Donne's Poetry
John Donne
Questions & Answers(Short)
Ans: His principal method of combination is simply to mingle the discourses of spirituality and carnality—pleading with God to rape him in the fourteenth Divine Meditation or claiming to embody the sweat of Adam and the blood of Christ in the “Hymn to God my God.” In the “Valediction,” Donne describes an ideal of spiritual love that seems to unify the holy and the romantic but that consciously eschews erotic desire. Poems, such as “The Flea” and “The Sun Rising,” make little use of the spiritual mode beyond passing reference (such as Donne’s calling the flea his “marriage temple”); poems, such as “Death be not proud,” have little to do with the worldly or the erotic.
2. How does Donne distinguish between physical and spiritual love? Which does he prefer? (Think especially about “The Flea” and “A Valediction: forbidding Mourning.”)
Ans :“Physical love” is love that is primarily based upon the sensation or the presence of the beloved or that emphasizes sexuality; in “The Flea,” Donne celebrates the physical side of love when he tries to convince his beloved to sleep with him. In the “Valediction,” Donne describes a spiritual love, “Inter-assured of the mind,” which does not miss “eyes, lips, and hands” because it is based on higher and more refined feelings than sensation. In the “Valediction,” Donne is critical of “dull sublunary” physical love, which could not survive in the absence of the beloved, and expresses a profound preference for spiritual love, which is much rarer—it is not the love of the common men and women. But there are certainly erotic moments in Donne’s writing (The graphically sexual “To His Mistress, on Going to Bed” comes to mind) when he would seem to prefer the erotic to the intellectual.dhselim@hotmail.com
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