Donne's approach lacks the courtly, dignified manner we associate with the sonnets of, for instance, Spenser and Sidney. Though it is dangerous to generalize about any poet's style and attitude, a typical (and very famous) example from Spenser's work can be cited as an extreme contrast with Donne:

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away. (Amoretti 75).

Spenser idolizes his love: he is in awe of her, hoping to "immortalize" her by merging her name with Nature, so to speak, but then concluding that his verse is what will cause her memory to become permanent.

The way his mistress speaks to him makes her seem like a rarefied being, far above him and his earthly concerns:

"Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise."

Donne's technique is about as distant as one can imagine from this putting-on-a-pedestal attitude toward women. His style, and that of the "Metaphysical" poets in general, is to draw parallels between the most unlike things and then elaborately demonstrate that these things are not so unlike after all.

In "The Flea" the union of a man and a woman is likened to the mingling of their blood which has been sucked by the insect. This is unsentimental and uncourtly in the extreme. It also would have been considered obscene by many readers, especially given the play on words suggested by the line:

It sucked me first, and now sucks thee.

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printing the initial "s" resembled an "f."

One might ask if Donne is being disrespectful to women and to the entire concept of love, or if he is simply being realistic. It's difficult to fully dismiss the first of these two interpretations. Donne tends to have a sardonic, almost embittered attitude about sexuality, which seems all the more striking when one considers that he was a religious man.

His tone is quite different not only from the Elizabethan sonneteers but also from most of his contemporaries and successors who also exemplified the metaphysical trend. Marvell, for instance, in "To his Coy Mistress" and in "The Definition of Love" is light-hearted and playful, though he uses the same kinds of startling and unsentimental metaphors and highly intellectualized manner as Donne.

We can also see a contrast between Donne and the general Elizabethan manner—even when the earlier poets offer a deliberate denial of the courtly, rarefied conception of women that is more typical of their age. Think of Shakespeare's lines: