Donne Questions

These questions are adapted from here.

You can find the individual poems at this site.

"The Good Morrow"

1. What use does the speaker make of the public realms he mentions--court, exploration, philosophy?

2. How is time's passage handled in this poem? What kind of temporality seems to govern Donne's love poetry?

"Song, Go and Catch a Falling Star"

3. What principle does "woman" stand for in this poem? The speaker's view may or may not closely resemble Donne's own, but how does it square with the compelling view of love relations we find in some of his sonnets?

"The Sun Rising"

4. What relationship is there between the public and the private spheres in this poem?

5. What is the speaker's attitude towards the sun?

"The Canonization"

6. How does the poem illustrate the idea that metaphysical poetry is characterized as much by logical precision as by a union of thought and feeling?

7. Explore one or more of the figures the speaker employs to describe love's mystery. What is striking about the way such figures are pursued?

8. What variation on the "immortalization through verse" theme does this poem set forth? How will the poem's "pretty rooms" (stanzas) become evidence in favor of the lovers' canonization?

9. As for the term "canonization," what does it mean? By what process is someone canonized? What is the balance or relationship in this poem between spirituality and erotic love?

"The Flea"

10. How does the opportunistic speaker keep pace with the events he is describing?

11. How seriously are we to take the sacred overtones of the poem--the references to the Trinity, etc.? How important is "honor" to the speaker?

"A Nocturnal"

12. How might this poem be said to reject or leave behind the love relations explored in poems such as "The Canonization"?

13. What does the speaker's self-definition by means of negatives prepare him to do or to accept?

14. What are lovers expected to learn from the speaker's unhappy experience?

"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"

15. What is the speaker's strategy to keep away mourning? How does the conceit of "stiff twin compasses" figure in this strategy?

"The Ecstasy"

16. How does the speaker articulate the relationship between body and soul?

17. How do the poem's first eight stanzas illustrate or set up the philosophical claims made afterwards?

"A Lecture upon the Shadow"

18. Explain the poem's conceit. What warning does the lecture make?

"Holy Sonnets"

19. The Holy Sonnets address God rather than an earthly female lover. But what links Donne's sacred poetry to his love poetry?

20. What connection to God do these sonnets try to establish? What seems to be necessary for salvation?

21. Compare Holy Sonnets 17 and/or 18 to Milton's "Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint." Which poem emphasizes the speaker's plight more insistently? What is the status of the beloved in each?

"Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward"

22. How does this poem connect its ordinary time frame and event with eschatological (religious, referring to "end things" such as death and ressurrection) time and significance?

23. For example, what will happen when the speaker finally "turn[s his] face" towards God? What must happen before he can do that?

"Devotions: Meditation 4"

24. What relation between human beings and the natural world does this meditation assert?

25. Who is the "physician," and what can this physician do?

"Devotions: Meditation 17"

26. This selection emphasizes the union of all human beings. But focus more particularly on the relationship that Donne tries to establish with his audience: how does he establish that relationship, and in what does it consist?

27. Is the emphasis in this devotion more on the union of one person with all others, or on the union of one person with God? Or are both equally stressed? Explain.