John Donne's Songs and Sonnets by John Donne

We do not know for sure when John Donne wrote his love poetry, because although it circulated in manuscripts during his lifetime, it was not published until two years after his death in Songs and Sonnets (1633). Confusingly, the collection does not contain sonnets as one would typically define them; rather, during Donne’s time the term was used more loosely to mean “love lyric.” Most likely he wrote many of them in the 1590s, before he married Anne More in 1601, and then some of the more serious love poems after his marriage. In a letter to a friend, Donne distinguished “Jack Done,” the persona of these love poems, from “Dr. John Donne,” the religious man who became Dean of St....