Date: Feb. From: The English Review Vol. Publisher: Philip Allan Updates. Document Type: Article. Length: 1, words. Translate Article. Set Interface Language. Decrease font size. Increase font size. Elizabeth Drury is said to be joy and to partake in joy at one and the same time «The First Anniversary», line , p.
The rebirth of the soul after death was commonly represented not so much as a metamorphosis but as a journey through space. While following the tradition in describing the soul's celestial voyage :. Donne immediately nullifies the concepts of time and space. Time and space, separation and change belong to the sublunary world ; Heaven, the realm of eternity and infinity, unity and immutability is nevertheless conceived of through reference to earthly love which carries with it the illusions of timelessness : «Only our love hath no decay» «The Anniversarie», p.
Love brings the poet above all a spiritual awakening :. Such joy is absent from the religious verse. Batter my heart, three person'd God ;. The language of ecstasy is voiced not in the religious but in the secular verse. Joy is asserted too, albeit less convincingly, in «The Anniversaries» which are basically songs of praise celebrating, as in an Easter hymn, rebirth after death :. Be got when man is made, 'tis borne but than When man doth die.
Our body's as the wombe, And as a mid-wife death directs it home. Donne may have the very Easter egg in mind when he murmurs :. Thinke thy sheell broke, thinke thy Soule hatch'd but now. In their various ways, bed and room, womb and tomb are protective, egg -like crucibles of generation. The production of life from death is also an alchemical notion. The alchemists held that mortification or corruption or «dying», as it was also termed, reduced a substance to its first elements and so prepared the way for new and better generation.
Thus Donne evokes the death and resurrection of Christ through alchemical imagery :. Whose body having walk'd on earth, and now Hasting to Heaven, would, that he might allow Himselfe unto all stations, and fill all, For these three daies become a minerall ; Hee was all gold when he lay downe, but rose All tincture, and doth not alone dispose Leaden and iron wills to good, but is Of power to make even sinfull flesh like his.
Donne is here drawing an analogy between the reduction of a substance to its «mineral», or basic, unrefined matter, and death which precedes resurrection. Christ was however already, metaphorically, the most perfect metal, gold, when he died ; at his resurrection he was refined into tincture, this giving him the power himself to transmute base metals into gold An alchemical reference to resurrection is also present in Donne's complex use of the figure of the phoenix in «The Canonization» p.
Paracelsus describes as the phoenix the alchemical process of dissolution followed by regeneration. The eagle and the dove were, moreover, symbols for substances produced in the course of this operation Alchemy joins forces with mythical, theological and sexual notions in the endeavour to foreshadow the process of death and the nature of the newly spiritualized flesh.
Alchemical metaphors are indeed frequently adopted when the poet seeks to convey a spiritualizing process. He was particularly fascinated by the «limbeck», or alembic, the apparatus used in alchemical distillation. As men of China, 'after an ages stay,.
Do take up Porcelane, where they buried Clay ;. So at this grave, her limbecke, which refines. Of which this flesh was, her soule shall inspire Flesh of such stuffe, as God, when his last fire.
Annuls this world, to recompence it, shall,. Make and name then, th 'Elixir of this All. The grave is an alembic which distils from mortal flesh a new kind of flesh in preparation for the resurrection ; that of Lady Markham, made from precious matter, was already so pure that after this first transmutation God will need to look no further for the elixir also known as tincture, quintessence and specular stone that will complete the purging work of the last fire, and bring what remains of the material world to pure gold and eternal life.
In «A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day» p. Mourning the death of a woman he loves, the poet composes a moving evocation of his utter despair by depicting the alchemical distillation that takes place in «loves limbecke» as the transformation of life into death or of all into nothing, and then of nothing into «A quintessence even from nothingnesse».
Quite different is the poem «Loves Alchymie» p. Here the poet refutes the powers of both alchemy and love, treating the two as downright impostures. The ambiguous status of alchemy, hovering between science and quackery, appeals to a poet of fluctuating temperament and corresponds, here, to his conflicting attitudes towards love. The poem is also, inevitably, an irreverent stance. The self -proclaimed makers of gold impressed Donne no more than they did Francis Bacon, but both men's minds were fashioned by all-embracing alchemical and indeed epistemological concepts such as corruption, separation, distillation, refinement and transmutation.
The alteration of substances, or transubstan- tiation, was of vital concern to alchemist, to scientist and to theologian alike. Who, though she could not transubstantiate All states to gold, yet guilded every state,. Donne is not here dwelling on doctrinal debate Anglicans did not believe in transubstantiation proper, but held that the transformation of the sacramental bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ took place in the soul of the communicant , but seeking by all the conceptual means at his disposal to represent.
The powers of tincture and the action of virtue, transfiguration through love and transformation through death, distillation, refinement, transmutation and trans- ubstantiation, all such concepts are metaphors one for the other in the attempt to apprehend invisible alteration as it affects man, and particularly in the bid to anticipate the ultimate transcendence.
Death itself, as a sexual, an alchemical, a Christian and a plain biological concept, is the fulcrum of Donne's system of understanding and being, the knot of a vast conceit that binds mortality to immortality. The major and most disquieting of changes in a series that leads from conception to putrefaction, death is also the one change mysteriously welded to changelessness and is thus for the poet a fertile, if intermittent, source of hope. To return to an anamorphic image, death, as concept, metaphor and even pun, is the supreme «istraforo di perspectiva» that casts the enigmas of existence into a comprehensible configuration.
Keast OUP, , pp. Patrides London : Everyman, I, livre II, ch. Donne New York, , pp. Wilson, eds. Davis and H. Gardner Oxford : Clarendon P. Donne and A. Discussed by F. Mathieu-Castellani Tiibingen :G. Narr, , pp. Discussed by M. London, , p. Donne's Poetry, ed. Roberts Hassocks, Harvester, , pp. Mazzeo, «Notes on Donne's Alchemical Imagery», his, 48 , The impression of changeableness is produced first and foremost by the abrupt manner in which many of Donne's poems 40 open.
Busie old foole, unruly Sunne, «The Sunne Rising», p. By using what appears at first to be a dialogue form, with language that carefully follows the lilt and the style of natural speech : For Godsake hold your tongue, «The Canonization», p.
Thus in the third stanza of «A Valediction of my name, in the window» : As no one point, nor dash, Which are but accessaries to this name, The showers and tempests can outwash, p. Again, the tone is likely to change as the poem advances : after its rollicking start, «The Sunne Rising» moves into a more solemn vein that reads at a stately, measured rhythm : She'is all States, and all Princes, I, Nothing else is.
The Christian who ardently desires to fix his mind upon God finds meditation difficult if not impossible : 41 Oh, to vex me, contraryes meet in one : Inconstancy unnaturally hath begott A constant habit ; that when I would not I change in vowes, and in devotione. In «A Valediction of my name, in the window», the lengthy and ingenious development upon the theme of the lover cutting his name in the glass of a window before leaving on a journey is, at the end of the poem, first ridiculed : Impute this idle talke, to that I goe, and then quickly given new pathos : For dying men talke often so.
The «Holy Sonnets», for their part, depict personae like the sinner : 42 For I have sinn'd, and sinn'd, and onely hee, Who could do no iniquitie, hath dyed : XI, p.
The paradox sets up a parallel between irreconcilable concepts while forcing them to converge : Immensity cloysterd in thy deare wombe. The most hallowed Christian paradoxes are ultimately as fragile as the playful : 43 On a round ball A workeman that hath copies by, can lay An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia, And quickly make that, which was nothing, All, «A Valediction of weeping», p. The telescope, first used by Galileo in , became a popular poetic image and Donne was one of the earliest poets to exploit its conceptual possibilities : Though God be our true glasse, through which we see All, since the beeing of all things is hee, Yet are the trunkes which doe to us derive Things, in proportion fit by perspective, Deeds of good men ; for by their living here, Vertues, indeed remote, seeme to be nere ; «Obsequies to the Lord Harrington», In other words — and the semantic field of the term «image» is signif- 44 icant — the poet's image forges a distorted image of reality.
The sustained metaphor lends itself particularly to such a modulation : 0 more then Moone, Draw not up seas to drowne me in thy spheare, «A Valediction of weeping», p. Strictly speaking, the latter involves a projection in time, whereas the former is an immediate transformation independent of chronology 12 : This flea is you and I, and this Our mariage bed, and mariage temple is ; «The Flea», p. But though many of Donne's metaphors are formed, as here, with the copula «is», this producing a bold, authoritative or startling effect that suits his assertive or provocative moods, he is also unusually fond of metaphors created by the verb «to make», where the transformation process takes place before the reader's eyes 13 Juan 47 Vives, in his Fabula de Homine 15 , used metempsychosis as a metaphor of man's progress towards divine perfection.
Acts of lechery are highlighted through the figures of birds and beasts ; the sparrow was a traditional embodiment of lust : Already this hot cocke, in bush and tree In field and tent oreflutters his next hen, He asks her not, who did so last, nor when, Nor if his sister, or his neece shee be ; Nor doth she pule for his inconstancie If in her sight he change, nor doth refuse The next that calls ; XX, p.
Images of decay are exceptionally vivid : The World is but a Carkas ; thou are fed By it, but as a worme, that carcas bred ; «The Second Anniversary», Graphic openings like : When my grave is broke up againe «The Relique», p.
It is easy enough to appreciate how the recumbent body of the lover might recall for the poet the corpse stretched out in the tomb ; how the young man might, revelling in sexual delights, 49 dread the loss of youth and the withering of the flesh ; and how the experiencing of sexual orgasm, referred to as «dying» by the Elizabethans, could thus readily prefigure the spasm of actual death.
But : Wee dye and rise the same, and prove Mysterious by this love. Furthermore, a bold association is set up between re-erection «Wee dye and rise the same» and resurrection : The Phoenix ridle hath more wit By us, we two being one, are it.
Thus lovers separated from one another can bear absence, because In «The Anniversaries» he evokes the ineffable by carefully fusing and confusing irrec- 51 oncilable states Donne uses a wide range of language showing his emotional and sexual feelings, such as in "The Flea. Aside from metaphors, Donne also uses similes and writes poems as if they were riddles, like in the poem, "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning. Some of Donne's early works between and consisted of songs, sonnets, and love poems.
His writings of "physical love" are love that is primarily based upon the presence of the partner, such as in "The Flea. John Donne has written many poems with a love theme, often with an idealized view of sexual love. Donne's hope for worldly success was gone. It was during this time period that Donne supposedly wrote his "sad letter to his Wife" that contained the following well known line: "John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done. The court decided in Donne's favor.
However, Carey is not too harsh on Donne. John Donne uses poetry to explore his own identity, express his feelings, and, most of all, he uses it to deal with the personal experiences occurring in his life. This essay will discuss some elements of John Donne's biography and how the issue of death is brought about in his Holy Sonnet 10, commonly called, "Death be not proud". John Donne was born into a prosperous Roman Catholic family in London in These harsh experiences brought out a fascination with death in John Donne.
It is very clear that John Donne has a severe obsession with death. Donne uses this word to describe he and his lover after they are deceased. Donne uses this definition of the word to describe himself and his deceased lover. And it is in this description that yet another of Donne's metaphysical conceits becomes clear.
Wit and Religious Imagery in "The Flea" In his funny little poem "The Flea," John Donne merges wit with religious imagery in an attempt to convince a woman to sleep with him. In the first stanza Donne cleverly uses the humorous image of an insignificant flea that has just sucked the blood of both Donne and his intended lover as he tries to convince his beloved that the mingling of bodily fluids during intercourse would be just as innocent as their blood mingling inside the body of the flea.
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