Selected Poems by John Donne
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Loves Alchymie
The alchemists were early chemists who believed in the spiritual and cosmic nature of matter. They would perform experiments, like modern scientists, but often when astrological signs were in a special conjunction, and they believed that ‘natural spirits’ emerged from chemical reactions rather than new compounds. Their aims were quasi-spiritual, but easily corruptible by hopes of untold riches and immortality. Most famously, they sought for the Elixir, Philosophers’ Stone or panacea (universal medicine) that would preserve life for ever and transform base metals into gold. In Donne’s time, alchemists were little more than clever con-men, duping fools out of money. Among the bizarre substances used by alchemists was ‘mummy’ (theoretically, at least, from ancient preserved Egyptian corpses). It was also much used in medicine, on account of its presumed preservation of some form of the human life-force, since it could ‘restore wasted limbs’ .
Donne takes the view of alchemy here that it is ‘imposture all,’ and the whole point of his poem is that love is a similar form of imposture. His argument is that men are all too prone to look for a solution to every ill in the love of a woman, just as the alchemists looked for health, wealth and eternal life in their ‘pregnant pots.’ The search for that ultimate ‘centric happiness’ will always end in disappointment. Some may say that love is a matter of souls and minds, but the speaker in this poem denies this completely in the most brutally misogynistic terms – ‘Look not for mind in women.’ There is no mind there at all, just flesh, in the same way that a mummified body has only a corporeal nature without a soul, mind or spirit. Women may look like they possess ‘Sweetness and wit’ when a man pursues them, but once ‘possess’d,’ he will see they are but ‘mummy.’
Donne is being as outrageous as he can be in this poem, and while it is easy to focus wholly on the phrase ‘they are but mummy, possess’d,’ and conclude that he is a deep-dyed misogynist, it is important to remember that while the speaker in this poem says one thing, the speaker in many others says quite the opposite. Donne is a dramatic poet (nurtured, no doubt, on the plays of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson) who is quite happy to adopt one view in one poem and another view in another. Here he takes on the misogynistic persona of a rejected and bitter male lover and libertine. The poem may represent one side of his personality, but it cannot be said to represent the only side.
The alchemists were early chemists who believed in the spiritual and cosmic nature of matter. They would perform experiments, like modern scientists, but often when astrological signs were in a special conjunction, and they believed that ‘natural spirits’ emerged from chemical reactions rather than new compounds. Their aims were quasi-spiritual, but easily corruptible by hopes of untold riches and immortality. Most famously, they sought for the Elixir, Philosophers’ Stone or panacea (universal medicine) that would preserve life for ever and transform base metals into gold. In Donne’s time, alchemists were little more than clever con-men, duping fools out of money. Among the bizarre substances used by alchemists was ‘mummy’ (theoretically, at least, from ancient preserved Egyptian corpses). It was also much used in medicine, on account of its presumed preservation of some form of the human life-force, since it could ‘restore wasted limbs’ .
Donne takes the view of alchemy here that it is ‘imposture all,’ and the whole point of his poem is that love is a similar form of imposture. His argument is that men are all too prone to look for a solution to every ill in the love of a woman, just as the alchemists looked for health, wealth and eternal life in their ‘pregnant pots.’ The search for that ultimate ‘centric happiness’ will always end in disappointment. Some may say that love is a matter of souls and minds, but the speaker in this poem denies this completely in the most brutally misogynistic terms – ‘Look not for mind in women.’ There is no mind there at all, just flesh, in the same way that a mummified body has only a corporeal nature without a soul, mind or spirit. Women may look like they possess ‘Sweetness and wit’ when a man pursues them, but once ‘possess’d,’ he will see they are but ‘mummy.’
Donne is being as outrageous as he can be in this poem, and while it is easy to focus wholly on the phrase ‘they are but mummy, possess’d,’ and conclude that he is a deep-dyed misogynist, it is important to remember that while the speaker in this poem says one thing, the speaker in many others says quite the opposite. Donne is a dramatic poet (nurtured, no doubt, on the plays of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson) who is quite happy to adopt one view in one poem and another view in another. Here he takes on the misogynistic persona of a rejected and bitter male lover and libertine. The poem may represent one side of his personality, but it cannot be said to represent the only side.
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