Donne was a successful courtier—secretary to Sir Thomas
Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal—until he secretly married Lady Egerton’s niece,
Ann More (without seeking her father’s permission), was briefly imprisoned, and his
hopes of preferment at court were forever dashed. Trained as a lawyer at Lincoln’s Inn
and a gifted orator, Donne eventually took up orders as a priest in the Church of
England where he became Dean of St. Paul’s cathedral in London and one of the church’s
greatest preachers.
Donne’s career is often seen as encompassing two
phases: the period prior to his becoming a priest, when he wrote a substantial quantity
of “secular” verse, mostly love poems; and the religious period, in which he wrote
devotional verse and sermons. This division, though convenient from a biographical or
historical point of view, does scant justice to the complex ways in which, throughout
his writing, Donne’s secular and religious preoccupations converge and overlap.
The two poems selected for today’s discussion, one from each of the two
periods, are examples of this tendency in Donne to combine the sacred and the
profane—i.e., spiritual and worldly concerns.
Donne is one of the
seventeenth-century “metaphysical” poets. His poetry, that is, is:
A conceit in the Donnean mode is a witty, because surprising and
unlikely, metaphor. In “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” for example, a mathematical
compass symbolizes the erotically-charged spiritual union of lovers separated by
physical absence. Or in “The Flea,” a tiny insect symbolizes at once the erotic and
sacred dimensions of marriage. The outrageous (and sometimes humorous) aspect of these
extreme metaphors is not merely clever and shocking. It attests, rather, to a world-view
now mostly lost to we moderns: one in which metaphor is not some fanciful literary
device, but rather a way of seeing the universe as an intricately interwoven set of
relations among its otherwise disparate elements. Poets like Donne do not merely create fanciful and surprising connections; they discover and reveal them.
“The Flea”
MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper’d swells with one blood made of two;
And this, alas! is more than we would do.
O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, 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’re met,
And cloister’d in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.
Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it suck’d 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.
“The Flea” is a seduction poem in which a speaker tries to convince his
(silent) beloved to have sex with him. The dramatic context is two lovers in a
private room. The conceit has the speaker proposing that
a flea or mosquito, filled with the blood of the two lovers, is a sacred symbol of
marriage.
In what ways does the poem combine sexual and religious ideas?
Notice that the first line of the second stanza implies that the
otherwise silent beloved is about to do something, and that the first line of the
third stanza implies that she has done something. What is it she has done, and why?
What’s her point?
How does the speaker recover from this challenge to his argument? Is
his argument effective? Who wins this contest of wit?
Analyze and comment upon some particularly effective or otherwise
striking passage.
“Holy Sonnet XIV”
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,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved 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.
Whereas “The Flea” is a seduction poem utilizing sacred ideas, “Holy
Sonnet XIV” is ostensibly a devotional poem—a prayer, in fact—that utilizes some of
the strategies of the love poet.
The speaker pleads with God, as might a lover his beloved, to relieve
him of the anguish of being separated, distant, and perhaps unloved by the supreme
object of his devotion. The theological context of the poem assumes that human
beings are so damaged by original sin that they are powerless to be reunited with
God, no matter how hard they try. Even human reason is damaged beyond any capacity
to think clearly and thereby reconnect with the divine.
An arresting feature of this sonnet is its manipulation of Petrarchan
poetics (recall Petrarch from the introductory lecture on lyric poetry). Unlike the
speaking voice of the typical love sonnet, wherein a male lover pursues an
unattainable female beloved, Donne’s speaker here is the beloved asking to be
pursued by the silent lover (God). The frustrated erotic desire of the lover becomes
here the spiritual perturbation of a would-be beloved. This (feminized?) speaker is
plagued by doubt and vexed by the lover’s apparent silence and indifference.
What sort of imagery does the poem use as a metaphor for this state of
spiritual depravity?
What role is played in the poem by the language of human love and/or
sexuality?
Analyze and comment upon some particularly effective or otherwise
striking passage.
Other Poems
Below are two additional favorites of mine. Choose one and offer
comments on any aspect or passage. Again, consult the Oxford English Dictionary for help with the
(many) puzzling terms.
A good selection of other Donne poems may be found at Luminarium.
“A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
“A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day,
Being the Shortest
Day”
’Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s,
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world’s whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th’hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr’d; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.
Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.
All others, from all things, draw all that’s good:
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
I, by Love’s limbec, am the grave
Of all, that’s nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown’d the whole world, us two; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.
But I am by her death—which word wrongs her—
Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.
But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all.
Since she enjoys her long night’s festival,
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight is.