Written circa 1610.
 Form: Petrarchan sonnet.
 Meter: Iambic pentameter with occasional trochaic feet (inversions).
 Rhyme scheme: abbaabba cddcee.

Dylan Thomas explores a very similar theme in his magnificent villanelle “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”¹. But where Thomas is all defiance and fire in the face of a higher power, Donne is cool and restrained and, indeed, mocking; his icy logic seems almost contemptuous of Death².

The conceit of Death being like a rest or a sleep is, of course, not new to Donne³, but the twist he gives it:

        "From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
         Much pleasure: then from thee much more must flow"

certainly is. The idea that Death, far from being a dread tyrant, is actually at the beck and call of “fate, chance, kings, and desperate men”, and indeed, of anyone who can wield a sword or a poisoned chalice, is equally fresh. “Poppy⁴ and charms” are just as efficacious as Death in inducing sleep. And the sleep of Death is not even permanent; instead, the pure of heart wake to eternal life, where Death is banished forever.

— Thomas

                "... We are such stuff
        As dreams are made on, and our little life
        Is rounded with a sleep."

– William Shakespeare

[Appraisal]

Because almost none of Donne’s poetry was published during his lifetime, it is difficult to date it accurately. Most of his poems were preserved in manuscript copies made by and passed among a relatively small but admiring coterie of poetry lovers. Most current scholars agree, however, that the elegies (which in Donne’s case are poems of love, not of mourning), epigrams, verse letters, and satires were written in the 1590s, the Songs and Sonnets from the 1590s until 1617, and the “Holy Sonnets” and other religious lyrics from the time of Donne’s marriage until his ordination in
1615. He composed the hymns late in his life, in the 1620s. Donne’s Anniversaries were published in 1611-12 and were the only important poetic works by him published in his lifetime.

Donne’s poetry is marked by strikingly original departures from the conventions of 16th-century English verse, particularly that of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. Even his early satires and elegies, which derive from classical Latin models, contain versions of his experiments with genre, form, and imagery. His poems contain few descriptive passages like those in Spenser, nor do his lines follow the smooth metrics and euphonious sounds of his predecessors. Donne replaced their mellifluous lines with a speaking voice whose vocabulary and syntax reflect the emotional intensity of a confrontation and whose metrics and verbal music conform to the needs of a particular dramatic situation. One consequence of this is a directness of language that electrifies his mature poetry. “For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love”, begins his love poem “The Canonization”, plunging the reader into the midst of an encounter between the speaker and an unidentified listener. Holy Sonnet XI opens with an imaginative confrontation wherein Donne, not Jesus, suffers indignities on the cross: “Spit in my face yee Jewes, and pierce my side…”

From these explosive beginnings, the poems develop as closely reasoned arguments or propositions that rely heavily on the use of the conceit – i.e., an extended metaphor that draws an ingenious parallel between apparently dissimilar situations or objects. Donne, however, transformed the conceit into a vehicle for transmitting multiple, sometimes even contradictory, feelings and ideas. And, changing again the practice of earlier poets, he drew his imagery from such diverse fields as alchemy, astronomy, medicine, politics, global exploration, and philosophical disputation. Donne’s famous analogy of parting lovers to a drawing compass affords a prime example. The immediate shock of some of his conceits aroused Samuel Johnson to call them “heterogeneous ideas … yoked by violence together”. Upon reflection, however, these conceits offer brilliant and multiple insights into the subject of the metaphor and help give rise to the much-praised ambiguity of Donne’s lyrics.

The presence of a listener is another of Donne’s modifications of the Renaissance love lyric, in which the lovers lament, hope, and dissect their feelings without facing their ladies. Donne, by contrast, speaks directly to the lady or some other listener. The latter may even determine the course of the poem, as in “The Flea”, in which the speaker changes his tack once the woman crushes the insect on which he has built his argument about the innocence of lovemaking. But for all their dramatic intensity, Donne’s poems still maintain the verbal music and introspective approach that define lyric poetry. His speakers may fashion an imaginary figure to whom they utter their lyric outburst, or, conversely, they may lapse into reflection in the midst of an address to a listener. “But O, selfe traytor”, the forlorn lover cries in “Twickham Garden” as he transforms part of his own psyche into a listener. Donne also departs from earlier lyrics by adapting the syntax and rhythms of living speech to his poetry, as in “I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I/Did, till we lov’d?”. Taken together, these features of his poetry provided an impetus for the works of such later poets as Robert Browning, William Butler Yeats, and T. S. Eliot.

Donne also radically adapted some of the standard materials of love lyrics. For example, even though he continued to use such Petrarchan conceits as “parting from one’s beloved is death”, a staple of Renaissance love poetry, he either turned the comparisons into comedy, as when the man in “The Apparition” envisions himself as a ghost haunting his unfaithful lady, or he subsumed them into the texture of his poem, as the title “A Valediction: forbidding Mourning” exemplifies. Donne’s love lyrics provide keen psychological insights about a broad range of lovers and a wide spectrum of amorous feelings. His speakers range from lustful men so sated by their numerous affairs that they denounce love as a fiction and women as objects – food, birds of prey, mummies – to platonic lovers who celebrate both the magnificence of their ladies and their own miraculous abstention from consummating their love. Men whose love is unrequited feel victimized and seek revenge on their ladies, only to realize the ineffectuality of their retaliation. In the poems of mutual love, however, Donne’s lovers rejoice in the compatibility of their sexual and spiritual love and seek immortality for an emotion that they elevate to an almost religious plane.

Donne’s devotional lyrics, especially the “Holy Sonnets”, “Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward”, and the hymns, passionately explore his love for God, sometimes through sexual metaphors, and depict his doubts, fears, and sense of spiritual unworthiness. None of them shows him spiritually at peace.

The most sustained of Donne’s poems, the Anniversaries, were written to commemorate the death of Elizabeth Drury, the 14-year-old daughter of his patron, Sir Robert Drury. These poems subsume their ostensible subject into a philosophical meditation on the decay of the world. Elizabeth Drury becomes, as Donne noted, “the Idea of a woman”, and a lost pattern of virtue. Through this idealized feminine figure, Donne in The First Anniversarie: An Anatomie of the World laments humanity’s spiritual death, beginning with the loss of Eden and continuing in the decay of the contemporary world, in which men have lost the wisdom that connects them to God. In The Second Anniversarie: Of the Progres of the Soule, Donne, partly through a eulogy on Elizabeth Drury, ultimately regains the wisdom that directs him toward eternal life.

– EB

Minstrels Links

Poems by John Donne:
Poem #330, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”
Poem #384, “Song”
Poem #403, “A Lame Beggar”
Poem #465, “The Sun Rising”
The first of these has a generous EB article on the Metaphysical poets in general, and Donne in particular. It also happens to be one of my favourite poems of all time - read it!