John Donne (2) The question of difficulty: Song (Sweetest love ...), The Flea, The Will
Students frequently ask, when a course on Donne is proposed, about whether or not his poetry is difficult. The answer must be that he is, in some ways, challenging but that it is worth the effort and that, when the reader has made that effort, all will be clear. After studying a poem, it is possible to write a prose paraphrase which would lose much of the impact but which would preserve the sense. This is unlike the difficulty of, say, T. S. Eliot, where the meaning would still be open to discussion. By examinng the three poems cited above, we can see three levels of intellectual demand.
"Song" is the simplest in every way. It is the lyric to an existing tune and the assonance in the first lines adds to the musical quality:
Sweetest love, I do not goe,
For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
A fitter love for mee:
The long vowels are repeated and the technique continues in the last four lines. The language is almost monosyllabic and lulls the listener but there is a need for attention at the end, when he argues that leaving her is like a false death and will make the real one easier. The very mention of death (although it is also a euphemism for an erotic climax)adds a note of foreboding which counteracts his plea for calm. The reader is the third party, another listener, but one who has to try to piece out the situation just as if it was overheard in real life.
Stanza two is a sustained comparison between the speaker and the sun but, once again, it is not fully convincing. The lover may have more motive than the sun for a speedy return but he does not seem to be promising to come back by tomorrow. Each stanza has its change of pace and intonation and this one ends on an upward beat.
A vigorous exclamation: "O how feeble is man's power ..." starts the thread of thought that a person cannot extend a happy time but will, by his or her attitude (and presumably he means the woman here), make hard times seem even longer. The rhythm lengthens in these lines to emphasise their meaning:
And wee joyne to it our strength
And we teach it art and length.
The long vowels increase the effect and we notice that the argument and tone throughout are sustained whilst the examples change frequently.
In stanza four, the woman (probably his wife) becomes real: she is sighing and weeping, behaviour which he discourages with the conceit that she is wasting his soul (air in sighing) and blood (liquid in tears) by her expressed emotion. Yet there is another small knot in the line: she is "unkindly kind" a perplexing contradiction that she is true in spirit but cruel to him. We feel that she will not be brought round by the argument that, if she loved him, she would not use up his powers like this but she would, perhaps, be moved by the final compliment that she represents the best of him. The thought processes in this poem are less dense and complicated than in others but still require careful attention.
The speaker's mind is endlessly active whilst he continues in lyric mode and ends with a plea that she should not forecast any misfortune with her "divining heart" as fate may do what she dreads. Instead she should think of the separation as a sleep during which they keep each other alive in what is not, therefore, truly a parting. Despite the song-like quality of the poetry, the line of thought is always present and demands concentration but on an easier level, consistent with being literally a setting to music.
"The Flea"
Fleas, because of their ability to invade all parts of the human body, were widely used in erotic literature and so this aspect of the poem is not particularly original. But he reproduces an entire dramatic circumstance: the lovers are close together and a flea is hopping from one to the other. A single speaking male voice is realised from the start which continues to react to an evolving situation whilst the woman's full reactions are held back for two stanzas although we know she is reluctant to agree to his desires. Out of this emerges a passionate love poem with an unlikely, small and seemingly trivial starting point.
The opening words are direct and spontaneous: the flea has just bitten him and is now biting her : "Mark but this flea.." With a confident leap into conceit, he compares this to having sex in the mingling of bloods and points out that she has not lost her purity by its action. It is as though he knows the analogy is false and is trying it out for pleasure, which means that we, as onlookers, are awaiting her response. The tone changes throughout and the stanza ends on an apparently dejected note: "And this, alas, is more than we would doe." His thoughts are dense as he argues with whatever comes to mind that she should yield but the passion is direct.
At the beginning of stanza two she has raised her hand to squash the creature and so we know that she is resisting his pleas. His arguments now become preposterous yet remain sincere: he truly loves her and will say whatever is necessary to bring her round. If she kills the flea, she kils three living things, since they are united within it, but more extreme is his theme that they are already married inside it, making it holy in itself. The elevation of the flea to an object of beauty is hyperbolic but the love is true and rings through the diction and rhythms: "this/Our marriage bed and marriage temple is." It seems that her parents resist their marriage as she does also. The last three lines, all rhyming for emphasis, claim that, although she frequently kills him with her cruel resistance, she must not commit suicide (because her life is in it) or sacrilege (because it is sacred) by murdering the flea.
Between stanzas the woman kills the flea with unexpected violence: "Cruell and sodaine, hast thou since..." has only four beats to represent the speed of her action. The reader may smile at the fact she has not listened to his persuasions but may also be moved by the efforts he has made to convince her. The situation is changing constantly and the speaker responds to to it with agility of mind and wit. The rhyme scheme continues to be as complex as the thought threads and he now questions her as to why the flea was guilty. Clearly she is gloating over him and he reports her as saying that neither of them is worse off for the loss of blood. She has now become a real person, though in some ways secondary, and he finishes by trying to take her words seriously while turning them back on her: if it is true that nothing has been lost, then nothing will be lost when she yields to him. We notice that he says "when" not "if" and wonder if this is his supreme confidence or if she has been playing a part all along.
Overall, the poem is one side of a dramatic dialogue: the attacks and tone evoke the woman who then develops a personality other than that of the reluctant mistress. It is a triumph of the genre of poems persuading an unwilling woman, combining vigour of feeling with constantly evolving arguments. The situation has changed from the beginning to the end of the poem but we do not know how she will ultimately behave. The difficulty here lies in following the twists and turns of the persuasions with their extra tonal modulations and yet the poem responds to careful decoding and we do finish by knowing excatly what has been said and done. It is a virtuose piece which we can only applaud.
"The Will"
This poem is an extended riddle and requires a different level of reader response: it cannot be understood by reading each stanza through as it is written. The last three lines in each are the answer to the conundrum: why is the writer bequeathing that particular aspect of himself to the particular person or group? It is therefore tempting to read those lines first but better to read each stanza twice and work out the riddle if possible on the first reading and enjoying the wit on the second.
The persona is that of the newly cynical lover who appears at first to be soliloquising. He has just been disappointed in love and claims to be dying of grief, leaving a Will. Using the dramatic device of apostrophe [speaking directly to an object] he informs Love itself that he is giving away some attributes. In the first stanza the recipients are Argos, Love itself, Fame or Rumour, women, the sea, and the clue is revealed to be that he will give his eyes, tongue, ears and tears to those who have too much of them already. There is social satire in his wish to give Ambassadors his ears since they are always listening for gossip. Love will receive his blind eyes, a quick insult to the woman with whom he has fallen in love.
Each stanza is constructed in the same way, with a mixture of wit, satire and emotion. In stanza two he gives to those who cannot use the gift, such as his silence to any returning traveller - a sentiment with which we modern readers can wholly agree. He finds several examples of people or groups who fit his purpose and the poem represents Donne in his most virtuoso mode. There are many contemporary references which need checking but the general ideas are clear. In stanza three he gives to those who will despise his qualities just as his mistress has despised them. She has rejected him in the same way that soldiers will reject his modesty, since they always boast. Gamblers will refuse patience and so on. Stanza four has him giving back to those who gave him the attributes in the first place: his wit will go to his friends, his illness to doctors who made him ill (we note the neat insults slipped in wherever possible) and his poetry to inspiring Nature. He does refer to his own excesses as a cause of illness although he probably exaggerates those throughout his work. In the next he bequeaths to those who make the legacy inappropriate: foreigners cannot use his language nor can the starving use his medals. Here we find one of the reasons for his cynicism: he has been rejected in favour of a younger lover and, for the first time we wonder if he is literally dying. In all the stanzas there is variety of length of lines and tone and a unity of construction emphasised by the appeal "Thou Love" near the end of each.
The final stanza has him finishing the Will and accepting death in simple and direct language. When he says "your" beauties, we realise that the supposedly cruel woman has been listening all the time, receiving all the oblique affronts to herself and others. This makes a sudden dramatic shift as does the change of tone to the serious and startling image of a sundial in a grave: her graces will have no more use that that when he, or other lovers, die of her scorn as there will be no-one left to see her beauties. The poem is difficult but can be decoded perfectly with every meaning clear and the combination of emotion, reason and wit is apparent throughout. The pattern is challenging but satisfying and we leave with a sense of his - and our own - achievement.
Continue to John Donne page 3
To go to Home Page with list of texts click here
I have not explained every small reference as it could become tedious and part of the fun is working it out for yourself. Some religious poems will be discussed the next page: Donne (3)
Students frequently ask, when a course on Donne is proposed, about whether or not his poetry is difficult. The answer must be that he is, in some ways, challenging but that it is worth the effort and that, when the reader has made that effort, all will be clear. After studying a poem, it is possible to write a prose paraphrase which would lose much of the impact but which would preserve the sense. This is unlike the difficulty of, say, T. S. Eliot, where the meaning would still be open to discussion. By examinng the three poems cited above, we can see three levels of intellectual demand.
"Song" is the simplest in every way. It is the lyric to an existing tune and the assonance in the first lines adds to the musical quality:
Sweetest love, I do not goe,
For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
A fitter love for mee:
The long vowels are repeated and the technique continues in the last four lines. The language is almost monosyllabic and lulls the listener but there is a need for attention at the end, when he argues that leaving her is like a false death and will make the real one easier. The very mention of death (although it is also a euphemism for an erotic climax)adds a note of foreboding which counteracts his plea for calm. The reader is the third party, another listener, but one who has to try to piece out the situation just as if it was overheard in real life.
Stanza two is a sustained comparison between the speaker and the sun but, once again, it is not fully convincing. The lover may have more motive than the sun for a speedy return but he does not seem to be promising to come back by tomorrow. Each stanza has its change of pace and intonation and this one ends on an upward beat.
A vigorous exclamation: "O how feeble is man's power ..." starts the thread of thought that a person cannot extend a happy time but will, by his or her attitude (and presumably he means the woman here), make hard times seem even longer. The rhythm lengthens in these lines to emphasise their meaning:
And wee joyne to it our strength
And we teach it art and length.
The long vowels increase the effect and we notice that the argument and tone throughout are sustained whilst the examples change frequently.
In stanza four, the woman (probably his wife) becomes real: she is sighing and weeping, behaviour which he discourages with the conceit that she is wasting his soul (air in sighing) and blood (liquid in tears) by her expressed emotion. Yet there is another small knot in the line: she is "unkindly kind" a perplexing contradiction that she is true in spirit but cruel to him. We feel that she will not be brought round by the argument that, if she loved him, she would not use up his powers like this but she would, perhaps, be moved by the final compliment that she represents the best of him. The thought processes in this poem are less dense and complicated than in others but still require careful attention.
The speaker's mind is endlessly active whilst he continues in lyric mode and ends with a plea that she should not forecast any misfortune with her "divining heart" as fate may do what she dreads. Instead she should think of the separation as a sleep during which they keep each other alive in what is not, therefore, truly a parting. Despite the song-like quality of the poetry, the line of thought is always present and demands concentration but on an easier level, consistent with being literally a setting to music.
"The Flea"
Fleas, because of their ability to invade all parts of the human body, were widely used in erotic literature and so this aspect of the poem is not particularly original. But he reproduces an entire dramatic circumstance: the lovers are close together and a flea is hopping from one to the other. A single speaking male voice is realised from the start which continues to react to an evolving situation whilst the woman's full reactions are held back for two stanzas although we know she is reluctant to agree to his desires. Out of this emerges a passionate love poem with an unlikely, small and seemingly trivial starting point.
The opening words are direct and spontaneous: the flea has just bitten him and is now biting her : "Mark but this flea.." With a confident leap into conceit, he compares this to having sex in the mingling of bloods and points out that she has not lost her purity by its action. It is as though he knows the analogy is false and is trying it out for pleasure, which means that we, as onlookers, are awaiting her response. The tone changes throughout and the stanza ends on an apparently dejected note: "And this, alas, is more than we would doe." His thoughts are dense as he argues with whatever comes to mind that she should yield but the passion is direct.
At the beginning of stanza two she has raised her hand to squash the creature and so we know that she is resisting his pleas. His arguments now become preposterous yet remain sincere: he truly loves her and will say whatever is necessary to bring her round. If she kills the flea, she kils three living things, since they are united within it, but more extreme is his theme that they are already married inside it, making it holy in itself. The elevation of the flea to an object of beauty is hyperbolic but the love is true and rings through the diction and rhythms: "this/Our marriage bed and marriage temple is." It seems that her parents resist their marriage as she does also. The last three lines, all rhyming for emphasis, claim that, although she frequently kills him with her cruel resistance, she must not commit suicide (because her life is in it) or sacrilege (because it is sacred) by murdering the flea.
Between stanzas the woman kills the flea with unexpected violence: "Cruell and sodaine, hast thou since..." has only four beats to represent the speed of her action. The reader may smile at the fact she has not listened to his persuasions but may also be moved by the efforts he has made to convince her. The situation is changing constantly and the speaker responds to to it with agility of mind and wit. The rhyme scheme continues to be as complex as the thought threads and he now questions her as to why the flea was guilty. Clearly she is gloating over him and he reports her as saying that neither of them is worse off for the loss of blood. She has now become a real person, though in some ways secondary, and he finishes by trying to take her words seriously while turning them back on her: if it is true that nothing has been lost, then nothing will be lost when she yields to him. We notice that he says "when" not "if" and wonder if this is his supreme confidence or if she has been playing a part all along.
Overall, the poem is one side of a dramatic dialogue: the attacks and tone evoke the woman who then develops a personality other than that of the reluctant mistress. It is a triumph of the genre of poems persuading an unwilling woman, combining vigour of feeling with constantly evolving arguments. The situation has changed from the beginning to the end of the poem but we do not know how she will ultimately behave. The difficulty here lies in following the twists and turns of the persuasions with their extra tonal modulations and yet the poem responds to careful decoding and we do finish by knowing excatly what has been said and done. It is a virtuose piece which we can only applaud.
"The Will"
This poem is an extended riddle and requires a different level of reader response: it cannot be understood by reading each stanza through as it is written. The last three lines in each are the answer to the conundrum: why is the writer bequeathing that particular aspect of himself to the particular person or group? It is therefore tempting to read those lines first but better to read each stanza twice and work out the riddle if possible on the first reading and enjoying the wit on the second.
The persona is that of the newly cynical lover who appears at first to be soliloquising. He has just been disappointed in love and claims to be dying of grief, leaving a Will. Using the dramatic device of apostrophe [speaking directly to an object] he informs Love itself that he is giving away some attributes. In the first stanza the recipients are Argos, Love itself, Fame or Rumour, women, the sea, and the clue is revealed to be that he will give his eyes, tongue, ears and tears to those who have too much of them already. There is social satire in his wish to give Ambassadors his ears since they are always listening for gossip. Love will receive his blind eyes, a quick insult to the woman with whom he has fallen in love.
Each stanza is constructed in the same way, with a mixture of wit, satire and emotion. In stanza two he gives to those who cannot use the gift, such as his silence to any returning traveller - a sentiment with which we modern readers can wholly agree. He finds several examples of people or groups who fit his purpose and the poem represents Donne in his most virtuoso mode. There are many contemporary references which need checking but the general ideas are clear. In stanza three he gives to those who will despise his qualities just as his mistress has despised them. She has rejected him in the same way that soldiers will reject his modesty, since they always boast. Gamblers will refuse patience and so on. Stanza four has him giving back to those who gave him the attributes in the first place: his wit will go to his friends, his illness to doctors who made him ill (we note the neat insults slipped in wherever possible) and his poetry to inspiring Nature. He does refer to his own excesses as a cause of illness although he probably exaggerates those throughout his work. In the next he bequeaths to those who make the legacy inappropriate: foreigners cannot use his language nor can the starving use his medals. Here we find one of the reasons for his cynicism: he has been rejected in favour of a younger lover and, for the first time we wonder if he is literally dying. In all the stanzas there is variety of length of lines and tone and a unity of construction emphasised by the appeal "Thou Love" near the end of each.
The final stanza has him finishing the Will and accepting death in simple and direct language. When he says "your" beauties, we realise that the supposedly cruel woman has been listening all the time, receiving all the oblique affronts to herself and others. This makes a sudden dramatic shift as does the change of tone to the serious and startling image of a sundial in a grave: her graces will have no more use that that when he, or other lovers, die of her scorn as there will be no-one left to see her beauties. The poem is difficult but can be decoded perfectly with every meaning clear and the combination of emotion, reason and wit is apparent throughout. The pattern is challenging but satisfying and we leave with a sense of his - and our own - achievement.
Continue to John Donne page 3
To go to Home Page with list of texts click here
I have not explained every small reference as it could become tedious and part of the fun is working it out for yourself. Some religious poems will be discussed the next page: Donne (3)