Selected Poems by John Donne

Pursuing the metaphysical in Donne provides the same pleasure as uncovering the obscure medical or theological references in a writer like Rabelais. The real point is the mentally provocative contrast between the poet’s theme – the delights of sexual intercourse – and the philosophical conundrums he uses to express it.

Details

‘I wonder by my troth, what thou and I/Did, till we loved? were we not wean'd till then ?’ – The experience of first love-making is as fundamental a change in someone’s life as the moment an infant first has solid food.

‘But suck'd on country pleasures, childishly?’ – as opposed to ‘town pleasures,’ perhaps with an obscene pun on ‘country.’

‘Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den?’ – These seven martyrs ‘slept’ over a century in a cave near Ephesus and then were resurrected when the world had turned Christian.

‘If ever any beauty I did see,/Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.’ – all those the speaker loved before were just foreshadowing dreams of his new beloved.

‘And now good-morrow to our waking souls,’ – implies they have ascended into a more exalted state of being – as living souls not merely living bodies.

‘Which watch not one another out of fear;/For love all love of other sights controls,’ – There is no jealousy in true love. The true lover only has eyes for his beloved.

‘And makes one little room an everywhere.’ – The true lover’s mind never thinks of anything outside the bedroom.

‘Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone;’ – America had been recently discovered.