The Love Poetry of John Donne: Component 1 of 3

1 Donne's Songs and Sonnets do not describe just one constant view of love; they show a wide range of feelings and attitudes, as if Donne himself were wanting to determine his connection with love through his poetry. Love can be an experience of the human anatomy, the heart, or both; it can be considered a religious experience, or merely a intimate one, and it can give rise to feelings which range from ecstasy to despair. Using anybody poem in isolation can give us a small view of Donne's perspective to love, but treating each poem being a fragment of a totality of knowledge, represented by most of the Songs and Sonnets, it provides us an insight in-to the complex selection of activities that can be arranged underneath the single heading 'Love.'In To his Mistris Going to Bed we see how highly Donne can praise real pleasure. He addresses the girl as:Oh my America, my new-found lande,My kingdome, safeliest when with one man man'd,My myne of precious stones, my Empiree,The photos are of real, material prosperity, and anyone scanning this poem alone would believe Donne's curiosity about girls was limited to the sexual stage. H-e identifies gender in terms of a spiritual experience; the girl can be an 'Angel', she offers 'A heaven like Mahomet's Paradise', and the bed is 'enjoys hallow'd temple.' But this is not a poem; nowhere does he say that he loves the lady, or that gender is part of a deeper relationship.In The Extasie Donne sends a really different and more technical attitude to real pleasure, when it is just one part of the connection with love.This Extasie doth unperplex( We said) and reveal what we love,Wee see by this, it was not sexe,Wee see, we saw not what did go. . .Love's mysteries in soules doe grow,But yet the body is his booke.The body and the heart are different, but related aspects of the totality of love. The uniting of people is the purest and highest form of love, but this can just only be attained through the uniting of bodies.Soe soule in to the soule may flow,Though it to body first repaire.This focus on the soul leads Donne to express a condescending attitude towards actual love in this poem that will be in marked contrast to the attitude he expressed in-to his Mistris Going to Bed.But O alas, so prolonged, so farreOur bodies why doe wee forbeare?They'are ours, the however they'are not wee. Wee areTh'intelligences, they the spheare.But in reading Donne one soon learns that the attitude expressed in one poem isn't to be studied as absolute and exclusive. One of Donne's qualities is the fact that he openly opposes himself from one composition to some other. The subject of the poem, The Extasie, signifies that love is a religious experience, as-a religious experience just as the diction of To his Mistris Going to Bed communicated sex. The religious metaphors provide a hyperbolic depth to his image, but the ideas expressed in The Extasie are firmly grounded in the medical ideas of his day.Donne's watch that spiritual love can be achieved through real love ties in with the contemporary theory of the 'chain of being.' Angels, possibly, can experience a totally spiritual love, unadulterated from the real. But gentleman, being part divine and part dog, can only reach the spiritual level through-the sensual.So should pure lovers soules descendT'affections, and to faculties,That sense may reach and apprehend,Else a great Prince in prison lies.The natural superiority of the spiritual level, and the part love can play in refining man's character towards the spiritual, is expressed in these lines:If any, so by love refin'd,That he soules language understood,And by great love were grown all mindeCopyright: Ian