How in Donne’s poetry the spiritual
and sexual serve not as forces of antagonism rather complementary each other
John Donne was known as the founder of the
Metaphysical Poets, a term created by Samuel Johnson, an eighteenth-century
English essayist, poet, and philosopher. The loosely associated group also
includes George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, and John Cleveland.
The Metaphysical Poets are known for their ability to startle the reader and
coax new perspective through paradoxical images, subtle argument, inventive
syntax, and imagery from art, philosophy, and religion using an extended
metaphor known as a conceit. Donne reached beyond the rational and hierarchical
structures of the seventeenth century with his exacting and ingenious conceits,
advancing the exploratory spirit of his time.
We find about Donne that life was
love—the love of women in his early life, then the love of his wife, and
finally the love of God. All other aspects of his experience apart from love,
it
seems, were just
details. Love was the supreme concern of his mind, the preoccupation of his
heart, the focus of his experience, and the subject of his poetry. The
centrality and omnipresence of love in Donne’s life launched him on a journey
of exploration and discovery. He sought to comprehend and to experience love in
every respect, both theoretically and practically. As a self-appointed
investigator, he examined love from every conceivable angle, tested its
hypotheses, experienced its joys, and embraced its sorrows. Combining his love
for love and his love for ideas, Donne became love’s Philosopher. In the
context of his poetry, both profane and sacred, Donne presents his experience
and experiments, his machinations and imaginations, about love.
John Donne’s method of sexual imagery looks
into religious and spiritual contexts. The main features of Donne’s technique
arise from his notion of ecstasy. Donne’s ecstasy describes how the souls of
two lovers leave their bodies during their physical union and mix together
before returning to their original bodies. This experience purifies each of the
lovers and grants them spiritual fulfillment. Writers such as Marsilio Ficino,
St. Teresa of Avila, and others have proposed similar ideas regarding the
transformative experience that sex has on the soul. These ideas directly
collide with the beliefs of some schools of thought, like Stoicism, where
sensual experiences are disfavored compared to the power of order and reason in
discovering spiritual truth. A discussion of the various perspectives on
ecstasy is followed by a brief examination of how the notion especially
pervades three of Donne’s works: “Holy
Sonnet XIV,” and “The Good-Morrow.”
Donne has a habit of combining sexual and
spiritual imagery, as can be seen in a few of his Holy Sonnets and other poems
like “The Ecstasy.” The juxtaposition of both sexual and spiritual
Language may seem strange at first, but this pairing
actually makes sense once the reader is familiar with Donne’s concept of
ecstasy. While some may consider John Donne’s technique of pairing sexual
language with spiritual subject matter as paradoxical, one may argue that this
technique serves a logical purpose in illustrating Donne’s notion of ecstasy,
which describes sexual gratification and spiritual fulfillment as two
concurring phenomena.
The
inward union of the body and soul of man is achieved through the outward union
of man and woman. Body and soul remain at odds within a person until he loves
another person, for the reason that his soul realizes and knows itself through
the experience of love. Love is a state in which flesh, become subordinate or
servant to the psyche, terminates its suppression of soul. During love, the
soul is ecstatically freed from the body, transplanted into a richer soil,
which is the soul of the other person, and thereby gains new strength and
knowledge about itself in relation to its body. When at the termination of
love’s ecstasy, the soul repairs to its body, the self is no longer a merely
carnal or physical being, but a synthesis permitted by love’s potentiating of
the soul.
Donne’s
notion of ecstasy may prove to be morally troublesome for traditional
philosophies such as Stoicism. The Stoics believe the highest virtues are
attained through self-control and avoidance of purely sensual experiences. They
believe truth and beauty can be found through reason alone. To suggest to the
Stoics that the pleasure of sexual experience can lead to spiritual truth would
be to undermine their view of virtue. Through mutual love, two lovers achieve
that
Perfect fusion of souls that makes them one—neither
he nor she, but both he and she in one spiritual union.
Sexual
union is seen as a path to spiritual harmony because of the relationship
dynamic that has been established between the body and the soul. Along with
Donne and Ficino, another historical figure who has been known to promote
similar ideas regarding the ecstasy of the body/soul is Saint Teresa of Avila.
John Donne's Songs and Sonnets do not describe a single unchanging
view of love; they express a wide variety of emotions and attitudes, as if
Donne himself were trying to define his experience of love through his poetry.
Love can be an experience of the body, the soul, or both; it can be a religious
experience, or merely a sensual one, and it can give rise to emotions ranging
from ecstasy to despair. Taking any one poem in isolation will give us a
limited view of Donne's attitude to love, but treating each poem as part of a
totality of experience, represented by all the Songs and Sonnets, it
gives us an insight into the complex range of experiences that can be grouped
under the single heading 'Love'.
Modern
readers, especially those of either sex who have any degree of feminist
sensibility, will most likely find John Donne's misogynistic verse tiresome
sophistry. The question remains as to whether those poems of his which continue
in the Petrarch an tradition exculpate him to any extent. The most celebrated
of Donne's amorous poems (and one of the most esoteric) is "A Valediction:
Forbidding Mourning," which Donne's biographer tells us was composed
before he made a trip to the Continent. (This poem demonstrates also the price
that Donne pays for his verbal game-playing; this love poem, like most of
Donne's poetry, is virtually devoid of lyrical charm. As Coleridge cogently
observed, Donne's verse "does not sing.") Written in tetrameter
Quatrains, the poem is a farewell, but one that
calls for no weeping. The persona says to her that their separation should be
as unobtrusive as the passing of a holy man, so quiet that the rest of the
world would not know when body and spirit had separated. The language of the
church provides him with his metaphor. Just as in "The Canonization,"
in which the lover defends himself for his removal from the world by saying
that he and his beloved are saints to love, Donne has his persona claim that he
and his beloved are the clergy, and making public their marital happiness with
a tearful embarkation would be a desecrating of their love. So Donne’s poetry relates
with each other as sexual and spiritual and not serve as a force of antagonism.
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