John Donne's Songs and Sonnets

To satirize is to poke fun at or mock something. In this poem, the speaker mocks the power of the sun. This is similar, if not entirely the same, to Donne's speaker mocking of death in "Death Be...

Donne expresses his metaphysical love. I would say he does so “forcefully” only in the sense that he does so with passion and confidence. In the first stanza, the speaker speculates what he and the...

When John Donne writes "Whatever dies was not mixed equally," he draws upon views of nature which had their origins in the ancient world by way of the Middle Ages. The most important of these...

The word “wit,” in John Donne’s day, had many more connotations than it tends to have today. Whereas we tend to think today of “wit” as mental or verbal cleverness, in the time of Donne and...

There is a collection of poetry by English poet John Donne entitled Songs and Sonnets. Published in 1633, it mainly contains his love poetry, usually called "sonnets" in the interpretation of "love...

John Donne's "The Flea" is one of the cleverest propositions for intimate relations in all of literature. We can picture the speaker and his beloved sitting somewhere close together. The speaker...

The quotation refers to Donne's "genius" (in other words, his innate ability as a thinker and writer), his "temperament" (in other words, his psychological make-up), and his "learning" (in other...

Metaphysical poetry is characterized by its conceits, extended metaphors that often compare two very unlike things (they are stranger or more unusual than metaphors typically are), and by its...

This is a fine question. Although John Donne's love poetry is often read as if it is mostly secular (in other words, non-religious), a strong case can be made that most of the love poems are...

One way to write an interesting essay on the imagery used in John Donne’s poetry might be to choose a random sample of poems and a random sample of images. For instance, you might choose the first...

Metaphysical poetry is a term used to describe 17th Century poetry of such writers as John Donne and George Herbert. It is characterized as highly intellectual representations of intensely...

John Donne's poem, "Song" or "Goe, and Catche a Falling Starre" (to distinguish it from other poems of the same name) addresses things that are supernatural/superstitious and impossible....

Although detailed comparisons and contrasts between Donne’s Songs and Sonets [sic] and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi would take far more space than is available here, a few suggestions can...

The "good morrow" is always to be anticipated, for the speaker's love is so consuming that the promise of another day brings the prospect of more intense love. First, the speaker...

I have answered some of these questions to another poster here on enotes, so I will append the link below. http://www.enotes.com/john-donne/q-and-a/donne-metaphisical-poet-discuss-63681...

This quotation, which comes from Sir Herbert Grierson’s book Metaphysical Poems and Lyrics of the Seventeenth Century (1921), expresses a common reaction to many of Donne’s love poems. One...

This poem is really the poet addressing his remarks to the sun! Donne, ever the fanciful and imaginative poet, takes many impossibilities and uses them in this lyric poem to explain how much he...

“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” is one of John Donne’s most justly famous poems. Since this work has been analyzed in some detail elsewhere on enotes (see link below), I will try to stress...

One play by Shakespeare that definitely seems to resemble sonnet 146 in imagery and themes is Hamlet, although King Lear might also be a contender in this contest. Sonnet 146 is concerned with sin,...

John Donne is famous for the sheer variety and ingenuity of the imagery he uses in his poetry. Few poets have used imagery so unpredictably and inventively as Donne did. Donne’s poems rarely seem...

For me, the most distinctive aspect of John Donne's poetry is the disparity between his young life and his later life: his ability to combine religion and sex (albeit with controversy)! I remember...

Although John Donne is an immensely inventive and unpredictable poet, certain analytical techniques are often consistently useful in analyzing his poems. Take, for instance, his poem “The...