Can we Express Real Love Emotions in Poems?

Donne is one of the greatest love poets of Elizabethan’s age. He surpassed all other love poets in practical love. He is quite unique in his love experience and his love-experiences are based on the physical union of a lover and a beloved. But his is different from other love poets in describing his experiences of love in his poetry with an expressive and savvy style.

Therefore Donne is called the king of love poets. But Donne began to write his love poetry in the Elizabethan age when the Elizabethan writers were composing artificial love poetry that was full of sugar coated words. But Donne revolted against the Elizabethan poetry and introduced a new type of love poetry that was full of natural thoughts, feelings and emotions. Donne’s love poetry is an escape from the courtly love of that time.

It is a fact that Elizabethan love poetry was a mixture of Patriarch, Dante, Ariosto, Watson and Davidson’s style. But Dante’s love poems are a beautiful blend of his personal experiences and observation. But Donne‘s reputation as a love poet depends on his well-known book Songs and Sonnets, published in 1835 in a single volume. We can divide his love poems into three main groups: amorous group, metaphysical group, and satirical group. In the beginning he wrote erotic poetry and mixed in it his practical emotions with metaphysical thinking. In this respect he is called Elizabethan Byron in describing his love affairs. He knew his beloved‘s every part of her body practically. As he says:

“License my roving hands and not let them go

Before, behind, between, above and below

O! My America, my newfound land

To teach thee I am naked first why then”

Donne’s love poems have singularity, attraction and charm and are based on philosophical

thoughts. His love poetry shows tussle with emotions and intellect, sense and spirit and body and soul. His love is sometimes is bitter and sometime is sweet. He shows in his poem sex, scorn, sarcasm and bitterness including infidelity of woman’s love.

According to the critics, Donne ‘s love poems show his romantic moods, a seductive mood and fanciful relationship with beloved. Sometimes his poems show his escapism from this condition. So we can say that it is the last stage of his love poems that lead him to divine poems. About woman’s love he thinks so as:

“Go and catch a falling star

Get with a child with mandrake root

Tell me where are past years are”

In the above lines Donne mocks at woman’s chastity and fair sex. The same thing he shows in the next verse:

‘ Nor can you judge woman’s thoughts by tears

Than by her shadow what she wears”

As we that Donne’ treatment in his love poems is realistic and idealistic. He considered the physical union of a lover and a beloved is an essential part of a spiritual love.

Donne does not think woman as goddess of love but he considered woman a chameleon that changes himself according to situation. So a chameleon and a woman have same nature.

The second group of Donne’s love poems is called the divine group that is based on his sincere and grand thoughts. As the text shows:

“ All things to their destruction draw

Only our love has no decay

This no tomorrow hath not yesterday”

The third group of Donne’s love poems is a mixture of patriarch and Ovid’s tune. It is the Donne who introduced metaphysical poetry to the English poets. As the text shows:

“O! Perverse sex where none or true but she

Who’s therefore true because her truth kills me”

Johnson says that Donne ‘s poems are not against marriage and adultery, although his poems differentiate between lust and marriage.

To sum up, Donne is a flawless poet of love poems. It is Donne who introduced metaphysical poetry in Elizabethan age. On the other hand, his realism in love poems is based on his love experience, philosophical thoughts and its source was the fickleness of woman. He considered lovers and beloved’s physical union is must for spiritual love. His style is dramatic and terse and complicated. His technique of presenting his ideas is personal that is called in English literature metaphysical poetry.