
ll. 2-8
The speaker insists that he has already been accepted as one of God‟s children,
that there should be no reason to doubt or question his salvation. Yet the following lines
question why God would expend effort for the salvation of mankind and then abandon
the speaker to the devil:
Why doth the devil then usurp on me?
Why doth he steal, nay ravish, that‟s Thy right?
Except Thou rise and for Thine own work fight,
O! I shall soon despair, when I shall see
That Thou lovest mankind well, yet wilt not choose me,
And Satan hates me, yet is loth to lose me.
ll. 9-14
Rather than upholding Calvinist theology, these lines agonize over what seems to
be wasted effort on the part of God. Why should God create man in His own image, then
secure salvation through Christ‟s sacrifice, only to refuse adoption to certain people and
fail to protect man‟s soul from being stolen by Satan? The argument presented seems an
absurd one: God creates man, offers salvation after the fall, but will only save a few
through grace.
Rather than being a passive acceptance of the idea of limited atonement, the
sonnet questions its value. Donne “shall soon despair” because God has failed to
“choose” him, yet he insists that he is worthy of salvation. In On Christian Doctrine, St.
Augustine notes that “whoever does not believe that his sins can be forgiven worsens in
desperation, as if nothing better than evil remained to him since he has no faith in the
fruits of his conversion” (I.xviii.17, p.17). While Donne has not explicitly lost faith, “As
due by many titles” shows a poet in danger of losing faith in his own salvation—he
cannot believe that he is “nothing better than evil,” but reason seems to demand that he
must be evil if Satan steals him while God looks on indifferently. Donne despairs
because he does not see that grace has been bestowed upon him, grace that might
prevent him from being “ravished” by the devil. Without the secure knowledge of
salvation, Donne lapses into despair, yet still begs God to fight for his soul and give him
the knowledge that grace has been bestowed upon him. Donne is unable to even repent
of his sins because he is still helplessly suffering under the yoke of Satan and unsure of
his salvation. Donne‟s language neither accepts nor upholds a theology of election,
where some are saved and some are damned, or of limited atonement. The anguished
tone of the speaker in the last two lines reflects an inherent rejection of the idea that
God could have bestowed grace on all and didn‟t: “That thou lovest mankind well, yet
wilt not choose me,/ And Satan hates me, yet is loth to lose me” (l. 13-4). The language
and tone of the poem thus prevent a Protestant, Calvinist reading of the sonnet,
elucidating a desire for more spiritual inclusion—inclusion that he could not find by
limiting himself to Calvinist theology.
HOLY SONNETS.
IV.
O, my black soul, now thou art summoned
By sickness, Death's herald and champion ;
Thou'rt like a pilgrim, which abroad hath done
Treason, and durst not turn to whence he's fled ;
Or like a thief, which till death's doom be read,
Wisheth himself deliver'd from prison,
But damn'd and haled to execution,
Wisheth that still he might be imprisoned.
Yet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lack ;
But who shall give thee that grace to begin ?
O, make thyself with holy mourning black,
And red with blushing, as thou art with sin ;
Or wash thee in Christ's blood, which hath this might,
That being red, it dyes red souls to white.
Glossary
Champion - In Donne's time, a champion was one who fought battles for another. IE, sickness
both announces the coming of death (herald) and helps bring it about (champion).
Overall Explanation
It is reasonable to assume that this poem was written during a time of sickness for Donne,
because it explores the idea of Donne's death with some anguish.
Donne looks into his soul and finds it full of evil ("black"). He compares it first to
someone who has committed a terrible wrong in some country and doesn't dare return. In
this comparison, the country which has suffered this horrible wrong represents God. In
his second comparison, his soul is a thief, who wants to get out of prison until he is
sentenced to death, at which time life in prison looks quite appealing!
Donne builds up the intensity of the poem with circular reasoning - he needs the grace to
repent, but will not have grace until he repents. The ending is a poweful one, partially
because Donne employs the paradox of red blood dying something white to create a
strong image in the mind. What he means here of course is that the reality of Christ dying
for to save humans' souls - the tangible red blood, is enough to make us pure in the eyes
of God (white souls).
Poetic devices
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This poem is written in sonnet form. See this page for information on Donne's sonnets. In the
octet he presents the problem (his soul is impure and without repentance he cannot go to
heaven), and in the sestet he reflects on this problem (he needs grace to repent, but cannot
achieve grace until he repents)
Direct address, a very common device in Donne's poetry, is used again in this poem to launch
straight into his powerful argument.
Metaphor and personification:
o Sickness is personified - it becomes a herald and a champion.
o His soul is also personified - like a pilgrim or a thiefe.
Circular reasoning creates an anguished tone: Yet grace... to beginne?
Paradox adds to power of image: being red, it dyes red soules to white
Imagery
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The comparison of Man's eternal soul to a traitor and a thief would have been quite shocking in
the 17th century.
The colour imagery that runs through the poem is very intense and memorable.
Generally
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delivered from prison - here the "prison" could actually represent Donne's mortal body, and
Donne could be saying that his soul is hoping to get out of his mortal body into Heaven, until
Donne realises that what awaits his soul after death is damnation.
Circular reasoning - see above.
Donne's puns are often intentional. Look at deaths doome be read. "Read" sounds like "red" and
could represent the fires of Hell.
Deathbed drama
This sonnet is a deathbed drama like ‘This is my playes last scene’. Here, however, Donne is not
just meditating on death but is lying seriously ill, with every possibility that he might die. It
anticipates several poems he wrote in similar circumstances in later life, such as A Hymn to God
the Father. As in most of the sonnets, Donne is talking, or arguing with someone. Here it is
himself, under the guise of his soul.
Black, red, white
The colour symbolism of the sonnet is obviously important. The opening image of sickness
being death's ‘herald’, who announces his coming (as well as his champion, who fights on his
behalf) should remind us that in heraldry colours play a symbolic function, as they do here.
Black represents the sinfulness which mars the poet’s soul, red the blood of Christ which can
bring forgiveness, and white the innocence for which he longs.
Investigating Oh my blacke Soule
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
In Oh my blacke Soule, look at the three colours mentioned
o Several of them have more than one meaning. What do they symbolise?
What is the difference between a herald and a champion?
Images of wrongdoing
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
The pilgrim who has committed treason and dares not return home. This is not so far-fetched,
given the times. There was an active Catholic resistance abroad, and a Catholic pilgrim could
potentially find himself in some nefarious plot. The metaphysical poet Richard Crashaw came
near to this in real life.
The condemned thief on the verge of execution who wishes himself back in prison
Act of grace
In this sonnet there is a bridge passage between the octave and the concluding part. ll.9-10 start
as a statement of some assurance, but then turn into an agonised question. Faith does not come
easily for Donne.
More on grace: Grace (through which humans are believed to receive undeserved forgiveness
and gifts from God) is a central concept in Christian thinking (John 1:17). Because human beings
are seen as predisposed to disobey God, they are unable to enter a relationship with him without
his forgiveness and ongoing help. As Donne suggests here, this help includes both assistance in
turning to turn to God in the first place (‘the grace to begin’) and willingness to repent Ephesians
2:4-5). It is also believed to include the presence of the Holy Spirit with the individual to bring
about a new way of living. Such help is an undeserved gift from God and relies upon him taking
the initiative.
The last four lines try to answer the question about grace. The poet seems to offer alternative
answers, saying ‘really repent and blush red for shame’ or ‘wash thee in Christ's blood’, which,
too, is red. In fact, in Christian teaching, the two are not alternatives but part of the same process.
To repent is to be washed of those sins, as 1 John 1:9 makes clear.
More on ‘wash thee in Christ's blood’: the phrase is taken from older translations of Revelation
1:5, with which Donne would have been familiar. It also occurs in the Anglican Prayer Book (the
Book of Common Prayer) in the liturgy for communion. The prayer of humble access,beginning
‘We do not presume to come’ contains the phrase ‘our souls washed through his most precious
blood’. The idea of blood taking away the guilt of sin comes from the sacrificial system of the
Old Testament, when animals were sacrificed to atone for human sin. In the New Testament,
Jesus Christ is described as having made a ‘once for all’ sacrifice to atone for sin Hebrews
10:11-14, with the shedding of his blood making forgiveness possible.
Investigating Oh my blacke soule

Examine the play on the word ‘dyes’ in the final couplet of Oh my blacke Soule
Verse form
The sonnet is basically Petrarchan in its octave-sestet division, but as in ‘This is my playes last
scene’, the sestet divides into a cdcd rhyme and a final couplet, so that there is the clinching
effect. Thus the ‘bridge’ passage gets absorbed into the cdcd rhyme, while the last two lines
stand apart in rhyme, though not in sense – an interesting interlocking.
Investigatng Oh my blacke soule
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
How are fear and hope blended in Donne’s religious experience?
Do we still see Donne’s concerns reflected today?
John Donne
70. "This is my playes last scene, here heavens appoint"
THIS is my playes last scene, here heavens appoint
My pilgrimages last mile; and my race
Idly, yet quickly runne, hath this last pace,
My spans last inch, my minutes latest point,
And gluttonous death, will instantly unjoynt
My body, and soule, and I shall sleepe a space,
But my'ever-waking part shall see that face,
Whose feare already shakes my every joynt:
Then, as my soule, to'heaven her first seate, takes flight,
And earth-borne body, in the earth shall dwell,
So, fall my sinnes, that all may have their right,
To where they'are bred, and would presse me, to hell.
Impute me righteous, thus purg'd of evill,
For thus I leave the world, the flesh, the devill.
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A meditation
This is one of Donne's ‘Holy Sonnets’, possibly written round 1607, though some critics suggest
1609. The date is not important, especially as it is not the deathbed poem it appears to be at first
reading. The depiction of death and dying is much more to do with ways of meditating,
especially based on Ignatian meditation.
More on Ignatian meditation?
Metaphors for death
Donne is imagining himself at his death, described in a series of metaphors, ‘playes last scene’,
‘pilgrimages last mile’ and ‘my race quickly runne’, and several others. Donne likes to pile up
words or images for dramatic effect. Death is seen like some monster, a very different image
than in the sonnet ‘Death be not Proud’ and more akin to ‘Oh my blacke Soule!’, where the
pilgrim image is again used.
Some of the above images were biblical ones: races (Hebrews 12:1) and pilgrimages (Hebrews
11:13) particularly. The language and idea of sleeping ‘a space’ is also biblical (1 Corinthians
15:51), as are ‘shall see that face’ (2 Corinthians 3:18). Donne makes a sharp distinction between
body and soul, and in this we can see some of his own divided personality. His body ‘in the earth
shall dwell’; but his soul will come face to face with God as his judge. This is what seems to
terrify him.
Morbid?
We may think this is rather morbid, but we need to remember that consciousness of sin and the
awesomeness of God were typical emphases in early seventeenth century religion, of whatever
sort. Even so, Donne's sensitivity to this seems to be much greater than someone like George
Herbert's, who feels unworthy (as in Love II), but not terrified.
Concluding prayer
The last four lines are a concluding prayer to round off this meditation. ‘So, fall my sins’ is an
order: ‘Fall, my sins ... ’. That is to say, let my sins drop down to Hell now, where they belong;
then I shall be ‘purg'd of evil’ (cf. Hebrews 1:3). The phrase ‘Impute me righteous’ is as
problematic as the phrase ‘Teach me how to repent’ in ‘At the Round Earths Imagin'd Corners’.
So is Donne really more concerned about getting rid of sin now; or being ‘imputed’ righteous
because of Christ's life? It seems Donne wants it both ways, just to be sure.
More on imputed: see Elegie XIX: Going to Bed by the same writer
The sonnet is basically a Petrarchan one, with octave and sestet. The rhyming couplet at the end
is more typical of a Shakespearean sonnet, however. It gives a clinching feel to the poem.
Investigating This is my playes last scene
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Do you think that Donne does clinch it at the end of This is my playes last scene?
o Or does the sonnet still feel unresolved?
What words suggest urgency and fear?
What words suggest calm and faith?
Can you see the way in which the octave has a transition into the final part of the sonnet?
Donne multiplies his metaphors for the movement toward death: "This is my playes last scene, here
heavens appoint / My pilgrimages last mile; and my race / Idly, yet quickly runne, hath this last pace" (VI.
1-3). Man is an actor, a pilgrim, and/or a racer. Although the heavens "appoint" the end of his journey,
he is responsible for its undertaking.
HOLY SONNETS.
VII.
At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that's as good
As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.
This is the Biblical Judgment Day, the Christian reckoning of the sins of all souls, both living
and dead. This event is central to the vision of the end of the world, or Apocalypse, described in
the Book of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament. Donne borrows images from
Revelation but eventually decides, "You say I'm a sinner, I say I should be saved, let's call the
whole thing off." Thus, Judgment Day is described in the first eight lines of the poem, before the
speaker changes his mind in the last six.
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Line 1: Donne is most likely alluding to a passage from Revelation 7 in the Bible: "After this I saw
four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth to
prevent any wind from blowing on the land or on the sea or on any tree." But he updates the
passage to reflect the modern knowledge that the earth is round. Why would he do that?
Line 2: When a poet talks to someone or something that can't respond, it's called apostrophe.
Unless the speaker has a direct line to the Angelic community, that's what we've got here, as he
orders the angels to blow their trumpets. Also, the image of angels with trumpets alludes to
another Biblical passage, from Revelation 8: "And I saw the seven angels who stand before God,
and to them were given seven trumpets."
Lines 3-4: The lines also allude to the theological belief that the bodies and souls of dead people
are reunited at the end of time.
Lines 5-6: More Biblical allusions. The "flood" is Noah's flood, or the flood in which Noah was
spared. This story is told in the Book of Genesis. The "fire" refers to the fires that will consume
those judged as wicked in the Apocalypse.
Line 12: The word "there" refers to the place of the Last Judgment.
Donne tells the heavenly angels to fire up Judgment Day. Like the conductor of a symphony, he
commands them to blow their trumpets in all parts of the world. The trumpets will awaken the souls of
all dead people. The souls will be reunited with their bodies, like it says in the Bible.
Naturally, the collection of all deceased people in the world is going to include both good and bad folks.
According to the Christian tradition, on Judgment Day, the good will be separated from the bad, which
explains why the speaker wants everyone to wake up.
Then he tells God, essentially, "Wait, I didn't mean I wanted Judgment Day now. We've got to let those
dead people sleep for a bit." Also, the speaker wants time to mourn for the dead and for his own sins.
He worries that if he hasn't repented enough for his sins, he had better do his repenting on earth,
before it's too late.
He asks God to teach him how to repent so he can be in the good category on Judgment Day. If God
would only teach him repentance, the effect would be the same as if God had signed a pardon with his
own blood. But here's the twist: according to Christian beliefs, God already signed this pardon
(metaphorically speaking) when he sent Jesus to earth to shed his blood for humanity's sins.
At the round earth's imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise
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The speaker orders the angels to blow their trumpets throughout all parts of the world.
Obviously, this is a bold – some might say "arrogant" – move. You can't just go ordering angels
around to do your bidding whenever you want. You'd better have a darned good reason. Our
speaker must think he has some major clout in Heaven.
The trumpets are supposed to wake up people – the speaker commands them to "arise, arise,"
but we don't know who these people are yet.
The most curious phrase in this entire poem is in the first line: "the round earth's imagined
corners." Let's unpack it.
This isn't 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue and some people still thought the earth
was flat.
We're in the early 17th century, and everybody knows the earth is round. So where would you
"imagine" a flat earth? How about on a map?
To say that the earth has "corners" suggests that a person could theoretically reach the
outermost part of the earth.
Donne wants those angels to be in the corners because, otherwise, how will everyone hear the
trumpets. If you treat the earth as flat, then what's a poet going to do: put a trumpeter in
Madagascar, one in Brazil, one in England, and so on? No, no, it's got to be a flat world, and the
trumpeters have to go in the corners.
We have even more evidence for our map theory: some English maps from the Renaissance had
illustrations of angels blowing trumpets in the four directions: North, South, East, and West.
In Biblical tradition, these angels even have names: Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, and Uriel
(source).
The poem seems to be alluding to two sections of the Biblical Book of Revelation. Here is the
first sentence of Revelation 7: "After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the
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earth, holding back the four winds of the earth to prevent any wind from blowing on the land or
on the sea or on any tree." And here is the second sentence of Revelation 8: "And I saw the
seven angels who stand before God, and to them were given seven trumpets."
Donne seems to be mixing these two passages together, and he gives the "four angels" the
"trumpets of Doom" possessed by the "seven angels" (source).
Lots of numbers, yes. In the Book of Revelation, when the angels blow those trumpets, lots of
nasty stuff happens: trees burn up, the sea turns to blood, meteors fall to earth, etc. It's the end
of the world.
Lines 3-4
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go,
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This poem is not a faithful description of the Biblical Last Judgment.
Instead of having a bunch of terrible things happen when the angels blow their trumpets, the
speaker takes it as a sign for all dead people to wake up and go find their bodies.
In Donne's Christian theology, your soul and body are separated when you die, but you get
reunited with your body on Judgment Day.
Donne emphasizes that there are a lot of people who have died throughout history. So many, in
fact, that he just lumps them all into some exaggerated, uncountable sum: "numberless
infinities."
To make things worse, all these souls have to travel to find their bodies where they died. The
bodies are not all in one place – they are "scattered."
Lines 5
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
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The infinite number of dead souls includes all the sinful people in the world, the ones who were
destroyed by the Biblical flood that only Noah and his family survived, and the ones who will be
consumed in the "fires" that end the world.
The angels aren't just waking some of these bad people, they are waking "All."
So, this line deals only with sinners. The word "o'erthrow" (overthrow) means to defeat or cause
the downfall of someone or something.
If you've read the Book of Genesis in the Bible, you'll remember the part about how God
drowned the world after deciding that humanity had forgotten about Him and His laws.
Well, not quite everyone. The virtuous Noah was given an advanced warning and allowed to
save himself by building an arc.
After the flood, God struck a deal with Noah: no more floods. But sinful people still have to deal
with the "fire" after Judgment Day.
Lines 6-7
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance, hath slain, […]
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Here the speaker takes another approach to defining "All" souls.
He broadens the category to include every kind of death – all the people who were "slain" or
killed by various culprits.
Let's bring out those usual suspects and take 'em one by one: "war" refers to people who died in
battle; "dearth" indicates people who died from hunger; "age" makes references to those who
died from natural causes; "agues" refers to people who died from sickness; "tyrannies" indicates
people who died at the hands of oppressive rulers; "despair" refers to those who killed
themselves; "law" means people who were put to death lawfully, and then there's "chance,"
people who died some accidental death.
This group would seem to include both good and bad people. For example, good people die
from sickness just like the bad.
(We encourage you to tuck "ague" into your memory storage attic: it's a cool-sounding word for
"sickness." Next time you go to the doctor with a cold, tell her you have an ague.)
Lines 7-8
[…] and you whose eyes,
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
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There's one last category of people that Donne covers: the people who are still alive but will not
be consumed in those end-of-the-world fires. These are the good people who are still living
when Judgment Day arrives.
The speaker certainly hopes he will be in this last group.
These lucky few will never have to experience mortality or "taste death's woe." Their "eyes" will
look on God in Heaven, as will the good people who had died in the past but have been
resurrected.
Now the speaker really has named everyone. Things could have gotten ugly if he had decided to
keep naming more groups: "And you whose lips never tasted the foulness of prune juice."
Lines 9
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space,
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Ah, there's a "but" when it comes to the end of the world, isn't there? This is called the "turn" in
the sonnet, when the poem shifts topics (see "Form and Meter" for more).
We hear the speaker asking God not to have the angels wake up all these deceased people just
yet.
We want to say: but you're the one who ordered him to wake them up! This is like hitting the
snooze button on the Apocalypse. Those poor dead people: they are very tired and need their
rest. ("Sleep" here is a metaphor for the time between death and resurrection.)
The real reason for this delay comes out in the second half of the line: it's all about "me."
The speaker wants some unspecified period of time to mourn for all the dead people.
Count us skeptical on that one. Do we really think he wants to mourn some long-dead people he
has never met?
Lines 10-12
For, if above all these, my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace,
When we are there; […]
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The speaker worries that his own sins might be greater than those of all the "sleeping" people.
If his sins are really that bad, it will be too late for him to be forgiven on Judgment Day. He
needs to start working toward forgiveness now.
His sins "abound" like sand abounds in a desert. "Abound" here means "to have a lot of" or "to
be well-stocked with."
It seems like the speaker has a lot of sins, above and beyond the rest of sleeping humanity.
In a lot of older Christian poetry and literature, the way that you show humility is to say that you
are the biggest sinner of them all; the worst of the worst. That's what the speaker is doing here.
Judgment Day is described as a place, "there."
The speaker is still talking to God at this point, and he is anticipating the time when he will have
to stand before God and account for all his sins.
If he has repented enough, God will show His "grace" through forgiveness. In Christian thinking,
God's grace is "abundant" enough that anyone who asks earnestly for forgiveness will be
granted it.
Lines 12-14
[…] here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent; for that's as good
As if thou hadst seal'd my pardon, with thy blood.
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In the middle of line 12, the poem shifts topics one more time. The shift is marked by the
contrast between "there" and "here." The speaker leaves off with his grand imaginings of
resurrection and returns to the present moment.
The speaker asks God to teach him how to "repent" or ask for forgiveness (line 13). If God
teaches him how to repent, the result would be the same as if God had sealed an official
document of pardon with his own blood.
(Back in the day, people used a wax "seal" to make documents official. It was kind of like a
signature. The speaker suggests that God's blood is like his personal seal.)
Remember when your mom told you there was a right way and a wrong way to say you're
sorry? That seems to hold true in religious matters, as the speaker makes it sound like asking for
forgiveness is a difficult task that requires a great teacher.
Coming back to the present and the earth seems like "lowly ground" compared to the standing
in front of God at the Apocalypse.
But wait: like many of Donne's poems, this one has a twist at the end.
The speaker compares learning to repent to having a pardon sealed in blood. The pardon would
absolve him of his crimes.
But the word blood might remind you of another story – the crucifixion of Jesus. According to
Christian thought, Jesus died for the sins of mankind. We are meant to think of Jesus' blood as
this seal of pardon.
The speaker shows his reverence for God even as he asks for God's help, and the poem itself is
an act of repentance.
Symbol Analysis
Many poems try to describe what the end of life will be like, but this one goes even further – it
describes what the end of death will be like. In Christian theology, death is the price of
admission into the afterlife, which really begins after the world has ended. People who have died
before the world ends (that is, most people) are compared to sleepers waiting for the "dawn" of
Judgment Day. The poem begins with angels blowing their trumpets to bring the dead back to
life, and to reunite their souls with their bodies. The end of the poem also alludes to death: the
crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
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Lines 3-4: There must have been a lot of dead people throughout history, but certainly not
"numberless infinities." That's an exaggeration, or hyperbole.
Lines 5-6: The repetition of the same word at the beginning of lines is called anaphora.
Lines 6-7: The speaker gives a catalogue, or list, of causes of death.
Line 9: Donne uses a very common religious metaphor in comparing death as a "sleep"
before the end of time, when both good and bad people will be "woken up" to meet their
eternal fate. Also, in this line, the speaker shifts the object of his apostrophe: he's now
talking to God.
The speaker decides in the second half of the poem that maybe he was hasty in calling for
Judgment Day before knowing if he has been forgiven for his sins. He wants God to teach him
how to repent, but repentance is harder than it sounds. One of the central Christian paradoxes is
that people have already been saved by the death of Jesus Christ, but they can't be saved unless
they come to faith by recognizing this sacrifice. The poem's complicated final simile grapples
with this paradox.
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Lines 13-14: The last two lines introduce an important simile. Learning how to repent is
like having the pardon for your sins sealed in blood. Donne conceives the pardon as an
official document, the kind that would normally have a wax seal that serves as a kind of
signature. But the simile is more complex than that. The speaker is saying that God really
did seal his (the speaker's) pardon with God's own blood when He sent Jesus to die for
the sins of humanity. The blood on the pardon is a metaphor for Christ's blood.
Petrarchan Sonnet
The Petrarchan or Italian sonnet is divided into two parts. The first part has eight lines and is
called an octet. The second part has six lines and is called a sextet. The division between these
two parts is called the turn, or volta, which sounds fancy until you realize that it's just the Italian
word for "turn." This kind of sonnet is named after the Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch, who
made the form popular throughout Europe.
This poem's "turn" at line 9 is about as dramatic an example of change as you can find. The turn
is marked in the poetic equivalent of a huge neon sign – the word "But." This little three-letter
word brings the entire vision of Judgment Day to a screeching halt. The poem is hurtling along
with this vision, and then "but" shows up like a turtle waddling across the road, forcing the poem
to slam on the brakes. In the second part of the poem, the speaker completely changes his mind
about the whole project.
"At the round earth's imagined corners" has a typical rhyme scheme for a Petrarchan sonnet:
ABBA ABBA CDCD EE. Then again, not all the rhymes are perfect, a case in point being
"arise" and "infinities" in lines 2 and 3. But you try to make a rhyme out of "infinities"!
The poem's meter is iambic pentameter: an unstressed beat followed by a stressed beat. "'Tis late
to ask a-bun-dance of thy grace." But, the poem has exceptions. Many exceptions. One of the
most obvious can be found at the beginning: "At the round earth's […]." The poem has two
unstressed beats followed by two stressed beats. The complicated rhythm makes this poem fun to
listen to and read aloud.
The first line of the poem sounds like the start of a race: "Take your mark, get set, GO!" vs. "At the round
earth's imagined corners, BLOW!" Clearly Donne could not have intended this parallel, but that verb
hanging at the end of the first line does set off a frenzy of linguistic energy. The first line carries over into
the second without a pause. The technical term for this is enjambment. Holy Sonnet 7 has a lot of
enjambment, and if you heard it aloud, you wouldn't know where the lines start and end.
The speaker doesn't actually have the power to start Judgment Day, but he acts like a cheerleader at a
race, urging the dead souls to "arise! arise!" and to "go!" to their scattered bodies.
Then the poem pivots on the word "but." At this point, the speaker starts making excuses, and the
sound of the poem becomes more dense and legalistic. The whole sonnet is filled with commas and
pauses, but after the word "space" in line 9, there is a larger pause, as if the speaker were doubled-over
and winded. Having bought himself a moment or two, our speaker tries to justify calling off Judgment
Day. At the end, the poem begins to sound more like an official plea to a powerful person, like the
"pardon" it describes in the last line.
Holy Sonnets: If poisonous minerals, and if that tree
BY JOHN DONNE
If poisonous minerals, and if that tree
Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us,
If lecherous goats, if serpents envious
Cannot be damn'd, alas, why should I be?
Why should intent or reason, born in me,
Make sins, else equal, in me more heinous?
And mercy being easy, and glorious
To God, in his stern wrath why threatens he?
But who am I, that dare dispute with thee,
O God? Oh, of thine only worthy blood
And my tears, make a heavenly Lethean flood,
And drown in it my sins' black memory.
That thou remember them, some claim as debt;
I think it mercy, if thou wilt forget.
John Donne
72. "Death be not proud, though some have called thee"
DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
5
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The poem first appeared as “Holy Sonnet X” in a collection of nineteen sonnets by John Donne (15721631). However, its title came to be known as “Death, Be Not Proud” (after the first four words of the
poem). It was written between 1601 and 1610—the exact year is uncertain—and published after Donne
died.
Type of Work
......."Death, Be Not Proud" is a sonnet (fourteen-line poem) similar in format to that established in Italy by
Petrarch (1304-1374), a Roman Catholic priest who popularized the sonnet form before it was adopted
and modified in England. Petrarch's sonnets each consist of an eight-line stanza (octave) and a six-line
stanza (sestet). The first stanza presents a theme, and the second stanza develops it.
Rhyme Scheme
.......The rhyme scheme of "Death, Be Not Proud" is as follows: ABBA, ABBA, CDDC, EE.
Meter
.......The meter varies, although most of the poem is in iambic pentameter, as in lines 5-7:
.......1....................2....................3................4...............5
From REST..|..and SLEEP,..|..which BUT..|..thy PIC..|..tures BE
.......1....................2....................3..................4......................5
Much PLEA..|..sure; THEN..|..from THEE..|..much MORE..|..must FLOW,
........1.................2...............3..................4...............5
And SOON..|..est OUR..|..best MEN..|..with THEE..|..do GO
Theme
.......“Death Be Not Proud” is among the most famous and most beloved poems in English literature. Its
popularity lies in its message of hope couched in eloquent, quotable language. Donne’s theme tells the
reader that death has no right to be proud, since human beings do not die but live eternally after “one
short sleep.” Although some people depict death as mighty and powerful, it is really a lowly slave that
depends on luck, accidents, decrees, murder, disease, and war to put men to sleep. But a simple poppy
(whose seeds provide a juice to make a narcotic) and various charms (incantations, amulets, spells, etc.)
can also induce sleep—and do it better than death can. After a human being’s soul leaves the body and
enters eternity, it lives on; only death dies.
Death, Be Not Proud
By John Donne
Text of the Poem
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,1
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,2
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must
flow,
And soonest3 our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave4 to fate, chance, kings, and
desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well5
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then? 6
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
overthrow: kill
thy pictures be: rest and sleep mimic death
soonest: willingly; as soon as
Rest . . . delivery: Their bones go to their earthly
rest but their souls do not die
slave: death is only a servant of events that end life:
bad luck,
accidents, royal decrees, murder, war, and illness
poppy or charms: charms and drugs made from
poppy seeds can
also induce sleep–and do it better than death can
why swell'st thou: why do you swell with pride?
..
Figures of Speech
.......To convey his message, Donne relies primarily on personification, a type of metaphor, that extends
through the entire poem. (Such an extended metaphor is often called a conceit.) Thus, death becomes a
person whom Donne addresses, using the second-person singular (implied or stated as thou, thee, and
thy). Donne also uses alliteration, as the following lines illustrate:
Alliteration
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then
One short sleep past, we wake eternally (Note: One begins with a w sound; thus, it alliterates with we and
wake.)
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die
Metaphor
Thou [Death] art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men
Comparison of death to a slave
Metaphor With Personification
Death, be not proud
Comparison of death to a person
Paradox and Irony
Donne ends the poem with paradox and irony: Death, thou shalt die.
Death is a total poser in this poem, like a schoolyard bully who turns out not to be so tough, after
all. The speaker even makes death out to be a good thing, because it leads to the new life of
Christian eternity. Plus, everyone bosses Death around, from kings to suicidal people. Finally, a
lot of the poem’s wit comes from combining literal and symbolic uses of the words "death" and
die."
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Lines 1-2: This has got to be one of the most famous examples of personification and
apostrophe in all of poetry. The speaker treats death like a person who is considered
"mighty" and "dreadful," which is personification. And, he addresses this person-like
Death directly, even though Death obviously can’t respond, which is apostrophe.
Lines 3-4: Donne uses apostrophe again to address, "poor Death," which is an
embarrassing and condescending way to talk to someone who considers himself a toughguy.
Lines 5-6: In this metaphor, he calls rest and sleep "pictures" of Death. They don’t have
photographs in Donne’s age, so "pictures" just refers to imitations, like a drawing or a
painting.
Lines 7-8: Continuing the personification of Death, the speaker says that good people
allow death to lead them out of their earthly lives. The bones of the "best men" are a
synecdoche, because they actually stand for the whole physical body. Line 8, then, draws
a standard religious contrast between body and soul.
Line 12: We often talk about people who "swell" with pride, and that’s what’s going on
here, when the speaker asks, "Why swell’st thou then?" This is a rhetorical question,
designed to make Death realize that he has no reason to be proud.
Line 14: He uses the concept of death three ways in this tricky line. First, there is real,
physical death (the second word of the line). Then, there is the personified idea of Death.
Finally, there is death as a metaphor for simple non-existence – something that ceases to
be there – which the last word "die" references.
Donne didn’t invent the comparison between death and sleep, but he uses it here to great effect.
But, you have to know a tiny bit of Christian theology to fully understand the idea. It is thought
that, when faithful Christians die, they are only "dead" until the Day of Judgment comes and
Christ returns to Earth. They compare this length of time to a period of "sleep." At this point,
time ends, eternity begins, and all the faithful Christians who died will "wake up" to be led into
Heaven. At this point, all their earthly troubles are over for good, and they will be at "rest" with
God.
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Line 5: This metaphor compares "rest" and "sleep" to "pictures," like a painting or
drawing. The point is that the rest and sleep are pale imitations, and Death is the real
thing. On the other hand, Death is only a much stronger version of sleep, and not
something scary and different.
Line 8: This line describes what the experience of death means to the "best men" of line
7. One of its meanings is eternal rest for their weary bodies, or "bones."
Line 11: The comparison between Death and sleep becomes an extended metaphor at this
point. The speaker says that, if he only wants a really good sleep, he doesn’t even need
Death; he can use "poppies" (opium, a kind of drug) or "charms" (magic or potions).
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

Line 13: The extended metaphor continues. He calls the time between the speaker’s death
and the Day of Judgment a "short sleep." In human terms, this may not seem that short
(we can assume the speaker is "asleep" for hundreds of years already), but, compared to
Eternity, pretty much anything is short. When the speaker "wakes up," he will find
himself in Heaven.
Line 9: This metaphor calls Death a "slave" to "fate, chance, kings, and desperate men."
Implicitly, all these things are personified as Death’s master.
Line 10: Although it’s not as obvious as in other parts of the poem, we think "poison,
war, and sickness" are personified as thugs, or worthless individuals.
Line 8: It’s a pun! Sweet! To "deliver" someone can mean to set them free, as in the Lord’s Prayer:
"Deliver us from evil...." But, the speaker also wants to be "delivered" into the afterlife, like a baby is
"delivered" into the world during birth. The comparison of death to rebirth is such a common metaphor
that we rarely even think of it as a being a metaphor.
The Petrarchan sonnet has fourteen lines and a rhyme scheme that goes ABBAABBA and then, most
frequently, CDCDCD. But, "Death, be not proud" finishes slightly differently. Its last six lines are CDDCAA.
If you look closer, there’s even more weird stuff going on at the end. For example, line 13 has a word
near the end, "swell’st," that rhymes with "dwell" and "well" from the previous two lines. He just sticks a
rhyme in the middle of the verse: very strange. And, the last two lines don’t seem to rhyme well at all:
"eternally" and "die." You have to pronounce it "eternal-lie" to make the rhyme work. No one is sure
exactly what Renaissance English sounds like, so it’s possible that they did pronounce the word this way.
But, it’s also possible that Donne wanted the rhyme scheme to fizzle out at the same moment when
death "dies."
Another feature of a Petrarchan sonnet is a shift, or "turn," in the argument or subject matter
somewhere in the poem. In Italian, the word is volta. Usually, the turn occurs at line 9 to coincide with
the introduction of a new rhyme scheme. That’s the case for "Death, be not proud," although the turn
isn’t major. The speaker sharpens his attack and starts calling Death names, but he doesn’t
fundamentally change his argument. If you want to rebel, you can argue that the real turn doesn’t
happen until the middle of the last line, when Donne drops this shocker: "Death, thou shalt die." At the
very least, we think it’s the most surprising move in the poem.
Finally, the Petrarchan sonnet has a regular meter: iambic pentameter, which means that each line has
ten syllables, and every second syllable is accented. That’s the reason, for example, that "Thou art" has
to be condensed into one mouth-cramming syllable, "Thou’art" in line 9. Otherwise, there would be
eleven syllables in the line.
But, what about the first line? For one thing, it begins on an accented beat: DEATH. Truth be told,
Donne’s pretty loose with his iambic pentameter. For him, iambic pentameter is less of a rule and more
of a general guideline, like that "No Horseplay" sign at your local pool. Of course there’s going to be
horseplay! It’s a pool! And Donne sometimes counts a big pause as a syllable, which is why line 1 seems
to only have nine syllables: because of the pauses in the line, it takes at least as long to recite.
Many of Donne’s poems, and Metaphysical Poems in general, sound like someone tying a complicated
knot. Like a bowline. Or, a half-hitch. Or, a sheep shank. OK, so the kind of knot isn’t important. What’s
important is that it has to be tied just right. Same thing goes with trying to prove that death isn’t scary
using only a single, fourteen-line Petrarchan sonnet. In general, we’ve got two contrasting strains in the
poem, which are like the two ends of a string we use to tie the knot.
The first strain is what Death thinks he is. The second strain is what Death really is. Let’s try it out. In the
beginning, death thinks he is "mighty and dreadful" because people call him that (line 2). But, then, the
second strain gets looped in, and we learn that death isn’t either of these things. Easy enough.
How about lines 3-4? Well, Death thinks that he can kill or "overthrow" people, which is one end of our
knot, but it turns out that Death can’t kill anyone at all, which is the other end of the knot. As you can
see, the second end of the string does all the complicated twisting and looping around the first end of
the string. With each line, Donne makes the knot a little thicker. Fortunately, compared to some of his
other poems, this one is relatively easy to untangle.
Some people complain that Donne’s sonnets don’t have a consistent rhythm or meter. Sure, the poem is
in iambic pentameter, but it breaks this pattern as often as it follows it. As in this line: "One short sleep
past, we wake eternally" (line 13). In the phrase "short sleep past," all of the words seem equally
accented, and, then, there’s a huge pause in the middle (as our two strains get tied together). But, it’s
not that Donne lacks regularity: the knot-like pattern is his regularity. He goes back and forth, up and
down, down and through. Sometimes, it sounds like his sentences come at you in reverse: "From rest
and sleep, which but they pictures be, / Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow." If that
isn’t a knot in words, we don’t know what is. But, that’s the point.
The other thing about a knot is that everything must come together at the end to make a grand loop.
Donne’s sonnet does this. The poem begins on an apostrophe to Death and ends on one. The final
statement sums everything up – with a twist.
Death be not Proud consists of a number of reasons why human beings should not fear death.
However, rather than state the reasons as if talking to us, Donne turns to Death itself. He
personifies and apostrophises it: he argues it into submission, till at the end he can state the
paradox ‘Death, thou shalt die!’ triumphantly.
Death not the end
To understand the poem fully, we need to know three things:
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
Firstly, that Donne genuinely had to wrestle with near fatal illnesses, and seems to have had
difficulty in the past with the fear of death, fed by a strong sense of guilt
Secondly, in the forms of meditation he and his contemporaries often used, a skull or ‘death's
head’ was frequently on display! This was to focus thoughts on man's mortality and the need to
live as free from sin as possible

Thirdly, the Christian teaching on death is that it is not the end of life at all: that there is a
resurrection and a judgement, and the life of the Christian believer will continue for eternity.
Death, therefore, is seen as a rite of passage to something much better. A well-known biblical
passage often read at funerals is 1 Corinthians 15:35-57.
More on resurrection: see The Exequy by Henry King
The poem is best understood as three quatrains and a concluding couplet.
First quatrain
The first quatrain states the theme, with its central paradox that those whom death touches do not
really die. That is because of the Christian hope of resurrection and immortality. Paul writes,
using the image of a grain of wheat: ‘it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body’ 1
Corinthians 15:44.
Second quatrain
The second quatrain takes the idea that sleep and death are allied, one
being an image of the other (‘thy pictures’). Sleep is pleasant, therefore death must be, so why
fear it? In fact, the best people, that is those who are most pure in their lives, die most quickly,
because they know their soul will be ‘delivered’ into a new life.
Third quatrain
The third quatrain mocks death. Death is not in control of itself, but has to come wherever there
is disease or war. So why is death so proud? Then he argues that opiates mimic death and much
more pleasantly.
Concluding couplet
This leads on to the triumphant couplet, that we shall wake into eternal life and death will be
finished. The triumphant couplet echoes Paul's triumphant question:
‘Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?’ 1 Corinthians 15:55, quoting Hosea 13:14
The poem is not an argument as such. Rather, it is a number of points piled up one upon another,
not always quite logically connected, but nevertheless effective in building up to a climax.
Investigating Death be not Proud
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
Read the whole passage from 1 Corinthians 15
o What do you notice about the difference in tone and argument?
In what way is mocking our enemies an effective way of dealing with them?
Making fun of death
Paul describes death as ‘the last enemy’ 1 Corinthians 15:26. Usually the ‘death of death’ is seen
in Christian thinking in terms of the death and resurrection of Christ, as Paul presents it. But
Donne strikes out in quite another direction. He confronts death and belittles it, in order to take
away its ‘sting’. Death is seen as a boastful enemy (see Themes and signficant ideas > Death as
friend or foe). Donne taunts it and in this way it loses its power in our imagination.
Personification
The main figure of speech in Death be not Proud is the personification.
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Death is given negative human traits: pride mainly, but also pretence and inferiority.
Death is likened to sleep, a commonplace image. Donne doesn't pursue this image very far in
the second quatrain, but then picks it up in the third, suggesting that death can never be more
than sleep. The final reference to sleep is in the couplet: ‘One short sleep past’. Death really is
no more than a short sleep. It has been reduced step by step in this extended metaphor.
Metonymy
‘Poppy and charms’ refer to the use of opium and magic to produce sleep,
or, ambiguously, to produce a gentle death. Technically ‘poppy’ is a metonymy rather than a
metaphor: it is what is derived from the poppy that is the opiate, not literally the flower itself.
But then death is likened to a slave as well, and this is the startling conceit. It has no choice
where it is to fall. ‘Fate, Chance, king’ are all examples of metonymy, suggesting certain reasons
why death occurs:
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
Chance we can understand as accidents
Kings as the whole judicial and/or the military system
Fate must suggest a wider concept, that our length of life is decreed elsewhere, and death is
therefore no more than an executioner. Although Fate is not in itself a Christian concept, the
Bible does suggest a sense of destiny in the matter: ‘Just as man is destined to die once’
Hebrews 9:27.
Monosyllables
The language of Death be not Proud is striking, though the vocabulary is not unusual. As often
with Donne, it is the dramatic voice and the element of surprise that gives the language its force.
The voice is helped by the unusually large proportion of monosyllabic words employed, much
higher than normal: eight out of nine in the first and ninth lines; ten out of ten in the final line.
You can do a simple count for yourself.
Death is addressed in words totally opposite to those usually employed: ‘poor’, ‘slave’, ’nor yet
can thou kill me’. Again, the monosyllabic precision of these simple words leaves no room for
ambiguity or doubt. Donne is almost bullying death. The alliteration in l.3 brings this out well.
Sonnet form
Death be not Proud is technically a Shakespearean, or Elizabethan, sonnet, consisting of three
quatrains and a couplet. Typically, the couplet packs the punch, which it does here, though the
preceding lines are not without their punches too.
However, the rhyme scheme (abba abba) is that of the Petrarchan sonnet which has the first eight
lines as a group or octave. The Shakespearean sonnet typically rhymes abab cdcd. However, the
couplet rhymes of ee is typical of the Shakespearean form.
Sonnets are typically in iambic pentameters.

Donne, however, likes an emphatic start, so there is some significant first foot inversion to make
sure the stress comes on the very first syllable of the lines:
o
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‘Death’,’Might-‘,’Die’, ‘Rest’
Notice, too, the caesurae in ll.4,12,13,14
Also the lists in ll.9,10, giving extra stresses spondees on ‘Chance, kings’
The rhythm is disturbed a number of other times, as in ‘one short sleep past’.
Investigating Death be not Proud



Consider the rhyme scheme of Death be not Proud
o Can you see any internal rhymes?
o What other stylistic features have you noticed?
Trace the contrasts in rhythm that Donne introduces
If you were setting this to music
o where would you emphasise the beat?
o where might you employ some syncopation?
o where might you vary the tempo?

What seem to you the most memorable features of the poem?
In "Death be not proud" (Divine Sonnet X), Donne turns his rhetorical skills on his greatest poetic
adversary - death itself.
“Divine Sonnet X” by John Donne is one of his best-known religious poems. It famously begins
“Death be not proud” and advances a stream of arguments to prove that man’s greatest fear has
no power over him.
Apostrophe
The opening line, “Death be not proud”, is an apostrophe or address to an abstract figure. Donne
favours apostrophes and dramatic monologues, which give an immediacy and urgency to his
rhetoric – in his career as a churchman, Donne was a famous preacher, so it’s no surprise that
many of his poems sound like dramatic speeches. In rhetorically picking on death, Donne is
taking on a big adversary, though not entirely without precedent. There is an echo in the opening
of St. Paul’s famous demand in 1Corinthians 15:55, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where
is thy victory?”
Arguments
Rather than developing a single line of logic, Donne throws several arguments at Death to try to
humble it. “those whom thou think’st thou dost ovethrow/ Die not” he declares, without fully
explaining what he means at this point. “Rest and sleep” seem to be the “pictures” of death, and
these are enjoyable, he argues, so the real thing must be even more pleasant – and in any case
“soonest our best men with thee do go”; if the good die young, why should anyone want to avoid
it?
In a brilliant turn of argument, Donne tells Death that it is not “mighty and dreadful” because it
is merely a functionary, a “slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men”. Anything which can
be whistled for by so many despicable causes is hardly to be respected. Its habitat is amongst
“poison, war and sickness”, a realm which no-one would want to rule. This is typical Donne:
grandiose, verbally aggressive, and picking up any argument, however specious or inconsistent,
which can serve to support his cause. He even goes so far as to patronize the Grim Reaper,
calling it “poor death” and demanding “why swell’st thou then?”
Conclusion
As the poem ends he elaborates on his earlier statement that “those whom thou think’st thou dost
overthrow/ Die not...nor yet can’st thou kill me”, by pointing out that for Christians, death is
merely the beginning of eternal life: “one short sleep past, we live eternally.” He encapsulates
this in an even shorter phrase in the last line, mingling the consolation of the Christian faith with
a paradox, and triumphing “Death will be more no more, death, thou shalt die.”
Holy Sonnet Donne
Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to'another due,
Labor to'admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly'I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me,'untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you'enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Summary
The speaker asks the “three-personed God” to “batter” his heart, for as yet God only knocks
politely, breathes, shines, and seeks to mend. The speaker says that to rise and stand, he needs
God to overthrow him and bend his force to break, blow, and burn him, and to make him new.
Like a town that has been captured by the enemy, which seeks unsuccessfully to admit the army
of its allies and friends, the speaker works to admit God into his heart, but Reason, like God’s
viceroy, has been captured by the enemy and proves “weak or untrue.” Yet the speaker says that
he loves God dearly and wants to be loved in return, but he is like a maiden who is betrothed to
God’s enemy. The speaker asks God to “divorce, untie, or break that knot again,” to take him
prisoner; for until he is God’s prisoner, he says, he will never be free, and he will never be chaste
until God ravishes him.
Form
This simple sonnet follows an ABBAABBACDDCEE rhyme scheme and is written in a loose
iambic pentameter. In its structural division, it is a Petrarchan sonnet rather than a Shakespearean
one, with an octet followed by a sestet.
Commentary
This poem is an appeal to God, pleading with Him not for mercy or clemency or benevolent aid
but for a violent, almost brutal overmastering; thus, it implores God to perform actions that
would usually be considered extremely sinful—from battering the speaker to actually raping
him, which, he says in the final line, is the only way he will ever be chaste. The poem’s
metaphors (the speaker’s heart as a captured town, the speaker as a maiden betrothed to God’s
enemy) work with its extraordinary series of violent and powerful verbs (batter, o’erthrow, bend,
break, blow, burn, divorce, untie, break, take, imprison, enthrall, ravish) to create the image of
God as an overwhelming, violent conqueror. The bizarre nature of the speaker’s plea finds its
apotheosis in the paradoxical final couplet, in which the speaker claims that only if God takes
him prisoner can he be free, and only if God ravishes him can he be chaste.
As is amply illustrated by the contrast between Donne’s religious lyrics and his metaphysical
love poems, Donne is a poet deeply divided between religious spirituality and a kind of carnal
lust for life. Many of his best poems, including “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” mix the
discourse of the spiritual and the physical or of the holy and the secular. In this case, the speaker
achieves that mix by claiming that he can only overcome sin and achieve spiritual purity if he is
forced by God in the most physical, violent, and carnal terms imaginable.
As with all the Holy Sonnets, this one has no separate title, merely taking the first half line as a title. It is
probably one of the best known of all Donne's religious poems, since its images are so striking and
dramatic. Donne uses the language of violent sexuality, as well as images of warfare, to make an
impassioned plea to God for some spiritual breakthrough. Just as in his love poetry, Donne desired
intensity and a complete experience. The most similar of Donne's other sonnets is As due by many titles.
An impassioned plea
In the sonnet Batter my heart Donne quite deliberately goes out to find as many paradoxes as
possible. But far from being an intellectual exercise, it is a deeply impassioned plea to the ‘three
person'd God’. The Trinity is invoked as if the term ‘God’ alone would not be sufficient as the
person addressed.
Apathy?
As always, Donne's drama requires someone to address or argue with or, as here, plead with. The
forceful opening is a plea for deliverance from a supposed state of apathy or lack of devotion and
for a renewal of spirit. In fact the desperation voiced suggests a state far from apathy! So there is
an unconscious paradox underlying the conscious ones.
In the first quatrain, then, God has to be very active. In the second quatrain Donne explains why.
Try (‘Labour’) as he might, he just cannot seem to allow God to have control of his life. He
knows God should govern his life, but it is as if he's been taken over by other forces, though he
does not say what these forces might be. They might be apathy, or they may be more obviously
evil.
Love for God
In the sestet, he declares his continuing love for God, and his desire to receive God's love. Here
the language becomes very sexual. Unless God really acts and takes Donne by force, he is never
going to get out of his present spiritual state of sinfulness and indifference.
Donne here is not unique but is echoing the cry of many Christians down the centuries who have
expressed a desire to be free to love and serve God more deeply, yet who have felt that
something has held them back. The classic biblical passage expressing this comes in Romans 7,
where Paul cries out: ‘O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this
death?’(Romans 7:24 AV). Paul finds a way out; Donne leaves his poem unresolved, yet at the
same time there is a sense that the battle has in fact been won.
Investigating Batter my heart

Relate Batter my heart to your own experiences of, perhaps, wanting to do something good or
loving, but finding it difficult
o How would you describe Donne's spiritual life? Do you find his struggles surprising?
Sinful, unworthy, unfaithful
The overriding theme of Batter my heart is Personal Sinfulness and Unworthiness, to which,
almost as a corollary, the theme of Unfaithfulness is attached. The imagery of the sestet is quite
explicitly that of marital unfaithfulness: ‘am betrothed unto our enemie’; ‘Divorce me’; ‘ravish
mee’. It might seem shocking to use such explicit human terminology for spiritual
unfaithfulness, but, then, the Metaphysical poets do set out to shock. For Donne, we feel, this is
not some rhetorical trick, but an expression of his own sense of being a divided personality.
A divided personality
Various critics have made suggestions about why Donne feels so divided:
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His leaving of the Roman Catholic church may still have haunted him with feelings of
betrayal and of division.
It may be more temperamental. Some people are supersensitive to their own
shortcomings and failures.
Whatever the reason, it makes for dramatic poetry.
Investigating Batter my heart

Pick out words and phrases in Batter my heart that express Donne's sense of his own sinfulness
o Is this sense of sinfulness a general malaise?
 Or do there seem to be specific sins behind it?
Force and bending into shape
The sonnet Batter my heart is dense with imagery. The verbs in the first quatrain suggest a
variety of activities: from the domestic picture of a housewife cleaning and polishing to a
blacksmith or metalworker bending into shape some obstinate object. The biblical image of a
furnace used to shape us, as seen in Isaiah 48:10 and Ezekiel 22:20-22, is echoed here.
Under siege
In the second quatrain, the central image is of a besieged town, perhaps picking up on the
opening word ‘Batter’, as in a battering ram to break down a city's gates. Interestingly, another
religious writer of the same century, John Bunyan, uses this image as the central symbol in his
fiction The Holy War. The simile is an extended one, as the poet works out its details. Reason is
‘your viceroy’, or governor, but is powerless to act. Donne is unable to reason himself into a
better spiritual state. It is as though God's forces are outside, but Donne cannot get to the gates to
let them in – hence the need for the battering ram.
Rape!
In the sestet the imagery becomes markedly sexual – and paradoxical.
More on paradox: see Affliction I by George Herbert
Donne is portrayed as in love with God but betrothed to his enemy. In his time, when arranged
marriages were not uncommon, this could happen. So the ‘Divorce mee’ means God is to
dissolve the betrothal, undo the knot of the engagement. Then come the clinching paradoxes: that
of ‘enthral/free’, where to enthral means to enslave, mentally or morally. The sexual overtones
are made explicit in the last line, where ‘chast/ravish’ are set alongside each other. In the sonnet
As due by many titles, Donne talks of the Devil ravishing him, a more obvious use. But God
ravishing?! The shock reverberates through the whole poem.
Investigating Batter my heart


Look at the male/female roles in Batter my heart
o Which role does the poet take?
Compare this role with that taken in much of his love poetry
o
What significant differences do you see?
Dramatic language
The language used by Donne in Batter my heart is highly dramatic.


The monosyllabic verbs especially hit us, as they are run off as a list in quick succession:
o ‘knocke, breathe, shine’ contrasting with
o ‘breake, blowe, burn’ The alliteration is carried on from the opening ‘Batter’
The paradoxes are similarly paired:
o ‘rise and stand’ with ‘o'erthrow’;
o ‘imprison...enthrall’ with ‘free’
o The verbs predominate, just as monosyllables do.
Dramatic voice
The initial outburst reminds us of Donne's dramatic voice, seen in so many other openings:

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

‘Busie old foole’ (The Sunne Rising)
‘For Godsake hold your tongue’ (The Canonisation)
‘Blasted with sighs’ (Twicknam Garden)
‘Spit in my face’ (another of the Holy Sonnets).
However there is considerable variation of tone: it is not all strident. 1.6 has more a tone of
longing; 1.9 is much softer, a declaration of love. The drama is never rant. There is a curious
tension between importunity and reverence.
Investigating Batter my heart

Examine the proportion of statements to commands in Batter my heart
o Is there a pattern?
o Is ‘commands’ exactly the right word?
 Can you think of better terms to use for the voice he uses to God?
Complex form
The sonnet form used by Donne in Batter my heart is actually very complex. The octave form of
the first part, with the rhyming scheme of abba abba definitely suggests the Petrarchan form. But
as with other Donne sonnets, the sestet is somewhat of a mixed form, as Donne likes to get the
clinching effect of the final couplet of the Shakespearean sonnet form. So, as with other sonnets,
he rhymes cdcd ee. The punctuation goes against this, however. The last six lines break into a
2+1+3 pattern, which means that the last three lines read like a triplet. Even the ‘I/ee’ rhyme is
close. We could even argue that the last line stands apart, and it is that which is by itself the
clincher, though anticipated by the preceding lines.
The iambic pentameter form of the sonnet is kept fairly rigidly. There are significant first foot
inversions in ‘Batter’, ‘Labour’ and ‘Reason’. However, the urgency is maintained through the
number of run-on lines (enjambement), at ll.1,3 and significantly, 12. The many lists of words
make extra stresses (as ll.2,4) and also for an interrupted and jerky reading, which of course,
mirrors his own state of mind. Even a line like
reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend
which seems to run smoothly enough to start with, has the deliberately awkward ‘mee, mee’ in
the middle to force a caesura. Lines 9,10 are the only ones to give a smooth reading, perhaps
suggesting how tempting his present captivity still is to him.
Investigating Batter my heart



Try reading Batter my heart in several different ways, perhaps emphasising its fragmented
nature or its cohesion
o Which do you prefer?
Look at the structure of the octave
o Is there any uniting force there?
o Or does it divide into separate parts?
What do you think are the poem's strengths?
o Would you say it deserves its reputation?
Lines 1-2
Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

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The speaker begins by asking God (along with Jesus and the Holy Ghost; together, they make up
the "three-personed God") to attack his heart as if it were the gates of a fortress town.
If you are caught up on the word "batter," note that back in medieval times, in order to break
down the door of a fortress or castle, you'd have to use a battering ram. It's a huge pole of
wood, possibly with a ram carving on the front.
He asks God to "batter" his heart, as opposed to what God has been doing so far: just knocking,
breathing, shining, and trying to help the speaker heal.
Those actions are nice and all, but Donne wants something a little more intense. Scholars focus
a lot on these verbs, and the words are certainly stressed in the line (notice how you accent
these verbs and pause between them when you read the poem out loud), so let's break them
down a bit.
First of all, none of the verbs are particularly active. God asks to come in by knocking, which is
nice, but he also just breathes and shines, two things that he might do out of necessity — not
choice. When we breathe, it's normally not because we choose to, and the same applies to
things that shine.
The "mending" seems nice, but note that Donne says "seek to mend," and not just "mend."
Does God really "seek to" do anything? Doesn't He just do it, if he's all-powerful?
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So, what about the specific actions? Are they particularly significant? Well lots of scholars think
that the three verbs mirror the set-up of a "three-personed God" (the Christian notion of the
Trinity). Thus, they associate the Father with power as he knocks but ought to break, the Holy
Ghost with breath as he breathes but ought to blow like a strong wind, and the Son with light as
he shines but ought to burn like fire.
These actions make some sense as representative actions of each part of God, but other
scholars argue that, based on the Bible, it isn't clear which member of the Trinity should be
understood to do which of the actions. The confusion about which aspect of God does what
appears to be purposeful.
If the speaker wants to make things easier, he can very well put the verbs in the traditional
order in which the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are normally described.
But, the Trinity isn't the only way to read those verbs. Some scholars point out that these terms
(especially when combined with the other series of three verbs in line 4) all make sense in the
context of metal- or glass-blowing (the process of shaping glass and metal objects). In this way,
scholars see the speaker as making God into a craftsman who can, like a glassblower, "blow" life
into the object (the speaker).
Lines 3-4
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
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Lines 3-4 continue much like lines 1-2, with the speaker asking God to treat him violently.
He asks God to "bend your force," which may mean to "make use of your power."
More importantly, even though it takes him four full lines, the speaker finally gets to the point
of why he's telling God to do all this. His goal, as he puts it, is to "rise" and "stand" and become
"new."
This can work in two ways. First, there's the born-again angle, where the speaker asks to have a
moment of religious epiphany. He wants to recognize God's power, but he worries that the only
way God will get through to him is by doing something violent and completely overthrowing his
life.
On the other hand, "make me new" is probably a reference to the Christian idea that true
happiness and salvation come only after death, and that, in order to get into Heaven, earthly life
must be a continual act of suffering. That may be why our speaker wants to be abused and
broken in the earthly world — so that he will be worthy for the afterlife.
A quick note on the language here: read these lines aloud, and notice how the word "o'erthrow"
makes you take a big pause and change the rhythm of your speaking, and how violent and
intense those alliterated b-words are ("break, blow, burn"). These words get a lot of attention
verbally, and it's a cool example of words' sounds reflecting their meaning. Onomatopoeia
anyone?
Lines 5-6
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
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Here comes the explanation of that whole "battering" business. The speaker compares himself
to a town that is captured or "usurped."
The phrase "to another due" suggests that the town belongs to someone else, but it's tricky
because we don't know who this "someone" could be.
Whose was it originally, and who took over? The likely possibility is that it was originally God's,
and it was subsequently taken over by another, but that doesn't help us figure out who the
"other" is.
In any case, the speaker wants to let God in, but he's unsuccessful so far.
These lines are interesting in part because, unlike anywhere else in the rest of the poem, Donne
actually uses a simile here instead of a metaphor. Instead of saying, "I am a usurped town," he
leaves more room between himself and the town by only saying that they're similar.
What's the big deal? Well, it suggests that the speaker is conscious of how unrealistic his
requests are. Where, in the first few lines he directs God to overthrow, break, blow, and burn
him, it's not until this line that we know he's being metaphorical (instead of actually wanting to
be broken, burned, and so forth).
The "oh" in line 6 is another linguistic choice worth mentioning. There are two ways we might
see this:
First, we can read it as the only moment of truly honest self-expression in the poem, where the
speaker lets his words go without careful control. In other words, the "oh" is the only word in
the poem that isn't actually a word – it's more of a sound, a sigh, or an exclamation. It's a
different kind of language, and one we don't see elsewhere in the poem.
If we read it as a sigh, it might lend this line some extra emotional pull if he seems sad that he
can't let God in.
On the other hand, you might think the "oh" is theatrical and overly dramatic, like a "woe-isme!" moment.
Lines 7-8
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
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Our bet is that these are the trickiest lines in the poem for you. Us too. They're weird, but it
helps to put them into simple English: "Reason, my local ruler who works for you, should be
defending me, but he was captured, and revealed himself to be weak or unfaithful."
We assume that the "you" to whom Reason is supposed to report is God.
The whole idea guiding these lines is that God gave us reason (rationality) to defend ourselves
from evil, but now the speaker's reason seems to have turned on God (or is just incapable of
warding off evil), so the speaker is having trouble showing his faith in God.
As we discuss in the "Speaker" section, the sense of entitlement is interesting. Check out the
back-to-back "me's" and the "should" in "Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend." It's all
about the speaker's self-interest, and he sounds like a spoiled little kid: "Me! Me! You should
defend me!"
And, if we zoom out a bit, why on earth is he treating his ability to reason as if it were a real
person? The answer may be: so that he can pass the buck and blame this other person (who's
really God's responsibility, according to the speaker).
If you think about it, the speaker actually blames God, through his representative (Reason) for
the speaker turning over to the enemy's side.
Lines 9-10
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
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When you get to line 9 of a sonnet, you know that you have to do a little extra work, since the
ninth line of a sonnet traditionally marks the "turn" in the poem, where the problem set up in
the first 8 lines begins to move towards a solution.
To be honest, though, this line doesn't make for much of a turn at all. The simile of the fortress
ends here (until it's picked up again at "imprison"), but this line, like those before it, mainly
furthers the development of the speaker's desired relationship with God.
He hints at no solution, but the line does mark a shift in tone. The speaker seems to be a bit
more candid and personal here, and he abandons some of the similes and metaphors that he
uses before. "Yet dearly I love you" is the most straightforward line we've had so far.
"And would be loved fain," though, is a continuation of the kind of self-centeredness we see in
lines 7-8. He's saying "I'd be happy to be loved," just like you'd tell a friend "I'd be happy to help"
– he makes it sound a little like he's doing God a favor.
What's more, the speaker quickly drops the straight-talk, and goes back into another metaphor:
he says he's "betroth'd," or engaged to marry, the "enemy."
This word "enemy" is troublesome, because we don't know who it is. There's no one right
answer here, but our speaker may be referring to Satan.
The question is, why did the speaker choose the metaphor of a wedding engagement? Why
didn't he just say, "I'm under the Devil's control, so help free me?"
Perhaps an engagement implies that the speaker is cool with the whole thing and isn't forced
into this relationship with the enemy. Unlike in lines 5-8, where the speaker blamed Reason for
losing touch with God, here he seems to suggest that it is actually kind of his fault, since he
agrees to an engagement with the "enemy."
Lines 11-12
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
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Line 11 continues the train of thought in line 10, asking God to help him get out of this close
engagement with the enemy. He wants God to help him break the wedding "knot" he tied when
he was "betroth'd," and take him away from the enemy.
What's absolutely key here is the word "again" – does it mean this isn't the first time the
speaker needed to ask God for help in getting away from the Devil?
All of a sudden, we learn that these pleas to God may be a frequent occurrence. This can have a
major impact on our understanding of the poem. The speaker begins to look less like a poor guy
who's all-of-a-sudden blurting out his love for God the only way he knows how -- and more like a
con-artist who makes it seem like he's desperately in need, when, in fact, he's been down this
road a number of times.
But, instead of thinking that the speaker has wanted a wedding knot broken before, we might
read "again" as referring to another time when God had to break a knot. (As if the speaker were
saying, "Sorry, God, you have to go through that whole knot-breaking thing again.")
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By this logic, "again" could be a reference to the moment in Genesis (in the Old Testament)
when God expels Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden because they follow Satan’s advice.
This way, when the speaker says, "Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again," he seems to say
"either divorce/untie me from Satan, or you'll have to break the knot between us, just as you did
with Adam."
In line 12 (and on into line 13), the speaker seems to bring back the castle siege metaphor one
last time with "imprison," and rekindles the earlier debate about who had captured (or
imprisoned) the town in the first place.
Here, again, the speaker refuses to make things clear, first asking God to imprison him, but only
so that he can be free. This all goes back to the Christian idea that a human must to suffer in
order to get to Heaven, and reminds us again that violence and aggressive behavior aren't
necessarily bad things in this poem, so long as God is in the driver’s seat.
Lines 13-14
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
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These last two lines make it clear that the speaker loves those paradoxes and double meanings
that we struggle with all along. Both lines take the form of "If you don't ______, I can't be
______," but the speaker fills in that first blank with double entendres (words or phrases with
two possible meanings).
The first can be read as "If you don't excite me, I can't be free." If we read it that way, it's
possible that "excite" has sexual connotations, and this makes sense in light of the following
line.
But, we can also read line 13 as, "If you don't enslave me, I can't be free." Back in the day,
"enthrall" would also mean "enslave," so we should be aware of that possibility.
We can read line 14 as, "If you don't fill me with delight, I will never be able to refrain from sex."
Like "excite" in line 13, "fill me with delight" in this reading might carry some sexual
connotations.
Confusing, right? These lines leave us with some major paradoxes, refusing to pin down exactly
what the speaker wants from God.
As we see it, it seems that the speaker wants better access to God, and having been
unsuccessful in the past, demands that God reveal himself forcefully and powerfully.
In other words, the only way the speaker and his stubborn "reason" will be convinced of God's
power is to see an epic example of it. What's more, the speaker desperately wants to be
convinced, so he can be “saved.”
Still, it's hard to make the last line fit, mainly because you can't really become chaste. Either the
speaker is and always has been chaste, in which case he wouldn't have to worry about it, or he's
had sex but now wants to abstain.
But, if he wants to abstain, is more sex really the prescription?
And, if he wants this divine sexual encounter so much, then wouldn't that contradict the idea
that it is "rape"?
In the end, then, we might come to the conclusion that talking about God in human terms and
metaphors actually doesn't make sense. The kinds of rewards and interactions that God can
provide simply can't be described properly in human language, and that's why the speaker gets
so caught up in paradox and mixed metaphors.
Holy Sonnets: Since she whom I lov'd hath paid her last
debt
BY JOHN DONNE
Since she whom I lov'd hath paid her last debt
To nature, and to hers, and my good is dead,
And her soul early into heaven ravished,
Wholly in heavenly things my mind is set.
Here the admiring her my mind did whet
To seek thee, God; so streams do show the head;
But though I have found thee, and thou my thirst hast fed,
A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yet.
But why should I beg more love, whenas thou
Dost woo my soul, for hers off'ring all thine,
And dost not only fear lest I allow
My love to saints and angels, things divine,
But in thy tender jealousy dost doubt
Lest the world, flesh, yea devil put thee out.
His wife’s early death
This sonnet stands apart from most of the Holy Sonnets as it was discovered in a separate
manuscript along with two other sonnets. The sonnet is known as Westmorland II after the name
given to the manuscript. It is probably the most autobiographical of the sonnets, detailing the
effect of his wife's early death, especially in driving him closer to God.
Spiritual journey
Nevertheless he does not feel he is nearly close enough. The octave describes this spiritual
journey, ending with the lines ‘A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yett.’ A dropsy is a medical
condition, whereby water is retained by the body, so that the sufferer is constantly thirsty. Donne
uses the image of spiritual thirst, not as an illness, but as a spiritual condition, akin to the
Psalmist's ‘As pants the hart’ in Psalms 42:1, where thirst is a metaphor for spiritual desire.
God as a jealous lover
The sestet, however, reverses this direction dramatically. Rather than Donne seeking God, it is
God who is the holy lover, actively wooing and seeking the poet. God is offering him an
exchange: ‘Dost wooe my soul for hers; offring all thine’. This is a bold, almost outrageous
image. Even worse, God is seen as a jealous lover, doubting the poet's fidelity, and mistrusting
him in the face of his rivals. The first of these rivals are still ‘things divine’, but which still might
divert Donne's love away from God.
More on Love language: see ‘Batter my heart’ also by John Donne
The second group of rivals is altogether more dangerous: ‘the World, Fleshe, yea Devill.’ This
trio were seen as the great enemies of the soul in the Middle Ages and are mentioned in The
Book of Common Prayer used in the Church of England. They had already been used by Donne
in Satyre III: ‘On Religion’. The sonnet ends unresolved, despite a final couplet. In a sense, there
can be no final resolution till death.
From tenderness to contempt
The sonnet is a strange one, moving from great tenderness at the beginning to almost dramatic
contempt at the end. We feel perhaps Donne has neither resolved his grief over his loss, nor yet
his commitment to God. Nor perhaps is he used to no longer being the assertive male lover, but
the more passive female one, with God taking on the dominant role.
Investigating Since She Whom I Lov'd
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Read through Donne’s Since she whom I lov’d
o Does the sestet back up the claim of the octave: ‘Wholly on heavenly things my mind is
sett’?
o Do you find the use of human love language somewhat surprising in a sonnet of
religious devotion?
o How is it that the two spheres of experience can borrow images from one another?
o Explain the image ‘so streames do shew their head’
Turnip-Snedder (Heaney, District and Circle)
A Shiver
Anahorish 1944
The Aerodrome
Out of Shot
Anything Can Happen (Heaney, District and Circle)
Wordsworth's Skates (District and Circle)
The partial return to what Seamus Heaney does best after volumes of largely perfunctory poetry in
'District and Circle' is well illustrated by this poem. It's outstanding in its achievement in semantic force in
some places.
Words with particular semantic force are underlined here.
But the reel of them on frozen Windermere ... And left it scored.
This is obviously an allusion to the thrilling lines which describe skating in 'The Prelude' (lines 452-457,
1805 version), although Wordsworth was skating on Esthwaite Water, near to Hawkshead, where he went
to school, not on Windermere. I discuss these lines, in connection with sectional analysis, on the page
concerned with linkages between poetry and music.
reel is very good but not as wonderful as scored, I think. Skating has physicality but often it seems nearly
effortless. The ecstatic long glides are more to the fore than the necessary effort in skating, but ice is
hard. By describing the lines as 'scored,' Seamus Heaney shows us unforgettably the crystalline hardness
of ice. The scored lines are a 'trace' of the ecstatic action, just as the 'one track / Of sparkling light' is a
trace of Wordsworth rowing on Ullswater in another 'spot of time' in 'The Prelude.' (lines 357 - 400, 1805
version.)
The intervening line, though, is Parnassian: 'earth' is in ineffective contrast. A factor in an image, such as
size, may be excluded or denied by the poet, who may make it clear that another factor, such as colour, is
what counts in a simile - but the associations of the excluded factor may be impossible to overlook. Here,
the skater is escaping 'the clutch of earth' to speed along the ice, but the associations of earth remain,
leaving the line earth-bound in part. There's an awkward transition from 'flashed' to 'clutch of earth' as if
the skater were suddenly slowed or brought to a halt by earth on the ice, before speed and smoothness
are abruptly restored with 'curve' and 'scored.' The meaning is clear, but images aren't fully under control.
The same problem is apparent in the preceding lines
Not the bootless runners lying toppled
in dust in a display case,
Their bindings perished.
This is outstanding in its semantic force. The image is a memorable one - so memorable that the 'not' is
incapable of cancelling it. It remains in the mind, despite the negation, so that there's an abrupt and
awkward transition to the last three lines, 'But the reel of them on frozen Windermere ...' in which the
skates in their state of deterioration do after all carry the skater on the frozen lake.
The placing of the lines concerned with the skates in the display case reinforces this effect. Their {priorordering} in the poem allows the forming of a strong image and the image has inertia, which has a linkage
here with inertia in physics: the image tends to continue, despite being negated. In a poem with strong
images or language with strong semantic force, these tend to have a dominating effect. This is what I call
perturbation. (In Physics, 'perturbation' is a secondary influence which brings about {modification} of
simple behaviour. For example, the trajectories of comets are perturbed when they pass close to massive
bodies, such as the planets of our solar system. In poetic perturbation, things which are more massive,
substantial, vivid tend to have a modifying effect.) In my page metre I discuss metrical inertia and metrical
perturbation.
I refer to non-cancellation, non-cancellation of negation, and although the effect is unintended here and
has to be counted as a flaw, non-cancellation can be intended and can contribute to the layering of a
poem, which can increase its richness and resonance. This is {diversification} of non-cancellation.
Craig Raine, a very acute and perceptive commentator - very perceptive because of his strengths in
analysis, amongst other strengths - discusses a famous line, the closing line of Philip Larkin's 'An Arundel
Tomb,' which, using my terms, can be interpreted in terms of 'cancellation of part cancellation' and
perturbation. (Craig Raine refers to 'cancelling' below but I arrived at the term independently.) The
discussion is in 'Counter-Intuitive Larkin,' in Issue Twenty-three of the Arts journal 'Areté.' This is the last
verse-paragraph of 'An Arundel Tomb):
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
Martin Amis quoted the moving last line in a fine piece on the victims of one of the planes of 9/11. Philip
Larkin intended to cancel it, in part, by 'Our almost-instinct almost true' but the line, the feeling, is too
strong to be cancelled. Craig Raine on these lines (a reading of the whole poem is needed to follow all of
this):
'Andrew Motion's biography tells us that Larkin wrote on the end of the manuscript draft: 'Love isn't
stronger than death just because statues hold hands for 600 years.' Larkin is consciously refuting The
Song of Solomon 8.6: 'for love is strong as death.' And logically that - 'Love isn't stronger than death' - is
the enforced conclusion of the poem. 'Time has transfigured them into / Untruth.' There is, apparently, no
way around this. It fills the doorway like a bouncer saying 'I'm afraid not, sir. If I could just stop you there,
sir.' It is reinforced by another denial: the earl and countess didn't mean it. I take it this isn't a reference to
the Victorian repairs, but the primacy of the sculptor's role. 'The stone fidelity / They hardly meant ...'
Thereafter, though, the qualifications are themselves qualified. Prove is a very strong verb and almost
cancels the almost in 'Our almost-instinct almost true'. It again becomes a question of weighting. The last
line has all the force of a last line. It simply overrides the prior qualifications so that we, and Larkin, enjoy
the afflatus unqualified.'
The last line has such force that it perturbs.
The first four lines of 'Wordsworth's Skates' are at a much lower level of achievement.
It's not the highest praise to claim that a poet should be achieving at approximately the same level, and in
much the same way, in his recent work and in work from decades previously. This isn't artistic
development. If the later is only as good as the earlier and of the same kind as the earlier, then it's
disappointing. The same can't be claimed of Beethoven, who produced great works in his early period,
even greater works in his second period and still greater works in his third period which were
unprecedented, belonging to a different sound world and emotional world from the works of the previous
periods. In 'achieving at approximately the same level,' 'approximately' means here 'very, very
approximately.' The achievement in 'District and Circle' shouldn't be exaggerated.
In 'Wordsworth's Skates,' Seamus Heaney doesn't surpass the achievement of Wordsworth in his
evocation of skating on Esthwaite Water, quite the opposite.
Heaney pays reverence to Wordsworth’s affecting legacy in his piece “Wordsworth’s Skates.”
This poem addresses the skating Spot of Time, wherein Wordsworth stops literally spinning in
circles on the ice, only to find that the world around him is still spinning—he is
dizzy. “Wordsworth’s Skates” begins with a similarly dizzying, or disorientating sequence of
thought.
Star in the window.
Slate Scrape.
Bird or branch?
Or the whet and scud of steel on placid ice?
Heaney glimpses a “Star in the window” and wonders whether it is “Bird or branch” that he
hears scraping his “Slate,” either a windowpane or the top of his roof. The thought of this
scraping then reminds him of the “whet and scud of steel on placid ice.”
Not the bootless runners lying toppled
In dust in a display case,
Their bindings perished…
The “bootless runners” of the second stanza should be interpreted in two ways. Most naturally,
they are the unattached blades of Wordsworth’s skates, and this reading positions the reader in
front of a “display case,” where Wordsworth’s literal skates are held, “their bindings
perished.” A second reading of “bootless runners” situates the perished “bindings”[4] as bookbindings. A “Runner” is involved in the actual construction of books, and as defined by the
OED is “a smooth-faced board placed on the right hand of the book when cutting” which
determines the book’s spine. And as “to make boot of” is another way of saying “to make profit
of,” “bootless runners” is alternative way of expressing that the books “lying toppled/ In dust in a
display case” are essentially profitless, worthless, when compared to the “reel” of Wordsworth’s
actual skates “on frozen Windermere.”
In the first stanza the poet happens upon the idea of ice-skates from ambient noise, and this
triggers his memory of Wordsworth’s skating Spot of Time. In the second stanza, he disavows
any physical notion of the skates—he is not thinking about Wordsworth’s actual skates, probably
on display at Dove Cottage (in the Lake District, where Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy spent
almost a decade living together), nor does he need to return to a bookshelf to know
Wordsworth’s passage. The passage is one he knows by heart, one that transcends the trappings
of the dusty “display case.” The passage is so deep-cutting and relevant still, that the scene
which is “perished” to some “flashed” back to Heaney in an appreciative moment where he
realizes that Wordsworth left the “earth… scored,” not merely his local “Windermere.”[5]
District and Circle (District and Circle)
And to conclude, a few words about the four title sonnets, “District and Circle”: Heaney’s
fondness for the sonnet form is well known and well represented throughout his oeuvre, indeed it
is his most constant form.
He turns it to good use once again for exploring the “underworld” known to millions of us in the
great cities. It is a cat-and-mouse game he plays with a tin-whistle artist, “my watcher on the
tiles.” But, of course, it is also about the underworld itself, a classical motif that he has turned to
good advantage before, like Homer and Virgil before him. It takes us back to that player of the
saw who waits patiently for the loose coin to drop into his hat, player and listener locked in a
game of their own. A game of winks and nods. Contrasted with that are the “parks at lunchtime
where the sunners lay/ On body-heated mown grass regardless,/ A resurrection scene minutes
before/ The resurrection, habitués/ Of their garden of delights, of staggered summer.”
Like Hades, the underground has its levels, and the poet re-entered the safety of numbers; he sees
them now as “a human chain,” “jostling and purling” like a skein of wool, at once loud, “then
succumbing to herd-quiet….”
But he is still aware of his counterpart, the tin whistler, and worries that he may have betrayed
their bond. This is a recurring theme in his poems that marks him as a man of conscience who
would like at times to escape its harsh demands.
The final two sonnets capture perfectly the feel of such infernal travel: “I reached to grab/ The
stubby black roof-wort and take my stand/ From planted ball of heel to heel of hand/ As sweet
traction and heavy down-slump stayed me.” Notice how carefully the poet matches word to
motion and interjects blunt monosyllables to take the strain.
The final sonnet introduces another frequent theme in his poetry: his “father’s glazed face in my
own waning and craning.” Rarely have father and son been so often flung together by a
contemporary poet, and with so little bitterness and so much affection. And we should note as
well the careful wordplay of the final lines. In the end he becomes “the only relict/ Of all that I
belonged to,” and surely we are meant to hear in that the Catholic word relic. The final image has
its own resonance:
Reflecting in a window mirror-backed
By blasted weeping rock-walls.
Flicker-lit.
To get one thing out of the way first, before I involve myself in this fascinating poem-world as a whole and
try to account for its discordant impressions: the poet's reaching out for the 'stubby black roof-wort. ' This
shows that Seamus Heaney can be just as careless in creating neologisms as in using established
language. Bernard O' Donoghue, the editor of 'The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney,' is very
good at noticing things not in the least obvious, particularly in his areas of expertise, such as the
'Eclogues' or 'Bucolics' of Virgil, but poor at noticing the obvious. In his 'Introduction' he writes of 'the
powerful physical evocation of the 'roof wort' - a neologism that could not apply to anything else, except
perhaps the 'old kale stalk' in 'The Harrow-Pin' in the same book.
It's likely, I think, that Seamus Heaney and Bernard O' Donoghue were only familiar with 'liverwort,' the
plant. Reaching out for the 'stubby black roof-wort' is reaching out for something that does resemble the
plant, to an extent. But consulting the entry for 'wort' in an English dictionary would have shown that the
neologism was misguided, ridiculous.
The word 'wort' has a hallowed and important use in the traditional brewing skills of Ireland and other
countries as well as Britain, an important use in high-technology brewing too. The bars of Ireland and the
pubs of Britain depend upon wort. Brewing has a rich repertoire of terms, which should appeal very much
to Seamus Heaney, such as grist, mashing, fly-mashing, mash tun, underletting, underback, sparging,
spendsafe, trub, and carragheen (Irish moss), but 'wort' is one of the most important. Malting converts
barley to malt. Wort is the liquid which is extracted from the malt in the mash tun. The pitching of yeast
into the wort begins the process of turning wort into the alcoholic drink. Later, there may be gyle-worting.
Irish stouts were traditionally gyle-worted.
Reaching for the 'stubby black roof-wort' has, then, associations of the poet immediately showered with
liquid from the brewery. How 'roof wort' could ever apply to the old kale stalk,' given that kale, which is
related to cabbage, grows in the ground, not upside down from roofs, and 'wort' has these brewing
associations is a mystery.
But this miscalculation is obviously only a moment in the poem. As for the poem-world of 'District and
Circle, ' I think the choice of the London underground as the subject for a poem was unusual, unexpected,
offering so many new opportunities. This is a long way from rural County Derry and marks a notable
increase in his range.
The way in which this underground world is reached is described in the lines
Posted, eyes front, along the dreamy ramparts
Of escalators ascending and descending
To a monotonous slight rocking in the works,
We were moved along, upstanding.
This is a characteristic mixture of strength and weakness. A kind of rigid attentiveness is expressed in
both 'posted' and 'eyes front' but 'eyes front' is inferior by far. The 'dreamy' of 'the dreamy ramparts / Of
escalators' is poor, since escalators are hard, metallic, but so too is 'ramparts,' since the word refers to
the embankments of a fort. Although 'a monotonous slight rocking in the works' is beyond praise, the line
that follows, 'We were moved along, upstanding' is hopeless. It adds nothing.
'The white tiles gleamed' is simple and effective. As for 'In passages that flowed / With draughts from
cooler tunnels' I remember, from having used the underground in London for years, but a long time ago,
that adjoining tunnels brought in warmer air. But I don't insist on this point.
'I missed the light / Of all-overing' contains another of Seamus Heaney's neologisms, 'all-overing,' not a
worthwhile addition to English in general or this poem in particular.
The line
Parks at lunchtime where the sunners lay
could have been an abrupt and very effective transition from the underground to life above ground,
although not in the same artistic category as Wilfred Owen's abrupt transition from cold to warmth in
'Exposure: '
We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed,
Deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed,
But the transition in 'District and Circle' is mishandled and almost immediately there's banality: ' ... the
sunners lay / On body-heated mown grass regardless,' in which it's obvious enough that the grass, like
most grass in these urban settings, will have been mown and the heating effect of somebody lying on the
grass isn't worth mentioning. The banality isn't relieved in the slightest by the next line, with its attempt to
introduce weighty significance with one word, 'resurrection,' quickly followed by completely inept phrasing,
A resurrection scene minutes before
The resurrection, habitués
Of their garden of delights, of staggered summer.
Rhythmically, too, this is useless.
The first line of the next verse paragraph is
Another level down, the platform thronged.
Even though all that's happened is that we've been taken back to the world below ground after this
unsuccessful excursion to the world above ground, our interest is immediately restored. For many
readers, 'another level down' will bring to mind the circles of Dante's Inferno. This could well mark the
beginning of something exciting, a contemporary Inferno.
In the next line but one, there's mention of 'a crowd.' This echoes T S Eliot's line in The Waste Land,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
- which echoes Dante's lines in Canto 3 of 'The Inferno,' 'so numerous a host of people ran, / I had not
thought death had unmade so many.' (Translated by Anthony Esolen.)
But in this poem, the effect is confused, without impact:
A crowd half straggle-ravelled and half strung
Like a human chain, the pushy newcomers
Jostling and purling underneath the vault,
On their marks to be first through the doors,
Street-loud, then succumbing to herd-quiet ...
There are many things wrong with these lines. These are some of them: yet another neologism which
adds nothing to the resources of English in 'straggle-ravelled,' the allusion to starting an athletics race in
'On their marks,' banal and too distant from this situation to add anything, an ineffective conjunction in
'street-loud,' too obviously imitating 'street-wise.'
The remaining lines of this verse paragraph are worse, completely forgettable. 'whelm' is a neologism to
the extent that here it's used as a noun, whereas the established (but archaic) meaning is as a verb, 'to
engulf with water.' Here, it's fairly effective in isolation but in its context completely 'underwhelming:'
Then caught up in the now-or-never whelm
Of one and all the full length of the train.
The poet gets on to the train, stepping 'on to the carriage metal.' As carriages in the underground are
made mainly of metal, this isn't a point worth mentioning. Then he reaches out for the 'stubby black roofwort,' which I've discussed already. 'stubby,' though, is exact and effective.
More poor lines follow, although 'Spot-rooted, buoyed, aloof,' is an exception. 'Spot-rooted' is an
interesting and concise alternative to 'rooted to the spot,' I think, and 'aloof' captures very well the
appearance of people travelling on the underground to other passengers, equally aloof.
The remaining lines of the verse paragraph don't repay discussion or even a bare mention.
The final verse paragraph has vivid fragments, not lighting up the dross but in contrast with the dross. The
closing words, 'Flicker-lit,' referring probably to electrical discharges, is very distant from the 'twilit water'
of 'A New Song' and the girl from Derrygarve (although 'Flicker-lit,' given a line of its own, is isolated,
unlike 'twilit,' and amounts to an after-thought. 'Flicker-lit' is too good to be wasted in this way.) There's
also 'galleried earth,' a very effective conjunction of underground passage and the dramatic / theatrical,
and 'treble / Of iron on iron,' which would have been far more effective without 'one-off' before 'treble:'
'one-off treble / Of iron on iron.' 'One-off' belongs to the everyday world above ground. There are
miscalculations to go with these successes, such as the line 'My lofted arm a-swivel like a flail,' in which
'flail' has associations which are much too vigorous, of thrashing around.
The first section, which describes the busker, forms a kind of Prologue. It's at a low level of
accomplishment. The linkage between the busker and Charon, confirmed by the giving of a coin to the
busker (a coin was given to Charon in the underworld) is trite and formulaic. The fact that the busker has
'two eyes' and not another number ('his two eyes eyeing me') wasn't worth mentioning. The only good line
is 'As the music larked and capered ...' which is Elizabethan in its high spirits. It brings to mind the close
of Act I, Scene III of 'Twelfth Night,'
Sir Toby ... Let me see thee caper! Ha! Higher! Ha, ha! Excellent!
Bernard O' Donoghue's comment in the Introduction to 'The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney'
that 'The poem invites comparison with Rilke's 'Orpheus' in the way that worldly experience translates
without strain into the transcendental, 'transported / Through galleried earth with them, the only relict / Of
all that I belonged to' is fatuous. For a discussion of Rilke and the transcendental, amongst other matters,
see my page Rilke and Kafka.
“The Harrow-Pin”
In the poem ―The Harrow-Pin, Heaney focuses once again on his father as the subject of the poem.
And as he had done in ―The Harvest Bow‖ twenty-seven years earlier, Heaney sets out to explore
his father‘s inner self, the source of his actions and beliefs, by focusing on an inanimate object
associated with the man. The poem reads like a free flowing conversation. It begins with a speaker
recounting a time from his childhood when he and his siblings believed in the magic of Christmas.
He remembers how, as kids, he and his siblings would hang up stockings in the hope that by morning
they would be filled with treats. He tells how they would be warned by his father to behave or else
stockings would be filled with old dried cabbages instead of treats. This bit of reminiscing leads the
story teller to remember his father‘s worst threat of all – the harrow-pin. This hand-forged spike
would be used not only as an object for their instruction; his father would want to use it in place of
picture hooks and wire nails for shelving. Talk of the harrow-pin leads to stories of working the
fields and the horses. Their tackle would hang in the barn. But the Christmas story and the father‘s
use of the harrow-pin for everything from threats, to hanging pictures, to working the fields are all
part of a long ago harder time. The father, however, was never able to let those hard times go.
Throughout the years he still judged everyone by their ability to make do and tough it out.
―The Harrow-Pin‖ was published in Heaney‘s 2006 collection, District and Circle. The poem is
comprised of 24 lines arranged into eight three-lined heterometric stanzas. Heaney moves the poem
forward by iambic meter and enjambment. The rhyme is created using assonance and alliteration.
The primary object in the poem is a harrow-pin. This is a forged metal spike, part of an agricultural
tool. These spikes are pounded, a dozen or so at a time, through a piece of wood which is dragged
spike side down behind a horse to break up clods of dirt in the plowed fields. Heaney associates the
use and qualities of the harrow-pin with his father‘s world view. The harrow-pin becomes the
symbolic plane for his father‘s inner self.
Heaney is the speaker in ―The Harrow-Pin.‖ His recollections flow as a stream of consciousness. He
begins the poem by recalling what his father used to tell him when he was a child:
We‘d be told, ―If you don‘t behave
There‘ll be nothing in your Christmas stocking for you
But an old kale stalk.‖ And we would believe him. (District 25)
The telling of the Christmas stocking story reminds Heaney that as a child he believed in whatever
his father told him, even something as fantastical as stockings being magically filled by some unseen
someone who was able to know if we were bad or good. He doesn‘t recall finding an old cabbage in
his stocking, just being threatened that it would be put there if he didn‘t behave. Once this correlation
is established, Heaney introduces his father‘s most outrageous threat: the harrow-pin. In the mind of
a child the harrow-pin takes on frightening possibilities and monstrous anamorphic design: ―Headbanged spike, forged fang, a true dead ringer.‖ But, from Heaney‘s adult perspective, the forged pin
loses these menacing qualities. In 2008 Heaney described the family discipline when he was a child:
―No punishments were administered. She [Heaney‘s mother] never raised a hand to one of us. What
loomed, when the situation was grave, was the authority of my father, although this was never
exercised as corporal punishment‖ (O‘Driscoll 311). The adult Heaney is able to describe the harrowpin‘s physical aspects and its associations, an approach he had taken for the harvest bow twentyseven years earlier. The harrow-pin comes from an era when times were tough, people worked hard
to make ends meet, and made do with what they had:
Out of a harder time, it was a stake
He‘d drive through aspiration and pretence
For our instruction. (District 25)
―He‘d drive through aspiration and pretence / for our instruction,‖ echoes values first expressed in
―The Harvest Bow‖: ―Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks / And lapped the spurs on
a lifetime of gamecocks‖ (OG 175). What wasn‘t obvious to the poet twenty-seven years earlier was
the long term impact the hard times had on his father. In ―The Harvest Bow,‖ the middle aged poet
recalls seeing evidence of difficulty but was sheltered from the struggles by the presence of his
father:
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,
An auction notice on an outhouse wall—
You with a harvest bow in your lapel,
Me with the fishing rod, already homesick
For the big lift of these evenings […] (175)
Age and circumstances have changed Heaney‘s perspective. In his mind, the harrow-pin drives home
the difficult times that shaped his father‘s worldview. The father‘s association to the harrow-pin is
extended to include the farm horses that Heaney once described in ―The Follower‖: ―My father
worked with a horse-plough […] The horses strained at his clicking tongue […] the sweating team
turned round‖ (OG 10). Age and insight open Heaney‘s eyes; the romance of the ploughman gives
way to the harsh reality of field work. The harrow-pins, used to hang the horse tackle, personify this
harsh reality:
Brute-forced, rusted, haphazard set pins
From harrow wrecked by horse-power over stones
Lodged in the stable wall and on them hung
Horses‘ collars lined with sweat-veined ticking,
Old cobwebbed reins and hames and eye-patched winkers,
The tackle of the mighty, simple dead. (District 25)
Heaney‘s stream of consciousness has moved forward from an association between the harrow-pin
and his father to an association between the work horses and his father. Heaney forces us to ask,
―Who are the mighty simple dead? The long dead horses? Heaney‘s deceased father?‖ The final two
stanzas morph the horses, the harrow pin, and his father into one:
Out there, in musts of bedding cut with piss
He put all to the test. Inside, in the house,
Ungulled, irreconcilable.
And horse-sensed as the traveled Gulliver,
What virtue he approved (and would assay)
Was hammered in iron (District 26)
Heaney‘s father‘s stern criticism of the world around him and his desire for a Spartan existence,
expressed seven years earlier in ―xxxiii‖ from ―Squarings,― ―‘Plain, big, straight, ordinary, you
know‘, / A paradigm of rigour and correction‖ (OG 352) takes its toll. In his father‘s later years
Heaney sees a father who is increasingly cynical. The poet compares him to the traveled Gulliver.
Gulliver held unrealistic expectations for human behavior and because of this the world of humans
became a disappointment to him (Dyson 682). The father judges all by the standards of a world that
is not a human world. It is the world of his draft horses, tough, hard, physical, and, like Gulliver who
leaves the land of Houyhnhms, the father‘s world is gone and cannot be revisited. The father‘s
horses have been replaced by modern machinery: ―From harrows wrecked by horse-power over
stones,‖ their rusted and stained tackle hanging as testament to a by gone era. In the end, what the
father‘s high ideals lead him to is unemotional pure reason and practicality. What emerges in this
poem is a complex picture of a man who, like Swift‘s Gulliver, holds himself and his fellow man to
such high ideals that it can only lead to self alienation.
One Christmas Day in the Morning
The nod
A Clip

The main character in the poem is the local barber, Harry Boyle. Instead just
calling him the barber, Heaney tells us his name.

The sheet put around the boy having his hair clipped is like the cloak or costume
worn by the Ku Klux Klan, an American racist organisation.

The 2nd to the 6th lines describe how Harry Boyle cut the young boy's hair.

The poem is full of wonder at what happens in the one-roomed house of Harry
Boyle.

The poem describes in close-up the sounds and sights of a hair cut or a "clip".

Like "Clearances" and "Requiem for the Croppies" this poem is a sonnet.

The title could have two meanings: a dip refers to a haircut; but the poem is also
like a short clip from a film.

Harry Boyle was a scruffy man; but he gave a good haircut.

There is a very good description of the equipment the barber uses.

The poem is a memory of the poet's childhood.

The barbershop is also the barber's house.

Harry Boyle's house has become dilapidated.

Seamus Heaney got his hair clipped in a house instead of a traditional barber
shop.
Heaney calls the hair on the floor "windfalls" as if it were fruit from a tree.
In his poem “A Clip,” Heaney addresses the Spots of Time through thematic concerns, and in
doing so, alludes to a poet’s highest calling, that of social adequacy.
In the Spots of Time, Wordsworth repeatedly mentions mysterious sounds. While stealing
birds from traps, he hears “among the solitary hills/ Low breathings,” and in the act of
stealing raven’s eggs he notes what a “strange utterance did the loud dry wind/ Blow through
my ears.” While out for a late-night row in a stolen rowboat, he avers it is “not without the
voice/ Of mountain-echoes did my boat move,”[9] and while out past curfew ice-skating, he
recognizes “the distant hills/ Into the tumult sent an alien sound/ Of melancholy, not
unnoticed.”[10]
In Heaney’s “A Clip,” the speaker also experiences “close breathing” in his “ear,” yet it
arises from a definite source, the poem’s barber, Harry Boyle. So while the barbershop in “A
Clip” is “Near enough to home but unfamiliar,” Heaney still wonders “What was it happened
there,” even though the “close breathing”[11] in his ear has an identifiable wellspring. In
effect, whether the sound arises from “the solitary hills,” the “loud dry wind,” the
“mountains,” or the “the distant hills,”[12] “Harry not shaved, close breathing in your
ear”[13] creates an arresting strangeness analogous to that of The Prelude’s Spots of Time.
The force behind Wordsworth’s “low breathings” is located in the interaction between the
speaker and his surroundings. In the rowboat scene, for example, where Wordsworth once
gently “dipped” his oars into “the silent Lake”—when he sees a prodigious cliff that with
“voluntary power instinct,/ Upreared its head” as he rowed farther from the shore, he
subsequently “struck (the water), and struck again,”[14] as if involved in “an act more violent
than rowing alone.” As Bishop writes, a scene that once involved “Reciprocation”[15] shifts
to include a measure of retaliation. Alone in the expanse of nature, the height of the
impending cliffs humbles Wordsworth and turns him defensively aggressive.
Heaney feels an almost suffocating tension in “Harry Boyle’s one-room, one-chimney
house.” He details the “Cold smooth creeping steel” of the “strong-armed chair” in which he
sits. Of course, “strong-armed” describes the make of the thing, but Heaney also feels
“strong-armed—” forced, or arrested, as it were, to sit down and endure the menacing
ordeal. He goes on to describe his “sheeted self inside that neck-tied cope.” This mention of
“cope”[16] is open to interpretation. On the one hand, it references how Wordsworth feels
when touched by the inspirational afflatus in Book 1 of “The Prelude,” as if “clothed in
priestly robe.”[17] On the other hand, however, Heaney feels he almost cannot “cope” with
the situation, as if the “neck-tied cope” is choking him to submit to the “clip.”[18]
Along with how directly Heaney addresses the themes of Wordsworth’s Spots of Time in
Book 1 of The Prelude with “A Clip,” the violence in each scene is important to note. In
each passage, the subject is sedentary—Wordsworth in the rowboat, and Heaney in the barber
chair—as one is likely seated during the composition of a poem. Despite this suggestively
passive posture, however, Heaney emulates Wordsworth’s vividly aggressive language to reassert the purpose that Wordsworth’s early childhood memories serve. This purpose is akin
to the famous Blake passage from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that “without
contraries, there is no progression,”[19] or to the closing lines of Paul Muldoon’s early poem
“Wind and Tree:” “by my broken bones/ I tell new weather.” These early memories serve as
foundational engagements with the world around each poet and as opportunities for selfknowledge through irksome encounters.
Heaney has The Prelude, and more specifically, the Spots of Time in the forefront of his
mind in both “Wordsworth’s Skates” and “A Clip.” In Finders Keepers he writes that
“poems are elements of continuity, with the aura and authenticity of archaeological
finds.”[22] Indeed, in “A Clip,” the “neck-tied cope”[23] that Heaney mentions can be
understood as the pressure he feels to define his own experience, but also as the first inkling
he senses of the pressure to address the larger world around him. It seems Heaney offers that
the best a poet can do is “cope” with whatever situation is at hand, in a quest to find “images
and symbols adequate to our predicament.”[24]
Edward Thomas on the Lagans Road
The shell blast that stopped Edward Thomas's heart on the battlefield at Arras stopped his pocket
watch, too, at 24 minutes to eight on the morning of Easter Monday, 1917. That frozen timepiece
is an appropriate image for a poet whose best work seems to still time, to suspend a moment of
clear-sighted observation. The 142, mostly slender, poems he left behind are timeless in a more
obvious way, too. As the list of contributors to Branch-Lines - a kind of posthumous festschrift
of poems and essays - shows, his influence is still profound: Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney,
Andrew Motion, Penelope Shuttle, Anne Stevenson, Paul Muldoon and Peter Porter are among
the 56 writers and critics queuing up to sing the praises of a poet whom Ted Hughes
acknowledged as "the father of us all".
If Thomas has a reputation as "a poet's poet", it's partly down to the lambent purity of those
poems, which he took to writing only in the last few years of his life. Walter de la Mare wrote
that Thomas had "unlearned all literary influences". That's by no means true, but it reveals
something important about the simplicity of his diction and forms. Yet clarity and simplicity may
well be mirages; they are the hard-won result of Thomas's attention not merely to things-as-theyare - to nettles, or rain, or the ploughed earth - but to the inner processes of memory, perception,
naming and thought.
The poems in this inestimable book are in no way all homages; still less are they imitations or
pastiches. But they are all indebted in some way to Thomas. Where appropriate, the relevant
Thomas poem is printed alongside its modern descendant. So Heaney's "Edward Thomas on the
Lagans Road" appears next to "As the team's head-brass ...", off which it plays. Many echoes
may be heard: noting that Thomas has appeared in translation in Japan, Penelope Shuttle recasts
him as a kind of Basho in "Edward San", in which "a pure thrush word / spreads its calligraphic
wings / over Kyoto". The thrush's cry, from Thomas's "The Word", is remade here as an
enigmatic emblem of poetic influence. Elsewhere the debt is more glancing, or unacknowledged.
Matthew Hollis writes of the ways in which poets may be influenced by poems they have never
even read, "rather like the way conversation can move across a crowded room".
Thomas's intense preoccupation with the detail of rural lives and landscapes has led many to see
him as pre-eminently a poet who hymns a vanishing England. But just as the backward glance is
characteristic of Thomas's writing, so, too, is the onward step. To take things at walking pace is
to take them at their proper, human speed; and this allows Thomas to find in England's roads and
woods and hidden haunts a close correspondence between the rhythms of nature and those of
common human life and speech. Walking, for him, was essentially a levelling activity; he could
delight, De la Mare wrote, in "a poor man of any sort, down to a king". That egalitarian impulse
is clear in Thomas's concern, shared with his great friend Robert Frost, for the dignity of manual
labour. It's clear, too, in an ear that is often wittily attuned to the cadences of unstudied speech:
"Women he liked, did shovel-bearded Bob, / Old Farmer Hayward of the Heath, but he / Loved
horses. He himself was like a cob, / And leather-coloured. Also he loved a tree."
The poem ends by telling us that all that now survives of the farmer is a name: Bob's Lane. This
interest in naming, which recurs throughout Thomas's poetry, is picked up here by UA Fanthorpe
in a poem of Gloucestershire placenames. These, the "vocabulary of earth", are in themselves
almost a force of nature: "No committee okayed them. / They happened, like grass. / ... / Their
proper stresses a password / Known only to cautious locals."
"Old Man" is the poem that receives most mentions here, and it's easy to see why, as its
insistence on the manifold bewilderments of utterance and reference give it a strikingly
contemporary ring. It begins: "Old Man, or Lad's-love, - in the name there's nothing / To one that
knows not Lad's-love, or Old Man, / ... / Even to one that knows it well, the names / Half
decorate, half perplex, the thing it is". It's not just that Thomas is interested in the inner life of
words and speech, but that his best poems, as here, enact his inquiries for the reader. Like Frost,
he shows great skill in bringing speech or thinking to life, whether through a persona or his own
clean authorial voice.
As ever, his attention to linguistic stagecraft repays the closest scrutiny. Such is his simplicity of
diction that the reader is frequently led astray by phrasings that double-back sharply on paradox
or secondary meanings. In "The Word", for instance, he muses on memory's failings, likening
everything he has formerly loved and now forgotten to "a childless woman's child / And its
child's children", a startling, infinite regress of loss, which prefaces a stripping down of the poet's
own perceptions to the most basic sensations - "the elder scent / That is like food" or "the wild
rose scent that is like memory" - and then, finally, to that "pure thrush word", the "empty
thingless name" that, denoting nothing, is yet distilled to a very quintessence of meaning.
Glyn Maxwell captures something of this characteristic in the largest contribution here, a series
of 14 "Letters to Edward Thomas" cast as notes that can never be read by their intended
recipient: "What I write / Is on its way nowhere, is less than breath, / So might be anything, as
nothing might." He continues, with reference to Thomas's "Words": "Words I mean you not to
know / Don't see why they should move in any step / I fix them with." As Jem Poster argues in a
persuasive essay that locates Thomas within the context of the first stirrings of modernism, this
endless, stumbling word-dance lies at the heart of Thomas's work.
Edna Longley, our foremost student of Thomas, writes in her introduction to The Annotated
Collected Poems that his influence endures because his poetry "secretes core values, traditions
and tricks of the trade". This edition, generously and skilfully annotated, with what amounts to a
mini-essay on each of the poems, is an invaluable addition to Thomas scholarship. Both these
books form a fitting tribute to a body of work whose pure clarity of utterance, 91 years after the
death of its begetter, still pulses with feeling, thoughtful life.
'Edward Thomas on the Lagans Road' is a spectral encounter rather in the Hardy vein, and there is a
grim, twinkling awareness of mortality which now shines from some lines in this collection, recalling
Hardy in particular.
The Sally Rod
In 'Senior Infants', when a schoolmate is encountered after many decades, now walking with a
stick, it is the physical memory of another, chastising stick which unites the two men:
'Well, for Jesus' sake,' cried Duffy, coming at me
With his stick in the air and two wide open arms,
'For Jesus' sake! D'you mind the sally rod?'
The Northern Irish 'mind' (for remember) is perfectly judged, and anything but casual.
Childhood, Heaney makes us feel, is something lodged in the body's memory as well as that of
the remembering mind.
When the young Heaney steps out of line in “The Sally Rod”, with its account of how “Miss
Walls / Lost her head and cut the legs off us / For dirty talk we didn’t think she’d hear” the real
misdemeanour is that the poet couldn’t manage something more transgressive than such an
insipid little tale.
a quiet, simple poem that is astoundingly wise about aging, friendship, memory, regret, exile and irish
masculinity.
A Chow
Heaney sounds right more often than any other living poet, a product of instinct, not of poring over
dictionary entries in search of arcane and archaic interlacings of Indo-European roots. He did not need
to know that hag and hew were related to mention them in the same breath; nor quid and cud to call a
mouthful of tobacco his ginger calf's lick (in "A Chow"). His ear told him. It is an argument for the idea of
a collective, shared subconscious that Heaney's readers also recognize the sound; from the start of his
career, reviewers have noted that "the visceral impact of his speech is his signature" ( Publisher's Weekly
). He seems instinctively to give words the room and the situation they need to manifest the full range,
depth, and history of their meanings, "a course where something unhindered, yet directed, can sweep
ahead into its full potential."
the collection is at its best when at its homeliest. In 'A Chow', the great man has been offered
something, evidently hot-tasting, called 'warhorse plug'. I found myself smiling at the disclosure
'The roof of my mouth is thatch set fire to/ At the burning-out of a neighbour, I want to lick/
Bran from a bucket, grit off a coping-stone'. This appears much more personal and authentic -yet
even here Heaney cannot entirely eschew the literary, with the poem concluding: 'like a scorch
of flame, his quid-spurt fulgent'. In more ways than I could ever fully explain, I'll always hope to
avoid a fulgent quid-spurt!
HOW ABOUT THIS FOR A PIECE OF VERBAL MAGIC in Heaney’s elegy for a ‘favourite aunt’ (in
District and Circle):
She took the risk, at last, of certain joys –
Her birdtable and jubilating birds,
The ‘fashion’ in her wardrobe and tallboy.
Look how hard the word ‘jubilating’ is working here — except it’s not really working, more like
playing or dancing. The word can hardly contain itself, just like the little birds it’s describing.
You can see them bouncing and nodding up and down one after the other, with that odd little
stop-motion animated effect you get with the movements of birds. It’s like being a child
watching an animated film. Or indeed, being a child watching birds on your birdtable. It’s a little
Mexican wave of word, as if each syllable were a bird jumping up and landing just as the one
behind it jumps up.
It’s also a multicoloured word — no-one in the British Isles will miss the proximity of
‘jubilating’ to ‘jubilee’, so that the word conjures up the red, white and blue of a Royal Jubilee,
with the bird-like flicker of cellophane Union Jacks being waved by children. Which of course
has political connotations in the Northern Irish context.
But the word is not exclusively Unionist in its associations — it also brings to mind ‘In Dulce
Jubilo’, the mediaeval Catholic carol written by the Dominican mystic Henry Suso. Which in
turn evokes the spirit of Heaney’s own ‘St Francis and the Birds’, from Death of a Naturalist.
I’m not suggesting this is a political poem, just that political tensions are a perpetual presence in
Heaney’s writing, hovering on the edge of awareness, like the ‘ghost surveillance / From behind
a gleam of helicopter glass’ earlier in the poem.
And out of the corner of my eye I could swear I caught a glimpse of Christopher Smart’s cat
Jeoffrey, eyeing those birds from the pages of Jubilate Deo.
Now you might say I’m reading too much into a single word, and that Heaney couldn’t possibly
have intended all those meanings. But I bet he did. Or at least, when the word landed on that
birdtable as he wrote, he was aware of that the meanings that (ahem) flocked around it, and saw
that they were just what he wanted.
If Heaney asks more attention than busy lives easily allow, he amply repays with a surpassingly
beautiful poem such as "The Lift," about an open-air funeral for a much loved woman; the poem,
like its subject, too reticent to say whom.
Many of Heaney's best poems, such as "Clearances" -- about peeling potatoes with his mother -speak in a similar voice of restrained elegy, and "The Lift" prefaces a series of such poems in this
book, including a remembrance of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz.
This is called 'The Lift'. It has the word 'braird' in the first line, and it records the funeral of my
sister who died three years ago. Something unexpected happened at the end. It was a very
traditional funeral. She lived near the church and we walked behind the hearse and people took
lifts of the coffin at the beginning and at the end of the funeral ... And at the end we had an army
helicopter crossing. Not because of the funeral...
Hofn
unboundedly global: one of the strongest short lyrics, "Hofn," wonders at a newly melting
glacier, anxious about global warming, yet astonished by the ice's remaining immensities, its
"grey-gristed earth-pelt, aeon-scruff," "its coldness that still seemed enough/ To iceblock the
plane window dimmed with breath."
Without lessening the case of global warming activists, Heaney reminds us that the deep-freeze
of the glacier is our natural enemy
The Blackbird of Glanmore
The Tollund Man in Spring
Heaney's voice in general is that of a sober, mature elder with a rich imagination. "The Tollund Man in
Springtime" speaks through the fourth-century B.C. cadaver found in the peat bogs of Denmark. When
the poem says, "Cattle out in rain, their knowledgeable/Solid standing and readiness to wait/These I
learned from," you feel Heaney's own reserved observing.
“For Heidi With Blue Hair” commentary
“For Heidi With Blue Hair” is a poem written by Fleur Adcock, during the 1980s. The poem
presents the readers with a central image of a child being sent home from school for dying her hair
blue. The poem can be seen as one in a narrative form since the poem is being described like a story,
with several dialogues used. Using different literary devices and imagery, Adcock manages to
transform such a minor event and convey the different issues face in adolescence’s life such as
friendship, solidarity, school life, home life, family relationship, independence and the many social
boundaries that they are being confronted with.
The poem deals with independence and individuality in human beings. The main character- Heidi,
in the poem has obviously grown up, and has developed her own thoughts and personality, and this can
be seen in the headmistress’s tone, being unused to students dying their hair ‘blue’. The poem
successfully shows how important relationships between parents and children are, as without her
father’s help she would not have achieved her independence. Her father is recognized as a “freedomloving father”, showing the support he gives to Heidi, which is not very usual among parents. From the
poem we can also see Heidi’s strong determination in achieving what she wants, as she is strong
minded “Tell them it won’t wash out-not even if I wanted to try”. This shows her courage in standing up
to what she believes in, and the courage to strive for what she desires.
The poem uses some imagery, and a metaphor is used “shimmered behind the arguments”,
demonstrating how they were all aware of the depressing news of her mother’s death, and that it was a
major problem that she was going through. Despite this the poet regains Heidi’s justice and strongly
states his firm and that by dying her hair blue was not to rebel against her mother’s death, “It would
have been unfair to mention your mother’s death, but that shimmered behind the arguments.” The
poet however, manages to evoke the reader’s feelings, such as to feel what Heidi is going through,
having to face her mother’s death, “The school had nothing against you; the teachers twittered and
gave in.” From this we can see that the death of her mother may have caused the school to back out of
pity, yet the issue of her mother’s death remained hidden. The poet also manages to evoke the reader’s
feelings towards how the school rules are to some extent, unreasonable, and how the headmistress
does not accept different styles- Heidi’s hair being dyed blue was an unusual thing and this can be seen
in how Heidi’s father explains that “She’s not a punk in her behavior, it’s just a style”. This clearly shows
that it was unusual that one would dye their hair blue. The poet also manages to convey a message that
it is not right to judge a book by its cover.
The poem is written in six stanzas, each of which contains five lines. The poem does not rhyme,
but the style of the poem is enjambment. This can be seen in how the author phrases each line of the
poem, and how none of the lines in the poems were complete sentences. The poem uses four voices,
Heidi, Heidi’s dad, the headmistress and the poet himself. The poem is written from an outsider’s point
of view, to Heidi’s herself.
The poem uses alliteration in this poem and this can be seen in “the teachers twittered”. By
using the alliteration, the poet manages to make the teacher’s comments seem silly. The poet also uses
sarcasm in the poem, “You wiped your eyes, also not in school color”. This was obviously referring to
either the color of her eyes, or the makeup, and shows how the poet was trying to obtain justice for
Heidi, and that it was not fair for them to judge her base on her appearance and individual taste of
dying her hair blue. Dialogues in the poem are made use of to convey certain messages, such as in
“She’s not a punk in her behavior; it’s just a style.” From this the author manages to question the
readers whether the appearances could clearly present the personality of a person, and how sometimes
one should not be judged by his or her appearance. In stanza 2, the poet states “although dyed hair was
not specifically forbidden”, from here the poet again raises the question of whether or not this is really a
rule or an excuse. In the last stanza, the poet uses irony, by having Heidi’s friend color her hair “in grey,
white and flaxen yellow” which were “the school colors precisely”.
Through the many literary devices and the poem, the poet tries to convey the message that it is
not right to discriminate people because of any abnormal preferences or tastes. Just because someone
is different from the normality, does not mean that they are necessarily bad in the heart. People have
been so used to being conformed to the normality in the world that they have judged people because of
the differences, without actually knowing the true personality of a person. The poem also deals with
human rights, where people should be given the right to choose their dress code and hairstyle. The
issue symbolizes individual’s freedoms and rights in the conflict between the teenager and authority,
whether it is at school or at home. The poem manages to depict the conflicts between school culture
and youth culture in different aspects including looks and attitudes. I myself agree with the poet’s
message that he is trying to convey to the readers. I think it is important that we do not criticize people
just because of the way they look, or because they are dissimilar from the others.
'Country School' � Allen Curnow
LITERATURE ASSIGNMENT
Poetry analysis of \'Country School\' – Allen Curnow
In this poem \'Country School\', the persona (who might be Allen Curnow himself) pays a visit to his old
school where he takes a nostalgic walk down memory lane and recalls his childhood. As this poem
reflects childhood reminiscence, the persona seems to realize that things are not as bad as they seemed
before along with the portrayal of the overall issue of aging. However, the tone of the persona seems to
sway between enthusiastic and apathetic as there are many a times when the tones seem to differ
between two extremes.
In this poem, the persona describes a country school that seems to be in a somewhat dilapidated
condition. The vivid image drawn by the alliterative phrase \'Paint all peeled\' supports the fact that the
school is indeed deteriorating. With the phrase \'tufts topping\', one is able to picture a country school
architect with pinus tufts on it \'roof ridge\', establishing an image of a typical country school. Through
the usage of colloquial language, the vivid images seem to hold a lot of details, for instance the word
\'dunny\' evolves a picture of the local Australian toilets enlightening the audience to the smallest of
details. Furthermore, \'Girls squeal skipping\' conjures up an auditory image as the little kids play
around.
Several kinds of sound effect helps describe what the persona is going through. The fluid \'r\' sounds in
rank, and roof-ridge help integrate the ideas, linking them and helping form a wider image of the
country school. Also the \'b\' sounds in \'bargeboard, weatherboard and gibbet belfry\' calls attention to
the detailed observation again helping in building up the vivid image.
Allen Curnow has employed parallelism as well as repetition in order to draw links in this poem. The
parallel comparison of \'How small; how sad\', draws a link with how the persona seems to be recalling
his days back in school. The passing of time and his aging is revealed for the very doors that seemed
huge as a kid now seems to be described as being rather \'small\'. The persona refers to himself as a
third person and this is deduced through the repetition of the word \'you\'. Perhaps the persona had a
tough time reconnecting with his old school that he felt more comfortable referring himself as a third
person rather than personally reflecting, as though he were talking to himself.
This poem follows an irregular rhyme scheme, perhaps something that reflects his irregular pattern of
this recollection of memories. The lack of a proper rhyme scheme might also reveal the lack of
assurance, and the hard time he seems to have re-adjusting to his past. Although the poem does follow
an imperfect rhyme scheme: topping-skipping; waves-eaves; than-began; small-wall, the fluctuating
rhymes and discordant sounds allows the audience to notice his discomfort while revisiting his school.
Curnow has made use of an unstable structure so to say, for the poem does not hold a constant number
of stanzas, rather the poem begins with 3 and 5 lined stanzas but ends with two 4-lined stanzas. Now
this growth of stability towards the end perhaps reflects the growth or the increase in the persona\'s
clarity of understanding. It\'s as though he finally realized that the very things that were unsettling or
intimidating to him as a child (terrible doors) are not as bad as they seemed back in the day. This minor
epiphany seems to be mimicked by the structure of the poem itself. Similarly, in this poem, the persona
seems to get distracted momentarily and this can be shown in the second stanza after \'Pinus betrays\'.
While observing the pinus he drifts away into talking about how they function. However, the persona
gets back on track in the third stanza \'For scantling Pinus\' as his focus shifts back to the tall trees that
seem to be protecting the school. Several roll over lines, such as – \'paint all peeled on bargeboard\';
\'scattering bravely Nor\' West gale\' etc find its place in this poem. The ideas rolling together suggests
the pace at which the persona seems to be remembering his past and the sense of excitement is
established with this upbeat pace with lines spilling over to others, not slow with end stopped lines.
Also, the rolling over lines reveal the haphazard ideas that seems to be moving on to the next in contrast
to other poems where the ideas follow a stable well paced pattern.
In this poem, Curnow employs colloquial language, the usage of this everyday language is to perhaps
connect with his audience and communicate on an informal level and talk about something as casual as
\'school\'. \'Gibbet belfry\' would be an example of this simplistic yet local language helping the
audience further visual this school in detail. The idea that the school started along with the persona
himself brings into notice that the school might not be as old as one would think. Also \'you call it old\'
further suggests that the persona is merely just referring to the school as being \'old\' when actually its
not. Also, the idea of aging has also been linked to the pinus trees that grow mature \'in less than the
life of a man\'. This line suggests that the time period for a tree to gain maturity is lesser than the time
taken for human beings. Also the word \'scantling\' further backs this idea for the word describes the
measurement of the maturity of the tree and to deduce its time of harvest. Similarly, the word
\'terrible\' implies that the persona wasn’t actually fond of the tiny doors when he was a kid, and its
reference as being \'sad\' suggests its dilapidated state. Its through words like these that the audience is
able to sense a hint of unpleasantness in the past as the persona fails to hold an optimistic approach to
this walk down memory lane. Rather the tone seems to be somber and a bit died down. Furthermore it
suggests that the persona pities the state of his school.
This poem holds a variety of figures of speech used and this perhaps reflects the variety of emotions the
persona himself goes through in this visit to his old school. The alliterative phrases: \'paint peeled\';
\'rood-ridge\', \'tufts topping\' all help the audience build up a vivid image of the school. A similar
imagery effect is achieved through the series: \'bargeboard, weatherboard and gibbet belfry\'. Using
neologism, the phrase \'srub-worn\' suggests that the school is not in the best of its condition as the
floors have worn out.
The pinus trees that seem to portray the same pace of aging, has been personified as it has been
accused of betraying the school and not protecting the roof from the stormy \'Nor\' West gale\'.
However, the trees have also been described as \'scattering bravely\', perhaps an attempt to denote the
nobility of what the tree is doing for the school by scattering the strong winds and defending the meek
school structure. This task of the trees has been compared to the \'reef\' through the analogy \'as a reef
its waves\' for the wind is scattered just as the tidal waves are scattered by the reef, drawing an
interesting comparison with the two elements wind and water. Also, the comparison of the ages
between the persona and the trees are established through the usage of the polyptiton \'less than a life
of a man\' and \'together your lives began\' further stating the common point in time as they
simultaneously began this process of aging. Also, the persona holds a humorous as well as a sarcastic
tone when saying \'O sweet antiquity\' for it has been made clear that they are not so old let alone
antique.
Known to be a \'time-haunted poet\', Curnow has portrayed this persona who seems to be in denial of
growing old. It\'s quite obvious that the persona is just as old as the school but we find him calling the
school antique, suggesting that he doesn’t feel like he\'s getting older but finds it okay to exaggerate
other\'s age. Through this poem, I have realized that it\'s still possible to savor the past without having
to hold the same perspective. In the sense that, times change and so does one\'s perspective, however
it doesn’t mean that things remain the same throughput and the very things that seemed unpleasant
once upon a time might seem laughable now.
CAMBODIA
James Fenton, the poet of 'Cambodia' spent several years in Asia, touring countries such as
Cambodia, Vietnam and Indochina and became distressed and exceedingly more and more
incensed by the atrocious war crimes being committed by those in authority. He wrote most of
his poems upon his return to America, but 'Cambodia' was written while he was visiting
Southern Asia. Cambodia was a country devastated by war, and over 2 million civilians died in
the various conflicts. The conflict he is referring to here is when American troops conducted
illegal bombing raids under the guise of killing Viet-Cong they thought were fleeing into
Cambodia. These bombing raids cost 750,000 innocent civilians their lives. Cambodia was then
ruled by Pol Pot, who killed up to two million civilians in his reign. James Fenton was
particularly disillusioned with those who had the power to stop the war, and became a fervent
anti-war supporter. He knew that it was the ordinary citizen who was dying, not soldiers or the
higher class. In this poem it is those ordinary people he focuses on, those who have either
perished or are facing almost certain death on the battlefield.
'Cambodia' has a deceptively simple and childlike structure. In the 1st stanza he describes a man
who smiled and said goodbye, a reference seemingly to his death. If this is so, it is debatable
whether this is sarcastic, given that the man would not be smiling at the time of his death, or
whether it is highlighting how war can instantaneously change things for people, so that one day
he was smiling and happy and the next dead. However on closer inspection, it could appear to be
a man either being sent away from the battle, or a man being called up for duty possibly saying
his farewells to his family. The fact that a constant theme throughout the poem is that the first
line contains a survivor, while the second line depicts the dead or those who will soon be dead,
adds credence to this thought as does the fact that he is saying two will be left-presumably left
behind in battle. In the second line James Fenton initiates a trend that continues throughout the
poem of an increasing number of people in the second line of the stanza. As stated above, this
poem is to focus on the dead and those who will die and the second line here adheres to that. He
gives us false hope by saying that two shall be left, but then cruelly dashes that when he says that
"two shall be left to die".
In the 3rd stanza we are told that a man shall give his best advice, but three men will die as a
result of it. This is a reference to the habitually abysmal military intelligence that plagued these
conflicts and often led men into traps. In the fourth stanza we see that one man shall live, but will
live a life of regret and to meet that one man surviving four men will have to die. This could be
the cause of the man's regret, as survivor's guilt that often plagues the survivors of war in these
situations when they live, but their comrades don't. In the fifth stanza we see the after-effects of
war, the nightmares and flashbacks and the shellshock suffered. We see this expressed in many
poems, but the minimalism of this line conceives an extremely vivid and therefore shocking
image of the after-effects of war. The second line also describes that the man thinks it's a
nightmare or a dream, but it is actually happening and is reality. War is so bad that it must seem
like a nightmare to those involved, and this also shows that there is no escape from war no matter
where you are.
The last stanza escapes the form of the previous stanzas, in that it doesn't have one man on the
first line and then six men on the second line. Instead it says "one man to five. A million men to
one." I think here that James Fenton is trying to emphasise that for the one man who started the
war, a million must suffer the consequences, and also that for every five people who stay at
home and don't go to war, one man must die. The last line, "And still they die. And still the war
goes on." is a chilling reminder to us, a line that is as brutal as it is simple. This line feels laden
with anger, accusations, guilt and grief and could be tabled as an accusation at those who are in
'control' of the battles as to why they won't end it. It also demonstrates how there is no end to
war, and that that must be particularly astute to those involved.
The structure of 'Cambodia' is so 5 stanzas of two lines which lets the poem flow extremely fast
and lets the poem get straight to the point. This makes it concise and almost allies us to the
poem, rather than letting us feel detached. The poem is also almost lyrical and is presented in an
almost joking way which only heightens the shock and impact of his words when we get to the
real message. As these poems were always intended to be a form of anti-war propaganda (a fact
touched upon by the Washington Post Editorial Feature) and so would be used as a way of
getting his message across to the masses, it is clever that he gives us hope at the start of each
line. Every first line starts optimistically like "One man shall live" which grants us false hope,
before cruelly taking it away from us and showing us that war doesn't have happy endings, as is
shown with this line which ends with "live to regret." Because we are hopeful at the start when
we lose that hope we feel even more negative, which is a really good tactic for this form of
propaganda.
Although references have been made to this already, it is necessary to remark again upon the
importance of the simplistic outlook of this poem. This is because it is this simplicity that allows
James Fenton to convey successfully to us the shock. The simple structure lends the poem a fast,
snappy rhythm which ensures the poem gets straight to the point. This creates not only a tense
atmosphere but guarantees that the reader will feel that this is an important message. The simple
words of no more than 6 or 7 words contrive to build up devastating images because they allow
our imaginations to run wild and think up horrors far worse than words could.
This poem brings up an extremely famous quote by a man who committed some of the worst
deeds history has ever seen, mostly against his own people. Stalin once commented that while "A
single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." While these words are ghastly, to a
certain degree they are true. Reading in the papers of one mans heroic death is far more heartrending than hearing that 1 million soldiers have died in the war so far. James Fenton uses that to
his advantage here; by always keeping the numbers low - even when he talks about the million
dead he reminds us that it is caused by one person.
As this was intended as a piece of anti-war propaganda, it is worthwhile to look at how effective
a piece it is. To me, this is a superb illustration of how bad war is, but how simple it appears.
Although not as comprehensive as pieces such as "Dulce et decorum est" by Wilfred Owen, I
think that it is far more shocking and persuasive than the aforementioned poem, while not
drawing on any personal experiences or describing the abominable conditions of war. It was
published in countless newspapers and figured on leaflets and anti-war demonstrations which
shows its eminence and value. Even now it is an apt and timely reminder about the perils of war.
Follower
The title of this poem is ambiguous - it shows how the young Heaney followed his father literally
and metaphorically.
The child sees farming as simply imitating his father's actions (“close one eye, stiffen my arm”),
but later learns how skilled the work is. He recalls his admiration of his father then; but now his
father walks behind (this metaphor runs through the poem). Effectively their positions are
reversed. His father is not literally behind him, but the poet is troubled by his memory: perhaps
he feels guilt at not carrying on the tradition of farming, or feels he cannot live up to his father's
example.
The poem has several developed metaphors, such as the child's following in his father's footsteps
and wanting to be like him. The father is sturdy while the child falls - his feet are not big enough
for him to be steady on the uneven land.
There are many nautical references:
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The father's shoulders are like the billowing sail of a ship.
The “sod” rolls over “without breaking” (like a wave).
The child stumbles “in his wake” and dips and rises on his father's back.
“Mapping the furrow” is like navigating a ship.
In these images the farmer is not shown as simple but highly skilled.
Heaney uses specialized terms (a special lexicon or register) from ploughing - terms such as
“wing”, “sock” and “headrig”. There are many active verbs - “rolled”, “stumbled”, “tripping”,
“falling” and “yapping”. There are lots of monosyllables and colloquial vocabulary, frequently as
the rhyme word at the end of line. Some of these terms sound like their meaning (onomatopoeia),
like “clicking”, “pluck” and “yapping”.
The metre of the poems is more or less iambic (in tetrameters - four poetic feet/eight syllables to
each line) and rhymed in quatrains (stanzas of four lines). We see a phrase without a verb written
as sentence: “An expert”. The poet uses contrast - apart from the general contrast of past and
present we note how:


the father's control is effortless (“clicking tongue” or “single pluck/Of reins”) while the powerful
horses (“sweating team”) strain, and how
the young Seamus “wanted to grow up and plough.” but all he “ever did was follow”.
In thinking about the poem you might like to consider these questions:
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What does the poem show of the relationship of father and son, and how time has changed
this?
What does the last line of the poem mean? Does Heaney really want his father to “go away”?
Is this a poem about farming specifically or is it relevant to other skills and occupations? How
does Heaney explore the idea of family tradition here?