-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
John Donne’s poem “The Sun Rising” is satirical in a number of different respects. The poem opens, for instance, with explicitly satirical words, as the speaker calls the sun itself a “Busy old...
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
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...
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
One of the most distinctive traits about the poetry of John Donne is his inventiveness and thus his capacity to surprise. This ability to surprise his readers exists not only as one moves from...
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
Metaphysical poetry involves the elevation of a seemingly common item or action to an almost spiritual level of importance, and John Donne’s “The Flea” illustrates this definition perfectly. In...
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
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...
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
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 Songs and Sonnets
"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" is stuffed to the brim with literary devices, from the sound and rhythm of the poem to the way it represents ideas. Form/rhyme scheme: This poem is a formal...
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
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....
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
Ironically, Shakespeare both glorifies and immortalizes the "young man" in "Sonnet 18" through the poetic verse itself. This echos the theme "Sonnet 18" which is eternal beauty through verse....
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
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...
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
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...
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
The term “metaphysical poetry” was not a term used by Donne or by his contemporaries when referring to poems by him or other poets of his time. The term was first used, when referring to Donne, by...
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
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...
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
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...
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
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...
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
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...
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
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...
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
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's Songs and Sonnets
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...
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
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...
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
The beautiful love poem "The Good-Morrow," by Donne, traces the development of love between a man and woman. It begins with a description of the changes love brought to their lives. Love...
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
Many of the poems in John Donne’s Songs and Sonets [sic] collection deal with varying attitudes toward love. Certainly this is true of both “The Sun Rising” and “Love’s Alchemy.” The attitude...
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
Songs and Sonnets is a collection of metaphysical poetry by the young John Donne. It can be found online at http://www.luminarium.org/editions/songsandsonnets.htm. Enotes says, We do not know...
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
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...
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
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...
-
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets
“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...