Works

"No man is an Island, entire of itself"

In Donne’s time, the general opinion was that poetry was not a profession. Donne and almost everyone else saw the writing of poetry as a hobby that was appreciated if you were any good. So, during his lifetime, most of his poems were not published or collected. They were passed around in manuscript copies among his friends and patrons.

A Renaissance element in Donne’s work is his use of classical genres like the elegy and the satire. In his third satire he deals with the subject of religion. This satire was written when Donne was in the middle of leaving the Catholic Church. He treats the question of how you can discover the true Christian religion, when there are so many different churches and people who claim to possess the truth. (Many people today ask or have asked themselves this same question.) Donne answers this question by saying that it is better to have an honest attitude, full of doubt that makes you search for the truth, than to just accept things because they are traditional. He describes the truth as hard to get to, Truth is standing “on a huge hill, cragged and steep”1.

Very typical of Donne is his use of images. For instance, in his poem The Flea, the speaker uses the image of a flea to show how close he would like to be to his mistress. Many people have wondered how it is possible that one person can produce two very different kinds of poetry. On the one hand, love poetry and on the other hand, religious poetry. Over the past years and ages, many critics have noted that his love poetry is full of religious imagery and his religious poetry is full of love and erotic imagery.

The Sun Rising

This poem describes two lovers that lie in bed in the morning when the sun comes up. The speaker doesn’t want to be disturbed by the sun and tells him to disturb others: Must thy motions lovers’ seasons run? Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide late schoolboys and sour prentices. Love knows no time, it is not bound to the divisions that are made of time: Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime, nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

A theme that occurs a lot in Donne’s poetry is that “the private world of lovers is superior to the wider, public world. Or this love world simply contains the whole of this other world.”2 It’s a theme that you still find in a lot of modern pop songs and love poetry. This theme we also find here, but Donne describes it very physically: She is all states, and all princes I, Nothing else is. So all the sun has to do is: Shine here to us and thou art everywhere; this bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

Holy Sonnet 5

Donne is often seen as the founder of metaphysical poetry. One aspect of this type of poetry is that it deals with intellectual issues. A century later, Samuel Johnson writes that “the metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show learning was their whole endeavor.” ² A good example of this learned style of Donne is Holy Sonnet 5.

The Holy Sonnets belong to Donne’s religious poems. They were published in 1618, but he probably wrote them from 1609 onwards, after he left the Catholic church.

The first line of Sonnet 5 reflects Renaissance ideas about the relationship between the world and a human being. A human being was thought of as “a little world,” a microcosm. A human being was the small version of the macrocosm, the whole world. Just as the great world was made up of 4 elements (earth, water, air and fire), the human being was also created out of 4 elements. In a human being these elements were referred to as humours, the 4 different kind of bodily fluids.

This poem also shows that Donne is familiar with the scientific discoveries that were made in his time and the discovery of the New World. He speaks about “new spheres” (new stars and things in the universe), “new lands” and “new seas”.