Love And Love In John Donne's Poetry

John Donne’s poetry is rife with analogous themes, which allows the reader’s mind to wrap itself around the poems in the most superlative way possible. Donne’s poems are alive with collective themes of paradoxes and fidelity. Fidelity, in Donne’s vision of humanity, also weaves aspects of love: be it physical or spiritual. His theology and religious dogmas are abundant in his poems as well as his conception of cosmic forces beyond our control.

“The Flea” portrays a young girl, fearful of losing her chastity, who is being sought by a cavalier young man. His efforts to beguile her are shattered when she destroys their “conjectural marriage” while he is in the throes of his seduction. She deters him by killing a flea, drunk on their intermingled blood after it has bitten both the fellow and the lady. The supposition of marriage is called off by the woman, suggesting a paradox in Donne’s time; women did not have the right to end a marriage, unlike a man who always had the prerogative to end a marriage. “Donne's manner of blurring boundaries between male and female has typically been regarded as a way of entrenching conventional gender roles and of suppressing the assertiveness of female sexuality” (Mintz, B Susannah. "Forget the Hee and Shee": Gender and Play in John Donne); this creates the paradoxical image of a cloud between male and female gender roles which can be seen in the following.

There is no marriage of course. He is trying to convince her to have sex with him, “a sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead: ” (line 6) based solely on the fact that their blood is already commingled in the flea so they might as well share other bodily fluids. This is in common with “The Triple Fool” in which Donne demoralizes himself for havi...

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...cept often that divine love is perfect love and serves as the only genuine model for all others. In another of Donne’s poems “The Canonization,” the poet writes, “Countries, towns, courts beg from above/A pattern of your love” (lines 44-45). This indicates that two lovers have such a perfect love that it serves as a paragon for the rest of the world.

John Donne and his poetry exemplify the type of verse that connects the themes of derisive cosmic forces out of our control, to love, to religion, to paradoxes within the poems, and the theme of fidelity. These themes are evident in “The Flea”, in which the woman kills the flea and the supposed marriage between the man and the woman, “The Hymn to God My God in My Sickness” in which Donne feels he is on the verge of dying, and “The Triple Fool” in which Donne feels depressed after rejecting his love in a sexual manner.