We find three main strands in Donne’s poems.
The first is cynical attitude which
is anti-woman and hostile to the fair sex. The second strand is of happy married life or of mutual love.
The third is regarding supremacy of love
with philosophical interpretation.
In the poems of
first strand i.e. in the poems marked by cynicism
and scorn, we see the poet’s contempt towards love itself and a gaiety and
playfulness. For example, the poet begins ‘Go and Catch a Falling Star’ with an
impossible imagery followed by many others only to prove the impossibility of
discovering a true and faithful women,
‘‘Go, and catch a falling star
Get with child a mandrake root’’
Since it is impossible to catch a
falling star and to produce a child with mandrake root, it is also impossible
to find ‘‘a woman true, and fair’’.
The poet says,
‘‘And swear
No where
Lives a woman true and fair’’
Thus we can get such examples also in ‘Woman’s
Constancy’, ‘The Indifferent’, ‘The Apparition’ and ‘Loves Usury’.
The second group
of poems upholds the simple, pure, mutual
love and the best in conjugal love. Many of them are addressed to his wife
Anne More. ‘The Anniversary’, written to celebrate the second anniversary of
his weeding, gives a fine picture of domestic bliss. In ‘A Valediction:
Forbidding Mourning’, a departing husband is arguing his wife not to tear,
because his departure is not
‘‘a breach, but an expansion
Like gold to aery thinness beat’’.
Their two souls are actually one, but
‘‘if they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two’’
Here the wife is the fixed foot while
the husband is the moving foot who must return again to the fixed foot. In ‘The
Sun Rising’ the poet says,
‘‘She’s is all states, and all princes, I,
Nothing else is’’.
Here the lover does not know anything
except his beloved.
As for the supremacy of love, the poet
sometimes says that physical love is the best, elsewhere says spiritual love is
the best and again says that spiritual love out of physical love is the best. In
‘‘The good Morrow,’’ the speaker says,
‘‘If ever any beauty I did see
which I deserved, and got, was but
a dream of thee’’
and,
‘‘If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike, that none so slacken,
non can die’’.
Here we see the supremacy of spiritual
love.
In ‘‘The Cannonization’’,
the speaker asks his friend to let them love each other without any interference,
because they are not making any harm to the world. They have forsaken all the
material world. The speaker urges that through their harmless physical love,
they will be approved as canonized for love and regarded as saints of love. The
speaker says,
‘‘And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us cannonized for love.’’
Thus here physical love turns into
spiritual appeal.
Another example of physical love’s being
spiritual is that of ‘The Ecstasy’,
‘‘Loves mysteries in souls do grow
But yet the body is his book’’