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Analyzing the Poetry of John Donne

Analyzing the Poetry of John Donne

John Donne’s poetry is characterized by complex imagery and irregularity. In his four pieces of poetry, Song, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, Meditation 17, and Death Be Not Proud, Donne effortlessly displays the traits of a metaphysical poet. He uses a variety of arguments in all of his work. He also incorporates many significant comparisons in his poems. Finally, Donne includes a fine use of language in all of his poetry. Overall, John Donne enlists all of the conventions of a metaphysical poet in his prose, meditation and poems.

John Donne uses a great variety of arguments in all of his work. In “Death Be Not Proud,” Donne expresses his view that death is not something feared, as it often is, and has been, since the beginning of time. He points out the weaknesses of death and, with confidence, declares his victory over it by means of his lack of respect and fear for its implications. The basis of his argument is to show the weakness of death in his poem. For instance:

…Death be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, not yet canst thou kill me…

(Donne, “Death Be Not Proud” 1-4)

He goes on to describe death as a mere transition, which does not serve as an end, but instead, a new awakening to an eternal afterlife.

Throughout Donne’s poetry, he incorporates many significant comparisons. In A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, Donne expresses his feelings about his wife with a great use of comparisons. The metaphors of earthquakes in line 9, and celestial spheres, line 11, portray a great understanding of his relationship with specific details about the magnitude of love. Donne uses these to explain how two different, and gigantic events can either bring “harms and fears”, or “innocence”. The contrast between the magnitude of earthquakes and celestial trepidation is compared to the love between two bodies and two soles. While the early language of the poem relates lover’s souls as one, the possibility of separate bodies, yet a single mixed soul is described:

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fixed root, makes no show

To move, but doth, if th’ other do.



And though...

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