John Donne poems Pt. 1 (Songs and Sonnets)

John Donne Poems
The Indifferent
This poem advocates for sleeping around and uses a 3 act structure to move through the argument. The first stanza shows that Donne can love any woman, no matter what she look like or act like, so long as she’s not true. The second stanza addresses a person, questioning them, asking them if truth and honesty are really necessary because he can’t be bound by being constant. The third stanza addresses Venus herself and he claims that Venus says constancy is the minority and only those who are constant themselves will feel the sting of inconstancy. This seems to follow the line of familiarity breeds contempt.
The Apparition
This is one of Donne’s “love” poems, if you can call it that. The apparition figure is himself, after he’s been killed by the scorn of a would-be lover. There’s a threat of rape, or at least, of harassment, when Donne says his ghost will visit her by her bed-side while she sleeps. He calls her a “feigned vestal” or pretend virgin, which is then borne out in the plot of the poem as Donne, in his imagination, sees her with another man. There’s a double entendre surrounding “thy sick taper” which, in the poem could mean the light of her life, or, the man next to her who begins to “wink”. This man next to her will not come to her aid, and instead pretends to be asleep as she tries to wake him, and Donne harasses the woman with words that he does not include in the poem. 17 line poem, sets itself up to be a sonnet with abba rhyme, but the fifth line comes as another b. Rhyme scheme follows: abbabcdcdceffeggg.

The Bait
Another of Donne’s love poems, but this time the threat is against himself, although this isn’t clear until the very end of the poem. There are numerous references to nature in the poem, the first half show how nature palls in comparison to his love. The sun and moon are dark compared to her, the fish are metaphors for all the men who love this woman. He wants to be the only fish that’s caught though, and the second half of the poem is Donne’s wish that nature will work against his fellow fish. The woman is the bait, and Donne is caught, but he claims that the fish that isn’t caught by her is “wiser” than him. This means that being caught is somehow unpleasant, but the beginning of the poem starts with pleasant experiences, which leaves tension in the poem. Somewhere, in the middle, as Donne starts listing out the dangers of nature to his fellow fish, he’s become caught himself. There’s a clue in the second stanza, that the fish stay “begging themselves they may betray”, but what is the betrayal? Falling in love? Staying with one woman? It’s unclear, but the poem has to be re-read in order to understand that the threat is there the whole time. It’s a 35 line poem in 4 line couplet stanzas.

The Canonization
Here, Donne mixes love poetry with religious poetry, perhaps blaspheming in his “canonization” of him and his love. The first line of the poem, “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love” is unclear as to who needs to be quiet. It seems as though it’s all of society itself, as the poem rails against people who question their love. Of course, Donne does not make it clear that they are not married, and their “love” is their sexual relationship, but its implied in stanza three, when he writes, “We are tapers too, and at our own cost die” harkening back to the notion of sexual exploits costing lifeforce. The analogy in this stanza with the phoenix is great too, because here, not only does sex cost them a “little death” but it seems to bring about a rebirth too. The poem indicates that those who have shunned them or questioned them will in the end, after their deaths and reading this poem of canonization, ask for a “pattern of their love”. Donne sees himself as a trend setter then, as someone who can love freely and then write poems to justify his sexual exploits. The poem is a justification in a religious sense, following an argument that this love is worthy of saintliness. Rhyme scheme abbacccaa
The Ecstasy
This poem is also one that is sexually based, but it contains many references to natural features such as banks of rivers, plants, and springs. These natural features are used to refer to the bodies, and the joining of those bodies as a necessity or the joining of souls. Love is a mixture, something that he’ll refer to again and again in his poems, and like alchemy, at times giving you something expected, at other times something unexpected. Donne talks about heaven’s influence and how it has to work through the body first before it can reach the soul and makes the same claim about love. The love connection between two souls also seems to reach to a higher soul, a universal, like God. Sex, then, becomes a way of prayer or devotion.
The Flea
Here, Donne shows that the intermingling of physical bodies is nothing because their bodies blood has already been comingled in the flea that his bit them both. Donne claims that the mingling of blood is already worse than what they would do with their bodies, so there’s no harm in it. The second stanza shows his surprise when his would-be lover threatens the flea that contains their blood. He tries to convince her that the flea is their marriage bed and temple because they’ve already been joined in the flea’s body. The third stanza is the surprising turn, as Donne was not successful in his attempts to woo the woman and she has killed the flea.

Love’s Alchemy
Donne starts by saying he hasn’t been able to find a “deep” love, and that those who say they have must lie. Alchemy, a science that was based on a theory that never came to fruition, is equated with love in the same way that the elixir of life and the philosopher’s stone were. They were constantly sought after and never found, just like love for Donne. And those who stay together because of mores, marriage, or laws, get a cold night rather than a summer’s day. Donne rails against constancy in this poem, arguing that the wedding is a show, or a play and that marriage only makes women think of babies. The double play of “mummy” at the end signifies this obsession with being a mother, and with a dead thing, repossessed. Aabbacddccee

A Nocturnal upon S. Lucy’s Day, being the shortest day
Donne’s depressive poem about the consequences of love. In this poem Donne bemoans the darkness of the earth, but even as dead as the earth is, those things all seem jovial compared to him, the author. Donne compares the “light squibs” of the women wearing candle crowns as not being constant, which contributes to his foul mood. In the second stanza, Donne claims that he is “every dead thing” which would-be lovers should see and be cautious about the draining effects of love. He’s been denied love, by love’s “limbeck” [retort] and am now nothing. It’s only by the fourth stanza that we are informed that his love has died, but whether this is a real person or Love as a personification is unclear. The third stanza talks about “we” and so the fourth can be interpreted as a singular person, but I think that Love as a feeling is also true. Abbacccdd
The Sun Rising
This is an aubade, a poem or song for morning. This poem starts with a great line that makes you question the nature of the poem—“busy old fool, unruly sun,” which could indicate that the sun is the busy old fool, but it could be self-referential. These two things, separated by a comma, do not have to refer to the same thing, but can be almost like a list—“busy old fool” Donne and “unruly sun”. In any event, though, the sun interrupts Donne’s love-making. The first stanza tries to get the sun to go away to bother other people, but the second stanza shows how the sun has no real power that Donne doesn’t have. He seems to claim that his love can outshine the sun, and that his love contains multitudes, everything seems to be in his bed. The third stanza shifts gears then, and claims that the sun should only shine on his bed because it’s the entire world. There’s nothing else that matters. Abbacdcdee

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
In this poem, Donne is taking a trip and he forbids his love to mourn. He uses the idea of the compass to refer to their constant connection, no matter how far one leg gets from the other, but also as a sexual innuendo in how “erect” one gets the closer the one leg moves to the other. There’s also some sexism in how one foot must follow the other, obviously Donne implies she should follow him, but she also cannot mourn. He dictates what she can and cannot do. Abab cdcd efef etc.

Elegy 19 To his Mistress Going to Bed
A poem that uses language to strip the woman before him, but he is the one that ends up naked. There are moments in the poem that equate the women to land and country, like America, which could be useful in thinking about how colonialism is based in gender. As souls must leave the body in order to enter heaven, bodies must become undressed. Clothing is just a distraction that works on others, but for Donne it only makes him wish he were the articles of clothing. Donne uses several rhetorical tricks to try and undress the woman before him. First, he proclaims her beauty is fairer than the world, then that she’s so clever to dress the way she does because it stops most men’s eyes, then a promise of paradise, and then that if no one had sex there would be no children. His ploys don’t work, however, because Donne is the only naked one at the end of the poem. Aabbccddeeff etc.



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