greykit.poetry — John Donne

• 1633 [john-donne] A Valediction: forbidding mourning
  Songs and Sonets

  Parting should be as quiet as the death of virtuous men — no tear-floods, no sigh-tempests — because a love refined beyond the senses only stretches, like gold to airy thinness, or like the two legs of a compass.

  #lyric#love#parting#1630s
• 1633 [john-donne] Holy Sonnet X: Death be not proud
  Holy Sonnets

  Death is addressed to its face and steadily demoted — from dreadful power to a slave of fate and chance, no better than poppy or charms at bringing sleep — until the last line kills it outright.

  #sonnet#death#religion#1630s
• 1633 [john-donne] Holy Sonnet XIV: Batter my heart, three person’d God
  Holy Sonnets

  A prayer that asks God to stop knocking and start breaking: the speaker is a usurped town whose viceroy reason has proved untrue, and only being imprisoned can free him, only being ravished can make him chaste.

  #sonnet#religion#violence#1630s
• 1633 [john-donne] The Flea
  Songs and Sonets

  A flea that has bitten them both becomes, by three turns of outrageous logic, their marriage bed and marriage temple — and when she kills it and nothing is lost, the argument simply changes sides and wins anyway.

  #lyric#seduction#wit#1630s
• 1633 [john-donne] The Sunne Rising
  Songs and Sonets

  The sun is scolded through the bedroom curtains as a busy old fool and a saucy pedantic wretch — until the poem swallows the world whole: she is all states, he all princes, and this bed is the centre the sun must warm.

  #lyric#love#aubade#1630s
• 1633 [john-donne] The good-morrow
  Songs and Sonets

  Everything before this love was a sucking on country pleasures, a sleep in the seven sleepers' den; waking, the lovers find each other's faces in each other's eyes and make one little room an everywhere that cannot die.

  #lyric#love#waking#1630s