John Donne Poetry

The Power of John Donne’s Poetry Louis Hunt
John Carey’s description of Donne’s “power” is laudable, and to a certain extent, accurate. Carey captures the masculine nature of Donne’s tone; the vividness of Donne’s imagery; the subtle coercion of Donne’s metaphor. Carey also notes Donne’s application of syntax and rhythms, writing that Donne’s words, “are packed into the poems like boulders… Inversions and interjections fracture the run of the lines, necessitating a strenuous advance.” Carey is right to recognize Donne’s “powerful” manipulation of the language – not only the wit of his diction, but the sounds, and for lack of a better term, the flow of his poetry. However, Carey is wrong in his description of the overall manner of Donne’s poetry. Carey uses harsh language to describe Donne’s work, words and phrases such as, “dictatorial attitudes,” “unrelenting argumentativeness,” and “violent,” as if he feels that Donne grabs his readers by the wrist and drags them into submission. This is hardly the case. Donne does not rape his audience; he seduces them. Donne does not demand; he persuades, and in the process, empowers his reader with tangible emotion. Such empowerment might feel like a “sensation of pressure” if misunderstood or denied. But there-in lies Donne’s power: his ability to convey the matter of his poetry and invoke feeling in his reader by applying a masterful combination of diction, imagery, metaphor, and perhaps most importantly, pace and sound. Donne’s orchestration of language, or his “power,” is audible in the poem, “Air and Angels,” in which Donne explores the connection between two of his favorite subjects, love and the divine. Twice or thrice had I love thee, Before I knew thy face or name; Already in the first two lines, Donne sets the general tone of the poem. There is a sense of modesty in the notion of loving some nameless, faceless being. The humility that Donne immediately establishes might strike one as