‘Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begun’
The firmness is referring to the physical stiffness of the leg of the compass, this being the honest strength he is urging on her throughout the poem. The final line is understandably where the compass similarity breaks down. The Lady is now the thought of both the point on the circumference of the circle where he began and where he returns and the centre, the point in which he revolves around. This could show the pressure of feeling within the poem. This not only shows the understanding of the poem but also shows the imagery of his topics and the way he explains something by likening it into something else, a paradox. It is a carefully constructed argument again typical of John Donne.
The second poem I am going to analyse The Good Morrow. Even though John Donne was a religious man, he still had temptations and encounters with women. This poem has details of his feelings about one of his loved ones and is about great love. He starts the poem by saying that even if they thought they had loved before it is just a false impression
‘I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? ‘. The love they are experiencing is the real thing and that all other loves are unimportant in comparison. In the second verse, Donne says that the room that he and his lover are sharing is everything and also everywhere. He creates the image that there is no life beyond the walls of there room and that they are the only two people in the world that matter
‘Let us posses one world, each hath one, and is one.’ Then in the third verse, Donne and his lover are looking at each other’s eyes
‘My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,’ Donne sees his own image reflected in her eyes and she sees hers in his. This shows the imagery created by Donne. He then portrays the image that their eyes are both hemisphere’s, referring to the shape of the globe, linking back to the view that they are the only people in the world that matters.
‘If our two loves be one, thou and I
Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die’. This statement is saying that if they love each other equally then their love will never die. This poem, like the first, uses a paradox or image to illustrate his point about their love. This poem bases around two metaphors. One of the two lovers waking into a new life together and the other is of the new world created by their new love. What gives the poem a distinct characteristic is how he uses these images in an argument to reveal more about the experience of love between them, which was obvious from the start.
The third poem is The Sun Rising. From the start the first line we can pick up a distinct characteristic of his poetry,
‘Busy old fool’. The first word shows a lot of emphasis and is often stressed and forceful. It is one of his dramatic openings. Another example of this is from The Canonization, which starts with,
‘For God’s sake hold your tongue’, this is again another dramatic, explosive opening. In The Sun Rising the sun intrudes the lover’s bed, and he takes offence at this by referring to it, as he does at the start. He creates the image that the sun has forced the end of their time together,
‘Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?’ For the man this intrusion is too soon. He then attacks the sun and refers to him as unruly and then tells him where he should be going. In the end though he decides to allow the sun into his chamber but highlights that they are still the centre of the world,
‘This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.’ An arrogant tone comes through in this poem by the way he insults the ruler of time, the sun. He also claims that his lover is more powerful than the sun,
‘If her eyes had not blinded thine’. The arrogance also shows by the way he is saying that the whole world is in the bed and that he is more important than both sides of the world, and that the sun couldn’t wake them. However, since the sun cannot be stopped, Donne cleverly turns this around and the lover pretends to give the sun permission to stay,
‘To warm the world, that’s done in warming us’, he then turn’s his refusal to the sun’s entering into a show of generosity by letting it enter and warm them. This is a good example of Donne’s clever writing. Donne has written poems in which lovers respond to dawn, they often portray a happy love and develop a further theme, in this case it’s the two lovers making up one world.
From these poems we can assume many things about John Donne’s poetry. The first is the intense dramatic sense that John Donne creates throughout his poems and many of his poems are dramatic. An example of this is from The Flea. This is a speech delivered by a would be lover to an unwilling lady and her reactions and A Valediction Forbidding Mourning is a speech to a tearful wife. Another characteristic is Intellectualism. From the use of imagery and referring things as something else, Donne presents his poems as though they are riddles. For example from A Valediction Forbidding Mourning you have to ask the question, how are a happily married couple like a compass, he presents them all as similes. A lot of his poems are also influenced by emotion, for example A Valediction Forbidding Mourning was written when he was going away from his wife. His intellectual nature comes through in a lot of poems. For example in The Flea the complaining lover uses the messages of both science and religion to argue that their joining is justifiable. However we can also see that even though he makes plenty of sexual and emotional references he also manages to combine this with intellectual and logical arguments without losing the two.
