JOHN DONNE Q: Discuss the fine blending of passion and thought, emotion and intellect, feeling and ratiocination that you find in Donne’s poetry.

John Donne gave up the trend of unbridled emotion and passion of the Elizabethan poets; put aside the over-romanticized ideas and their sugar-coated language. Rather Donne and his followers made a fine blending passion and thought, emotion and intellect, imagination and reality, feeling and ratiocination.

“The Canonization” is one of the most famous poems of Donne in which we can trace the blending of emotion and reason. He uses some images and conceits to express the supreme feeling of satisfaction in love in a concrete manner in the following lines:

                 “Call us what you will, we are made such by love,

                  Call her one, me another fly,

                  We are tapers too, and at our own cost die,

                  …………………………………………………

                 We can die by it, if not live by love.”

This emotion of love is harmonized with the use of complex wit and conceit, reason and argument.

                          Another important poem where Donne is uncommon in fusing intellect and passion is “The Sun Rising”. The lover is undoubtedly highly passionate in his expression of love but it is always tempered with experience and reason that we can observe in the following lines:

             “To warm the world, that’s done in warming us

               Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere,

               This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.”  

Here the passion of love is conveyed in images which are erudite, logical and of an intellectual nature. In this poem we also find Donne’s ratiocinative style, reasoning step by step towards his conclusion.

                          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 doesn’t allow him to leave her even for a temporary period. But the lover is trying his best to pacify her emotion with some logical points and argument.

Donne, as a great scholar, always showed his experience and learning using argument in his various poems. So critics sometimes made criticism of his poetry considering it lifeless and emotionless. They charged his poetry with mere expression of intellectuality and pedantic thought.