Lovers as Microcosms
Donne incorporates the Renaissance notion of the human
body as a microcosm into his love poetry. During the Renaissance,
many people believed that the microcosmic human body mirrored the
macrocosmic physical world. According to this belief, the intellect
governs the body, much like a king or queen governs the land. Many
of Donne’s poems—most notably “The Sun Rising” (1633),
“The Good-Morrow” (1633), and “A
Valediction: Of Weeping” (1633)—envision
a lover or pair of lovers as being entire worlds unto themselves.
But rather than use the analogy to imply that the whole world can
be compressed into a small space, Donne uses it to show how lovers
become so enraptured with each other that they believe they are
the only beings in existence. The lovers are so in love that nothing
else matters. For example, in “The Sun Rising,” the speaker concludes
the poem by telling the sun to shine exclusively on himself and
his beloved. By doing so, he says, the sun will be shining on the
entire world.
The Neoplatonic Conception of Love
Donne draws on the Neoplatonic conception of physical
love and religious love as being two manifestations of the same
impulse. In the Symposium (ca. third or fourth
century b.c.e.), Plato describes physical
love as the lowest rung of a ladder. According to the Platonic formulation,
we are attracted first to a single beautiful person, then to beautiful
people generally, then to beautiful minds, then to beautiful ideas,
and, ultimately, to beauty itself, the highest rung of the ladder.
Centuries later, Christian Neoplatonists adapted this idea such that
the progression of love culminates in a love of God, or spiritual
beauty. Naturally, Donne used his religious poetry to idealize the
Christian love for God, but the Neoplatonic conception of love also
appears in his love poetry, albeit slightly tweaked. For instance,
in the bawdy “Elegy 19. To His Mistress Going
to Bed” (1669), the speaker claims that his
love for a naked woman surpasses pictorial representations of biblical
scenes. Many love poems assert the superiority of the speakers’
love to quotidian, ordinary love by presenting the speakers’ love
as a manifestation of purer, Neoplatonic feeling, which resembles
the sentiment felt for the divine.
Religious Enlightenment as Sexual Ecstasy
Throughout his poetry, Donne imagines religious enlightenment
as a form of sexual ecstasy. He parallels the sense of fulfillment
to be derived from religious worship to the pleasure derived from
sexual activity—a shocking, revolutionary comparison, for his time.
In Holy Sonnet 14 (1633),
for example, the speaker asks God to rape him, thereby freeing the
speaker from worldly concerns. Through the act of rape, paradoxically, the
speaker will be rendered chaste. In Holy Sonnet 18 (1899),
the speaker draws an analogy between entering the one true church
and entering a woman during intercourse. Here, the speaker explains
that Christ will be pleased if the speaker sleeps with Christ’s
wife, who is “embraced and open to most men” (14).
Although these poems seem profane, their religious fervor saves
them from sacrilege or scandal. Filled with religious passion, people
have the potential to be as pleasurably sated as they are after
sexual activity.
The Search for the One True Religion
Donne’s speakers frequently wonder which religion to choose
when confronted with so many churches that claim to be the one true
religion. In 1517, an Augustinian monk in
Germany named Martin Luther set off a number of debates that eventually
led to the founding of Protestantism, which, at the time, was considered
to be a reformed version of Catholicism. England
developed Anglicanism in 1534, another reformed
version of Catholicism. This period was thus dubbed the Reformation.
Because so many sects and churches developed from these religions,
theologians and laypeople began to wonder which religion was true
or right. Written while Donne was abandoning Catholicism for Anglicanism,
“Satire 3” reflects these concerns. Here,
the speaker wonders how one might discover the right church when
so many churches make the same claim. The speaker of Holy Sonnet 18 asks
Christ to explain which bride, or church, belongs to Christ. Neither
poem forthrightly proposes one church as representing the true religion,
but nor does either poem reject outright the notion of one true
church or religion.
