John Donne- Treatment of Secular Love
QUESTION
Using four poems, examine the distinctive poetic features of Donne’s treatment of secular love.
Within Donne’s vast range of secular works he provides no simple definition of love; his treatment of such matters reaching radical and unconventional highs. It is through his great variety of emotion and passion that Donne explores, arguably, his most consistent theme of love itself. “The Sunne Rising”, “The Ecstasy”, “A Valediction of Forbidding Mourning” and “Air and Angels” are four poems which contrast on various levels but still link on common ground in their ideas and techniques to which Donne uses to portray a passionate yet sometimes cynical outlook on love.
Donne’s insight into the agony of love is expressed through his own personal experiences: his dramatic sorrow, sincere or not, serves to emphasise his frustrations in the falseness of women and his want for physical closeness, his misery in secrecy, and then love in death creating, questionably, the ultimate agony. Donne is cynical in his description of the “weak men” who’s love, he states, will never be as pure as his due to their understanding that physical love is the ultimate connection : his distress then comes as own body is prompting him into compelling urges surrounding the physical elements of love. His poems espouse sexual connotation to deliver possible hints to his sexual desire: “pregnant bank swelled up”. He references to parts of his lovers body, “Care less eyes, lips and hands to miss”, this list of attributes represent her whole being, revealing his struggle as the frustrated lover in a relationship with a reluctant female, his want for the female body and his love of her. The conceit used in “Air and Angels”: “With wears which would sink admiration, / I saw I had love’s pinnace overfraught;”
This is an analogue of his physical admiration for his lover serves to overwhelm him, “much too much”; thus he has metaphorically drowned her in his seductive approach or contrastingly
Using four poems, examine the distinctive poetic features of Donne’s treatment of secular love.
Within Donne’s vast range of secular works he provides no simple definition of love; his treatment of such matters reaching radical and unconventional highs. It is through his great variety of emotion and passion that Donne explores, arguably, his most consistent theme of love itself. “The Sunne Rising”, “The Ecstasy”, “A Valediction of Forbidding Mourning” and “Air and Angels” are four poems which contrast on various levels but still link on common ground in their ideas and techniques to which Donne uses to portray a passionate yet sometimes cynical outlook on love.
Donne’s insight into the agony of love is expressed through his own personal experiences: his dramatic sorrow, sincere or not, serves to emphasise his frustrations in the falseness of women and his want for physical closeness, his misery in secrecy, and then love in death creating, questionably, the ultimate agony. Donne is cynical in his description of the “weak men” who’s love, he states, will never be as pure as his due to their understanding that physical love is the ultimate connection : his distress then comes as own body is prompting him into compelling urges surrounding the physical elements of love. His poems espouse sexual connotation to deliver possible hints to his sexual desire: “pregnant bank swelled up”. He references to parts of his lovers body, “Care less eyes, lips and hands to miss”, this list of attributes represent her whole being, revealing his struggle as the frustrated lover in a relationship with a reluctant female, his want for the female body and his love of her. The conceit used in “Air and Angels”: “With wears which would sink admiration, / I saw I had love’s pinnace overfraught;”
This is an analogue of his physical admiration for his lover serves to overwhelm him, “much too much”; thus he has metaphorically drowned her in his seductive approach or contrastingly