Divine and Profane Love in the Poetry of John Donne

By Diana Crciun,
First Year, German English

Along with Ben Jonson, John Donne was the most influential poet of the 17 th century.
His works are noted for their strong, sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious
poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires, sermons and epithalamia
(wedding songs). His biography shows a man of great contrast: first a Catholic and a young
adventurous libertine who attains favours at the court, especially with the ladies, later
marrying in secret Ann More, Lady Egerton 1s niece; then he renounces his faith and becomes
an Anglican priest, appointed some years afterwards the Dean of Saint Pauls Cathedral. This
contrast that existed in Donnes life also exists in his opus: on one hand, we have poetry of
human, carnal love and on the other hand, poetry of divine, holy love. This paper is an attempt
to describe the relationship between these two types of poetry in John Donnes works, taking
as a start point three of his most famous creations, The Good Morrow, The Flea and Sonnet
14 of The Holy Sonnets.
He is considered to be one of the Metaphysical poets, although this term was a misnomer
introduced by John Dryden and then used by Samuel Johnson. Other Metaphysical poets are
considered to be George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Carew, Andrew
Marvell and Abraham Cowley, who were largely influenced by Donne. However, they never
formed a literary school and they were, in fact, quite different in terms of poetic
preocupations. Their poems are not at all metaphysical, but rather earthly. What the two critics
referred to was, actually, the tendency common to these poets of displaying a huge amount of
learning and a penetrating wit, which are set above any interest in <<poeticity>> (Schneider,
2013, 67-68). T. S. Elliot was the one to rediscover the Metaphysical poets, in the twentieth
century: he considered it to be his task to recover in his poetry that unified sensibility, in
which the body and the soul, the heart and the mind worked together in a perpetual
celebration of the complexity of life (Schneider, 2013, 68). The artistic devices most used by
the so-called Metaphysical poets are the conceit, a literary device which usually sets up an
analogy between one entitys spiritual qualities and an object in the physical world and

1 Lady Egerton, wife of Sir Thomas Egerton, one of the highest officials in the queens court. John
Donne was appointed his private secretary in 1598.
sometimes controls the whole structure of the poem, and the paradox, an assertion exhibiting
inexplicable or contradictory aspects.
One of John Donnes poems that relies on the literary device of the conceit is The
Flea, in which he compares the relationship between himself and his lover to the flea that
sucked blood from both of them, their bodily fluids mixing in this small parasite. Thus they
are united inside the flea. The male speaker tries to woo the woman, telling her she denies him
something as little as the flea is and that the blood mingling in the flea cannot be called sin or
shame or loss of maidenhead2. However, the lover is not convinced by his arguments and
wants to kill the flea, although he begs her to spare the three lives inside of the small creature:
his life, her life, and the fleas own life. This repeated reference to the number three was
interpreted by some as an allusion to the Holy Trinity, therefore killing the flea meant killing
God. It also alludes to the three anatomical sections of an insect head, thorax, and abdomen.
In the second stanza, he calls the flea "our marriage bed" and "our marriage temple". Alas,
their parents grudge their romance and she will not make love to him. In the end, she proceeds
to killing the flea and the speaker calls her cruel and lacking in nobility for murdering an
innocent creature, that had no other sin than sucking a drop of blood. If she were to sleep with
him (yield to me), she would lose no more honor than she lost when she killed the flea.
The use of this insect as the main metaphor of the poem is unexpected and intriguing. It is
characteristic of Donne to write in a colloquial, quite shocking language and The Flea is a
good example of his "down to earth" style of poetry: "The poem is a gesture, i.e, it not only
says something, but it does something, as in The Flea, which begins by pointing out the
insect: <<Mark but this flea...>> and before it ends it condemns, although it does not describe,
the killing of the said insect: <<Cruel and sudden! Hast thou since/ Purpled thy nail in blood
of innocence?>> Consequently, the metaphors and conceits are conceptual, not pictorial; they
are functional, not decorative, drawn from the <<unpoetic>> world of everyday reality,
philosophy, science, geographical discovery, major social and political events, etc. [...]; there
is a marked absence of pastoralism and mythology as they had been employed by Donnes
predecessors" (Schneider, 2013, 64).
Another well known love poem by John Donne is The Good Morrow. Although
referred to as a sonnet and included in the 1633 collection Songs and Sonnets, it does not
follow the most common rhyming scheme of such works, but is instead 21 lines long, divided
into three stanzas. The poem beautifully combines the concepts of profane and spiritual love;

2 For the quotations from John Donnes poems, the following source was used: Jokinen, Anniina,
Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature,
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/donnebib.htm, [Accessed 2nd of May, 2014]
it is rich in religious references and it is considered to be a representative example of
Platonism in John Donnes poetry. The Good Morrow is basically about a lovers thoughts as
he awakes next to his partner. The poem opens by mentioning the Catholic legend of the
Seven Sleepers, seven children, presumably persecuted for their faith during the reign of the
Roman emperor Decius, who slept for 200 years in a cave: "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?". Love awakened not only the body,
but also the soul, from the sleep of mundane life. It is an individuals own miracle, personal
discovery, comparable to the finding of a new world to an explorer. At the beginning a
childish love, consisting of pure lust, a relationship in which they had to watch each other out
of fear, their feeling evolved to a state in which they can experience true, spiritual love,
independent of erotic love. Achsah Guibbory states that the poem is an intentional reference to
Paul the Apostle's description of divine, agapic love: "At moments like these... eros merges
with agape. Walls collapse, the veil parts, we know as we are known; our deepest, truest
selves exposed" (Guibbory, 2006, 145), while the repeated mentioning of the sphere as a
representation of perfection is a clearly Platonic idea. Scholar Robert L. Sharp also makes an
interesting observation when stating that Donne would not have been familiar with the
Mercador maps, but rather with the cordiform ones (Sharp, 1954, 493), thus shedding new
light on the relationship between love and the world in this poem.
As it can be seen from the above poems, Donne has a characteristic view on women.
Unlike the fair ladies of the medieval times, the women in Donnes poetry are not intangible
madonnas, but mens partners in love. This is both an innovation compared to medieval
poetry and a step towards more modern approaches to love and life. However, Donne is
esentially masculine in his attitude, man is presented as superior to women, having a deeper
understanding of the world. The Flea is a good example in this respect, the man being
portrayed as kinder and wiser than the woman, who seems more interested in keeping
appearances than looking at things in a deeper perspective.
Surprisingly, Donnes religious poems are comparable to his profane love ones: [...]
Divine love is always dealt with in the same terms profane love is dealt with and with the
same vividness and gusto. More often than not religious terms are replaced by metaphors of
carnal love, and many of these poems are based on the ambiguous biblical notion that Christ
is the bridegroom and the soul the bride, and that the soul must seek and pray for the union
with God (Schneider, 2013, 65).
Although he also wrote sermons and devotions, his best known works with religious
character are the nineteen Holy Sonnets, in which he blends the Petrarchan tradition with the
Shakespearean one. They were never published during Donnes lifetime but they did circulate
in manuscript. Many of them are believed to have been written between 1609 and 1610,
during a time of great personal turmoil: it was the time in John Donnes life when he
converted from Catholicism to Anglicanism and was preparing to take religious orders. Also,
the idea of death seemed to preoccupy him more and more after 1610. His works took a more
somber note, however, some influences from his earlier style and persona can be traced.
Even in the religious poems, Donne uses forceful terms that create vigorous and
unexpected images; for example, Sonnet 14 starts with the ardent request that God should
batter the poets heart, like a foreign army sieging a town. This alludes to the Christian saying
that God knocks at every soul and it is the choice of every person if he or she will let Him in.
However, only a knock is not sufficient in the case of the poet, who wants God to force
assault on his heart, probably indicating remorse for past sins and a desire to better himself.
Alas, temptation seems to be great and his willpower in desperate need of divine help, since
his cry to Heavens is so powerful. Indeed, the second quatrain begins with the metaphor of
the speaker as an usurpd town controlled not by God, but rather by sin and worldly
pleasures. This spell that captured his soul and his reason is of Satanic origin, since he states
Yet dearly I love you and would be fain/ But am betrothd unto your enemy. There is also
an analogy between human and divine love because he prays to God to divorce him from his
sinful nature and liberate him, paradoxically, by imprisoning him. As stated above, the soul is
perceived to be of a feminine nature, passive in love, praying for the union with God, the
bridegroom, who is supposed to make the decisive moves and conquer the soul.
John Donnes poetry can be read in many keys. For example, some see in the Sonnet
14 a suggestion that the Church, metaphorically married to God, is in deep need of change for
the better, even after the Reformation. Others consider that Donne, through the frequent
analogies between erotic and divine love, was alluding that profane love is the only way
through which humans can understand the relationship with God. Both answers might be, in
fact, correct, since the beauty of poetry lies precisely in its many interpretations. The mixture
of erotic and religious in John Donnes poems give them a touch of the unexpected and the
modern, certainly deserving a more detailed study than they receive nowadays in general.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Guibbory, Achsah, Erotic Poetry, in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne,

Cambridge University Press, 2006
2. Jokinen, Anniina, Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature,
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/donnebib.htm, [Accessed 2nd of May, 2014]
3. Sharp, Robert L., Donne's "Good Morrow" and Cordiform maps, in Modern Language
Notes, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1954
4. Schneider, Anna-Karina, English Literature: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries, Editura Universitii Lucian Blaga din Sibiu, Sibiu, 2013