Some things to note:
Donne writes about love and sex in many different voices: some of his speakers are promiscuous libertines, others are devoted lovers or husbands, some are women.  But all of these speakers are concerned with the issues men and women face when they leave behind the deadlock of the Petrarchan devotion to an icy mistress.  In Shakespeare's sonnets, as we saw, sexual requital led to betrayal, anger, a sense of self-loathing and of bitterness toward the woman involved.  Donne's speakers have more mixed experiences, but they too are trying to come to grips with the complexities of male- female relations: they attempt seductions; they tell of encounters which seem to hover somewhere between intellectual persuasion and erotic mutuality; they ponder the risk of sexual infidelity, they celebrate the oneness of lovers' souls.

The titles attached to the poems are the ones assigned to them in the posthumous print editions of Donne's poems; the versions circulating in manuscript during his lifetime sometimes lacked titles, and the title given for a poem in one manuscript sometimes differs from those attached to the poem in other manuscripts.  We have no surviving manuscript of a love poem in Donne's own handwriting.  Thus, it is risky to assume that the title by which we know a poem was the one Donne himself intended for it.

Study Questions for the 17th:

1.  A favorite genre of love poem in the medieval and renaissance periods is an adaptation of a form used in classical Roman literature: the alba (Latin) or aubade (Provençal) or dawn song.  The alba is a song sung at dawn, usually to lament the coming of day when the lovers must part.  The need to part is often (though not always) linked to the illicit nature of the relationship.  Which of Donne's poems are dawn songs?  How do Donne's speakers feel about the coming of the morning in these poems? How does the dramatic context of lovers waking up in the morning after a night together affect the tone of these poems in various ways?  How does the imagery reflect that dramatic context? Which (if any) of these poems have female speakers?  How do the female speakers compare to the male ones?

2.  Many of Donne's poems are what has come to be called "dramatic monologues," poems in which the speakers' language evokes a dramatic situation of some sort, in which the persona interacts with an addressee, explains a thought process, changes his or her mind, develops an opinion, unintentionally reveals some insecurity, or otherwise evokes a dramatic context.  Indeed, as Fowkes points out in his introduction, "Very few of the love poems are soliloquies; most are addressed to an imagined hearer."  Choosing one poem, analyze how the language evokes a dramatic context; who is the implied hearer or addressee?  What sort of relationship exists between him or her and the speaker?  How are the speaker's attitude and circumstances revealed through the tone and wording of the address?

3.  During the eighteenth century Donne was classified by literary critics as one of the "metaphysical poets," late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century writers known for their use of intellectually complex conceits and metaphors that draw on the language of science, math, law, geography, cartography (map making), philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, political theory, and theology.  Poetry grounded in such discourse sounds very different from poetry that depends (as Petrarchan poetry so often does) upon nature imagery, allusions to classical mythology, and the language of religious devotion.  In reality, of course, the break with Petrarchan tradition is not so easily mapped: around the same time that Donne was writing his love poetry, writers such as Sidney and Shakespeare were also importing the language of law and alchemy and politics into their sonnets, and many of Donne's poems tap Petrarchan conventions.
A.  Which of Donne's poems strikes you as most thoroughly Petrarchan in character?  How does Donne put his own "spin" on Petrarchan conventions in these pieces?  (Consider particularly the speaker of "Twickenham Garden" [pronounced Twick'-nam, with only two syllables] who finds some interesting and rather perverse ways to empower himself despite his frustration.  Explore his tactics.)
B.  Which poems seem most dependent on "metaphysical" imagery?  How does Donne's use of this relatively non-traditional discourse affect the way he approaches the subject of love in these poems?

4.  Many male speakers in Donne's poems seem--like Benedick--to fear female infidelity, but others claim to fear female fidelity.  Why would the latter be a problem?  How (if at all) are these fears related?  Base your answers upon careful analysis of the language in specific poems (such as "The Indifferent" and "Love's Usury").

5.  In "The Good Morrow" and "The Anniversary," the speakers celebrate fully consummated and mutually loving relationships with their beloveds, but even in these poems, the speakers mention the possibility of "slacken[ing]" and "treason."  Are there any positive effects of these negative references?

6.  In which poems on the question of fidelity and loyalty does the speaker seem to be a woman?  What aspects of the language suggest that the speaker is female?

7.  "The Canonization" uses a religious metaphor to justify the "sainthood" of the lovers, their dedication to the religion of love that worldly men and women cannot comprehend or appreciate.  Be prepared to discuss how each of the five stanzas of the poem contributes to this overarching metaphor.  Who is addressed in each stanza?  What grammatical mood does each use (declarative, imperative, interrogative, subjunctive, exclamatory)?  How do images and figures of speech contribute to each?

8.  Questions on "The Indifferent:
A.  Does the speaker seem to be bragging in the opening stanza, or merely expressing facts?  To whom is he speaking?  Why is the last line of the stanza so surprising?
 B.  Does he continue to address the same person or persons in the second stanza?  When he asks "Will no other vice content you?" to what "vice" is he referring?  In the next two lines, he sarcastically contrasts that "vice" with the "old vices" and the practices of the addressees' "mothers"?  What were these, and what is the point of his sarcasm?
 C.  As stanza two continues, it becomes clear that he is exploring, through questions, some elaborate and rather artificial explanations of female fidelity; he is thinking of reasons a woman might choose to be faithful and then arguing that she should not.  Why does he oppose the possibility that the "you" he addresses might be faithful to one man (and to him in particular)?
 D.  In stanza three, the speaker pulls back from everything he's "sung" up to that point, and tells a little mythic story of what "Venus," goddess of love, does when she hears it.  What is the meaning of this mini-myth?  What light does it cast on the poem as a whole?

Study Guide for Monday, February 22
Read the poems on pp. 33, 36-48, 52-53, 66

Study Questions on Specific Poems
I. "The Flea"
1.  There is more to this poem than the words; the white spaces speak volumes as well.  What happens in the interval between stanza one and stanza 2?  What happens in the interval between stanza two and stanza 3?  What happened in the white space "before" this poem?  That is, what kind of relationship forms the context for the exchange between the speaker and his lady?  What will happen in the white space "after" the poem?  That is, what kind of response will the speaker elicit from the woman he addresses?  Our feel for the poem as a whole depends in part upon the assumptions we make about this.
2.  What function does religious language serve in "The Flea"?
3.  Write a paraphrase of the sophistical argument which the speaker makes in stanza one.  What are the "grounds" for the speaker's argument that the woman should sleep with him?  How does the speaker shift ground as the poem proceeds?

II.  "The Ecstasy"
1.  One popular conception of love in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was based on Neoplatonic philosophy.  The Neoplatonists revived Plato's notion of the Beautiful as coextensive with the Good, stressing the idea that true Beauty is only dimly reflected in physical beauty and that one may ascend through a "Ladder of Love" to live the Idea of the Good and the Idea of Beauty rather than being confined to the love of any earthly shadow of those ideas.  Donne's "The Undertaking" (p. 4 in our edition) expresses a Neoplatonic speaker's devotion to just such an ideal.  Many poems of the same period express an "Antiplatonic" rejection of such philosophy as abstract and unrealistic.  See, for example, lines 11-14 of "Love's Growth" on page 26 in our edition.  Where does "The Ecstasy" fall in this controversy?
2. Stanzas 1-5 set a scene.  How does the imagery work in this section of the poem?
3. Stanzas 6-7 introduce a hypothetical eavesdropper.  He is referred to again in stanza 19.  What qualifications must this person have if he is to understand what follows?  How does his role compare to that of the poem's reader?
4.  Stanzas 8-18 are the "dialogue of one" introduced by stanzas 6-7 and referred to again in stanza 19 (the final stanza).  According to the speaker of stanzas 1-7, who speaks stanzas 8-18?   What is the subject of the discourse in those stanzas?  What crucial transition occurs in stanza 13?
5.  Who or what is the "great Prince" of stanza 17?

III.  "The Blossom"
1.  To whom or what is the first stanza addressed, and what point is the speaker trying to make?
2.  The rest of the poem (stanzas 2-5) involves a sort of dialogue between the speaker and his own heart.  Explain the analogy between stanza one and stanza two.
3.  What thought processes does the speaker attribute to his heart?  What does the heart think it will be able to do?
4.  At the end of stanza two, the speaker tells his heart that "thou tomorrow . . . / Must with . . . me a journey take."  He then imagines how his heart will respond to this news.  Paraphrase the argument  attributed to the heart in stanza 3.
5.  In stanzas 4-5, the speaker makes some rather cynical responses to his heart's arguments.  Paraphrase the speaker's response.
6.  In stanza two, the lady to whom the speaker's heart is devoted is referred to as "a forbidden or forbidding tree" and as a "Sun."  What do these terms tell us about her relationship with the speaker?
7.  What does the speaker mean in lines 27-28? ("A naked thinking heart, that makes no show, / Is to a woman but a kind of ghost;")  What is he trying to tell his heart at this point?
8.  What is the tone of lines 31-32? ("Practice may make her know some other part, / But take my word, she doth not know a heart.")
9.  In stanza 5, the speaker proposes a possible cure for the frustrations of unrequited love.  What does the cure involve?
10.  Compare the speaker of "The Blossom" to the speaker of "Love's Diet."  What are the similarities and differences between their situations and attitudes and courses of action?

IV.  "The Bait"
Compare Donne's poem to the poem that inspired it, Christopher Marlowe's  "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love"

Assignment for Wednesday, February 24:  Read the Elegies on pp. 76, 79, 94-96, and 97-98.  Read the poems by D. M. Thomas and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill on photocopy.

Study Guide on Donne's Elegies
The "Elegy" is a distinct poetic genre.  In classical literature (ancient Greek and Roman), the elegiac meter was a distinctive meter used to lament or commend.  Some Roman poets (Propertius, Tibullus, Catullus, Ovid), used the elegiac meter for love songs.  In the Renaissance, love poems in rhyming pentameter couplets are often termed elegies.  Some of them imitate the Roman poets' love elegies (especially those of Ovid), while others are verse renderings of a popular Italian prose form, the paradox, in which the writer makes a witty display by considering (usually scornfully) some supposedly paradoxical assertion.  Donne wrote some such prose paradoxes (e.g., "That a wise man is known by much laughing," which defends that idea in face of the usual proverb that you know a man is a fool if he's always laughing).  The Renaissance love elegies that imitate Ovid tend to be elusive, ambiguous, inviting a sense that there are many levels of meaning involved; the speaker of an Ovidian elegy presents his poem as an autobiographical account and hints at a complex psychology and sense of social and political context.  Ovidian speakers are derisive in tone and often appropriate the official metaphors, myths, and mottos of the ruling culture (the idealized imperialism of the Roman Empire under Augustine) to present activities and defend attitudes that are in one way or another antithetical or subversive of those official Roman values and ethics.  Donne writes elegies both on the model of the paradox (argumentative, witty, non-dramatic pieces that hold forth derisively on a particular idea or concept) and on the model of Ovid (narratives or addresses that pretend to be autobiographical accounts, dramatic in structure, involving a narrative and a plot, and directly or indirectly undermining Elizabethan politics and state religion).  Note: Throughout the above paragraph, I am indebted to a Study Guide on Donne's Elegies written by Professor M. Thomas Hester of North Carolina State University.

"His Picture," "Elegy: Nature's Lay Idiot," "Love's Progress," and "To His Mistress Going to Bed"

"Love's Progress" belongs to the paradox-like category of Elegy.  In it, the speaker attacks the Petrarchan and neo- Platonic approaches to love and love poetry.  He insists that a man should not worship a woman from afar, nor spend his time writing blazons that describe her hair and face.  But he takes his witty advice even further, arguing that the man who begins by kissing his lady's face will never be sexually successful.  In order to get to the "centrique part," he argues, one should start out from the foot instead.  And the "centrique part" is the only part that counts in this speaker's opinion.  He is quite obscene and his advice is designed to shock and amuse.   "To His Mistress Going to Bed" also rejects Petrarchan adoration and insists upon a different approach to wooing and lovemaking; but it does so in the Ovidian style, presenting a dramatic situation in which the speaker seems to be addressing his mistress.  The other two Elegies assigned for today are also essentially Ovidian, featuring a speaker addressing his mistress in a dramatic context.  Here are some questions on two of the poems assigned:

"Love's Progress"
1.  In lines 1-36, the speaker is concerned with defining the essence of love and of woman, and he insists that both can be defined only in terms of their "end" or "use."  Gold, after all, has many characteristics, but it is because of the way it is used that it has value and significance.  What is the "right true end of love" from the speaker's perspective?  And what is the essence of a woman, that thing that makes her "she"?
2.  The poem opens with an analogy between love and a sea voyage; that analogy is followed by two animal images that insist one should not try to shape and mold love into something better than what it really is.  The implication is that Petrarchan lovers and those devoted to Platonic ideas of love are missing the whole point and warping love itself.  Do these analogies and images reduce love to sex?
3.  As we noted in reading Much Ado About Nothing the bawdy puns on "thing" and "nothing" are sure to show up in Renaissance works about sex.  In some works, that pun is played out further in imagery that takes associates zero with the vagina (0 being both an image of the woman's "centric part" and a representation of nothing as numeric quantity), the circle as a hieroglyphic or symbol of infinity or eternity, and the unbroken, circular, golden wedding ring as a symbol of the wife's unbroken and eternal fidelity (compare Donne's "A Jet Ring Sent" on p. 58 of our edition).  Lines 37-38 of "Love's Progress" play upon this punning and symbolism, but they remain obscure unless considered in the light of Neo-Platonic idealism.  How do the Neo-Platonic ideas of the soul and of spiritual love contribute to the wit in these lines?
4.  Lines 39-72 mock and refute the Petrarchan blazon.  Explain how the speaker picks up on and develops the image of sea travel (from the opening lines of the poem) in this section.  How does the idea of lovemaking as sea-voyage affect the tone and meaning of the work?
5.  How does the speaker make use of first person singular pronouns (I, me, my) throughout this work?  How does he combine them with the first person plural (we) and the second person (thine, thou, etc.) and the third person (he)?
6.  The final section of the poem explains why it's better for a lover to begin by kissing the woman's foot: outline the various analogies and metaphors the speaker uses to defend this position, considering how each works individually and how they all work together.  Consider with particular care the final six lines, in which the speaker returns to the imagery linking money and the female sexual organ.  He calls the mouth and the vagina "two purses" with their openings set at two different angles.  The last two lines of the poem are particularly disgusting.  Compare them to the opening of the poem.  How do they affect the work as a whole?  Is this just foulness for foulness's sake, or does the bawdy language contribute to a more serious and worthwhile "point"?

"To His Mistress Going to Bed"
1.  Make a list of the various metaphors, analogies and similes used by the speaker to describe his mistress and/or his feelings toward her and/or his relationship to her and/or what he wants her to do.  What effect does each comparison have individually?  How do they work together as a group?  Do they develop during the course of the poem?  How do the political images interact with the religious ones?
2.  Explain the pun in the poem's final lines; how does it affect the overall tone and effect of the poem?
3.  For Neo-Platonic thinkers, love of physical beauty was only a starting point for love of the soul and the abstract good of Beauty itself.  Donne's "The Extasy" might be cited as an example arguing for an alternative point of view and stressing the importance of the body and of physical expression of love. The speaker of this poem, too, emphasizes physical sexuality; but he uses the language of Neo-Platonism to make his point! Explain how he does so.
4.   Read the twentieth-century poems by D. M. Thomas and by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill (translated from the Irish by Eilean Ni Chuilleanain).  They are different poems, poems with a life of their own; but in writing poems inspired by or reacting to Donne's, these poets are also doing critical "readings" of Donne's work.  Write a prose account of what Ni Dhomhnaill's and Thomas' poems "say about" Donne's.  How are the views of love conveyed by the speakers of these works different from the views underlying Donne's poem?