John Donne’s Poetic Philosophy of Love

John Donnes Poetic Philosophy of Love For the enormously multiform and vexed John Donne (1572-1631), the one(a) in whom exclusively contraries meet, (Holy Sonnet 18), flavor was sleep togetherthe make do of women in his early life, then the sexual chicane of his wife (Ann More), and fin onlyy the love of God. All other aspects of his experience apart from love, it seems, were in effect(p) 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 ubiquitousness of love in Donnes life launched him on a jaunt of exploration and disco very(prenominal). He sought to comprehend and to experience love in every respect, both theoretically and practically. As a self name investigator, he controld love from every conceivable angle, tested its hypotheses, experienced its joys, and embraced its sorrows. As Joan Bennett said, Donnes poetry is the work of one who has tasted every fr uit in loves orchard. . . Combining his love for love and his love for ideas, Donne became loves philosopher/poet or poet/philosopher.In the context of his poetry, both deject and sacred, Donne presents his experience and experiments, his machinations and imaginations, to the highest degree love. Some believe that Donne was indeed an accomplished philosopher of erotic ecstasy (Perry 2), just now such a judgment seems to be too much. Louis Martz notes that Donnes love-poems upshot for their basic theme the enigma of the ready of love in a physical world dominated by change and death. The problem is discuss in dozens of different ways, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, sometimes by asserting the immortality of love, sometimes by declaring the futility of love.Donne was not an accomplished philosopher of eroticism per se, but rather a psychological poet who philosophized about love, sometimes playfully, sometimes seriously. The question, thus, arises as to the nature and content of Donnes philosophy of love serendipitously verbalised in his sacred and profane poetry. I will also contend that this particular philosophical perspective in Donne established the basis for the allude alliance between his profane and sacred poetry in which sacred and sexual themes are closely linked and intermeshed.After briefly touching on the intellectual atmosphere in which Donne worked, I will proceed to examine the Ovidian and Petrarchan traditions in Donnes amatory lyrics, and their respective contributions to his philosophy of love. The subject of Petrarchism was love, of course, ruttish and spiritual love conceived as a noble way of life, and the buff as an aristocrat of feeling (Guss 49). Donnes development in his profane poetry of the nobility and aristocracy of Petrarchan love was by means of these native themes including, . . . he proem, the initiation of love The Good Morrow , the complaint against the ladys obduracy Twickenham Garden, the expressi on of sorrow at parting The dismission, the remonstrance against the god Love Loves Exchange, the elegy on the ladys death A Nocturnal upon St. Lucys Day, be the terseest day, and the renunciation of love Farewell to Love. Other leafy vegetable themes are the ladys eyes, her hair, her illness The Fever, the dream The hallucination, the token A Jet Ring Sent, the anniversary of love The Anniversary, and the definition of love Negative Love.How can a spell and a woman achieve a love which is not based on rank sensuality, and yet which recognizes human physicality and ascribes a proper role and function to the eubstance? How can a man and woman love one another with deep spiritual intensity and soulful devotion, and yet at the same time stop short of romantic or emotional idolatry? How can both components of man physical structure and soulbe brought together into a happy deduction to create a love that eschews the problems of Ovidian immorality and Petrarchan idolatry, but is rather dictate and rightly tenacious?The answers to these questions and the resolution of these tensions are found in Donnes concept of idealized love generated largely under the influence of a Christian Platonism which establishes the sine qua non of his philosophy of love. It is a philosophy of love that seeks to balance the roles and establish right relations between both body and soul. Donnes perspective is an attempt at integration, at wholeness, a melodic phrase at the reconciliation of opposing, dialectical forces.It seems that ever since the fall of humanity, life has been characterized by division and fragmentation God vs. man, heaven vs. earth, man vs. woman, body vs. soul, fill vs. contemplation, theory vs. practice, and so on. Donne seeks to heal and harmonize at least one aspect of a divided world his view is body and soul, not body or soul. He defines and describes the component parts of love in light of the comprehensive nature of humanity. His position would see m to answer the questions and split up the tensions created by the Ovidian and Petrarchan traditions in his love poetry.It would avoid the Ovidian problem of sexual immorality, and Petrarchan problem of romantic idolatry. Love is powerful, and it may very well abuse the body or the soul in its quest for satisfaction. But it can be rightly ordered as well. Donnes outlook finds an appropriate place for both the body and the soul in a rightly ordered love. When coupled with his devotional poetry, the pattern indeed becomes complete, for it is in the love of God, which is the highest of all love, that human love itself finds its meaning and final reference point.If it is full-strength that all human love has as its source and meaning in the very love of God, then there must be a reciprocative relationship between these two forms of love, the infinite and the finite. Gods love validates human love, and human love reflects and images Gods. There is an intimate connection between love b oth human and divine. This would certainly be true in Donnes Christian Platonism in which all things on earth, including human love, are a reflection of and point to things in heaven.