Final Exam Review------John Donne

John Donne

Background

• Catholic
• 1572-Born
• Attended Oxford and Cambridge and Law at Lincoln Inn
• 1590- Became Anglican
• Traveled and read books
• 1598- appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egoter
• 1601- Secretly married Ann More and was fired and imprisoned for it
• Obtained patronage of Robert Drury and memorialized Drury's daughter
• 1607-Patronage of King James
• 1610- Gave up Catholic formally
• 1615- entered ministry
• appointed Reader of Divinity
• 1616- Preached to the court
• 1617- Ann died
• 1621- Appointed Dead of St. Paul's Cathedral
• 1622-23 Sermons published
• 1624-1630 more sermons published
• 1631- Died

The Flea

Stanza 1: Flea sucked my blood then yours, in it the blood mixed (idea of sex) yet you have lost no honor in doing so, so why dney me sex.

Stanza 2: Father, son and holy spirit all in one flea., we in the flea are more than married. We have had sex already within the flea, don't kill the flea for doing so you'll be killing all three of us.
(kills flea)
Stanza 3: Why have you killed it? What has it done besides take so little blood from you? Yet, you say you feel no weaker for doing so and losing so little blood. You will lose equal amount of honor and life in having sex with me.



The Canonization

Stanza 1: Shut up and let me love, or make fun of my shaking or joint problems or my age or my lack of money. Or take up arts, go some where, go to court or do accounting, think what you will and approve so you can let me love.

Stanza 2: Who has been hurt by my love? Have I drowned ships with my sighs? or flooded grounds? Have my colds kept spring from coming? Have my fevers caused plagues? Soldiers still go to war and lawyers find men with arguments even though she and I love.

Stanza 3: Call us what you wish we are made by love, we are candles that will burn ourselves out and in us find war and peace. We rise from our own ashes.

Stanza 4: If we can't live by love we will die by it. If our love be unfit for a tomb it will be fit for verse, and if we preserve no book then we will build in stanzas in Sonnets, just as equal to a well-wrought-urn or half acre tombs and from these sonnets all shall know of us as saints of love.

Stanza 5: The prayer.




A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

Stanza 1: As honorable men die, they tell their souls to leave, their friends watch as their breath goes and other say they haven't died.

Stanza 2: So let us fade away, noiselessly, with no floods of tears or sighs, twere horrible to speak of our joys and to tell the common people of our love.

Stanza 3: Earthquakes cause harm and fear but shaking the heavens are greater yet innocent.

Stanza 4: Boring earthly love is physical, when we are apart there isnt anything.

Stanza 5: We live by a love so pure we can't describe it we only know it in the mind. Eyes, lips and hands don't know to miss it.

Stanza 6: Our souls are as one, I have to go but think of it not as a break but as an expansion of our love.

Stanza 7: If our souls are two may they move as a compass, with your soul as the fixed point, and when my soul moves yours follows.

Stanza 8: As my soul roams yours leans after it, and as my soul comes home yours straightens.

Stanza 9: You will be like this to me. As I roam you will be fixed so I end where I began.



Holy Sonnet VII

Angels at your corners blow your trumpets. Arise you infinite souls from death and return to your bodies. All of you whome Noah's flood and Apocolyptic fires did kill, and all of you who died by war, hunger, age, sickness, tyrants, suicide, sentenced, accident, and you whom are about to face God and haven't died. But hold on and let me mourn them first, if my sins are worse than all of those it will be too late to ask for your grace when I am being judged. Here on Earth teach me to repent for that will be as good as if you had pardoned me with one from your own blood. (Jesus)



Holy Sonnet XIV

Batter my heart (3 personed god) you have yet to do much, so that I may rise again, you must overthrow me and renew me. I am yours to command, I am working to allow you but in vain. Reason is your governing body in me, and should defend me but it has been captured and proves too much to stop me. I love you, and would be loved but am currently married to your enemy. Free me fromhim again imprison me in your will and ravish me