هذا نقد critic للقصيدة :-
obviously the poem contains no moral or noble truth about life.yet ''winter'' which has appealed to readers now for nearly four centuries, is not inspirational and contains no moral preachment.though the poem is appealing in it's way and contains elements of beauty,there is only a little that can be counted as beautiful in the poem. the function of poetry sometimes to be ugly rather than being beautiful.and thepoet may deal with greasy cooks and foul roads just like he would deal with sunshine and flowers.
shadows
•
hi Dam3a... i found this about the famous poet John Donne and his love poems( agroup of poems called love poem) i hope this will be useful for you.... :27:
John Donne was born in Bread Street, London in 1572 to a prosperous Roman Catholic family, a precarious thing at a time when anti-Catholic sentiment was rife in England. His father, John Donne, was a well-to-do ironmonger and citizen of London. Donne's father died suddenly in 1576, and left the three children to be raised by their mother, Elizabeth, the daughter of John Heywood, epigrammatist, and a relative of Sir Thomas More.
Donne's first teachers were Jesuits. At the age of 11, Donne and his younger brother Henry were entered at Hart Hall, University of Oxford, where Donne studied for three years. He spent the next three years at the University of Cambridge, but took no degree at either university because he would not take the Oath of Supremacy required at graduation. He was admitted to study law as a member of Thavies Inn (1591) and Lincoln's Inn (1592), and it seemed natural that Donne should embark upon a legal or diplomatic career.
In 1593, Donne's brother Henry died of a fever in prison after being arrested for giving sanctuary to a proscribed Catholic priest. This made Donne begin to question his faith. His first book of poems, Satires, written during this period of residence in London, is considered one of Donne's most important literary efforts. Although not immediately published, the volume had a fairly wide readership through private circulation of the manuscript. Same was the case with his love poems, Songs and Sonnets, assumed to be written at about the same time as the Satires.
Having inherited a considerable fortune, young "Jack Donne" spent his money on womanizing, on books, at the theatre, and on travels. He had also befriended Christopher Brooke, a poet and his chamber-fellow at Lincoln's Inn, and Ben Jonson who was part of Brooke's circle of literary associates. In 1596, Donne joined the naval expedition that Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, led against Cádiz, Spain, and the following year joined an expedition to the Azores, where he wrote "The Calm". Upon his return to England in 1598, Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, afterward Lord Ellesmere.
Donne was beginning a promising career. He sat in Queen Elizabeth's last Parliament, for Brackley. But in 1601, he secretly married Lady Egerton's niece, seventeen-year-old Anne More, daughter of Sir George More, Lieutenant of the Tower, and thereby ruined his own worldly hopes. Donne wrote to the livid father, saying: "Sir, I acknowledge my fault to be so great as I dare scarce offer any other prayer to you in mine own behalf than this, to believe that I neither had dishonest end nor means. But for her whom I tender much more than my fortunes or life (else I would, I might neither joy in this life nor enjoy the next) I humbly beg of you that she may not, to her danger, feel the terror of your sudden anger."1 Sir George had Donne thrown to Fleet Prison for some weeks, along with his friends Samuel and Christopher Brooke who had aided the couple's clandestine affair. Egerton dismissed Donne from his post, and for the next dozen years the poet had to struggle to support his growing family. Donne later summed up the experience: "John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone." Anne's cousin offered the couple refuge in Pyrford, Surrey, and the couple was helped by friends like Lady Magdalen Herbert, George Herbert's mother, and Lucy, Countess of Bedford, women who also played a prominent role in Donne's literary life. It was not until 1609 that a reconciliation was effected between Donne and his father-in-law, and Sir George More was finally induced to pay his daughter's dowry.
During the next few years Donne made a meager living as a lawyer, serving chiefly as counsel for Thomas Morton, an anti-Roman Catholic pamphleteer, later Bishop of Durham. Donne may have collaborated with Morton in writing pamphlets that appeared under Morton's name from 1604 to 1607. Donne's principal literary accomplishments during this period were Divine Poems (1607) and the prose work Biathanatos (posthumously published 1644). In the latter he argued that suicide is not intrinsically sinful.
As Donne approached forty, he published two anti-Catholic polemics Pseudo-Martyr (1610) and Ignatius his Conclave (1611). They were final public testimony of Donne's renunciation of the Catholic faith. Pseudo-Martyr, which held that English Catholics could pledge an oath of allegiance to James I, King of England, without compromising their religious loyalty to the Pope, won Donne the favor of the King. In return for patronage from Sir Robert Drury of Hawstead, he wrote A Funerall Elegie (1610), on the death of Sir Robert's 15-year-old daughter Elizabeth. The elegie won for Donne and his wife an apartment in Drury House. The two Anniversaries— An Anatomy of the World (1611) and Of the Progress of the Soul (1612) continued the patronage. Sir Robert encouraged the publication of the poems: The First Anniversary was published with the original elegy in 1611, and both were reissued with The Second Anniversary in 1612.
Donne had refused to take Anglican orders in 1607, but King James persisted, finally announcing that Donne would receive no post or preferment from the King, unless in the church. In 1615, Donne reluctantly entered the ministry and was appointed Royal Chaplain later that year. In 1616, he was appointed Reader in Divinity at Lincoln's Inn (Cambridge had conferred the degree of Doctor of Divinity on him two years earlier). Donne's style, full of elaborate metaphors and religious symbolism, his flair for drama, his wide learning and his quick wit soon established him as one of the greatest preachers of the era. Fully 160 of his sermons survive.
Just as Donne's fortunes seemed to be improving, Anne Donne died, on 15 August, 1617, aged thirty-three, after giving birth to their twelfth child, a stillborn. Seven of their children survived their mother's death. Struck by grief, Donne wrote the seventeenth Holy Sonnet, "Since she whom I lov'd hath paid her last debt." According to Donne's friend and biographer, Izaak Walton, Donne was thereafter 'crucified to the world'. Donne continued to write poetry, notably his Holy Sonnets (1618), but the time for love songs was over. In 1618, Donne went as chaplain with Viscount Doncaster in his embassy to the German princes. His Hymn to Christ at the Author's Last Going into Germany, written before the journey, is laden with apprehension of death. Donne returned to London in 1620, and was appointed Dean of Saint Paul's in 1621, a post he held until his death. Donne excelled at his post, and was at last financially secure. In 1623, Donne's eldest daughter, Constance, married the actor Edward Alleyn, then 58.
Donne's private meditations, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, written while he was convalescing from a serious illness, were published in 1624. In 1624, Donne was made vicar of St Dunstan's-in-the-West. On March 27, 1625, James I died, and Donne preached a sermon before Charles I. But for his ailing health, (he was emaciated and suffering from infections of the mouth) Donne almost certainly would have become a bishop in 1630. Obsessed with the idea of death, Donne preached what was called his own funeral sermon, Death's Duel, just a few weeks before he died in London on March 31, 1631. The last thing Donne wrote just before his death was Hymne to God, my God, In my Sicknesse,
John Donne
The love poetry of John Donne
by Ian Mackean Search Now:
Books by and about John Donne
Books of and about Metaphysical Poetry
Poetry books index
English Literature Home Page Course Summary English Literature Resources English Literature Essays Contact Us Find books
Donne's Songs and Sonnets do not describe a single unchanging view of love; they express a wide variety of emotions and attitudes, as if Donne himself were trying to define his experience of love through his poetry. Love can be an experience of the body, the soul, or both; it can be a religious experience, or merely a sexual one, and it can give rise to emotions ranging from ecstasy to despair. Taking any one poem in isolation will give us a limited view of Donne's attitude to love, but treating each poem as part of a totality of experience, represented by all the Songs and Sonnets, it gives us an insight into the complex range of experiences that can be grouped under the single heading 'Love'.
In To his Mistris Going to Bed we see how highly Donne can praise erotic pleasure. He addresses the woman as:
Oh my America, my new found lande,
My kingdome, safeliest when with one man man'd,
My myne of precious stones, my Empiree
The images are of physical, material wealth, and anyone reading this poem alone would think Donne's interest in women was limited to the sexual level. He describes sex in terms of a religious experience; the woman is an 'Angel', she provides 'A heaven like Mahomet's Paradise', and the bed is 'loves hallow'd temple'. But although erotic, this is not a love poem; nowhere does he say that he loves the woman, or that sex is part of a deeper relationship.
In The Extasie Donne conveys a very different and more complex attitude to erotic pleasure, when it is just one part of the experience of love.
This Extasie doth unperplex
(We said) and tell us what we love,
Wee see by this, it was not sexe,
Wee see, we saw not what did move . . .
Love's mysteries in soules doe grow,
But yet the body is his booke.
The body and the soul are distinct, but related aspects of the totality of love. The uniting of souls is the purest and highest form of love, but this can only be attained through the uniting of bodies.
Soe soule into the soule may flow,
Though it to body first repaire.
This focus on the soul leads Donne to express a condescending attitude towards physical love in this poem which is in marked contrast to the attitude he expressed in To his Mistris Going to Bed.
But O alas, so long, so farre
Our bodies why doe wee forbeare?
They'are ours, the though they'are not wee. Wee are
Th'intelligences, they the spheare.
But in reading Donne one soon learns that an attitude expressed in one poem is not to be taken as absolute and exclusive. One of Donne's characteristics is that he freely contradicts himself from one poem to another. The title of this poem, The Extasie, implies that love is a religious experience, just as the diction of To his Mistris Going to Bed conveyed sex as a religious experience. The religious metaphors give a hyperbolic intensity to his imagery, but the ideas expressed in The Extasie are firmly rooted in the scientific theories of his day.
Donne's view that spiritual love can be attained through physical love ties in with the contemporary theory of the 'chain of being' . Angels, presumably, could experience a totally spiritual love, unadulterated by the physical. But man, being part divine and part animal, can only reach the spiritual level through the sensual.
So must pure lovers soules descend
T'affections, and to faculties,
That sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great Prince in prison lies.
The inherent superiority of the spiritual level, and the part love can play in refining man's nature towards the spiritual, is expressed in these lines:
If any, so by love refin'd,
That he soules language understood,
And by good love were grown all minde
The scientific framework of Donne's view of love is also seen here:
But as all severall soules containe
Mixture of things, they know not what,
Love, these mixt soules, doth mixe againe,
And makes both one, each this and that.
Just as the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water were supposed to combine to form new substances, so two souls mix to form a new unity. The strength and durability of this new unit is dependent upon how well the elements of the two souls are balanced, as we see from these lines from The Good-Morrow:
What ever dyes, was not mixt equally;
It our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die.
A good example of this state, where two lovers' souls cannot be separated, even when they are physically far apart, is seen in A Valediction: forbidding mourning:
If they be two, they are two so
As stiffe twin encompasses are two,
Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th'other doe.
The idea of two coming together to form one is very important in Donne's view of love. When a couple find perfect love together they become all-sufficient to one another, forming a world of their own, which has no need of the outside world. This idea is expressed in these lines from The Sunne Rising:
She'is all States, and all Princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy spheare.
And again it in The Good-Morrow:
For love, all love of other sights controules,
And makes one little roome, an everywhere.
For Donne love transcends all worldly values. As we see in The Canonization, values such as wealth and glory have no place in the world of love.
With wealth your state, your minde with Arts improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his honour, or his grace,
Or the Kings reall, or his stamped face
Contemplate; what you will, approve,
So you will let me love.
Like love itself, the women to whom Donne's verses are addressed are usually praised in hyperbolic terms. In The Sunne Rising her eyes shine brighter than the sun. And in The Dreame she is praised as a being above the level of angels.
Yet I thought thee
(For thou lov'st truth) an Angell, at first sight,
But when I saw thou saw'st my heart,
And knew'st my thoughts, beyond an Angels art,
When thou knew'st what I dreamt, when thou knew'st when
Excess of joy would wake me, and cam'st then,
I do confesse, it could not chuse but bee
Profane, to thinke thee any thing but thee.
This reverence for woman sometimes leads Donne close to adopting the traditional attitude of the courtly lover , who suffers through being in love with a woman, usually already married, who scorns him. An example of this kind of love is suggested by the references to the symptoms of love in The Canonization:
Alas, alas, who's injur'd by my love?
What merchant ships have my sighs drown'd?
Who saies my teares have overflow'd his ground?
When did my colds a forward spring remove?
When did the heats which my veines fill
Adde one man to the plaguie Bill?
The courtly love ideal, however, is in conflict with Donne's ideal of two well-matched and well-balanced lovers whose souls unite to form one. In the poem Loves Deitie he expresses his contempt for the courtly ideal, which he sees as a corruption of the true nature of love.
I cannot thinke that hee, who then lov'd most,
Sunke so low, as to love one which did scorne,
. . . It cannot bee
Love, till I love her, that loves mee.
In fact Donne is unusual, if not unique, for his era in that courtly love hardly appears in his poetry at all. Courtly love seems to depend on the lover being unsuccessful, whereas Donne rejoices in success at every level. And the courtly love poet always expresses the same experience of love, the range of situations and emotions dealt with being very limited. In contrast Donne expresses an enormously wide range of feelings in his Songs and Sonnets, all relating to the experience of love, but varying from the heights of ecstasy to the depths of despair. This variety of feeling lends Donne's poetry much of its impact, for we seem to be reading an individual's personal experience of love, and not just a poet's contribution to a long-standing tradition of poetic love.
We have seen how in The Extasie Donne describes love as a sublime union of two souls. This, perhaps is the highest form of love, but by no means the only one. The Dreame expresses a passionate mood of a more down-to-earth nature.
Enter these armes, for since thou thoughtst it best,
Not to dreame all my dreame, let's do the rest.
The Sunne Rising expresses the reckless pride and satisfaction felt by the lover in bed with his mistress.
Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?
In The Flea Donne adopts a cynical and rather flippant tone towards his woman, using his wit to try to belittle and overcome her moral arguments, in favour of immediate pleasure.
Marke but this flea, and marke in this,
How little that which thou deny'st me is
For Donne, love can lead to suffering and disillusionment as well as to ecstasy. A Nocturnall upon S. Lucie's day, Being the shortest day is an extremely powerful evocation of the suffering caused by the death of a loved one, an experience which takes him beyond suffering to a state of absolute nothingness.
. . . Yea plants, yea stones detest
And love; All, all some properties invest;
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, 'a light, and body must be here.
But I am none;
In Twicknam Garden Donne expresses extremes of disillusionment, his view of love here being totally opposed to his view in The Extasie:
The spider love, which transubstantiates all,
And can convert Manna to gall,
And his view of woman is totally opposed to the view expressed in most of his love poems:
Nor can you more judge womans thought by teares,
Than by her shadow, her what she weares.
O perverse sexe, where none is true but shee,
Who's therefore true, because her truth kills mee.
Perhaps the most extreme anti-love poem of Donne's, and certainly the most un-courtly, is The Apparition. The bitterness expressed here is so intense that it is surely a hate poem; it opens:
When by thy scorne, O murdress, I am dead,
And continues with the lover threatening to haunt his mistress after his death.
Finally we ought to consider whether Donne's poetry expresses real love at all, or whether, as some critics suggest, he was merely a talented poet using his wit and ingenuity to create clever poems. Johnson said of the Metaphysical poets: 'Their courtship was void of fondness and their lamentation of sorrow.' He did not feel that Donne's poetry moved the affections, or that Donne had necessarily felt the emotions in order to write the poems.
Donne's poems are extraordinarily witty and ingenious, but this does not exclude the possibility that they also contain strong emotion. Donne's poems are quite capable of stirring the emotions, and no matter how clever his conceits, or revolutionary his thought, his poems would not work without a seed of genuine feeling at their centre.
Biblioghraphy
1 All quotes taken from: The Metaphysical Poets. Ed. Helen Gardner. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1957 (revised 1972)
2 Tillyard, E. M. W. The Elizabethan World Picture. Harmondsworth: Pelican. 1972
3 Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love. OUP 1973
© Ian Mackean, February 2001
(With thanks to Derek Farmer, lecturer in English at Mid-Herts College of Further Education in the 1970s. Please email me if you ever read this. If anyone reading this knows his email address please email me)
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English Literature Home Page Course Summary English Literature Resources English Literature Essays Contact Us Find books
Books by and about John Donne Books of and about Metaphysical Poetry Poetry books
John Donne was born in Bread Street, London in 1572 to a prosperous Roman Catholic family, a precarious thing at a time when anti-Catholic sentiment was rife in England. His father, John Donne, was a well-to-do ironmonger and citizen of London. Donne's father died suddenly in 1576, and left the three children to be raised by their mother, Elizabeth, the daughter of John Heywood, epigrammatist, and a relative of Sir Thomas More.
Donne's first teachers were Jesuits. At the age of 11, Donne and his younger brother Henry were entered at Hart Hall, University of Oxford, where Donne studied for three years. He spent the next three years at the University of Cambridge, but took no degree at either university because he would not take the Oath of Supremacy required at graduation. He was admitted to study law as a member of Thavies Inn (1591) and Lincoln's Inn (1592), and it seemed natural that Donne should embark upon a legal or diplomatic career.
In 1593, Donne's brother Henry died of a fever in prison after being arrested for giving sanctuary to a proscribed Catholic priest. This made Donne begin to question his faith. His first book of poems, Satires, written during this period of residence in London, is considered one of Donne's most important literary efforts. Although not immediately published, the volume had a fairly wide readership through private circulation of the manuscript. Same was the case with his love poems, Songs and Sonnets, assumed to be written at about the same time as the Satires.
Having inherited a considerable fortune, young "Jack Donne" spent his money on womanizing, on books, at the theatre, and on travels. He had also befriended Christopher Brooke, a poet and his chamber-fellow at Lincoln's Inn, and Ben Jonson who was part of Brooke's circle of literary associates. In 1596, Donne joined the naval expedition that Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, led against Cádiz, Spain, and the following year joined an expedition to the Azores, where he wrote "The Calm". Upon his return to England in 1598, Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, afterward Lord Ellesmere.
Donne was beginning a promising career. He sat in Queen Elizabeth's last Parliament, for Brackley. But in 1601, he secretly married Lady Egerton's niece, seventeen-year-old Anne More, daughter of Sir George More, Lieutenant of the Tower, and thereby ruined his own worldly hopes. Donne wrote to the livid father, saying: "Sir, I acknowledge my fault to be so great as I dare scarce offer any other prayer to you in mine own behalf than this, to believe that I neither had dishonest end nor means. But for her whom I tender much more than my fortunes or life (else I would, I might neither joy in this life nor enjoy the next) I humbly beg of you that she may not, to her danger, feel the terror of your sudden anger."1 Sir George had Donne thrown to Fleet Prison for some weeks, along with his friends Samuel and Christopher Brooke who had aided the couple's clandestine affair. Egerton dismissed Donne from his post, and for the next dozen years the poet had to struggle to support his growing family. Donne later summed up the experience: "John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone." Anne's cousin offered the couple refuge in Pyrford, Surrey, and the couple was helped by friends like Lady Magdalen Herbert, George Herbert's mother, and Lucy, Countess of Bedford, women who also played a prominent role in Donne's literary life. It was not until 1609 that a reconciliation was effected between Donne and his father-in-law, and Sir George More was finally induced to pay his daughter's dowry.
During the next few years Donne made a meager living as a lawyer, serving chiefly as counsel for Thomas Morton, an anti-Roman Catholic pamphleteer, later Bishop of Durham. Donne may have collaborated with Morton in writing pamphlets that appeared under Morton's name from 1604 to 1607. Donne's principal literary accomplishments during this period were Divine Poems (1607) and the prose work Biathanatos (posthumously published 1644). In the latter he argued that suicide is not intrinsically sinful.
As Donne approached forty, he published two anti-Catholic polemics Pseudo-Martyr (1610) and Ignatius his Conclave (1611). They were final public testimony of Donne's renunciation of the Catholic faith. Pseudo-Martyr, which held that English Catholics could pledge an oath of allegiance to James I, King of England, without compromising their religious loyalty to the Pope, won Donne the favor of the King. In return for patronage from Sir Robert Drury of Hawstead, he wrote A Funerall Elegie (1610), on the death of Sir Robert's 15-year-old daughter Elizabeth. The elegie won for Donne and his wife an apartment in Drury House. The two Anniversaries— An Anatomy of the World (1611) and Of the Progress of the Soul (1612) continued the patronage. Sir Robert encouraged the publication of the poems: The First Anniversary was published with the original elegy in 1611, and both were reissued with The Second Anniversary in 1612.
Donne had refused to take Anglican orders in 1607, but King James persisted, finally announcing that Donne would receive no post or preferment from the King, unless in the church. In 1615, Donne reluctantly entered the ministry and was appointed Royal Chaplain later that year. In 1616, he was appointed Reader in Divinity at Lincoln's Inn (Cambridge had conferred the degree of Doctor of Divinity on him two years earlier). Donne's style, full of elaborate metaphors and religious symbolism, his flair for drama, his wide learning and his quick wit soon established him as one of the greatest preachers of the era. Fully 160 of his sermons survive.
Just as Donne's fortunes seemed to be improving, Anne Donne died, on 15 August, 1617, aged thirty-three, after giving birth to their twelfth child, a stillborn. Seven of their children survived their mother's death. Struck by grief, Donne wrote the seventeenth Holy Sonnet, "Since she whom I lov'd hath paid her last debt." According to Donne's friend and biographer, Izaak Walton, Donne was thereafter 'crucified to the world'. Donne continued to write poetry, notably his Holy Sonnets (1618), but the time for love songs was over. In 1618, Donne went as chaplain with Viscount Doncaster in his embassy to the German princes. His Hymn to Christ at the Author's Last Going into Germany, written before the journey, is laden with apprehension of death. Donne returned to London in 1620, and was appointed Dean of Saint Paul's in 1621, a post he held until his death. Donne excelled at his post, and was at last financially secure. In 1623, Donne's eldest daughter, Constance, married the actor Edward Alleyn, then 58.
Donne's private meditations, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, written while he was convalescing from a serious illness, were published in 1624. In 1624, Donne was made vicar of St Dunstan's-in-the-West. On March 27, 1625, James I died, and Donne preached a sermon before Charles I. But for his ailing health, (he was emaciated and suffering from infections of the mouth) Donne almost certainly would have become a bishop in 1630. Obsessed with the idea of death, Donne preached what was called his own funeral sermon, Death's Duel, just a few weeks before he died in London on March 31, 1631. The last thing Donne wrote just before his death was Hymne to God, my God, In my Sicknesse,
John Donne
The love poetry of John Donne
by Ian Mackean Search Now:
Books by and about John Donne
Books of and about Metaphysical Poetry
Poetry books index
English Literature Home Page Course Summary English Literature Resources English Literature Essays Contact Us Find books
Donne's Songs and Sonnets do not describe a single unchanging view of love; they express a wide variety of emotions and attitudes, as if Donne himself were trying to define his experience of love through his poetry. Love can be an experience of the body, the soul, or both; it can be a religious experience, or merely a sexual one, and it can give rise to emotions ranging from ecstasy to despair. Taking any one poem in isolation will give us a limited view of Donne's attitude to love, but treating each poem as part of a totality of experience, represented by all the Songs and Sonnets, it gives us an insight into the complex range of experiences that can be grouped under the single heading 'Love'.
In To his Mistris Going to Bed we see how highly Donne can praise erotic pleasure. He addresses the woman as:
Oh my America, my new found lande,
My kingdome, safeliest when with one man man'd,
My myne of precious stones, my Empiree
The images are of physical, material wealth, and anyone reading this poem alone would think Donne's interest in women was limited to the sexual level. He describes sex in terms of a religious experience; the woman is an 'Angel', she provides 'A heaven like Mahomet's Paradise', and the bed is 'loves hallow'd temple'. But although erotic, this is not a love poem; nowhere does he say that he loves the woman, or that sex is part of a deeper relationship.
In The Extasie Donne conveys a very different and more complex attitude to erotic pleasure, when it is just one part of the experience of love.
This Extasie doth unperplex
(We said) and tell us what we love,
Wee see by this, it was not sexe,
Wee see, we saw not what did move . . .
Love's mysteries in soules doe grow,
But yet the body is his booke.
The body and the soul are distinct, but related aspects of the totality of love. The uniting of souls is the purest and highest form of love, but this can only be attained through the uniting of bodies.
Soe soule into the soule may flow,
Though it to body first repaire.
This focus on the soul leads Donne to express a condescending attitude towards physical love in this poem which is in marked contrast to the attitude he expressed in To his Mistris Going to Bed.
But O alas, so long, so farre
Our bodies why doe wee forbeare?
They'are ours, the though they'are not wee. Wee are
Th'intelligences, they the spheare.
But in reading Donne one soon learns that an attitude expressed in one poem is not to be taken as absolute and exclusive. One of Donne's characteristics is that he freely contradicts himself from one poem to another. The title of this poem, The Extasie, implies that love is a religious experience, just as the diction of To his Mistris Going to Bed conveyed sex as a religious experience. The religious metaphors give a hyperbolic intensity to his imagery, but the ideas expressed in The Extasie are firmly rooted in the scientific theories of his day.
Donne's view that spiritual love can be attained through physical love ties in with the contemporary theory of the 'chain of being' . Angels, presumably, could experience a totally spiritual love, unadulterated by the physical. But man, being part divine and part animal, can only reach the spiritual level through the sensual.
So must pure lovers soules descend
T'affections, and to faculties,
That sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great Prince in prison lies.
The inherent superiority of the spiritual level, and the part love can play in refining man's nature towards the spiritual, is expressed in these lines:
If any, so by love refin'd,
That he soules language understood,
And by good love were grown all minde
The scientific framework of Donne's view of love is also seen here:
But as all severall soules containe
Mixture of things, they know not what,
Love, these mixt soules, doth mixe againe,
And makes both one, each this and that.
Just as the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water were supposed to combine to form new substances, so two souls mix to form a new unity. The strength and durability of this new unit is dependent upon how well the elements of the two souls are balanced, as we see from these lines from The Good-Morrow:
What ever dyes, was not mixt equally;
It our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die.
A good example of this state, where two lovers' souls cannot be separated, even when they are physically far apart, is seen in A Valediction: forbidding mourning:
If they be two, they are two so
As stiffe twin encompasses are two,
Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th'other doe.
The idea of two coming together to form one is very important in Donne's view of love. When a couple find perfect love together they become all-sufficient to one another, forming a world of their own, which has no need of the outside world. This idea is expressed in these lines from The Sunne Rising:
She'is all States, and all Princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy spheare.
And again it in The Good-Morrow:
For love, all love of other sights controules,
And makes one little roome, an everywhere.
For Donne love transcends all worldly values. As we see in The Canonization, values such as wealth and glory have no place in the world of love.
With wealth your state, your minde with Arts improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his honour, or his grace,
Or the Kings reall, or his stamped face
Contemplate; what you will, approve,
So you will let me love.
Like love itself, the women to whom Donne's verses are addressed are usually praised in hyperbolic terms. In The Sunne Rising her eyes shine brighter than the sun. And in The Dreame she is praised as a being above the level of angels.
Yet I thought thee
(For thou lov'st truth) an Angell, at first sight,
But when I saw thou saw'st my heart,
And knew'st my thoughts, beyond an Angels art,
When thou knew'st what I dreamt, when thou knew'st when
Excess of joy would wake me, and cam'st then,
I do confesse, it could not chuse but bee
Profane, to thinke thee any thing but thee.
This reverence for woman sometimes leads Donne close to adopting the traditional attitude of the courtly lover , who suffers through being in love with a woman, usually already married, who scorns him. An example of this kind of love is suggested by the references to the symptoms of love in The Canonization:
Alas, alas, who's injur'd by my love?
What merchant ships have my sighs drown'd?
Who saies my teares have overflow'd his ground?
When did my colds a forward spring remove?
When did the heats which my veines fill
Adde one man to the plaguie Bill?
The courtly love ideal, however, is in conflict with Donne's ideal of two well-matched and well-balanced lovers whose souls unite to form one. In the poem Loves Deitie he expresses his contempt for the courtly ideal, which he sees as a corruption of the true nature of love.
I cannot thinke that hee, who then lov'd most,
Sunke so low, as to love one which did scorne,
. . . It cannot bee
Love, till I love her, that loves mee.
In fact Donne is unusual, if not unique, for his era in that courtly love hardly appears in his poetry at all. Courtly love seems to depend on the lover being unsuccessful, whereas Donne rejoices in success at every level. And the courtly love poet always expresses the same experience of love, the range of situations and emotions dealt with being very limited. In contrast Donne expresses an enormously wide range of feelings in his Songs and Sonnets, all relating to the experience of love, but varying from the heights of ecstasy to the depths of despair. This variety of feeling lends Donne's poetry much of its impact, for we seem to be reading an individual's personal experience of love, and not just a poet's contribution to a long-standing tradition of poetic love.
We have seen how in The Extasie Donne describes love as a sublime union of two souls. This, perhaps is the highest form of love, but by no means the only one. The Dreame expresses a passionate mood of a more down-to-earth nature.
Enter these armes, for since thou thoughtst it best,
Not to dreame all my dreame, let's do the rest.
The Sunne Rising expresses the reckless pride and satisfaction felt by the lover in bed with his mistress.
Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?
In The Flea Donne adopts a cynical and rather flippant tone towards his woman, using his wit to try to belittle and overcome her moral arguments, in favour of immediate pleasure.
Marke but this flea, and marke in this,
How little that which thou deny'st me is
For Donne, love can lead to suffering and disillusionment as well as to ecstasy. A Nocturnall upon S. Lucie's day, Being the shortest day is an extremely powerful evocation of the suffering caused by the death of a loved one, an experience which takes him beyond suffering to a state of absolute nothingness.
. . . Yea plants, yea stones detest
And love; All, all some properties invest;
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, 'a light, and body must be here.
But I am none;
In Twicknam Garden Donne expresses extremes of disillusionment, his view of love here being totally opposed to his view in The Extasie:
The spider love, which transubstantiates all,
And can convert Manna to gall,
And his view of woman is totally opposed to the view expressed in most of his love poems:
Nor can you more judge womans thought by teares,
Than by her shadow, her what she weares.
O perverse sexe, where none is true but shee,
Who's therefore true, because her truth kills mee.
Perhaps the most extreme anti-love poem of Donne's, and certainly the most un-courtly, is The Apparition. The bitterness expressed here is so intense that it is surely a hate poem; it opens:
When by thy scorne, O murdress, I am dead,
And continues with the lover threatening to haunt his mistress after his death.
Finally we ought to consider whether Donne's poetry expresses real love at all, or whether, as some critics suggest, he was merely a talented poet using his wit and ingenuity to create clever poems. Johnson said of the Metaphysical poets: 'Their courtship was void of fondness and their lamentation of sorrow.' He did not feel that Donne's poetry moved the affections, or that Donne had necessarily felt the emotions in order to write the poems.
Donne's poems are extraordinarily witty and ingenious, but this does not exclude the possibility that they also contain strong emotion. Donne's poems are quite capable of stirring the emotions, and no matter how clever his conceits, or revolutionary his thought, his poems would not work without a seed of genuine feeling at their centre.
Biblioghraphy
1 All quotes taken from: The Metaphysical Poets. Ed. Helen Gardner. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1957 (revised 1972)
2 Tillyard, E. M. W. The Elizabethan World Picture. Harmondsworth: Pelican. 1972
3 Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love. OUP 1973
© Ian Mackean, February 2001
(With thanks to Derek Farmer, lecturer in English at Mid-Herts College of Further Education in the 1970s. Please email me if you ever read this. If anyone reading this knows his email address please email me)
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اهلين بناااااااااااااااات
والله تعبتكم معايا تسلموووووووووووووووو
وربي يسعدكم ويعطيكم العافيه ويجعله في موازين حسناتكم ياااااااااارب
ويحقق لكم كل ماتتمنووووووووووووووا
والله تعبتكم معايا تسلموووووووووووووووو
وربي يسعدكم ويعطيكم العافيه ويجعله في موازين حسناتكم ياااااااااارب
ويحقق لكم كل ماتتمنووووووووووووووا
الصفحة الأخيرة
in this poem shakespeare communicates the quality of winter life around teh sixteenth-centry english country house. but he doesn't do so by telling us flatly that winter in such surroundings is cold and in many respects unpleasant,though with some pleasant features also. instead,he provides a series of concrete homely details that suggests the qualities and enable us,imaginatively, to experience this winter life ourselves.The shepherd blows on his fingernails to warm his hands; the milkfreezs in the pail between the cowshed and teh kitchen;the cook is slovenly and unclean; the roads are muddy; the folk listening to the parson have colds; the birds ''sit brooding in the snow'' ;and the servant girl's nose is raw from coldv. But pleasant things are in prospect.Tom is bringing in logs for the fire,the hot cider or ale is ready for drinking,and the cook is preparing the soup or stew.in contrast to all these familiar details of country life is teh mournful and eerie note of the owl.