John Donne: Love and Divine Poems
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Donne's reputation as a love poet rests on his fifty-five lyrics which were written at different periods of his life but were published for the first time in 1633 in one volume called Songs and Sonnets. Donne was one of the greatest of English love poets.
Donne is the founder of a new kind of lyric, which for want of better name has been called 'the metaphysical lyrics'. As a matter of fact, Donne intellectualized the English lyric and thus extended its range and scope.
Donne was a rebel against the Petrarchan tradition in love poetry, with its lovers in flower gardens; its smooth lawns and murmuring streams; its goddesses of mythological and pastoral imagery; and its conventions of chivalry. Donne is neither Platonic nor ascetic, but frankly and honestly sensuous. His interest is in his experience of love and his endeavor is to understand it, not to deny or suppress it, and still less to present it untruthfully. The presentation is anything but romantic.
In his love- poetry John Donne revolted against the Petrarchan tradition. From the time of Wyatt, Surrey and their contemporaries, English lyrical and amatory poetry had been flowing continuously in the Petrarchan channel. Spenser in 'The Shepheardes Calendar (1579) and Sir Philip Sydney in his Stella followed the same tradition.
There are indeed, several strands in Donne's songs and elegies. Some of the love- poems are frankly, even arrogantly sensual. In others, the tears of passion are touched with shame and scorn. Other again are directly and splendidly passionate, like the following:
"If yet I have not all thy love"
(Lover's infiniteness);
"Twice or thrice had I loved thee"
(Aire and Angels);
"All Kings and all their favorites"
(The Anniversary)
In The Ecstasy, he sings of the inter-dependence of soul and body; and the Song: "Sweetest love I doe not goe" expresses in a simple but deep affection for his wife.
Grierson distinguishes three distinct strains in it.
Firstly, there are the cynical strains and his attitude towards women and their love and constancy are one of contempt and rejection.
Secondly, there are the strains of conjugal love to be noticed in poems like Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, addressed to his wife Anne Moore whom he loved passionately and in his relationship with her he attained spiritual peace and serenity.
Thirdly, there is the Platonic strain of poems like The Canonization in which love is treated only as a holy passion.
In between cynical Realistic strain and the highest spiritual strain, there are a number of poems which show an endless variety of mood and tone. Thus there are poems in which the tone is harsh and defiant, others, which are coarse and brutal, still others in which he holds out a mocking threat to his faithless mistress as in the Apparition.
Donne does not write only love poems dealing with the heart and the senses. He writes the purer poems, in more complex moods. So in The Ecstasy, A Nocturall upon St, Lucy's Day is at the opposite pole of Donne's thought from The Anniversarie. The Ecstasy makes us realize fully what Johnson meant by calling Donne " The first poet in the world for some things."
Donne is one of the greatest lyricists in the English language. His rhythmical structure is governed by the nature of the passion, feeling, and mood. He is the first poet who has delineated ecstatic joy of fulfilled love in The Sun Rising, The Anniversary and The Good Morrow. His songs are entirely different from those of the Elizabethan lyricists like Campion and Daniel.
In the Middle Ages, poetry was divorced from thoughts and reasons. It was purely written from expressing emotions and thoughts. The Elizabethan love- poetry was largely Petrarchan. There were also the medieval and Platonic strains in the Elizabethan love- poetry. Thus Donne emphasizes that to be a satisfactory relationship, love should be a mutual passion. He says that women are no longer treated as a goddess but as a creature of flesh and blood.
Donne introduced a new realism in love poetry, revolting against the Petrarchan tradition. Some of his love poems are cynical and he mocks at women and at love. Some poems sing for joy of love and contended mutual passion. He also introduced colloquial language in love- poetry. Donne's services to lyrical poetry were as valuable as that of Shakespeare to drama.
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