How effective do you find Donne`s use of imagery and language in conveying the strength of his feeling and to what extent could A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy`s Day, Being The Shortest Day be considered a love poem?

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Katie Burrows

How effective do you find Donne`s use of imagery and language in conveying the strength of his feeling and to what extent could A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy`s Day, Being The Shortest Day be considered a love poem?

          In the first stanza Donne presents a picture of a dying world, `The sun is spent...The world`s whole sap is sunk...life is shrunk, dead and interred. ` If it can be assumed that the poem is an expression of grief for his dead wife Anne (which would imply the poem is about love, or at least the loss of it), the use of that particular image could have two purposes.  Firstly to show that, to Donne, the loss of Anne is worse than the death of the world, ‘yet all these seem to laugh, compared with me,’ or secondly to show that Donne perceives the death of Anne as the death of the world, as to him she was the world.  It is the distinction made by the use of metaphor as opposed to simile, ‘life is dead,’ that conveys the strength of Donne`s feeling.

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          In the second stanza Donne shows how loving Anne has changed him, ‘For I am every dead thing, in whom love wrought new alchemy.’ His use of the word alchemy shows the magnitude of Donne`s feeling as it suggests he perceives love as a change of being, and as such before he loved Anne he was a ‘dead thing’ ; it was only after he fell in love that he began to exist and live. This concept is developed further at the end of the stanza, ‘and I am re-begot of absence, darkness, death; things ...

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