048 John-Donne-Poems---[TutFlix.ORG]---.pdf

The cannonization

1. The Canonization &
Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

2. Donne’s Life
Born into a Roman Catholic (illegal religion) family in 1572
1590s Study of Law; wrote Satires and Songs and Sonnets (mostly erotic poems)
Didn’t get a university degree from Oxford or Cambridge; brother imprisoned for Catholicism in 1593
Women, literature, travel with Earl of Essex and Walter Raleigh on colonial missions (late 1590s)
Conversion to Anglican religion (late 1590s); Member of Parliament 1601
Private secretary to Lord Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Seal; secretly married his niece Ann More (1601), for
which he was briefly imprisoned; followed by financial struggles
Appointed Royal Chaplain (1615); wife died after giving birth to 12th child (1617); fame as preacher
Sir Robert Drury was his patron
Almost none of his poetry was published during his lifetime; poems circulated privately in manuscript form
Died 1631

3. The Canonization

4. For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,
         Or chide my palsy, or my gout,
My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout,
         With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,
                Take you a course, get you a place,
                Observe his honor, or his grace,
Or the king’s real, or his stampèd face
         Contemplate; what you will, approve,
         So you will let me love.

5. Stanza 1
The poet asks his friend to stop discouraging him from
making love
It is as useless as rebuking the poet for his paralysis or gout
or grey hair, or mocking his ruined fortune
Instead of wasting time advising the poet, he should
improve his finances or practise some arts, start a career
(course), secure a position in court, be with the King so as to
see his face in real or in coins
The friend should give it a thought and do what he wants;
so that he will let the poet love

6. Alas, alas, who’s injured by my love?
         What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned?
Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?
         When did my colds a forward spring remove?
                When did the heats which my veins fill
                Add one more to the plaguy bill?
Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still
         Litigious men, which quarrels move,
         Though she and I do love.

7. Stanza 2
Alas, no one is hurt by the poet’s love-making
His sighs have created no storms that drowned ships;
his tears have caused no floods in any farmer’s land;
his colds have not delayed winter; the heat of his
passions has not added a name to the list of plague
victims (making fun of Petrarchan conventions)
Soldiers still fight wars; lawyers still find litigious men
who start quarrels — these things happen even if the
poet and his beloved love

8. Call us what you will, we are made such by love;
         Call her one, me another fly,
We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,
         And we in us find the eagle and the dove.
                The phœnix riddle hath more wit
                By us; we two being one, are it.
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
         We die and rise the same, and prove
         Mysterious by this love.

9. Stanza 3
The poet tells the friend: you can call us what you want (mad or foolish), but we
are made so by our love
The poet and his beloved can be called two flies chasing after the light, and
dying in the flame; or they can be called two candles that burn themselves out.
He compares the two of them to the eagle and the dove — one strong and
violent and the other gentle, one preying on the other
The phoenix riddle is more appropriate to describe the lovers — they are not
two, but one
Like the Phoenix bird which has both sexes, the poet and his beloved fit
together as one
Also, like the Phoenix dies and rises from its own ashes, the lovers also die
by love, and live by it
Finally, their love is also mysterious and inexplicable like the Phoenix

10. We can die by it, if not live by love,
         And if unfit for tombs and hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
         And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
                We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
                As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
         And by these hymns, all shall approve
         Us canonized for Love.

11. Stanza 4
If the lovers cannot live by love, they are ready to die for it
If their story is not worthy of tombs and hearses, the poet will
write verses on it
If their love is not recorded in history, the sonnets they write on
their love will be their pretty rooms, which will contain their
story as perfectly as a well-wrought urn will contain the
greatest ashes
These sonnets will be like huge (half-acre) tombs for the lovers
And by these “tombs”, everyone will respect them as saintly lovers

12. And thus invoke us: "You, whom reverend love
         Made one another's hermitage;
You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;
         Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove
                Into the glasses of your eyes
                (So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize)
         Countries, towns, courts: beg from above
         A pattern of your love!"

13. Stanza 5
People will them pray to the canonised lovers thus:
You are saintly lovers whose honourable love made
yourselves each other’s hermitage (ashram)
To everyone else now, love is a source of suffering, but to
you it was peace
You squeezed the whole world into each other’s eyes, that
these eyes (or the spies) epitomised to you the whole world
Countries, courts, towns, all pray to God for such a
manner of love as yours

14. Valediction:
Forbidding Mourning

15. As virtuous men pass mildly away,
   And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
   The breath goes now, and some say, No:

16. Stanza 1
Virtuous people are not afraid of death and pass away
quietly
They whisper to their souls to leave in silence
Some of their friends are sad that the breath is going
now; and others hope they would not die

17. So let us melt, and make no noise,
   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
   To tell the laity our love.

18. Stanza 2
The lovers wish to part quietly without making any fuss
with tear-floods and sigh-tempests
It would be a disgrace to their love to tell the
unappreciative common people about their love

19. Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
   Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
   Though greater far, is innocent.

20. Stanza 3
Earthquakes create great damage
Men calculate what damage was caused or why it
happened
However, the movement of the larger planetary bodies is
much greater, but creates no destruction
Similarly, the parting of the lovers should be peaceful

21. Dull sublunary lovers’ love
   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
   Those things which elemented it.

22. Stanza 4
The love of worldly people (whose soul is in their bodies)
cannot bear absence
This is because absence of the physical body to them
means absence of those things that created their love
This means that the love of worldly people is physical,
and such people cannot bear physical separation

23. But we by a love so much refined,
   That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

24. Stanza 5
But our love is so much pure and noble that we cannot
fully understand it
Mutually assured of each other’s mind, we do not care
about missing the physical body

25. Our two souls therefore, which are one,
   Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

26. Stanza 6
Our two souls are one
An idea Donne has expressed in many poems
Though I have to go away from you, it does not mean a
break but only an expansion of our love
Like gold beaten to airy thinness

27. If they be two, they are two so
   As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
   To move, but doth, if the other do.

28. Stanza 7
If our souls are two, they are two in such a way as the
compass is two
Your soul, the fixed foot, makes no movement
And your soul moves only if the other moves

29. And though it in the centre sit,
   Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
   And grows erect, as that comes home.

30. Stanza 8
The fixed foot of the compass (beloved) sits in the centre
And when the other foot moves (roams), the fixed foot
moves towards it and follows it
And when the moving foot comes home, the fixed foot
stands erect or steady in love (and meets the other foot)

31. Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
   Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
   And makes me end where I begun.

32. Stanza 9
So you should be to me
I must, like the moving foot, go away
But your firmness in love will make complete my work
properly
And I will come back to where I began from

33. Features of Donne’s Poetry
Intellectual wit and metaphysical conceits
Syllogistic arguments
Carpe Diem
Abrupt and shocking, conversational tone
No conventional descriptions of nature
Imagery drawn from physical sciences
Philosophical musings on human life (mortality) and morality in
rejection of Petrarchan conventions