A2 Unit 3 - Poetry Pre-1900 and Unseen Poetry (A720U101)
Institution
WJEC
Book
Selected Poems
Full poem-by-poem guide with quotes and analysis of 40 of John Donne's poems. Selected and concise notes on 22 songs, 5 elegies, and 13 religious poems, with chosen quotations along with analysis points for each poem. Supplemented with brief summaries of the overall poem argument and progression. T...
John Donne Poems Analysis - elegies and religious poems (A**)
John Donne Poems Analysis - 22 secular poems and songs (A**)
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English Literature
A2 Unit 3 - Poetry Pre-1900 and Unseen Poetry (A720U101)
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DONNE ALL POEMS
, 1. The Good-Morrow (p.3)
Organised around 2 central metaphors: a pair of lovers ‘waking’ into a new life together,
and of the new world created by their mutual love.
Classic aubade poem – lamentation of dawn after a night with a lover
Dawn is used to recognise a clarity and consciousness in the speaker; assure the genuine
emotion of the poem, and a love that is reciprocated
This ‘true love’ transcends the physical longing
- Dawn symbolises a bringing together of lust and a deeper emotional connection
- These 2 in tandem are required in Donne’s perception of love
o Combination of physical and spiritual pleasure
o Progression of physical lust into love
Love adopts a new form of perfection
Love that is a new whole and transcends the individual
Makes claims to the perfectibility of the human experience of love.
- Is it too perfect?
- Immortality of the souls through love, yet also the conclusion with the sexual ‘die’
“weaned” “childish pleasures” “fancies”
- No pleasure before this love. he was still a child and had not truly existed.
- Lexical ambiguity of sucked and fucked
Seven sleepers’ den
- Retaining innocence Christian myth 200 years
“which I desired and got”
- Physical aspect. But also neo-platonic ideas of all truth being in love. unrivalled
physical pleasure in “a dream of thee”
“to our waking souls”
- Before love he only experienced a shadow of the world
Love “makes a little room an everywhere”
- Where ever he and his lover are, will encompass his whole world
- Love is an all-consuming emotion
- Metaphysical imagery condensing the world into a singular point.
- Their love is so powerful it can compare to the world
“sea-discov’rers to new worlds” “worlds on worlds”
- Colonial language critiquing imperialism? Rejects all of these in favour of love.
“let us possess one world” “two fitter hemispheres” anaphora
- Subjunctive ‘let’: Recalls Catullus V “let us live...let us love” embracing the day
- Echo of neo-platonic view that lovers are halves of each others worlds. True love
“my face in thine eye, thine in mine appears”
, - Eloquent metaphor for the interdependence of both characters
- Action is equal and not dominated by the speaker
- Valediction of Weeping
“each hath one and is one” “thou and I” (also mirrored at the start)
- Equality in this love. recalls religion and marriage – yet the religious institution of
marriage is irrelevant.
- He and his lover are central characters, but ironic as in his descriptions of the word,
this is a universal representation
“mixed equally”
- Alchemical reference. Belief of a perfect combination or a ‘natural balance’
Their love is so perfect that they can’t die. Nothing comes to an end in union.
1. Perfect microcosm of love with physical and spiritual in tandem
2. Too idealistic – speaker is aware of his own idealised perception.
All the world’s greatness doesn’t compare to the singularity of this union.
Pure conscious love
Good Morrow and the Sunne Rising
- Both use the sun as a conceit
- Transcendental nature of love
GM: love is an immortal epiphany
Sobering and significant in meaning
Profound enough to render everything they had previously known as childish/puerile
SR: arrogant tone. Portrays love as more significant than everything in the world combined
Almighty, playful portrayal
GM
- Mediation on the significance of love, and how it can be experienced as an astute
awakening
1. Describes first part of their lives without love with contempt and disdain
Only had a limited understanding of the world
2. Sun is a conceit. The discovery of love made him open his eyes= find enlightenment
Symbol of rebirth. Liberation of ignorance
The lovers learned the profound meaning of love, and hence life
Becomes more important than exploration and discovery of ‘new worlds’
Transforms their bedroom into an ‘everywhere’
3. Love is perfectly balanced and in perfect harmony
Hence it becomes immortal
, 2. Song (‘Go and catch a falling star’) (p.3)
Endorses the misogynistic belief that all women, especially beautiful women, are unfaithful
and shouldn’t be trusted
- Fantastical take on a traditional and misogynistic theme
- Women are inevitably unfaithful
Rhyme scheme, steady metre, clear hyperbole = light-hearted and satirical tone
- Trochaic metre, unrelenting beat sets the tone
- apostrophe
Speaker still harbours genuine melancholy, bitterness and cynicism towards women and
relationships.
Advises the listener to perform a series of impossible tasks
- Imperatives starting each line ‘go’ ‘get with child’ ‘tell me’: assuming superiority
- “tell me where all past years are” - Find the past and return it to the present. Seeking
“all past years” is a fool’s errand although it promises much
o Tension between longing and disappointment – which is ultimately inevitable
Power of imagination can conjure the wonder of obtaining these things, yet rationality
proves it is impossible
- Juxtaposition between “falling star” – image of loss, brightness descending, in need
of being caught and saved, light of love is being lost
- With “mandrake root”, impregnating something dark, black magic. Sexual menace of
relationships, nightmarish
- Then descent to “devil’s foot” which is “cleft” – the evil devil has a goat-like foot,
hooved, cartoonish, folklore, seems fake
o the beautiful turning bad
References to mythology - “hear mermaids singing” – listen to Greek sirens who would
crash sailors' ships
- Finding a faithful woman is as unlikely as these mythological occurrences
Celestial and natural imagery = Falling star, mandrake, mermaid, wind
Envy personified to “sting”
Orders the listener to grow old and travel to see “invisible” things, so that Donne may be
told about these things. One will be prepared to swear that truly faithful and beautiful
women do not exist.
“strange sights” sibilance
“things invisible to see” – paradox, this is not possible, juxtaposition between close words
“ten thousand days and nights” – hyperbole, excessive demands, speaker is proving how
unfaithful women are as even for this expanse of time, none will be found who are genuine
“age snow white hairs” – natural imagery of snow on human body. Early time
If women are “fair” they will not be “true” – “nowhere lives a woman true and fair”
- Nowhere on separate line – emphasis
a journey such as this that results in success would be worth it. However, even if she were
right next door and you wrote to tell me to come and see her, she would have been false to
2 or 3 other men before I reached her.
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