John Donne's Poetic Philosophy of Love

[Pages:10]John Donne's Poetic Philosophy of Love By Dr. David Naugle

Stand still, and I will read to thee, A lecture, love, in love's philosophy.

--John Donne, "Lecture upon the Shadow"

For the enormously complex and vexed John Donne (1572-1631), the one in

whom all "contraries meet," (Holy Sonnet 18), life was love--the love of women in his

early life, then the love of his wife (Ann More), and finally the love of God. All other as-

pects of his experience apart from love, it seems, were just details. Love was the

supreme concern of his mind, the preoccupation of his heart, the focus of his experi-

ence, and the subject of his poetry. The centrality and omnipresence of love in Donne's

life launched him on a journey of exploration and discovery. He sought to comprehend

and to experience love in every respect, both theoretically and practically. As a self-

appointed investigator, he examined love from every conceivable angle, tested its

hypotheses, experienced its joys, and embraced its sorrows. As Joan Bennett said,

Donne's poetry is "the work of one who has tasted every fruit in love's orchard. . ."

(134).

Combining his love for love and his love for ideas, Donne became love's

philosopher/poet or poet/philosopher. In the context of his poetry, both profane and

sacred, Donne presents his experience and experiments, his machinations and

imaginations, about love.1 Some believe that Donne was indeed "an accomplished

1 Louis Martz notes that "Donne's love-poems take for their basic theme the problem of the place of love in a physical world dominated by change and death. The problem is broached in dozens of different ways, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, sometimes by asserting the immortality of love, sometimes by declaring the futility of love" (169). In any case, the overwhelming question for Donne, according to Martz, was "what is the nature of love, what is the ultimate ground of love's being?" (172). N. J. C. Andreasen has devoted a whole book to the subject of Donne's philosophy of love in which he deals with what he called "the central problem in Donne's love poetry: the nature of love dramatized in each poem and the attitude expressed by the poem toward that kind of love and toward the nature and purpose of love in general" (13).

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philosopher of erotic ecstasy" (Perry 2), but such a judgment seems to be too much. T.

S. Eliot's observations about Donne in this regard are more exact.

In his whole temper, indeed, Donne is the antithesis of the scholastic, of the

mystic and of the philosopher system maker. . . . Perhaps one reason why

Donne has appealed so powerfully to the recent time is that there is in his poetry

hardly any attempt at organisation; rather a puzzled and humorous shuffling of

the pieces. . . . His attitude towards philosophic notions in his poetry may be put

by saying that he was more interested in ideas themselves as objects than in the

truth of ideas. . . . The usual course for Donne is not to pursue the meaning of

the idea, but to arrest it, to play catlike with it, to develop it dialectically, to extract

every minim of the emotion suspended in it (8, 11, 12-13).

Donne was not an accomplished philosopher of eroticism per se, but rather a

psychological poet who philosophized about love, sometimes playfully, sometimes

seriously.2 The question, thus, arises as to the nature and content of Donne's philoso-

phy of love serendipitously expressed in his sacred and profane poetry. In this paper I

will attempt to answer this question by arguing that the Ovidian and Petrarchan tradi-

tions of erotic love poetry (upon which Donne drew in his own compositions) which raise

2 Contrariwise, A. J. Smith writes that "The poems themselves show him consciously formalizing his experience [of love] in a precise scholastic way" (131). On the other hand, N. J. C. Andreasen views Donne as "a great poet and psychologist rather than a great philosopher" (19). Furthermore, this same critic writes that ". . . determining whether Donne is being satiric or serious [in his poetry] is so often a problem" (12); and C. S. Lewis would seem to agree for he says that "in one sense these poems are not serious at all. Poem after poem consists of extravagant conceits woven into the preposterous semblance of an argument. The preposterousness is the point. Donne intends to take your breath away by the combined subtlety and impudence of the steps that lead to his conclusion." On the other hand, "The effect of all these poems is somehow serious. `Serious' indeed is the only word. Seldom profound in thought, not always passionate in feeling, they are none the less the very opposite of gay. It is as though Donne performed in deepest depression those gymnastics which are usually a sign of intellectual high spirits" (118-119).

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poignant questions, and create profound tensions, find answers and resolutions in Donne's own Christian Platonism which constituted his fundamental outlook and engendered his philosophy of love. I will also argue that this particular philosophical perspective in Donne established the basis for the intimate connection between his profane and sacred poetry in which religious 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 Donne's amatory lyrics, and their respective contributions to his philosophy of love.

No doubt the time in which Donne lived and worked was at an intellectual crossroads. The tectonic plates undergirding Western civilization were shifting, and Donne, who possessed "the mind of a man of his own time" (Eliot 8), recognized the magnitude of the transformation taking place from medievalism to modernity. As he put it most famously in "An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary,"

And new philosophy calls all in doubt The element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and th' earth, and no man's wit Can well direct him, where to look for it. And freely men confess, that this world's spent, When in the planets, and the firmament They seek so many new; they see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies. `Tis all in pieces all coherence gone; All just supply, and all relation: (lines 205-214).3

3 Mary Paton Ramsay in her discussion of "Donne's Relation to Philosophy" (1931) believes that in composing his poetry, Donne drew on two sources for inspiration, namely his own intellectual genius, and the patterns of thought current in his own time. In her estimation, this meant medieval scholasticism which imparted to his work its distinctive "metaphysical" substance. She also asserts that as Dante's work

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Within the ebb and flow of these shifting cultural patterns, Donne, operating

within a generally Christian framework, drew on deeply ingrained and then popular

traditions in the composition of his love poetry. Andreasen explains.

. . . a sizable number of Donne's poems can with some fairness be seen as

subtypes within three general categories, each of which concentrates on a par-

ticular literary tradition. One group, those poems which treat love cynically or see

it as limited to sexual attraction, follows the Ovidian tradition. Although Donne is

sometimes said to be anti-Petrarchan, mostly because of the anti-idealism which

characterizes his Ovidian poems, there is another group of poems . . . which

crowns medieval scholastic philosophy as its ultimate literary expression, so "the metaphysical poetry of Donne and his period was born in its disintegration and decline as a universal mode of thought" (109). The decline of scholasticism and the medieval, essentially Christian, world view was brought about by a "new philosophy" which according to Ramsay and other critics was "the new physical science . . . the discoveries of Copernicus and others" (111). ". . . the displacement of the earth from the centre of the material universe, and a new conception of natural science, might well seem to strike at the heart" (112) of the standard medieval Christian conception of reality. This raises the important question about Donne's relationship to medievalism: did he remain with it, modify it, or break with it entirely. Opinions seem to be mixed. Ramsay in her dissertation (Les doctrines m?di?vales chez Donne, 1917) argues that Donne was "a true child of the Middle Ages and that he was to be understood only by tracing his origins to their medieval sources" (Moloney 210). On the other hand, critic W. J. Courthope suggests that Donne abandoned medieval scholasticism entirely, and finds himself tempest tossed by the new science without any kind of intellectual moorings (Ibid.). Moloney himself makes the rather radical suggestion that Donne "did break finally and irretrievably with his medieval heritage . . . and casts his lot with the [pagan] naturalism of the new age" (211). This naturalism was not just an acceptance of new scientific findings, but apparently a substantive change in metaphysics. Though he says that Donne broke with his medieval background, his shift in paradigms was ultimately "unsuccessful" since he was "so much the medievalist, yet so deeply and characteristically modern" (212). This cleavage can be traced, he believes, in his work. Charles Monroe Coffin in his work John Donne and the New Philosophy (1958) believes that he "does not fit into classifications, and so personal is his attitude toward any subject that we cannot associate him with specific and well-defined currents of opinion or schools of thought." For Donne, he says, "moral life is kaleidoscopic." (294). I think that Donne was indeed a confusion of flavors-- theistic, naturalistic, dogmatic, skeptic, medieval and modern--but essentially he was one whose central, sustaining orientation was originally (Roman Catholic) and finally (Protestant/Anglican) Christian.

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draw on Petrarchism and portray a more impassioned and romantic love. And finally there is a group which reflects the doctrines of Christian Platonism, although in this case the tradition upon which Donne draws is perhaps more philosophical than literary. But whenever he writes, Donne assumes an audience which accepts Christian teachings about love, and consequently its ethic indirectly informs nearly all his love poems, even the pagan Ovidian ones, and gives them their unifying and governing principle (17). Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 B. C. - A. D. 18) was, of course, the racy Roman writer known for his explorations of erotic love especially in his works Amores, Ars Amatoria, and Remedia Amoris. Though his works were suppressed and only read surreptitiously during the medieval Christian era, Ovid experienced a rebirth in the Renaissance, especially in Chaucer and Gower. Also the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries became England's Ovidian age when Marlowe, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne (among others) borrowed lines, situations, and themes from the celebrated Augustan poet (Drabble 726). Ovid's writings on love and lust are risqu?, satirical, cynical and ironic. In the several works mentioned above (which were the most influential on Donne), Ovid presents a threefold program of love. "First, to explain how love can be won [by lies and deception]; second, to treat the more difficult problem of how love can be kept once it has been won [by humiliation and self-deception]; and third, to suggest ways in which love can be remedied when the lover is unsuccessful or disillusioned [strength of will and reason]" (Andreasen 47). J. B. Leishman in his volume on Donne entitled The Monarch of Wit (1965) has, like many, recognized the use Donne made of Ovid's amatory agenda, especially in his Elegies and in selected poems in the Songs and Sonnets. Noting that Donne's predecessors had drawn on themes in classical mythology and legend, and upon Ovid's Metamorphoses, Leishman argues that Donne purposed to do something much more daring and original: "he proceeded to

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reproduce something of the tone, the situations and the cynical wit of Ovid's Amores." He details his use of Ovid in this manner.

There are, it is true, great differences in style: the smooth progression, the details seldom in themselves extravagant, the crackling fire of epigram which distinguished Ovid's Amores are very different from the drama, the extravagance, the vivid realism, the subtle analogies and the syllogistic arguments of Donne. What Donne has caught are the impudence and insolence and the assumptions about the true nature and end of love and the proper attitude to husbands (56).4 Eschewing the notion that these poems are in any sense autobiographical, or that they convey anything of "Donne's own conduct, morals and opinions" (58), Leishman finds evidence of Ovid's influence in numerous poems. These texts convey typical Ovidian themes including triangular situations between poet, mistress and husband, secret signs exchanged between lover and beloved, personal training in the theory and practice of love, the virtue of inconstancy, the vice of fidelity, and so on. One example Leishman develops is Donne's elegy entitled "Jealousy" (drawn from Ovid's Amores I. IV. 15-31, 51-54) in which the wife, hypothetically, would be unable to weep at the death of her husband, but would rejoice in his demise since it provides her with erotic freedom; on the other hand she has wept over his mad jealousy engendered by her amatory liaisons with the poet the solution to which was for them to carry on their affair in another location where they could resume their mockery of him. If he should die, Thou wouldst not weep, but jolly, and frolic be, As a slave, which tomorrow should be free; Yet weep'st thou, when thou seest him hungerly 4 A bit later on Leishman adds that "Donne seems to have been the first to perceive what novel, surprising and shocking effects might be produced by exploiting the more realistic and naturalist Ovid of the Amores," especially in his Elegies (58).

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Swallow his own death, heart's bane jealousy (Carey 14). From the Songs and Sonnets, Leishman selects Donne's poem "The Indifferent" as illustrative of another Ovidian theme based on the latter's work Amores II. IV. In the Fourth Elegy of the Second Book, Ovid declares that he is addicted to love, and that his erotic weakness is not kindled by desirable feminine traits, but rather by the simple fact that a woman is a woman. Whatever qualities she possesses are the very reasons for seeking to pursue and conquer her. Donne captures this attitude of indifference toward womanizing, reminiscent of Don Giovanni's mindset in Mozart's operatic masterpiece, in the first stanza of the text. I can love both fair and brown, Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays, Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and betrays, Her whom the country formed, and whom the town, Her who believes, and her who tries, Her who still weeps with spongy eyes, And her who is dry cork, and never cries; I can love her, and her, and you and you, I can love any, so she be not true (Carey 93). Here and elsewhere, Donne capitalizes on "the witty depravity, the entirely unidealized and unspiritualized sensuality, of Ovid, . . ." (Leishman 149). He combines Ovidian themes with aspects of his own poetic personality and scholastic sensibility in many other "promiscuity poems" (Stampfer 65-83) which makes Donne appear to be the forerunner and advocate of a sexual libertarianism.5 Certainly the Ovidian component in

5 Stampfer identifies the following as Donne's "promiscuity poems." "Go and Catch a Falling Star," "Woman's Constancy," "Love's Usury," "Community," "Confined Love," and "Love's Diet." Leishman explicates these texts as exemplars of Ovid's influence on Donne: "Jealousy," 58ff; "Nature's lay idiot," 62ff; "The Perfume," 63ff; "His Parting from her," 65ff; "The Expostulation," 66ff. In the Songs and Sonnets, Leishman

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his love poetry portrays ". . . a boy of high theoretical daring, for all his chaste, windy bravura, waving his boyish sword in all directions as he treads gingerly forward. Only the doctrine of intercourse is suggested, the exhilaration of chasing women, not the experience that follows catching them" (Stampfer 83). Donald Guss' threefold summary of Donne's "sexual poems" is helpful in understanding the Ovidian strand in Donne's love poetry (146). First of all, he says, these works are characterized by flagrant promiscuity and amorous insouciance. Second, he notes that these texts imply a ribald naturalism by promoting promiscuity on the basis of the sexual behavior of animals ("Community" and "Confined Love"), and on the ground of the moral neutrality of women as well as their physiological capabilities. The third characteristic according to Guss is Donne's calculating practicality expressed by their complete lack of sentimentality (as seen, for example, in "The Bracelet"). In these ways, Donne seemed to draw upon the Ovidian tradition in his love poetry.

There are, however, a couple of significant questions associated with Ovid's amatory poetry and its relationship to Donne. The first one concerns the ancient author's original intentions. Were his precepts and examples about love presented as lascivious lessons in the unvarnished art of lust, or was he writing as a moral satirist in an attempt to demonstrate the foibles and frustrations associated with prurient sexuality? The second question has to do with Donne's own use of Ovid. Did he deploy Ovidian themes and imagery in order to explore and perhaps promote a rank sexuality, or did he possibly draw upon the Roman writer satirically and for implicitly moral purposes?6 Furthermore, what contribution does the Ovidian tradition make to John

analyzes "The Sun Rising," 188ff, and "The Indifferent" as examples containing Ovidian influence. Carey in his volume of Donne's poetry specifically links the third, eighth, and tenth of the Elegies (his numbering), and "The Indifferent" to Ovid.

6 N. J. C. Andreasen argues that because J. B. Leishman does not read Donne's poetry with the Renaissance Ovid in mind, he finds them totally playful (that is, "preposterous, impudent, ingenious, mockingly illogical and paradoxical, and

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