英国文学 John Donne[5]

John Donne
the founder of Metaphysical school of poetry; lived and wrote during the successive reigns of Elizabeth to Charles I. His poems are usu. divided into 2 categories:
A. the youthful love lyrics, published after his death as Songs and Sonnets in 1633.
B. Sacred verse, published in 1624 as Devotions Upon Emergent Occasion
the poet of peculiar conceits, far-fetched comparisons
Metaphysical poets----a term used to group together certain 17th-century poets, usually Donne, Marvell, Vaughan and Herbert who are marked by their wit, inventiveness, and a love of elaborate stylistic manoeuvres.
Main characteristics of Metaphysical poetry:
1.The use of the conceit---a witty comparison between things at first sight utterly unlike each
other (Emphasizing thought by fantastic metaphors and extravagant hyperboles, strange imageries and obscure language)
2.Argumentative or logical structure
pressed and difficult; there is very little writing which is purely ornamental or descriptive
4.vivid and colloquial language, suggestive of the rhythms of ordinary speech
Song
The persona in this poem, which is also a dramatic monologue, is telling his listener about the fickleness and inconstancy of women. His use of mythological charactes and situations suggests that a constant woman is also just a figment of the imagination. In the second stanza, he tells his listener that if they were to ride for an age they would still never be able to find a woman who is "true, and fair". And, he continues in the thrid stanza, even if he did, by the time the persona meets her, she will have shown her true colours.
Donne takes time to get his point accross and it is not until he says No where Lives a woman true, and faire that we understand his line of argument about the fickleness and inconstancy of women.
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
Stanza 1: a deathbed scene; the image and sounds create a solemn, quiet and even holy atmosphere, an atmosphere of hush.
Stanza 2:
Our love is too significant to be spoken of loudly.
In the first two stanzas, the poet argues that the appropriate response to their parting is a solemn hush, because the moment is too sacred to be spoken of .
Stanza 3:
1.trepidation of spheres—an image from ancient astronomy started by Ptolemy, the geocentric
theory. Their parting is too momentous for such trivial display of emotions.
Stanza 4:
A commentary on the ordinary love; based on the senses, the physical experience of each other.
secular love physical or sensual love
Stanza 5:
Their love has reached such high level at which it becomes a mystery of which even themselves cannot give an account.
Stanza 6: a new argument ; their seeming separation is not a separation at all, because their souls are united as one and cannot really be separated.
Stanza 7: a famous conceit which gives further support to the argument that the two lovers are spiritually connected while they are physically separated.
Stanza 8: though the two legs are separated, they lean against each other and attend each other. Stanza 9: the importance of the firmness of the fixed foot in the drawing of a complete circle. Summary of the argument: The poet first magnifies and then diminishes the significance of their separation . A paradox: our parting is too significant and too insignificant for the display of mourning.
Written in iambic tetrameter, abab
Questions
1.What are the main features of “metaphysical poetry?”
2.What is a metaphysical conceit?
1. (1) “Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show/ (2)To move, but doth, if th’ other do./ (3)And though it in the center sit,/ (4)Yet when the other far doth roam,/ (5)It leans and hearkens after it, / (6)and grows erect, as that comes home.”
Those lines are from John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”.
a. What do you mean by “but doth, if the other do” in line (2)?
b. In line (3), what does “it” refer to?
c. In line (5), what does the first “it” mean? And what does the second “it” refer to?
2. Answer the following questions briefly based on your understanding of the texts studied. (12%;
1 point for each question)
Dull sublunary lover’s love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
a. Who was the writer?
b. What is the name/ title of the poem?
c. What does it mean by “Dull sublunary lover’s love”? (Explain it.)
d. What does “soul” mean?
e. What does “sense” here mean?
f. What does “it” mean in “because it doth remove”?
g. What does “Those things” mean?
h. What does “it” refer to in “Those things which elemented it”?
a. John Donne
b. A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
c. secular love/ ordinary (lover’s) love
d. essence
e. sense organs/ hands, eyes, lips, etc
f. absence
g. sense organs/ hands, eyes, lips, etc h. dull sublunary lover’s love
What are the features of Donne’s poetry?
What is the poetic structure of his Song and what is its theme?
What is the poetic structure of his A Valediction: Forbidding Morning and what images did he use? What is its theme? How did he express his point bout love and compare his love with the secular love?。