Just as love is divine is John Donne obscene, and no less is love carnal is John Donne pious. Widely known as a Renaissance poet, his love poetry really takes it to radical extremes; capable of praising love as a religious and sacrosanct faith, whilst also having no shame in telling cheesy and revolting sex jokes. Perhaps he writes different poems to different women? Religious and formal love poems to those who he wants to control and flirting and cheesy ones to those he wants to please?
In both cases however his ideas are delivered through elaborately constructed metaphors and personifications, giving his poems a complex, metaphysical air. These metaphors, which are emphasized with various poetic techniques, are then expanded upon throughout the poem to develop structure and new ideas, forming the conceit that Donne is so well known for.
The religious and formal style of his poetry can be seen in The Good-Morrow, where his metaphor for love is a holy awakening.
This idea is introduced in the first four lines of the first stanza: “I wonder”, “what thou and I did, till we loved?” Hadn’t we “sucked on country pleasures, childishly? Or snorted we in the Seven Sleeper’s Den?” Before true lovers met and love was made, life was chaos and immaturity. Pleasures before it were cheap, rustic and base, to be enjoyed numbly. We can see him emphasizing this idea with the use of a clever sound device: “Were we not weaned”, where he uses alliteration to further provoke the imagery of an unknowing child he was before love.
Furthermore he makes a reference to religion, the most dominant idea in his day, with the Den of the Seven Sleepers, who fell to sleep for 300 years to await the passing of the Roman oppression of the Christians. He makes the analogy that discovering true love is akin to awakening to a worldly holiness. Love is no less sacred than religion is.
In the second stanza, he develops this idea with a structural repetition: “Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, let maps to the other, worlds on worlds have shown.” He uses this technique to deliver the message that love’s value is on a different dimension compared to the discovery and mapping of new worlds, with each other being a world that the other possesses.
And lastly, Donne leaves us another religious note: “true plain hearts do in the faces rest”, “whatever dies, was not mixed equally.” He treats love as a religion on its own, based on “true plain hearts”, an allusion to mutual faithfulness, and that if the love between two “dies”, it was not initially pure. “If our two loves be one, or, thou and I love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.” Donne dons the crown of immortality of God and divinity on love — if it were to be based upon purity and piety.
It may be that Donne really thinks such about love, or instead it may be that he wants the woman to whom it is addressed to take love seriously with him, and not betray him for another?
Pure and pious as he is in this poem, he’d probably want to wipe The Sun Rising from his browsing history just in case his other lovers wanted an overall character check on him. Cringy and kinky, The Sun Rising is addressed to a lover in his bed in the morning, and reveals Donne’s antagonistic and sexy style to poetry. Here he personifies the different characteristics of the Sun to praise what “here in one bed lay”.
The first and half of the second stanza has him mocking the Sun for its brightness and unfaltering timeliness. He looks down on the Sun as an annoyance that with its bright rays and timeliness should be calling upon “late school boys and sour prentices”, “court huntsmen”, and “country ants to harvest offices” instead of intruding “through [my] windows and through curtains to call on us?” He starts to allude to love with an implicit longing of the night, the “season” for love. He personifies the Sun to antagonize and debase it, thereby impressing the lover in his bed with his great ego.
Then Donne falls back to his lover, leveraging the Sun to lavish her with elaborately formed imageries. He compares the wealth of Indian spices, the kings and royals of Renaissance England to her, and asks the Sun if really, the spices and kings were just his lover yesterday, who today in his bed! Donne also furnishes these phrases with a rhyme scheme throughout the poem: ABABCC, AABBCBCDD. If this poem were really made impromptu in bed, then the rhyme would have added significantly to the effect of impressing the lover in his bed, who the entire poem is dedicated to please.
Simply said the poem is a cuss at the Sun for bringing the morning after an “eventful” night.
Through these two poems we can really see how Donne is capable of writing poetry in the sacrosanct and sacrilegious extremes. He can commit to love as a pious and religious duty, whereas but also can make it obscene and cheesy, just to please. Or perhaps his poems are surgically crafted to fit his intentions with the women he is addressing? Just perhaps.
