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” 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.
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.
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.