Welcome Name :- Aarti Hareshbhai Vadher Sem :- 1 M.A (English) Roll no :- 9 Paper no :- 1 Topic :-John Donne’s Treatment of Love Email Id :- artivadher10@gmail.com Submitted :- Smt.Gardi MKBU, Department of English, Year :- 2016-2018

John Donne’s Treatment of Love

John Donne Born : 22 January 1573, London,

England Died : 31 March 1631 (aged 58)

Occupation : Poet, Priest, Lawyer,

Nationality : English Genre : Satire, Love poetry,

Elegy, Sermons Subject : Love, Sexuality,

Religion, Death Literary movement :

Metaphysical poetry

Introduction• Love, the most felt and discussed emotion of human mind• Its dominant theme of all branches of literature of all ages • The treatment of love has been different from writers to writers and

poets to poets• John Donne has also used ‘love’ to be an important theme of his poetry • Love may be different from man to man, time to time, Donne has also

treated realistically love to be different from one poem to others• It is not very easy to find out a simple definition of the love from Donne’s

poems

Three main strands in Donne’s poems

The first is cynical attitude which is anti-woman and hostile to the fair sex

The second strand is of happy married life or of mutual love

The third is regarding supremacy of love with philosophical interpretation

Cynical attitude In the poems of first strand i.e. in the poems marked by cynicism and

scorn, we see the poet’s contempt towards love itself and a gaiety and playfulness.

For example , the poet begins ‘Go and Catch a Falling Star’ with an impossible imagery followed by many others only to prove the impossibility of discovering a true and faithful women,

“Go , and catch a falling star Get with child a mandrake root”Since it is impossible to catch a falling star and to produce a child with

mandrake root, it is also impossible to find “a woman true, and fair”.

Mutual love The second group of poems upholds the simple, pure, mutual

love and the best in conjugal love. Many of them are addressed to his wife Anne More.

‘The Anniversary’, written to celebrate the second anniversary of his weeding , gives a fine picture of domestic bliss.

In ‘The Sun Rising’ the poets says, “she’s is all states, and all princes, I, Nothing else is”. Here the lover does not know anything except his beloved.

Physical Love As for the supremacy of love, the poet sometimes says that

physical love is the best, elsewhere says spiritual love is the best and again says that spiritual love out of physical love is the best .

In “ The good Morrow”, the speakers says, “ If ever any beauty I did see Which I deserved , and got, was but a dream of thee”And, “ If our two loves be one, or thou and I Love so alike , that none so slacken, non can die”. Here we see the supremacy of spiritual love.