Donne
Famous for his distinguished metaphysical love poems, Donne is recognised for his songs and sonnets predominately about physical love as he vividly describes his many experiences in exploring his lover’s body and succumbing her to his needs. Making him controversial Donne manages to insult women ever whilst making love to them, or declaring love for them. ‘Woman’s Constancy’ is a perfect example as he claims women to be unpredictable and untrustworthy. However, once grounded with faith, at a later time in his life when spirituality over took him, and his wife, Anne Moore, was all he needed, Donne’s poems had a deeper sense of meaning. Gone were the ideas of impending sex and exploring the body, as Donne introduces a profound love that has a world all of its own, to powerful for the common people and too intense to truly be understood. Donne uses religious imagery to raise him and his lover to a level of sainthood; poems that depict such ideas are The Relic, The Anniversary and The Canonisation.
The Relic, although a rather morbid poem, draws out an essence of love that people tend to forget, a love that never dies even when dead. As the poem opens we get the feel that the writer is angry or irritated he explains his grave being ‘broken up’ for ‘some second guest to entertain’-a common occurrence in his day, for several corpses to share the same grave. Never failing to insult a female, no matter how intense the love is he is describing, Donne follows his anger into a direct attack on the adulterous manner of women, “for graves have learn’d that the woman-head,/To be to more than one a bed”. However it is almost instantly that Donne contradicts himself by saying that he and his lover are above that, his lover is perfect as they have always “loved well and faithfully.”
The second stanza launches Donne’s more religious side and ideas of the Roman Catholicism and the relics, relics being personal items with religious...
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