spiritual image of "gold to aery thinness beat" as he describes how the loverssouls are connected, no matter how far apart their bodies:

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

But two stanzas later in the same poem he uses very earthy sexual imagery, comparing one of the hands of the compass to a human penis:

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Donne's imagery is startlingly original and combines the sacred and profane.

As is true of the writings of many good poets, John Donne’s imagery can be highly various and diverse.  Yet Donne’s poems, far more than those of many other writers, often seem especially unpredictable in the kinds of images they employ.  Donne was an innovator who extended the breadth and depth of the sorts of imagery that could be used in English poetry.  Whereas some of the poetry of the sixteenth century uses imagery in fairly conventional ways, Donne’s imagery is often not very conventional at all.

In his famous poem “The Flea,” for instance, Donne’s speaker compares the act of sex to a flea bite. While poems about fleas were not entirely original, certainly Donne’s is the most famous such poem ever written, particularly in English. Partly this is because of the unconventionality of some of the poem’s other imagery, as when the speaker says,

This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed and marriage temple is . . . (12-13)

Equally unusual is the poem’s later accusation that the woman who has just crushed the flea has “Purpled [her] nail in blood of innocence” (20). The examples just quoted illustrate several characteristic traits of Donne’s imagery, including its vividness, its cleverness, its wit, its inventiveness, and its capacity to surprise and even to shock.

Another famous trait of Donne’s use of imagery involves his ability to extend and develop a single image over many lines.  Such an image (called a “conceit”) is especially obvious in the final twelve lines of Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” in which the male speaker compares his spiritual link to his female beloved to the link that exists between the two legs of the kind of “compass” used for measurement and for drawing circles (25-36).

Donne’s imagery can also be suggestively allusive, as when, in “Elegy 19. To His Mistress Going to Bed,” he thrice uses imagery of standing to allude to a male’s erection (4, 12, 24).

Yet Donne could also use imagery that would have been instantly recognizable to his readers, even as he develops that imagery in striking and memorable ways.  Thus, it was common during Donne’s period to imagine Truth or Reason as residing at the top of a mountain, but it was Donne who breathed great life into that image by writing (in “Satire 3),

. . . On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must, and about must go,
And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so . . . . (79-82)

Here, the repeated “about must, and about must” mimics the very action it describes, so that the imagery is memorable in part because it is so literally energetic.  Donne’s images are almost always vital and striking; one senses that one is dealing with a poet who saw life and the world freshly for himself, and who could ingeniously communicate that kind of fresh, vivid vision to others.

There are two notable points to consider about Donne's use of imagery. First, he broke the rules of classical imagery usage, he and other metaphysical poets. This means that Donne did not avail himself of the imagery readily at hand in Classical allusion (allusion: an object, expression, symbol, persona that encapsulates some great image that would otherwise require a lengthy explanation; e.g., Herculean power). Donne did not use Classical imagery from Classical allusions.

Second, Donne did use imagery that was fresh and new based as it was upon the new revelations of the sciences. So rather than say he overworked Classical allusion imagery, it can be said that Donne developed new imagery based upon the everyday images within everyday happenings, objects and events as they derived from the new fields of science.

The imagery of John Donne varies throughout his writing life. In the beginning, Donne's imagery was meant as a metaphor for the satires which he wrote regarding common Elizabethan topics. These topics (politics, mediocrity in writing, and arrogant court people) were described with language that typically alluded to or blatantly depicted these topics with sickness and animal's manure.

After facing multiple personal conflicts (illness, financial problems, and deaths, Donne's poetry changed. The imagery took on a more calm and sedate feeling.

Renowned for his conceits (use of an extended metaphor which compares to completely different things into a singular idea), Donne was the master of imagery. One example of Donne's use of conceit appears in his poem "The Flea". Donne uses the biting and blood sucking of a flea to describe the union of a marriage.

That being said, Donne's imagery was the unchanging part of his poetry. While the message and satirised style of his early years is far from the more personal and religious works later, Donne's use of imagery always remained prominent.

John Donne's poetry is notable for the following types of focused imagery that go beyond the natural order:

1.  Union of the male and female (above and beyond the physical)

2.  Union of the human and God (above and beyond sin and guilt)

3.  Elaborate and extended metaphors that are very concentrated (focused) and intellectual

4.  Variety of conceits: alchemy, astronomy, horticulture, navigation, neo-platonism, military, micro/macrocosm, law, mathematics

5.  Distinct subject matter: analogies, conceits, pseudo-arguments, varied tone, idioms that transcend ordinary langauge, rough meter, paradoxes, and original wit

6.  Lack of traditional, mythical or Biblical allusions, similes, metaphors, or meter