John Donne: A Love Poet

“If our two loves be one, or, thou and I

Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die”.
John Donne (1572 – 1631) was the founding father of the school of metaphysical poetry. He was an
English poet, a soldier, and a scholar who debunked the conventional Elizabethan style of writing
poetry and used his own theme and style in his poems. His blending of passion and thought, emotion
and intellect, imagination, reality, feeling, and ratiocination in his poems made him a unique
metaphysical love poet in the history of English Literature. Donne was a poet of love and an analyst
of his own experience. He was the worshiper of love and developed love affairs and friendships with a
number of women. Finally, he fell in love with a lady named Anne More and fled with her and got
married. His experience of love with different angels made him a great love poet. His treatment of
love was not conventional but on his own experience. Even, though he was imprisoned for his love.
Donne’s views on love and his art of fusing passion with thought made him second to none in the
realm of English verse.

Many critics commented on Donne’s poetry. John Bennett says, 'Donne's love poetry is not about the
difference between marriage and adultery, but about the difference between lust and love'. Grierson
comments, ‘There are three distinct strains of his love poetry: cynical (anti-woman), platonic
(Spiritual), and conjugal (married life). That is why it is said that he has expressed his feelings in all
phases of love’. In Donne's love poems, there is a strain of happy married and joy of conjugal love
which has vividly been expressed in many poems like The Anniversary, The Dream, and The
Canonization. In these poems, women are figured out as angels and arts. These lyrical poems
conveyed conjugal and sensual love are intense, pure, and sincere. They are full of spiritual passion:
Sweetest love, I do not goe,
For wearinesse of thee
Nor in hope the world can show
A fitter love for mee.

In fact, as a love poet Donne tries to establish the union of the flesh and the soul. The mood and tone
make his love poems a piece of reality. In short, he is an innovator of a new kind of love poetry. He
can be called as one of the greatest love poets of the English language. He is indeed a complete
amorist amongst all. His capacity for experience is great and unique.
“Alas, alas, who injur’d by my love?
What merchant’s ships have any sings drown’d?”
In the history of English Literature, Donne is a widely acknowledged love poet and he treats this love
affair as completely a personal matter. Love is divine and anybody can love anyone if their two souls
meet their mental satisfaction. Love Affair never understands the caste, creeds, religion, black, white,
rich, poor, etc. It is guided by the law of nature. As a human being, it is one’s personal right to love
anyone. Donne wonders and asks how society is affected by his love. Through these above two lines,
the poet shows his own points of view based on his own intellectuality and emotion.

Donne’s other piece of wonder is “The Sun Rising”. In this poem, the poet expresses his own thoughts
on love and affairs. Though he is highly passionate about expressing his love towards his beloved, his
love is expressed in an intellectual term and not merely in an emotional tone. The poet says:
“She’s all states, and all princes I,
Nothing else is,”

The peculiar mingling of feeling and thought finds its better outlet in “A Valediction: Forbidding
Mourning”. Here the speaker’s beloved is highly emotional who does not allow him to leave her even
for a temporary period. But the lover is trying his best to pacific her emotion with some logical points
and argument. The blending of emotion and reason is expressed in the use of Donne’s typical
metaphysical conceit:
“If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two
They soul the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do”.

Another very passionate love poem is “Twickenham Garden” which is based on the passionate
outburst of sorrow expressing yearnings for unfulfilled one-sided love. The poet tries to blend his
innermost expression including frustration, anguish, love, appearance vs reality, and natural beauty.
Whatsoever, the person who roams around the Twickenham Garden talks about his feelings after
being ditched by a lady whom he loved the most. The feeling of one-sided love makes his mind
passionate and anger at the same time. His extreme frustration becomes acuate through the poem.
Moreover, the poet also presents the theme of natural beauty that somehow gives solace to the
speaker’s heart. However, all those themes make this poem an interesting piece to read. It opens with
a passionate utterance:
“Blasted with sighs and surrounded with tears
Hither I come to seek the spring”.

To conclude, his love poetry deals with the infinite quality of passion. His greatness as a love poet lies
in the fact that his experience of passion covers a wide range from its lowest depth to its highest
reaches.
Revolting against the romantic conventionalism of Elizabethan love poetry against the patriarchal
count John Donne revitalizes the language of poetry. He is a seventeenth contrary metaphysical love
poet. He deals with the love of different types physical and spiritual as well as transcendental. In his
poetry love is dealt with in its widest ranges love is expressed by ideas and ideas are defined in their
emotional context. In his poems, there is a scholastic way of thought, which tends towards synthesis
and unity in his treatment of love. Love finds itself with all its complexities and contradictions in his
poetry. His treatment of love is intellectual, analytical, and psychological. Donne achieves a fusion of
thought and feeling in his love poems. He combines commotion and reason. He is completely
different from his immediate predicators, especially in the way he treats love in his poetry.

According to Donne, to human beings, love is the most important and inevitable phenomenon of life.
In the history of English Literature, love dominates almost all sections of literature of all ages and is
the most heartily discussed issue among the people around the world. Different writers discuss love
differently, but the treatment of love varies from writers to writers, from poets to poets. John Donne
has also used ‘love’ to be an important theme of his poetry. Since love may be different from man to
man, from time to time, Donne has also treated realistically love to be different from one poem to
another. Thus, it is not very easy to find out a simple definition of love in Donne’s poems.

The metaphysical aspects of Donne’s poems are revealed in his treatment of love. His poetical pieces
are thought with beautiful, subtle, and startling images. They are featured by their dramatic qualities,
conversational tones, and dialectical structures. But most remarkable of all, Donne’s love poems are
distinguished for their extensive use of conceits taken from a wide range of sources. The power and
beauty of Donne’s treatment of love lie in its synthesis of emotion passion and thought. In his
treatment of conceits, Donne jokes together with the most heterogeneous ideas. There is a little bit of
violence in his poems, especially in his intellectual way of juxtaposing two completely dissimilar
things, especially shale dealing with love.
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;

"So let us melt and make no noise" refers to a situation of ultimate enjoyment. The poet urges her
lover to enjoy the moment and requests to be quiet. He compares his love with the melting gold by a
goldsmith or alchemist as the melting gold while melted it does not make any noise. The speaker and
his love should not display their private, intimate love as "tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move". In “A
Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” the central idea is that love is not destroyed by death. Donne
compares his love to “but trepidation of the spheres” which on earth is not destructive, although, the
lesser “moving of the earth brings harms and fears”. The separation but wean the lovers is not a
“breach” but an “expansion”-like gold to airy thinners beat”. The most striking image in the poem is
that a pair of compasses: the mistress who stays alive is the “fixit food” around which the dead would
revolve and which the dead soul revolves and which invisibly, circles with it. The circle in Donne’s
poetry is always a symbol of infinity. The poem ends:
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

Donne is argumentative but he never uses syllogistic arguments in his treatment of love. He rather
confines them to just three lines. For example, in the poem “Good Morrow” Donne shows his use of
syllogism in just three lines:
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love is so a like that none do slacken, none can die

In his treatment of love, Donne at times uses irony and paradox whereas Marvell prefers
personification. Donne’s attitudes are sometimes satirical too as is seen in the poem “Go and catch a
falling Star”. Donne treats alone in a conversational lone. “The opening of ‘The Sun Rising’” is
illustrative of his quick, tense quality:
Busy old fool, unruly sun,
why dost thou thus,
Through windows and through curtains call on us.

Donne’s treatment of love is appreciated for its wit, beauty, and perception. His conceits while
dealing with love are full of witty images. They are apt. to the context of the poem. They are at times
homely and realistic. Sometimes, they are scientific and philosophical. His wit also ties in his
treatment of irony as well as paradoxes. All these things are the silent features of Donne as a
metaphysical love poet.

John Donne uses the term ‘love’ as a dominating theme in his poetry. Naturally, love varies from man
to man and from time to time. Here, in his poetry, Donne treats love realistically. It can be different
from one poem to another. Above all, love must move in its own way. Only, the man can treat it in
their own way. So, it is hard to conclude a point regarding the definition of love in the reality. Hence,
it is not very easy to find out a simple definition of love in Donne’s poems. Donne revolts against the
Elizabethan and patriarchal convention of love. He challenges prevailing forms and conventions of
writing love poetry. But Donne at times sounds Elizabethan though he is essentially different from his
immediate predecessors in describing the beloved. In “The Sun Rising” the speaker describes the
stately prince-like beauty of his beloved by employing hyperbole:
She’s all states all prince, I
Nothing else is,
Princes do but play us: compared to this
 All honor’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.

Donne is more realistic than idealistic in the treatment of love and affairs. He believes that physical
pleasure meets up the mental thirst. He better knows the secret of making love secretly. He has a
passion to blend the body and soul at a time and enjoy the real momentum of love. He knows well that
true love does not relate to the body; it is the relationship of one soul to another soul. Interestingly, in
the poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” the poet emphasizes that the physical love may not
be as much as necessary but in the poem “The Relic”, the poet emphasizes more on physical
relationship which is necessary as part of normal life and living. So, though there are some
contradictions regarding love and relationship in Donne’s poetry, these contradictions do not make
harm the value of his poetry. They only tend to emphasize the dichotomy between the claims of the
body and the need of the soul.

Though having the realistic touches and descriptions in the love poems, Donne does not take pains to
detail the beauty and fascination of any part of the female body. Rather he describes its effect on the
lover’s heart. Here and there, he allows himself the freedom to wander over the different parts of
female anatomy, but like in the earlier poems, he does not dwell on the charms of the lips, eyes, teeth,
or cheeks of a handsome mistress. It is rather surprising that a poet who is so fond of sex should
abstain so totally from the temptation to dwell on the physical structure or charm of any part of the
female body.

While the Elizabethan love lyrics are imitations of the Petrarchan traditions, Donne’s love poems
stand in a class by themselves. Donne is fully acquainted with the Petrarchan model where a woman
is an object of beauty, love, and perfection. The lover’s entreaties to his lady, his courtly wooing, the
beloved’s indifference, and the self-pity of the lover are common themes of Petrarchan poems. Such
set themes are treated differently by Donne because he has no own intimate experience to guide him.
Donne is different from Petrarch in his attitude to love. Here is wooing, but it is of a different type.
The plea is a marriage bed and a holy temple of love. His courtship is aggressive, compelling, and
violent; there is no trace of self-pity in it. Rather, there is a threat of revenge declared openly by the
lover. In the treatment of love, most Elizabethan poets followed the style of Petrarch. On the
other hand, Donne is neither Petrarch nor Platonic in the treatment of his lover and his
beloved. Donne says, “It cannot be love till I love her that loves me.” He does not place the
beloved on a high pedestal of perfection. For him, love is a “two-way traffic”. In his poems,
he has amalgamated “thou” and “I” into “We”.

Donne’s style of writing poetry is very inventive and unconventional from others contemporary love
poets in the history of English Poetry regarding its form, content, and style. His far-fetched views
over love poems are unique and different. His love poems contain highly imaginative and very
passionate languages which are full of wit and highly erotic allusions. His extensive usage of imagery,
irony, and far-fetched concepts makes him the finest love poet. John Donne discovered himself
through his poetry and meet up his quest He used his poetry to search for himself and the questions
he had. His poetry is more of a journey for him, a journey of love, self-discovery, understanding, and
spirituality.