Poetry
Poems
John Donne · 1633
Opening lines
I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I
Did, till we lov'd? were we not wean'd till then?
But suck'd on countrey pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the seaven sleepers den?
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Love poems and sacred poems, gathered posthumously in a single volume with satires and verse letters. In the first, the speaking voice argues: with a woman, with the sun that comes in too early at the window, with a flea that has bitten them both and that becomes, since it mingles their blood, their marriage bed; two lovers who are parted are the two legs of a compass, one of which moves only if the other moves. In the second, the same voice argues with God and asks him to take it by force.
Context
The collection appeared in 1633, two years after its author's death, accompanied by elegies written for him by other hands; he had published almost nothing in his lifetime, and his verses circulated in manuscript copies. Six editions appeared in the twenty-three years that followed, then classical criticism held it in contempt, and the word now used to praise it was first used to blame it: Drummond already reproached that generation with its metaphysical ideas, Dryden in 1693 reproached him with affecting the metaphysical, and Johnson in 1779 made the term a label of contempt. In 1921, Grierson through an anthology and Eliot through the review he gave of it in the Times Literary Supplement reversed it, and the insult became the name of a school.
Who it is for
A selection of poems in seventeenth-century English, read in French in bilingual editions. Each poem is followed like an argument before being heard as a song.
Prizes and reception
Read and reissued in the seventeenth century, then held in contempt by classical criticism, it was restored to honour at the beginning of the twentieth century.
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