John Donne
Questions for Further Study
‘The Flea’
How does Donne create a mock serious tone in
the opening lines of the poem?
Fleas were a common humorous subject in the love poetry of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In one medieval Latin poem, the speaker envies the flea’s exploits on his mistress’s body, and longs to be changed into one! In a poem by the French poet Ronsard, the speaker longs to be transformed into a flea so he can bite his mistress’s teats during the day!
Donne’s poem carries on in this humorous and mock serious tradition, but adds the element of wit with his speaker’s ingenious but fallacious arguments. the sermonising and moralising tone of the opening, where the flea is used as an exemplum (as in a sermon, classical oration or homily) is especially humorous as this sort of rhetoric was generally used in the pulpit or in tracts to persuade people to a life of virtue. A tilt at the Puritans may be suspected!
The speaker shows good rhetorical skills in giving a concrete instance to illustrate his point, and continues to develop the argument, ingeniously referring everything to his initial example. He also shows debating skill in exploiting the reactions of the woman to his advantage, seemingly able to come up with a new and ingenious (not to say devious) argument for every attempt she makes to refute him. When the flea is finally killed, the woman might imagine she has won the argument. Instead the speaker uses her "triumph" to ensnare her in a clever piece of sophistry, arguing that loss of virginity is no more than a "flea bite" since in physical terms all that is involved in either is the loss of a little blood. The argument is similar to Falstaff’s (Henry IV Part One), where Falstaff argues that since honour cannot be described in physical terms it doesn’t exist. The speaker’s standpoint is amoral – all he is interested in is satisfying his desires. Unlike in "The Sunne Rising" he shows no concern for the woman – the sole occasion of the poem being her resistance. The language is deliberately coarse and full of sexual innuendo – it sounds obscene without actually being so - all the "u" and "s" sounds; sly references to erections, intercourse and pregnancy, post-coital triste and flaccidity "Finds’t not thyself nor mee the weaker now" and for a modern audience, oral sex…
"The Apparition"
Why does the speaker refer to the woman as a
"murderesse"?
This is probably one of the most famous and effective vituperative poems in the language. But the art of abuse is a long-established tradition –the Latin poets were extremely good at at and Catullus, Martial and Juvenal wrote scathing poems about the women (and men) who rejected them. What purpose drives the sustained and vicious innuendo here is mere conjecture – some may find the poem amusing, others merely distasteful. Is it possible to excuse the double standards in the poem by reference to the times, or to its dramatic qualities, or to literary tradition? Certainly, aspects such as the lover dying because of the woman’s rejection of him are part of the Petrarchan tradition. And the vivid scene setting and the dramatic qualities are something a modern readership can relate to. But the poem relates more to a mysoginist tradition which descends from the satires of Classical times, and perhaps from some of the more extreme anti-woman elements in the Christian tradition.
"Oh My Blacke Soule"
Comments:
The dominant imagery of the poem is of the colours associated with sin and death. Donne redefines these colours so that they come to stand for repentanc, and lead the sinner back from the brink of damnation to a hope of grace. The black of sinfulness becomes the black of mourning: the red – suggestive perhaps of carnal indulgence, becomes the red of shame, which leads by association to the blood of Christ which redeems all those who genuinely repent of their sins – hence it "dyes red soules to white". There is a deliberate pun on "dye, since Christ died on the Cross – but also suggesting some of the sins which may burden the speaker’s black soul, as the word "die" was used to refer to orgasm.
Grace comes from God, but no sinner who persists in his sin can hope for it – c.f. Claudius in Hamlet. How does one know one is genuine in one’s repentance? the speaker seems to be in doubt – grasping at hope in the 9th line, yet then realising that something is needed to start him on the path of repenctance. It is as if, despite the seriousness of his plight, he canot begin on his own. the poem then seems to offer a choice between the hard and easy paths to salvation. The final lines, however, resolve the dilemmas of much of the rest of the poem: the final image of the soul being "washed" is gentle and reassuring, and the poem reaches resolution with the image of whiteness as the speaker’s soul is cleansed through Christ and all casuistry is forgotten, as well as fear.
"Batter My Heart…"
What is the speaker demanding? Why?
For the speaker this time, the gentle and forgiving God is not enough – there is no reference to Christ in the poem except in the allusion to the Trinity – "three-personed God". The speaker is in such a hardened state of sin – helpless and captive to the Devil – that only the angry, jealous, vengeful and angry God will suffice to free him. God is personified ("three personed") as, first of all, a wrestler, throwing him down in order to make him upright, secondly as a blacksmith, violently smashing him to pieces in order to reforge him (i.e. he is like a flawed piece of steel which must be destroyed and re-made) and thirdly, in the concluding and most extreme image of the poem, as an abductor and ravisher, employing whatever force may be needed to capture, subdue and hence purify the speaker’s soul.
The violence of the imagery and language in this poem makes a convincing case for the agitation and distress of the subject, and persuades us of the gravity of his plight. We feel the situation as a personal spiritual crisis. There is a danger however that a modern reader may personalise the poem too much – in religious terms, the poem’s symbolism and allegory are equally if not more important. In these terms, the sexual imagery of the sestet may be seen in the context of the kind of scritural paraphrase and commentary which regarded the Song of Songs, for example, as an allegory of Christ and the Church. Imagery which seems to us outrageous and provocative may not have been seen as such in Donne’s time.
‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’
Comment on the tone and language of the
opening of the poem.