Rumination #3: I keep calling John Donne, Don Juan

I admit that after reading Norton’s introduction to John Donne I was intrigued by this rebellious, religious and sexual poet. The introduction makes a note, well many notes, about how revolutionary and fresh this author’s writing was; yet other than that I could have told you almost nothing about why John Donne was important. Thus, I consulted my best friend Google. Every once and a while we all need to accept a minor literary defeat and use our crutch, Google, to help us get started. Here is what I found and have used for my own interpretations of John Donne’s poetry.

John Donne is a metaphysical poet, but what exactly does this mean? My handy dandy dictionary describes a metaphysical poet as someone whose work is characterized by the use of complex and elaborate images or conceits, typically written in an intellectual form of argumentation to express emotional states. As if this wasn’t a little mind twist right here, I decided to find an alternative definition to help my analysis of John Donne’s poetry, which is that metaphysical poetry is characterized by verbal wit and excess, ingenious structure, irregular meter, colloquial language, elaborate imagery, and a drawing together of dissimilar ideas. Now I have to apologize for the mini vocabulary lesson that I took all of 60 seconds to read, but understanding the core of what we are reading really helped me to dissect this collection of poems.

With that being said, the first poem on our checklist for this week, “The Flea”, can be thought of as the most blatant form of metaphysical poetry. Following the definitions that I provided above, “The Flea” is an example of the most insignificant thing being turned into an elaborate symbol of love also known as sex. Can these lines be any more explicit? “Mark but this flea, and mark in this, How little that which thou deniest me is; Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee, And in this our two bloods mingled be” (1263). Let’s be honest, John Donne just created the best pick-up line ever by romanticizing a disgusting insect and its eventual death by smushing. He was able to tweak the symbolism of a flea from a bloodsucker and nuisance into a reason for connection between two people. If this is not an example of metaphysical poetry, I’m not really sure what is?

Besides, maybe another one of his poems entitled, “The Sun Rising”. This poem is more charming than the “The Flea”, although it is not at all more conservative than it. In “The Sun Rising” the lovers are in bed being awoken by the bright sun, who is hyperbolized into an old fool who has nothing better to do than to torment lover’s who wish to keep the dark moment in bed. The playful nature of this play furthermore helps to convey its genre. By the speaker insulting the sun and poking fun at daytime the speaker is referencing the Truths of the Age of Reason. Although, John Donne wrote during the Elizabethan era with such authors as Shakespeare and Ben Johnson before the Age of Enlightenment of the 18^th century, his keen interest in the sciences such as Alchemy and Cosmology mimic undertones of the future century. The last stanza, which states, “She is all states, and all prince I, Nothing else is. Princes do but play us; compared to this, All honor’s mimic, all wealth alchemy. Thou, sun, art half as happy as we, In that the world’s contracted thus; Thine ages asks ease, and since thy duties be To warm the world, that’s done in warming us .Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere” (1266). This stanza specifically encompasses these two writing structures, with some overlap. It is a metaphysical poem because of its structure and the way the subject is approached and changed to fit John Donne’s will, but it also possesses a strong scientific tone, in which things can only be proven through experimentation and knowledge.

I realize that I only dissected two of John Donne’s poems this week, so I am leaving this as a topic for class discussion: What other poems that we read from this collection can be clearly categorized as metaphysical?

And random side note, every time I say this character’s name, I cannot help but to mispronounce it as “Don Juan”. Maybe it’s just me?