Donne Flashcards
The ecstasy - quotes
“we two, one another’s best”
““Our hands were fully cemented/ with a fast balm, which thence did spring;/ our eye beams twisted, and did thread/ our eyes upon one double string”
“Our souls (which to advance their state/were gone out) hung ‘twixt her and me” - collective pronouns
“so by love refined/ that he souls’ language understood”
“we see by this, it was not sex” (that makes love)
violet - cohesive tie - “single violet transplant” “redoubles still, and multiplies” - a child? or embodied love?
“We are/ the intelligences, they the spheres” - bodies = spheres, vs soul
“so must pure lovers’ souls descend/ t’affections and to faculties”
to the observer “he shall see/small change, when we’are to bodies gone.” (last lines)
The autumnal - quotes
“No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace/ as I have seen in one autumnal face”
“Were her first years the Golden Age? That’s true/ but now she’s gold oft tried, and ever new./ That was her horrid and inflaming time,/ this is her habitable tropic clime.”
“Not panting after growing beauties, so/ I shall ebb on with them who homeward go”
To Mr Henry Wotton - quotes
PROSE, humanist letter of advice and reflection.
“Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls,/ for this friends absent speak”
“What refuge canst thou win/ parch’d in the court, and in the country frozen?/ Shall cities built of both extremes be chosen?”
“be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.”
Holy sonnet 2 - quotes
“Thou are like a pilgrim which abroad hath done/ treason, and first now turn to whence he’s fled”
“And red with blushing, as thou art with sin;/ or wash the in christ’s blood, which hath this might/ that being red, it dyed red souls to white”
John Donne - key texts
The Sun Rising The Ecstasy The Autumnal (elegy) To Mr Henry Wotton Holy Sonnets (2) The Flea The Good Morrow To His Mistress Going to Bed (sonnet)
John Donne - About
d.1631.
METAPHYSICAL POET.
Works published posthumously - during his life circulated privately in manuscript form.
Secretly married his bosses neice (Lord Egerton) and was dismissed for it.
Anglican by 1597; Dean of St Paul’s in 1621.
Donne - Key themes
Faith, love/lust/sexuality/sensuality (carpe diem), paradox, court/country (boredom of latter)
Donne - Critics
Ilona Bell - Donne’s serious love poems (sonnets) = to God. Donne uses established Renaissance poetic forms in unusual ways. Uses much colloquial language (start of To His Mistress…). Prefers unpoetic, to natural, images - master of metaphysical conceits. “Donne’s vision of the world is at once global… and intensely private”. voices “deeply entrenched patriarchal attitudes” (ie. women governed by lust). Poems to patrons, the Countess of Huntingdon and C. of Bedford, often performative, functional. Holy sonnets “filled with images of erotic physical love” - God gives no reassurance to his faith, unlike Herbert’s poems. Donne’s representation of women: “a reflection of male desire” or realistic?
Compass image: “donne’s most famous metaphysical conceit”
Donne - The ecstasy - about
around the time of his secret marriage to Anne More? (1601). Themes: Spiritual vs. sexual love, unity. Collective pronouns: intimacy. Lexical set of body parts.
The Good Morrow
FIRST POEM IN COLLECTION
“I wonder by my troth, what thou and I/ did, till we loved. Were we not weaned till then?/ But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?”
“good morrow to our waking souls” (literal and start of life together?)
“makes one little room an everywhere”
“my face in thine, thine in mine appears”
The Sun Rising
“Busy old fool, unruly Sun,/ why dost thou this,/ through windows and through curtains, call on us?” (conversational opening lines, interrogative/offensive?)
“Thy beams, so reverend and strong,/ why should’st thou think?/ I could eclipse and could them with a wink,/ but that I would not lose her sight so long”
“she’s all states, and all princes I”
“shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;/ this bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.” (images of encompassing throughout)
Song
“Go catch a falling star,/ get with child a mandrake root,” - imperatives, unattainable images.
3 stanzas, end lines: shorter (playing with form) - final: “Thou she were true when you met her,/ and last till you write your letter,/ yet she/ will be/ false, ere I come, to two, or three.” - infidelity, lack of confidence/faith. (final rhyming triplet)
The Anniversary
Love of wife - contrast of changing time and physicality but constant love. “all other things to their destruction draw,/ only our love hath no decay;”
“two graves must hide thine and mine corpse;/ if one might, death were no divorce” (ominous implications?)
The Trinity - IV of “A Litany”
(Comparative to Herbert?)
“O blessed glorious Trinity,/ bones to philosophy but milk to faith,/ which, as wise serpents diversely/ most slipperiness, yet most entanglings hath,/ as you distinguish undistinct/ by power, love, knowledge be” - complex images of joining
Holy Sonnet 10
“Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you/ as yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend”
triads: “break, blow, burn, and make me new”
“Divorce me, ‘untie or break that knot again”
“never shall be free,/ nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” - sexual overtones - almost rapacious? Emotion of anger/violence challenges the conventional sonnet form…
