Genre: songs in a wide variety of meters, rhyme schemes, and stanza structures; a sermon or moral argument.

Form: See entries for individual assigned works.  Donne acknowledged his indebtedness to Mary Sidney Herbert and Philip Sidney for their translations of the Psalms in a poem dedicated to them, and he also appears to have developed some of his wildly inventive stanza structures by following their lead.  See, for instance, the translation of Psalm #139 (962).

Characters:  "Jack Donne"'s persona, a brash young courtier-lover who will use any rhetorical strategy to attain his end, not excluding truth when it suits the occasion; Dr. John Donne's persona, a weary, passionate, ferocious intellect with a profound committment to the religious faith of his flock.  Note that this is an extremely difficult set of personae to puzzle out.  "Jack"'s humor is so antic that there is no guarantee he is addressing a real woman at all, but rather he may be playing a game with words, not unlike Sidney's "Astrophil" (or Herrick, especially!).  The second persona is more likely to be "on oath," since he speaks from a pulpit, but in the Holy Sonnets he says shocking things that may remind us of Margery Kempe or Julian of Norwich.  How does he mean us to read?

Individual Songs:

• "The Good Morrow"--three 7-line stanzas rhyming ababccc.   The poem's conceit describes the lovers as "New World" explorers, discoverers of the worlds that exist within each other.  See Sir Walter Ralegh, "That Man Is, As It Were, A Little World" (1030).  This poem's conceit pushes the man-microcosm analogy further by claiming the lovers' worlds are perfect because perfectly blended.  However, the poem finds it necessary to claim this because something is amiss, something disturbing which the other poems describe.
• "Song: Go and catch a falling star"--trochaic feet in tetrameter and dimeter, rhyming ababccddd (!).  The persona instructs his hearer to undertake notoriously impossible tasks from proverbial lore or impish innovation, and concludes these tasks will be sooner completed than that the hearer will find reward for honesty, a true and fair woman, or, if the latter be found, than that she will remain fair.  Its twee skipping meter in the ddd lines accentuates their mocking content.  Again, the exploration and discovery metaphor is used, but here the findings are "more of the same."
• "The Undertaking"--4-line stanzas in alternating trochaic and iambic tetrameter and trimeter, rhyming abab cdcd, etc..  The poem uses the skin=soul's clothing metaphor to advance the thesis that finding virtue in the shape of one's beloved is rare enough to deserve secrecy to avoid the mockery of profane men.   This makes love a religion (see "Canonization") and the search for love a pilgrimage (see "Good Morrow" and "Song" above).
• "The Sun Rising"--10-line stanzas in a variety of meters rhyming abbacdcdee.  The poem is a parody of an aubade.  See Jonson's Volpone, I.i.1ff for another parody of this medieval song of lovers lamenting the sunrise which ends their illicit pleasures, or click here. for Chaucer's Troilus, III: 1450-70 to see a real aubade with similarities to Donne's poem which are as yet undescribed in publication.  Here the "man-microcosm" motif might better be described "man-woman-microcosm" as the lovers find in each other their strange New Worlds.
• "The Indifferent"--9-line stanzas in trochees of varying numbers of feet, rhyming abbacccdd (similar to "Song" above).   The bold statement of a faithless lover who urges his beloved to be similarly faithless, too, rather than bind him with her own truth.  He tells her Venus has reported there are "some two or three / Poor heretics in love" (i.e., faithful to their lovers and not playing the cheating game) but that she has warned them they'll be wasting their truth on false beloveds.  Donne's paradoxical reversals of vice and virtue make his "religion of love" a dangerous rebellion against "dangerous constancy."  How might that relate to previous praises of unstable "truth" in social relations which we've heard from Jonson and Shakespeare?   What might this mean for Jacobean English culture?  (Thanks to Nicole Barnabee [Fall 1999] for correcting a previous error in this note.)
• "The Canonization"--9-line stanzas in varying numbers of iambs (and a couple of other kinds of feet!), rhyming abbacccaa. This is a tougher variant on the rhyme scheme of "The Indifferent" because the "a" rhyme returns in each stanza's concluding couplet, and tougher still because the "a" rhyme (--ove) is the same in all five stanzas.  This is perhaps one of the most famous and identifiable of Donne's poems, a shocking outburst that mocks the old Petrarchan conceits and shifts to a series of shocking comparisons, ending in the claim that future ages will make saints of the speaker and his beloved who will "build in sonnets pretty rooms" (32).  The next line's comparison of the poet's "hymns" to "a well-wrought urn" formed the thesis for Cleanthe Brooks' famous New Critical study of poetic structure, which used the latter phrase for its title (821.9 B873 c.2). 
  Note that the poem's furious development of its rejection of the world's interference keep on going into the "worshipers"' address to the "saints" (speaker and Beloved) "Who did the whole world's soul contract [shrink], and drove / Into the glasses of your eyes / [. . . ] Countries, towns courts"--the universe becomes compact enough to see reflected in one's lover's eye.  Oh, and those future worshipers will beg the recipe for that love.  It's a wild ride.  What kinds of neoclassical and medieval poetic conventions does Donne mock here?
• "Air and Angels"--two fourteen-line stanzas, sometimes in tetrameter and other times in pentameter, rhyming abbabacdcddeee (!!).  The speaker tells the Beloved that his love is to her love as angels' divine substance is to the barely grosser air which their wings displace.   It's a "guy thing," see?  She's really divine, but he is, by nature, just a little less so.  This key passage gets attention from critics: "...For, nor in nothing, nor in things / Extreme and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere" (21-2).
• "Break of Day"--six line stanzas, four of which are in iambic tetrameter and the last two are in iambic pentameter, rhyming baabbcc.  This is another mock aubade denying the sun's power to disrupt the lovers' tryst.  The third stanza draws upon the classical Roman distinction between commercium (business), the duty of those who are not "liberalis" or free to dispose of their time without working, and otium (leisure), the privilege of those who are, and are free to love, by Donne's definition.  For us working blokes (and "blokesses"), this raises a familiar problem also addressed by "Vivando," by the immortal Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks.
• "A Valediction: Of Weeping"--9-line stanzas in which lines 1, 5 and 6 are iambic dimeter, lines 2, 3, 4, 7, and 8 are iambic pentameter, and line 9 is iambic hexameter.  Don't cry, he tells her, and plays Petrarchan games with the metaphors "tears are coins (round), reflective of the beloved's face, bearing (pregnant) with the fruit of the beloved's essence, a world (sphere) or planet, a flood, a sea."   A "Valediction" is a farewell poem (hence, "valedictorian," s/he who delivers the high school seniors' farewell speech).
• "The Flea"--9-line stanzas in tetrameters and pentameters, mostly iambic, rhyming aabbccddd.  The lover turns insect-rights advocate, using the flea as a metaphor for intercourse resulting in conception, a marriage bed, a sacred site, a sacrificial victim, and the lover, himself ("Just so much honor, when thou yield'st to me, / Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee.").  The phrase "Purpled thy nail in blood of innocense" is an outrageous allusion to the Crucifixion, and the title of the poem (and its spirit) probably inspired the stage name of one of the Red-Hot Chili Peppers (I hope).
• "A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day"--9-line stanzas in a very complex metrical scheme, shrinking from pentameter lines (1,2) to tetrameter (3,4) to trimeter (5) and ending with a four-line conclusion in pentameter.  This poem may allude to the turning point in Jack Donne's life--see also Holy Sonnet #17, which more directly addresses the death of Anne More, the woman for whom Donne ruined his career.   The winter solstice, which the poem commemorates, serves as a metaphor for the poet's hopes.  The "spiritual model" strategy which animated "The Canonization" is here reversed.  The poet and his beloved are dead, and no hope springs from the grave.  It is an incredible paen to grief, itself, which has made the poet an "elixer" or refined essence of death, itself.  In this poem, Donne claims a day of the year for English poetry and makes it his own.
• "The Bait"--4-line stanzas rhyming aabb, etc.  Like Ralegh's poem (1022), it is a reply to Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd to His Love" (767).  The fishing motif is linked to a "fisherman caught by the fish" motif that is reminiscent of Spenser's use of the Hunt of Love strategy in the Amoretti.  The bizarre (but accurate, alas) depiction of fly fishing on reedy river banks is deliberately not aristocratic, but jarringly realistic.  Compare this with Marvell's "Mower" poems.
• "The Apparition"--17 lines of varying meters rhyming abbacdededfggfhhh (whew!).  The old motif of "Death-the-bridegroom" here reappears in the form of the jilted lover's threat to reappear (after "dying for love," that old Petrarchan conceit) to haunt her.   Just the thing for Halloween, though somewhat disturbing in its intensity.
• "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"--four-line stanzas rhyming abab cdcd, etc.  Compare this with the "Valediction: Of Weeping."  In this one, the lover envisions their elevation by love's refinement beyond the realm of mere physical contact.  Their love gives them the ability to transcend space and to respond, in harmony, to each other's presence and moods, as one foot of a navigator's compass responds to the stretching of the other toward some new point on the map, laying lower or growing more erect (yes, that's what he means, but as in "she swoons and then recovers") as the traveling foot ("JD") returns home.
• "The Ecstasy"--4-line stanzas of iambic tetrameter (how refreshingly simple!) rhyming abba, cddc, etc.  The "refinement by love" motif is continued here with the assertion that the lovers' bodies should be thanked as the vehicles for enabling their souls to meet.  In fact, the bodies release the lovers' souls from their pristine isolation to make the greater Soul created by love.  The body is the book of love, and the poem is its text.
• "The Funeral"--8-line stanzas of iambic pentameter (1,3,4,6,8), iambic dimeter (2) and iambic trimeter (5,7), rhyming ababcdcd. Note that the regularity of the rhyme is worked against by the irregularity of the line length--something's struggling in this poem.  The poet's jilted lover is warned that her woven hair bracelet (a Renaissance tradition) will still be worn by the lover in his grave where, thereby, "I bury some of you" (24)--sweet.  Very Cold War.  Compare with the more sophisticated use of the hair bracelet momento in "The Relic."
• "The Blossom"--8-line stanzas of (mostly iambic) trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter lines rhyming ababccdd.  Carpe diem (seize the day) returns but in an address to a dying flower which grows beside the doorway of the Beloved who rejects the poet's "naked thinking heart" (though not, perhaps, "some other part" in time).  He's not having any of that languishing stuff.   Better to scoot off to London, whoop it up: sorry flower, tough luck.
• "The Relic"--11-line stanzas of tetrameter, pentameter, and (2 per stanza) trimeter lines, mostly iambics, rhyming aabbcddceee.  The love religion claims another pair of saints, this time with a relic, "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone" (6).  Does this seduce your loins, oh Beloveds?  Or does it address our old friend, the carpe diem theme, while mocking (now, post-Reformation) Roman Catholic reverence for saints, relics, etc., even to the extent of spoofing that the editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature cannot bring themselves to explicitly explain (see note 4, p. 1099) but which Tom Robbins had no problem naming in Another Roadside Attraction.  That is, if she's "Mary Magdalen," who might her handsome friend be?
• "A Lecture upon the Shadow"--alternating 11-line and 2-line stanzas, with a meter I won't attempt to describe (do the math!), rhyming aabbcddceee and ff (or is it back to aa again?).  The lovers, walking upon their first meeting under the waxing sun, produce shadows which grow less while they produce love that grows greater.  The paradox is compounded by the danger that love poses should it once cease to grow--it shrinks to nothing (noon to midnight) in an instant.
• "Elegy 16.  On His Mistress."--rhyming couplets (whew!).  This imitation of Ovid's Amores addresses a reluctant mistress, urging her to withstand separation from him during his travels rather than accompanying him in disguise as a page.   (See the note re: Robert Dudley and Elizabeth Southwell on p. 1100.  Things were wild and crazy then, eh?)
• "Elegy 19.  "To His Mistress Going to Bed"--rhyming couplets.  He praises her body as she disrobes, and promises to make of her his New World ("O my America!"--cf. Alan Ginsberg!), his wealth of gems, his mythical beloved, and his innocent (in what sense?) beloved.  Yes, line 24 alludes to an erection, and once again, the Beloved becomes a book whose body must be read by the lover.
• Holy Sonnets--all are "English," most rhyming abbaabbacddcee.  These are the first experiments in what will become a major trend (see Herbert, Herrick, Crashaw, and Vaughan) adopting secular poetic forms which used to discuss sexual desire and transforming them to media for discussing divine love and the desire to be at peace with God whose demands are not less frustrating than those of the old erotic Beloveds.

  Main Examples--

  • #5, the "man-microcosm" trope we saw in "The Good Morrow" and "To the Sun Rising," but a little world corrupted and in need of a toxic waste disposal unit at the spiritual level (see Issue #I below).  Note the "lover"'s plea to be assaulted by the divine power ("burn me, O Lord"), which you will see again more intensely, if that's possible, in #14.
  • #7, the speaker almost taunts God and the angels of the Apocolypse to do that which they came to do, rather than cowering in fright.  But the sudden doubt of salvation makes the speaker pause in the proud boast and ask for instruction in repentance.  Oddly, this makes God responsible for the sinner's repentance--isn't that something free will was for?
  • #10, turns to taunting Death, because the promise of the bodily resurrection will end Death's power "And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die."  Consider this in the light of Everyman!  How has the culture changed, both in its poetry and in its religion?
  • #14, probably the most famous of Donne's Holy Sonnets or its astonishing use of onomatopoeia in the sound of battering verbs and verb phrases set in speeded up iambic series--"Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you / As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend..." (ll. 1-2).  Again, like #5, the speaker taunts God to "break, blow, burn, and make me new" (4) with the analogy of the soul in the body being like a rebel population in a city under seige by the rightful lord.   Finally, Donne uses a metaphor for taking cities, and women, that has roots reaching back to Homer, where the same verb was used to "unbind the bridal veil" with violence and "to sack a city."  How do Donne's metaphors work together in this poem, and how might you compare them to the visions reported by Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich?
  • #17, only discovered in manuscript form in 1892, this sonnet apparently refers to the 1617 death of Anne, Donne's wife (after she had borne him 12 children!).  The poem (like the first stanza of "Nocturnal on St. Lucy's Day") turns upon the paradoxical symptoms of a patient suffering from "dropsy," a breakdown of the lymphatic circulatory system that causes simultaneous swelling and overpowering thirst.  Note that Donne modifies Bembo's "Staircase" analogy to a stream which he follows from Anne to that which made Anne beloved, but still he fears that salvation will not succeed (#7 and others).  This anxiety relates to Sypher's view of Mannerist style (see Issue #1 below).
  • "Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness"--again, Donne uses the metaphor of physical exploration of the New World to describe a spiritual exploration, but this time it is not the mortal Beloved to whom he is sailing (see "The Good Morrow," "The Sun Rising," etc.).  Note also the effect of this "Metaphysical Conceit" upon Donne's representation of the pains of dying.  They are that which tunes the bodily instrument to make it fit for the afterlife.
  • Expostulation #19 takes up the vexing problem of interpretation, especially interpreting sacred texts of the Bible.  Donne asks the most fundamental question: should we read the Bible literally or figuratively, as a plain statement of facts and commands, or as something we should presume to be written in metaphors or symbols that must be interpreted before we can understand it.  He appears to come down solidly upon the "figural" side of the argument.  What does this mean for his own poems, especially the apparent contrast between the erotic and sacred works?  Could they, too, be written in a "figuration" that hides even more than their literal, paraphrased meaning?  Click here for a note comparing Donne's position with that of Sir Philip and Mary Sidney (Herbert) on biblical translation, and linking them to the poems by Marvell and Herbert on the perils of trying to beautify sacred texts with the secular poetic arts.
  • Meditation #4, published during Donne's lifetime, is the most typical way he was known to the English reading public.  What major themes does he explore here to define what it is to be human and the relationship between mortal humans and immortal divinity?  You should see some relationships to medieval and earlier Renaissance thought here.  What is "new" about his writing these ideas?  How does the "Meditation" imaginatively re-see human existence as something grand or marvelous, and then contract that vision into a more traditional view of our inferiority, even to other animals?  Where does Donne stand in the process of historical change between Medieval and Modern thought?

Issues and Research Sources: