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John Donne Notes (ENGL 210)
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John Donne Notes (ENGL 210)
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Topic 6: Introduction to John DonneOctober 26th, 2022
John Donne
Born into a Catholic family during the Reformation (later converted to Anglicanism)
● One of the very estranging things for people is the connection between the religious and
mystical and erotic in Donne’s work.
● He writes love poetry in a kind of religious way and writes religious poetry in a kind of
erotic way.
Known as part of the Metaphysical Poets (so is George Herbert)
● Known as the metaphysical conceit – the image of the geometric compass in “A
Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
Clearly about the relationship between two people.
● Begins in a strange manner – it follows conventions but does so in an unconventional
way: a poem about love with an opening image of a dying person.
○ Using the image of what it is to watch someone die, to introduce this description
or evocation of death and love.
● “Laity” – someone who isn’t in the clergy; using secularism to separate himself and his
beloved from other people (they are above the regular people)
While they will be physically separated, that physical separation does not actually entail eruption
(he uses the idea of gold being a soft metal and moulding it into something thin and fragile)
● “If they be two, they are two so / As stiff twin compasses are two” (ll. 25-26)
○ “And though in the center sit, / Yet when the other far doth roam” (ll. 29-30)
■ Thinking about the degree to which you open a compass when you draw a
circle (and the respective moments as you open the compass)
● Also talking about the speaker and his lover having sex after they reunite (erotic)
What’s at stake in this poem? – a faith-dependant relationship, subject to a cosmic hierarchy
● He’s talking about things being higher or lower and shifting planes – the poem goes from
verticality to horizontality (a geometric shifting)
● The dynamic seems a little bit unfair – the lover needs to anchor him (she remains at
home) while he travels and roams (he’s the breadwinner)
○ He also insists that this doesn’t cause any rupture in the relationship, but actually
improves the relationship
● He and his love and his wife are not near the “dull sublunary lovers” (l. 13), but are
actually above them.
● Love expands to become the entire universe – it’s a poem grounded in math!
“Elegy 19. To His Mistress Going to Bed”
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