Next

The speaker of Donne’s poem doesn’t make any concrete references to a particular time or place. The most specific information we get comes in the third quatrain (lines 9–12):

     Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
     And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
     And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
     And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?

Here, the speaker’s references to “kings” and “war” are left entirely vague, and they could just as well refer, say, to tenth-century Norway as to Donne’s own seventeenth-century England. More specific, perhaps, is the reference to “poppy.” Poppy was used to make a drug called opium, which was available throughout Europe in Donne’s time and grew increasingly popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hence, the reference to poppy locates the poem somewhere in early modern Europe. But less important than the specifics of time and place is the poem’s more abstract “setting” in a landscape of metaphysical speculation. This landscape is peopled with ordinary human figures, such as “kings” and “desperate men”—but these figures are archetypal rather than actual. Also archetypal are the speaker’s references to “fate,” “chance,” “poison,” and “war.” The speaker’s references to archetypes demonstrates that their concern doesn’t center on a particular context. Instead, they are interested in the human condition more generally.

Next section Themes

Take a Study Break