#John Donne as a Love Poet

Discuss the various attitudes to love shown by John Donne

“The first poet in the world in some things,” as Ben Jonson  has described John Donne.
Donne is one of the best-known Renaissance poets, so widely quoted that he ranks highly
among well-known authors, not far behind his near contemporary, William Shakespeare. He
is also generally considered as the most prominent member of the metaphysical poets, a
term coined by the poet and critic Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of English lyric
poets of the 17th century, whose work was characterized by the inventive use of conceits,
and by speculation about topics such as love, death or religion. As Joan Bennett  has said,
“Donne had enough experience to realize love’s many moods, from the most brutally cynical
to the most idealistic”. Donne expresses various attitudes to love in his poems, ranging from
his fixation with erotic, physical love in “The Flea” and “Elegy: To His Mistress Going To Bed”,
his worship of the incomparable love between man and woman in “The Good-Morrow” and
“The Sun Rising”, and of the love between man and God in “Batter My Heart”, to his very
cynical view of love in “Woman’s Constancy”.

Donne presents love as being of extreme importance to the speaker of his poems “The Flea”
and “Elegy: To His Mistress Going To Bed”. However, he puts focus on the erotic, physical
love between man and woman, disregarding love on an emotional level. These poems are
centred on a situation where a man is trying to persuade his lover to have sexual intercourse
with him. As Helen Gardner  has said, “Argument and persuasion, and the use of the conceit
as their instrument, are the elements or body of a metaphysical poem.” In “The Flea”, Donne’s
use of the metaphysical conceit is very clear, as he compares the “mingl[ing]” of the lovers’
blood in a flea to the act of making love. The speaker’s urgency comes across from his
attempts at persuading his lover, although he seeks to do this by presenting their lovemaking
as something simple, natural, and even trivial. He begins the poem by saying, “Mark but this
flea, and mark in this, / How little that which thou deniest me is”. The use of the imperative
and the repetition of “mark” add force and urgency to the beginning of the poem. This
provides a contrast with the following line, where the speaker reduces the significance of the
lover losing her virginity. In the third line, Donne suggests the simplicity and inevitability of
love-making, by saying that “It sucked me first, and now sucks thee, / And in this flea our two
bloods mingled be.” The slow and steady rhythm of the lines, caused by the caesura after
“first”, and the rhyme of “thee” with “flea” in the middle of the next line, gives the point he is
making a very simple and persuasive tone. This is followed by the speaker saying, “Thou
know’st that this cannot be said / A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead”. He uses
religious language, saying that the mingling of their bodily fluids in the flea are not
considered to be “a sin”, so why should their lovemaking be. Through this he emphasises the
innate nature of the intimacy that the speaker wishes to have with his lover. In “The Flea”,
Donne elevates the importance of love on the physical level through the speaker’s attempts
to persuade his lover to make love to him.

Similarly, in “Elegy: To His Mistress Going To Bed”, Donne presents physical lovemaking as
something of great importance. The poem starts with an imperative mood as he says “Come,
madam, come; all rest my powers defy;”. Using the imperative, and addressing the “madam”
create a sense of urgency from the very first line. However, contrastingly to “The Flea”, the
speaker of this poem does not present love as something trivial, but rather as something
almost heavenly. The speaker says, “Off with that girdle, like heaven’s zone glistering, / But a
far fairer world encompassing.” The simile used to compare the lover’s body to heaven and
the alliteration of “f” and long vowel sounds in “far fairer” emphasise the speaker’s awe of
even the very idea of making love to his lady. Donne presents physical lovemaking as
something sublime and of great importance in his poems “The Flea” and “Elegy: To His
Mistress Going To Bed”.

Donne pursues the idea of the unrivalled importance of love in his poems “The Good-
Morrow”, and “The Sun Rising”. As said by Achsah Guibbory , “Here, the particular, singular
woman is essential for the man’s fulfilment.” In “The Good-Morrow” the speaker cannot seem
to remember life before their love and relationship, as it all seems so insignificant in
comparison. Paul Muldoon  has said, “One of the ‘things’ in which Donne is surely the first
poet in the world’ is in his handling of first lines.” He opens the poem with a rhetorical
question, “I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I / Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till
then?” The latter is a perfect example of hyperbole, as he suggests that they were still
children, nursing from their mothers, until they met each other. The alliteration of “w” in “were
we not weaned” emphasizes the wondering tone, and the speaker’s amazement about how
trivial life was before their love. As Achsah Guibbory  has noted, “There is a sense of
completion, as if the lover has finally found what was missing from life, his other half.” In the
second stanza the speaker proposes that “love, all love of other sights controls, / And makes
one little room an everywhere.” This hyperbolic claim suggests that their love is above
everything else in the world, but at the same time, the outside world is nothing compared to
their love, as the love that they have has the power to turn their bedroom into a world of its
own. Comparably, Donne proposes a similar idea in “The Sun Rising”, when the speaker
confronts the sun by saying “and since thy duties be / to warm the world, that’s done in
warming us.” In this line the speaker suggests that together, he and his lover are the whole
world, and the sun’s duty will be done just by warming them. The caesura after the word
“world” emphasizes the importance of the lovers. Moreover, the sun’s “warming” could be
understood as a metaphor for the unrivalled love and affection between the lovers. In
Donne’s poems “The Good-Morrow” and “The Sun Rising”, Donne’s attitude to love is one of
awe - the importance of love between two humans is presented as being barely comparable
to anything else in the world, or in fact, the world itself.

Having converted to the Anglican Church in the early 1600s, Donne focused his literary
career largely on religious literature, such as his poem “Batter my heart”, where he presents
the love between man and God as the ultimate target in life. Helen Wilcox  has said, “In some
sense, then, Donne’s religious sonnets may be seen as love poems to God”. This idea is
supported by Donne’s use of the sonnet form, as until Donne wrote these poems, sonnets
were almost always about a speaker's love for a woman. The speaker in “Batter my heart”
begins with asking “Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you / As yet but knocke, breathe,
shine, and seeke to mend;”. Donne uses the triplet of verbs, “knocke, breathe, shine” perhaps
as symbols of the Trinity - God, the Holy Ghost, and His Son, Jesus. The speaker desires
more from God, as “knock[ing]”, “breathe[ing]” and “shin[ing]” is not enough for him. The
speaker continues by saying, “That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee,’and bend / Your
force, to breake, blowe, burn, and make me new.” He appears to think that God knocks, but
ought to “breake”, the Holy Ghost breathes, but ought to “blowe”, and the Son shines, but
ought to “burn” like fire. The alliteration in “breake, blowe, burn” emphasizes the speaker’s
unbearable desire and longing for God’s love and presence. The speaker expresses his own
love for God by saying, “Yet dearly ‘I love you,’ and would be loved faine, / but am betroth’d
unto your enemie:”. By starting the line with the word “Yet”, the speaker makes it seem as
though no matter what he has had to face, he still desires God’s love more than anything
else. Moreover, the use of direct speech for when he says, “I love you”, makes his statement
stand out, and seem truly genuine. In “Batter My Heart”, Donne’s presents love between man
and God as being most desirable and important.

In contrast to the previous poems, Donne’s attitude to love in “Woman’s Constancy” is rather
cynical. He begins the poem with a rhetorical question to his lover, saying, “Now that thou
hast loved me one whole day, / Tomorrow when you leav’st, what wilt thou say?” By saying
that she has loved him “one whole day”, Donne uses a sarcastic tone; one day is considered
a short time to be in love, but with this line, Donne suggests the contrary. The language of
this poem is full of questions – until the last sentence of the poem, all previous sentences
are questions posed to the lover. This emphasises the speaker’s questioning and pessimistic
attitude towards the love between them. The speaker says, “Or as true deaths true marriages
untie, / So lover’s contracts, images of those, / Bind but till sleep, death’s image, them
unloose?” The analogy he uses here emphasises the fragility of the bond between them, as it
can simply be untied by sleep, “death’s image”. Furthermore, by saying “true deaths” and “true
marriages”, he emphasises the contrast between the true love between a married couple,
and the ‘mock love’ between him and his lover. In the final lines of the poem, the speaker
suggests that he could “conquer” his lover’s reasoning, but he will not, as he says, “For by
tomorrow I may think so too.” This final line truly emphasises the cynical attitude towards
love in this poem, as not only is the lover the one not committed to the relationship, but also
neither is the speaker. In contrast to the previously mentioned poems, where love of different
kinds is presented as something of tremendous importance, in “Woman’s Constancy”
Donne’s attitude towards love is pessimistic and cynical.

As characteristic to a metaphysical poet, love is certainly a main theme in John Donne’s

poetry. As most of John Donne’s poetry was not published until after his death, but only
circulated in manuscript form amongst his friends, Donne was able to write about love
completely truthfully, not fearing the judgment of the wider public. Therefore, Donne was able
to show a very wide range of attitudes to love in his poems, ranging from one extreme to the
other. In some poems, Donne can be seen being most idealistic, presenting love as being
more important than the world itself, while in others, he is pessimistic about love’s
permanence past the initial feelings or desire between lovers.