Don't forget to read Rivers' Chapter on Platonism and Neo-Platonism
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"
To provide a cultural and philosophical context for "The Ecstasy,"
see Rivers' chapter 3.
1. Stanzas 1-5 set a scene. How does the imagery work in this
section of the poem?
2. 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?
3. 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?
4. Who or what is the "great Prince" of stanza 17? What
will confine him to prison? What will release him?
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. Donne's "Elegy XIX: Going to Bed"
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.
"To His Mistress Going to Bed" -- This poem is clearly an elegy
of the Ovidian, dramatic variety
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. Like "The Extasy," this Elegy might be cited as an example
of Anti-Platonism, as it stresses the importance of the body and of physical
expression of love. The speaker of this poem emphasizes physical sexuality;
but he uses the language of Neo-Platonism to make his point! Explain how
he does so.
4. Watch for the puns, many of which allude to the speaker's
erection.