A-Level English: John Donne Poems

The Good Morrow

Summary: As they wake in the morning, the speaker explores his relationship with his lover, wondering what the two did before they met each other. He feels they have equality in their love, both physical and spiritual, which means there is no imbalance and thus their love can become immortal.

Key image: The lovers united, making an entire world together.

Key context: The humours (perfectly 'mixed' and balanced), neoplatonism (souls becoming one)

Woman's Constancy

Summary: The speaker rejects traditional romantic idealism to express the uncertainties and insecurities of a new relationship; he argues against the hypothetical statements his lover might make in order to justify leaving him after one day. He twists the ending however, acknowledging that his feelings, as well as hers, may fade in the future.

Key image: Contactual, legal imagery to show the arguments the lover might make to end their relationship.

Key context: Donne's legal training.

The Sun Rising

Summary: In the early morning the speaker argues with the sun, first insisting that it leave him and his lover to sleep in peace, and then conceding that it can shine, but only if it merely warms their little 'sphere' rather than the world outside their bedroom; the lovers become the whole world.

Key image: The speaker and his lover as a whole world, she 'all states' and he 'all princes'.

Key context: The aubade form, the idea of the microcosm (they're a world together), the geo and heliocentric universes (he's mocking the sun).

The Canonisation

Summary: The speaker suggests that he and his lover are holy figures and deserve to be elevated to sainthood. In the first two stanzas he admonishes a listener who criticises his love, saying that it causes no harm. Then he describes how unique and spiritual their relationship is, to the point where they become divine and people on earth attempt to mimic and worship them.

Key image: The speaker and his lover dying for love and becoming saints, with poetry acting as a tomb to memorialise and celebrate them.

Key context: Catholic saint worship, the Court (which Donne references and dismisses)

Air and Angels

Summary: The speaker explores two different kinds of love, the spiritual and the physical, and concludes that neither sort of love is complete without the other. He compares that love must be spiritual, but also manifest in the physical; a man needs a woman to manifest the physical aspect of his love, just as angels need air to manifest in.

Key image: Male / spiritual love as like a pure angel, which needs a female / less pure physical love to manifest itself in.

Key context: Beliefs regarding angels (e.g Thomas Aquinas)

The Anniversary

Summary: On a couple's first anniversary, the speaker asserts that their love is pure, and their spiritual bond is immortal and transcends death despite the inevitable passage of time. He imagines them elevated to regal status, and at the end of the poem looks forwards to their long reign together.

Key image: The speaker and his lover as perfect, unique Princes, reigning on Earth before they are elevated to heaven with other lovers.

Key context: Renaissance princes and city states, Christian views on the soul, Catullus (Roman poet who Donne mimics in the line 'let us love nobly and live')

Twicknam Garden

Summary: The speaker expresses his heartbreak at a woman's rejection; he tries to take solace in a beautiful garden but instead feels he has corrupted it by bringing his melancholy in. He desires to become a weeping fountain, which could be treated like a shrine by lovers. Finally, he condemns all women as deceptive, except for his love — however this is tragically ironic, as if his love is the only true woman, then her rejection must also be genuine.

Key image: The speaker becoming a stone fountain, 'weeping', which lovers can come to and take the tears to compare them to their lover's tears and find out if they are true

Key context: Petrarchan Lovers, the Renaissance literary symbol of the garden, Donne's patroness the Countess of Bedford (owned the gardens, poem may be to her or a joke for her)

The Flea

Summary: The speaker compares sexual intercourse with his lover to a flea sucking both of their bloods to convince her to sleep with him. In the second stanza he tells her not to kill the flea, as by doing so she'll also kill herself and him, who are united in the flea's blood. In the third stanza he reacts to the killing of the flea, arguing that if her killing the flea was so insignificant, losing her honour by having sex with him will be equally insignificant.

Key image: The lovers' blood mingling inside a flea, which is compared to sex.

Key context: The image of the flea, Donne's lawyerly skill.

The Apparition

Summary: A a jilted lover who believes he will be killed by his love's rejection, says that when he is dead, he says he will return to haunt the woman as a ghost. However he will not tell her what his ghost-self will whisper to her, so that she will feel anxious about the future. He urges her to repent now rather than face his wrath later.

Key image: The woman, who is pale and shivering, as more like a ghost than the actual ghost himself.

Key context: Aspen = shivering tree, quicksilver = mercury

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

Summary: A speaker prepares for separation from his lover, telling her they must part calmly and peacefully. He reassures her their love is so spiritually great that they will not really be separated, except physically; they remain united, like the legs of a compass, they seem separate but are part of one soul.

Key image: The lovers as like a compass, physically separate but also united and creating a perfect circle of unity.

Key context: science, Galileo's creation of the compass in 1609, Petrarchan love poetry, Donne's travels (e.g to France in 1611).

The Relic

Summary: The speaker addresses a woman who he has not had a sexual relationship with, and imagines that in the future, when people dig up his grave they will find a bracelet of her hair around his wrist, and begin to worship the two as saints of love. He mocks this (Catholic-esque) idolatry and the idea of the hair as a miraculous relic of passionate, saintly love; the real miracle is their chaste and loving Platonic relationship, immortalised in the poem.

Key image: The woman as a 'Mary Magadalen' which insinuates the speaker is Jesus, the poem as a better relic than the bracelet.

Key context: Relics and Catholicism, Platonic love, Mary Magdalen, Donne's patroness Mrs Magdalen Herbert

Elegy: To His Mistress Going To Bed

Summary: In this erotic poem, the speaker aims to seduce a woman into sleeping with him by telling her to remove her clothes. In the final lines of the poem he adds an almost comical twist by revealing that he has already undressed himself, and thus she should join him because she doesn't need to be wearing clothes when he is naked.

Key image: The lover as the New World and the speaker as the adventurer discovering and conquering her.

Key context: Age of Discovery, America, 'Mahomet's paradise', expanding imperialism

Elegy: His Picture

The speaker presents his mistress with a miniature portrait of himself before he goes on a voyage.

- imagery of change and decay

- imagery of war

- antithesis

A Jet Ring Sent

-Directly adresses the adressee

-As love has broken the symbolism of the ring and the reflection of love from that using metaphors to compare

-The value of love as well as the value of the speaker

-Marriage has false meaning linked with the marriage idea differently in the anniversary

The Triple Fool

-Percieved as the different types of Donne through his lifetime represented through most poems but in more detail in this poem

-The fool has contradictory meaning possibly just like Donne as seen in biography and storyline of his life

-1st fool is the letting him love and love as a whole

-2nd fool as whining and writing about grief etc

-3rd fool could be as reflection of the wise person has become through stages of triple fool

-Self doubt linking with changes in life trying to fit with societal groups and religion