John Donne’s Poetic Philosophy of Love

John Donnes poetical Philosophy of Love For the enormously heterogeneous and vexed John Donne (1572-1631), the genius in whom all contraries meet, (Holy Sonnet 18), behavior was lambthe cheat of women in his early life, thence the pick out of his wife (Ann More), and finally the neck of God. All other aspects of his suffer by from get laid, it seems, were just details. Love was the supreme apprehension of his mind, the preoccupation of his heart, the focus of his familiarity, and the subject of his meter.The centrality and omnipresence of sleep together in Donnes life launched him on a journey of exploration and disco actually. He sought to comprehend and to experience know in each respect, some(prenominal) theoretically and practically. As a self-importance appointed investigator, he take apartd respect from every conceivable angle, tested its hypotheses, experienced its joys, and embraced its sorrows. As Joan Bennett said, Donnes poetry is the work of single who has tasted every fruit in be intimates orchard. . . Combining his venerate for heat and his wonder for ideas, Donne became loves philosopher/poet or poet/philosopher.In the context of his poetry, both infract and sacred, Donne presents his experience and experiments, his machinations and imaginations, about(predicate) love. Some believe that Donne was indeed an accomplished philosopher of erotic ecstasy (Perry 2), only such a judgment seems to be too much. Louis Martz notes that Donnes love-poems take for their sancti nonpareild theme the chore of the place of love in a physical orbit dominated by change and finish. The worry is broached in dozens of varied ways, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, sometimes by asserting the immortality of love, sometimes by declaring the futility of love.Donne was not an accomplished philosopher of eroticism per se, moreover rather a psychological poet who philosophized about love, sometimes playfully, sometimes seriousl y. The question, thus, arises as to the character and content of Donnes philosophy of love serendipitously expressed in his sacred and profane poetry. I will also make out that this particular philosophical perspective in Donne established the basis for the intimate company between his profane and sacred poetry in which religious and sexual themes argon closely linked and intermeshed.After briefly affecting on the intellectual atmosphere in which Donne worked, I will proceed to examine the Ovidian and Petrarchan traditions in Donnes amatory lyrics, and their single contributions to his philosophy of love. The subject of Petrarchism was love, of course, emotional and apparitional love conceived as a imposing way of life, and the lover as an aristocrat of feeling (Guss 49). Donnes development in his profane poetry of the nobility and grandeur of Petrarchan love was by means of these inwrought themes including, . . . he proem, the initiation of love The wide-cut Morrow , the complaint against the ladys unyieldingness Twickenham Garden, the expression of sorrow at parting The Expiration, the remonstrance against the paragon Love Loves Exchange, the plaint on the ladys death A Nocturnal upon St. Lucys Day, cosmos the shortest day, and the renunciation of love valedictory to Love. Other common themes atomic number 18 the ladys eyes, her hair, her illness The febricity, the dream The Dream, the token A Jet Ring Sent, the day of remembrance of love The Anniversary, and the definition of love Negative Love.How bear a man and a woman get to a love which is not establish on rank sensuality, and yet which recognizes gentleman physicality and ascribes a proper consumption and function to the frame? How can a man and woman love one another with deep spiritual brashness and individualful devotion, and yet at the equal time stop short of romantic or emotional idolatry? How can both components of adult maleity be and intelligencebe brought together into a talented synthesis to create a love that eschews the problems of Ovidian immorality and Petrarchan idolatry, but is rather dictate and responsibilityly arranged?The acts to these questions and the resolution of these tensions argon found in Donnes imagination of idealized love generated largely on a lower floor the influence of a Christian reality which establishes the sine qua non of his philosophy of love. It is a philosophy of love that seeks to balance the roles and establish right relations between both body and soul. Donnes perspective is an attempt at integration, at wholeness, a striving at the reconciliation of opposing, dialectical forces.It seems that ever since the decline in quality of tenderity, life has been characterized by division and atomization God vs. man, heaven vs. earth, man vs. woman, body vs. soul, action vs. contemplation, theory vs. practice, and so on. Donne seeks to retrieve and harmonize at least one aspect of a divided creative act ivity his view is body and soul, not body or soul. He defines and describes the component part of love in light of the oecumenical nature of humanity. His position would seem to answer the questions and resolve the tensions created by the Ovidian and Petrarchan traditions in his love poetry.It would avoid the Ovidian problem of sexual immorality, and Petrarchan problem of romantic idolatry. Love is powerful, and it may very well abuse the body or the soul in its quest for satisfaction. only it can be rightly coherent as well. Donnes outlook finds an set aside place for both the body and the soul in a rightly ordered love. When coupled with his devotional poetry, the pattern indeed becomes complete, for it is in the love of God, which is the highest of all love, that human love itself finds its meaning and final speech point.If it is true that all human love has as its source and meaning in the very love of God, then at that place must be a correlative relationship between the se two forms of love, the countless and the finite. Gods love validates human love, and human love reflects and images Gods. there is an intimate connection between love both human and divine. This would certainly be true in Donnes Christian Platonism in which all things on earth, including human love, are a consideration of and point to things in heaven.