John Donne: Poem Summaries

Question 1

The Good Morrow

Answer 1

-Serves as a celebration of secular love, presenting it as an unparalleled pleasure.
-The speaker asserts how all of his and his beloved’s previous relationships were insubstantial and primitive as they were founded upon sexual, lustful desire.
-He emphasises how now they have found each other, they enjoy a more substantial diet (i.e. spiritual love).
-He suggests that through meeting his beloved, his soul has metaphorically awoken, comparing meeting her to a spiritual epiphany.
-Explores the notion of love having to be in equal balance/distribution to transcend time through the conceit of an alloy.

Question 1

Song (‘Go Catch a Falling Star’)

Answer 1

-The speaker (a scored lover) launches a scathing attack on women - portraying them as inconstant and disingenuous.
-‘Nowhere/ Lives a woman true and fair’ –> Emotive phrase used as an AXIOM. Suggests that there is no woman alive who is both beautiful and honest.
-Universal truth that no woman is both beautiful and genuine - If a woman is beautiful, she will be disingenuous.

Question 2

The Sun Rising

Answer 2

-Aubade poem –> A response to dawn.
-The speaker wants to ‘bend’ the rules of the universe - he challenges the Sun’s authority - ‘Busy old fool unruly Sun’ and suggests that all he would have to do to shut the sun out is close his eyes- conveys how love makes people want to opt out of the normal routines/ rhythms of life.
-By the end of the poem, the speaker has ‘contracted’ the whole world to the bed - the bed is a microcosm of the world - to warm the world is the same thing as warming the couple - conceit of the sun alludes to his beloved being his whole world.

Question 3

The Canonization

Answer 3

-Serves as a defence of the speaker’s relationship with his beloved, conveying his frustration with detractors of their relationship.
-Likely to have been indirectly addressed to Sir George More following his condemnation of his daughter Anne’s clandestine marriage to Donne.
-Throughout the poem, the speaker attempts to justify their relationship, portraying it as harmless and pure.
-Transitions to a more celebratory tone as the speaker glorifies his love with his beloved (e.g. image of the Phoenix rising through the flames - i.e. adversity faced).

Question 4

Song: Sweetest Love I Do Not Go

Answer 4

-Valediction poem - Donne embarking on a journey so he and his beloved will experience a separation.
-Permeated with a reassuring tone throughout - The speaker asserts to his beloved that they will withstand the parting and brief separation as he attempts to diffuse her worries.
-Asserts how although their earthly lives may terminate, their relationship will restart in the spiritual world.
‘When thou sigh’st, thou sigh’st not wind, /But sigh’st my soul away; When thou weep’st, unkindly kind/ My life’s blood doth decay’ –> Hyperbolic language - oxymoronic –> Anne being unkind by crying and making the separation difficult - her upset at his imminent departure - her sorrows impact on him, quite literally and metaphorically killing him.

Question 5

Air and Angels

Question 6

The Anniversary

Answer 6

-The poem celebrates the speaker’s first-year anniversary of his relationship with his beloved.
-Explores the notion of the immortality of true love and is predicated on the notion that authentic love is able to transcend death and can exist in the spiritual realm.

Question 7

Twicknam Garden

Answer 7

-The poem features a speaker who bemoans and protests against his treatment at the hands of a woman and his situation unrequited love.
-Long lamentation of unrequited love and the melancholy attached to this feeling.
-The speaker visits the garden for consolation, believing the garden will rejuvenate his spirits, yet his mood has turned it evil and unpleasant –> The speaker projects his own melancholy sadness onto the garden.

Question 8

Love’s Exchange

Answer 8

-The poem is concerned with ideas of unrequited love –> The speaker yearns to receive something back from love after giving so much of himself to faith in Cupid in the hope that he will find love.
-He laments how unfair it is that he loves a woman but does not receive anything in return.
-The poem is permeated with imagery of torture and violence to convey how the speaker believes love and love’s deity (Cupid) treats and punishes him.

Question 9

A Valediction of Weeping

Answer 9

-The speaker bids his beloved farewell - perhaps written to appease Anne before his trip with Sir Robert Drury.
-Donne prepares to part with his lover, acknowledging that their separation will be difficult.

Question 10

Love’s Alchemy

Answer 10

-A secular poem in which the speaker laments his frustrations at not finding love and his failed attempts at not finding the mystery. Embittered speaker.
-The speaker reveals how one often dreams of having a marvellous, amorous romance, yet they receive a ‘winter-seeming’ summer’s night, characterised by darkness and death instead.
-Invites the juxtaposition between the ideal of love and its reality. One wants a long-standing love yet ends up with unsatisfactory love.
-Attitudes of the speaker become misogynistic in the second stanza as he suggests rationality and minds do not exist in women.

Question 11

The Flea

Question 12

A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day

Question 13

The Apparition

Answer 13

-The speaker laments his resentment towards his one-time beloved, explicitly outlining his intention to get his revenge on her by haunting her as a purgatorial ghost figure.
-The poem serves as a continuous threat to haunt a lost lover but to also keep her wondering about the precise nature of her punishment.
-The speaker then explores what he believes to be the duplicitous nature of women and the idealistic outward appearances they self-fashion (i.e. feigned vestal).
-Underpinned with a tone of resentment/ petulant tone as the speaker appears incredibly embittered following her rejection of him.

Question 14

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

Answer 14

-A farewell poem, likely to be addressed to Anne More before Donne embarked on his trip to continental Europe with the Drury family.
-The speaker confidently asserts how their separation should not matter to or affect him or his beloved as their love has the capability to transcend distance as it is predicated on an emotional, spiritual connection.
-The speaker compares his lover to the FIXED foot of the compass as she stays in England, and himself to the FREE foot as he is travelling –> this conjures an image of interconnection and dependency.
To be a perfect circle, his beloved must remain steadfast in her trust throughout his trip away, as if she doesn’t the circle will become distorted in shape.

Question 15

The Ecstasy

Answer 15

-Contemplative and philosophical poem in which Donne explores the spiritual idea of the merging of two souls in the formation of a connection.
-Poem introduces the reader to a rural scene - grassy bank on which a little violet reclines (symbol of love). Two lovers are sat by side - their hands are ‘cemented’ because of the moisture in their hands. Image of synchrony in the opening.
-‘equal armies/ negotiate there’ –> Troops from one army on one side and troops from another on the other - one troop would go out and ask if the other wants to surrender. The speaker suggests that their souls meet in the middle - their souls transcend their bodies and meet above their heads in between. ‘equal armies’ suggests unity in their relationship, proposes they have a unified soul.
-The souls have decoupled from their bodies and have merged together as spiritual souls - notion of dualism.
-The speaker asserts that if someone near is receptive to love and wanders past the couple and hear the souls’ language talking - they will become enriched as they would have heard the music of love.

Question 16

Love’s Deity

Answer 16

-Poem about Courtly Love - genre of poetry originated in the FOURTEENTH century in Italy with Francesco Patrarca and entered the English language through Thomas Wyatt.
-The speaker asserts how he wishes to talk with someone who lived before Cupid lived, when love was reciprocal.
-Self-loathing evident - the speaker is humiliated that he loved someone who did not love him back. ‘Scorn’ suggests that the one who he loves does not love him. The speaker blames Cupid for this unfortunate situation as he feels Cupid takes pleasure in creating these unrequited situations. He projects his anger towards the God of love (Cupid).

Question 17

The Funeral

Answer 17

-The speaker is contemplating his death, and he describes how he will have a bracelet of hair around his wrist.
-The speaker reveals that this locket of hair belongs to the lover who did not reciprocate his love, so through this he ensures that she will momentarily return to him in his grave on Judgement Day.

Question 18

The Blossom

Answer 18

-The speaker begins by tenderly addressing a spring blossom, which does not realise that in a day or two after coming into the world, it will be destroyed by the spring frost.
-The vulnerable image of the blossom is perhaps symbolic of how the speaker himself is vulnerable and powerless in the face and woman –> Symbolic of the human heart with its gaiety, yet the next moment it can be destroyed in the same way a blossom can be destroyed by frost.
-The speaker then imagines that his heart is like a bird, nestled on a tree (which presents a woman), the speaker recognises that his heart must move on, yet his heart remains with one woman.

Question 19

The Relic

Answer 19

-The speaker hopes that he and his beloved will be memorialised as a symbol of love.
-He imagines that one day, someone will dig up his grave and will find his bones wearing a bracelet of his lover’s ‘bright hair’ –> The speaker criticises how someone will probably try to pass these remains off as the relics of saints –> believe it to be Mary Magdalen’s hair.
-However, this is misplaced devotion, as what people should revere and worship is the love that he and his beloved shared.

Question 20

The Dissolution

Answer 20

-‘The Dissolution’ explores themes of death and loss, and the speakers seemingly hollow existence in the aftermath of his beloved’s death.
-The speaker employs elemental imagery (fire, water, air, earth) to convey how the elements that compose his being have become overpowering and burdensome in the wake of his beloved’s death as she is no longer there to temper him and to complement his traits/elements.

Question 21

Farewell To Love

Answer 21

-The speaker asserts how no man can find long-lasting happiness with women. The speaker’s lack of trust and confidence is explicit.
-The speaker resorts to revealing how he is no longer going to be besotted or invested in women who do not love him back and reciprocate his affections/admiration.
-The speaker feels betrayed by Cupid and feels foolish for worshipping him considering he has received nothing in return except failure in love.

Question 22

Elegy: Change

Answer 22

-Donne contemplates how human nature is inherently tarnished by change.
-In the corporeal world, change is a natural occurrence. Women change in their affections and the speaker is cautious of this and doesn’t want to emotionally commit and invest.
‘Women are like the arts, forced unto none’ –> Simile suggests the value of women lies in their availability to all seekers. Anyone can observe a piece of art –> suggesting that the only way that people can develop an appreciation of art is to observe it in a public place (through exposure to public gaze).
‘Fowler’ –> Catcher of birds, predatory image. His woman on public display might divert her attention away from him - same cunning tactics men may use to steal her away from him –> Expresses his vulnerability - speaker made to feel insecure by the advances of other men on his beloved.
YET the speaker begins to acknowledge that some degree of change and MUTABILITY is healthy - the speaker craves BALANCE.
‘waters stink if in one place they bide/ And in vast sea are worse putrified’ - Water represents women. Relationships are compared to stagnant water if they do not experience change.
‘stink’ - Grotesque image - not healthy, mirrors committing to one person. The speaker craves moderation and balance YET acknowledges it is not healthy for his beloved to be receptive to many other rivers (i.e. the sea).

Question 23

Elegy: His Picture

Answer 23

-Resembles a Valediction poem as the speaker bids farewell to his beloved before embarking on a trip.
-Donne explores the notion of how although the old love shared between the speaker and his beloved will die, a new love (characterised by a spiritual connection rather than dependency on physical intimacy will be born).
-Rhyme creates a sense of predictability, reflecting the harmonious nature of the speaker’s relationship through the absence of a sense of discord.
-The speaker gives his beloved a small miniature portrait as a token of remembrance of their love before he departs.
-The speaker reveals how he will likely be in a dishevelled state when he returns through his use of asyndetic listing. He explicitly declares the extent of the impending adverse effects of his physical decline.

Question 24

Elegy: The Comparison

Answer 24

-Dramatic Monologue in which the speaker invites a continuous juxtaposition between his own mistress and his friend’s mistress.
-The speaker praises his own beloved, using effusive language to portray her as fragranced, delicate and sophisticated, whilst DENOUNCING the other man’s mistress as grotesque and horrific.
-Competitive element to the poem - Donne is diminishing his friend’s beloved, alternating between the descriptions of the two women to invite a stark antithesis.
-All one stanza –> Represents the speaker’s outburst of relentless hatred and disdain.
-Half rhyme throughout may represent the stark contrast between the perfection of the speaker’s own beloved in comparison to the grotesque nature of his friend’s beloved.

Question 25

Elegy: The Autumnal

Question 26

Elegy: To His Mistress Going to Bed

Question 27

Holy Sonnet III (‘O might those sighs and tears’)