The Poet. John Donne’s poetry, are love poems. Regardless of their religious implications, they all root down to his feelings to the woman he loves and the turmoil that plagues him.
His brother was sent to prison for giving refuge to a catholic priest, and died of fever while he was in prison, resulting for John Donne to question his faith. In terms of his poetry, he presents problems which in the end, remain unresolved. Many facets of his life revealed his Catholic upbringing, regardless of the many reasons and trials in his life that has made him pessimistic.He also fell in love and married secretly. To Anne Moore who was the daughter of a noble and influential man. They were able to marry with the help of friends but were also thrown into prison as he was, when his wife’s father found out.
He did not stay there too long and he was also accepted by his in-law due to lack of choice. But by then, he was also forfeited the hopes of promotion in politics as he was terminated from the office. John Donne was born to a Catholic family at the time when the society was anti-Catholic. His poems are about love, death and of seeming strength.His first poem “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” or in simple words, “a final goodbye that prohibits grieving” talks about death as something not to be sad for the final ending it seems to entail. He talks about death and people’s views that when a person passes away, he will no longer be there to listen to us nor exist.
But he says that when a person dies, we should not grieve and instead tell that person of our love. The works. As people die and those who are left say goodbye, some say that they are gone and feel bad about it.But then he says that it is not so. And we should not make too much fuss about them dying. He says that love does not end simply because the object of its affections is no longer there, but rather it will live on forever for it is not where love originated.
By the fifth stanza of his poem, I realized that the real gist is his love for his woman. He tells her that their souls are joined by things that go beyond the worldly explanations and that regardless of the fact that he must leave, they must endure it and that may it not let their hearts go different ways.But if it just so happens that their hearts will divide, then he says that much as it hurts him so, then he just might have to heed his own advice that he himself has given off in his first verses. In his second poem, “The Funeral”, he expressed grave disillusionment.
He said that anyone who would want to cover or protect him should not be afraid. That person must also not ask a lot, implying that it will be better to know nothing at all about his affairs. Donne also said that no one should try to go beyond the walls that he has erected around him because it is his way of self-preservation.He talked about limbs and things that can be literally taken as a description of a corpse, but when analyzed, can be understood as something referring to his person. When he talked about tissues falling off his brain, I believe that what he really meant was when he gives a part of himself and that part is received and is accepted; it will become better and flourish, make him whole again.
He also says that it will make everything about him right again, put his life back into perspective. Again, he talked about the woman he loves and how she is the object of his desires, and also, pain.He also seems to think that it was her fault that he got into prison, which in a way she was. But then, in addition to feeling let down, he also implies that he is not sure about how she feels about him, or for how much her love for him will withstand everything.
He talks about loving her so much that he accepts that it might be the end of him. Just as well, he said that if she is willing to give him up and sacrifice him, as though burying him away from her thoughts, then it is at some point, brave for him to let go of her, too. Learn to forget her.Donne is a sad man who uses death as an analogy of the turmoil inside his head and the beatings his heart was enduring. From Donne’s The Funeral, “Have from a better brain, Can better do 't ; except she meant that I By this should know my pain, As prisoners then are manacled, when they're condemn'd to die. ” This could have been written in remembrance of his years in prison.
He is actually pretty vague in his work. The metaphors are too deep that the degree of ambiguity is so high. The “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” is very constant with the meter. The lines vary meters of 7, 8 or 9 counts.But he used a free meter in “The Funeral”. Both poems used internal/end rhymes.
The pattern were similar to that of Shakespeare’s sonnets of abab cdcd and so on, except that Donne’s poems are longer and do not classify as sonnets. Final words. We could conclude that the works of Donne embodies his outlook in life. He is a very emotional person and his works is very much more a personification of the author himself, his feelings, his emotions, his fears. Death is a great concern of the author and is given much important in his poems. He is more on the emotional meaning of death is about both the positive and negative side of it.
