John Donne, the founding father of the school of metaphysical poetry, revolted against the conventional Elizabethan poetry both in theme and style. Donne made a fine blending of passion and thought, emotion and intellect, imagination and reality, feeling and ratiocination in his poems. Let us discuss some of Donne’s representative poems to illustrate his art of fusing passion with thought that made him second to none in the realm of English verse.
“The Canonization” is one of the most famous poems of Donne in which we can trace the blending of emotion and love. Donne ardently believes in the value of love in life in its constancy and mutability. “The Canonization” establishes that lovers are saints of love. In this poem the poet says:
“Alas, alas, who injur’d by my love?
What merchant’s ships have any sings drown’d?”
The lover here says that his love-affair is a personal matter and asks how society is affected by it. These lines reveal simultaneously the force of intellect and emotion.
The poem “The Sun Rising” is another illustrating the peculiar blend and thought. The lover is undoubtedly highly passionate in his expression of love but it is expressed in an intellectual term and not merely in an emotional tone. The poet says:
“She’s all states, and all princes I,
Nothing else is,”
The peculiar mingling of feeling and thought finds its better outlet in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”. Here the speaker’s beloved is highly emotional who does not allow him to leave her even for a temporary period. But the lover is trying his best to pacific her emotion with some logical points and argument. The blending of emotion and reason is expressed in the use of Donne’s typical metaphysical conceit:
“If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two
They soul the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do”.
“Twicknam Garden” is a passionate love poem. It is a passionate outburst of sorrow expressing yearnings of unfulfilled love. It opens with passionate utterance:
“Blasted with sighs and surrounded with tears
Hither I come to seek the spring”.
To conclude, his love poetry deals with the infinite quality of passion. His greatness as a love poet lies in the fact that his experience of passion covers a wide range from its lowest depth to its highest reaches.
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