Donne is sick and his poetry is sick. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay – Stanley FishFish's comment, while extreme in its reductive assessment, is nevertheless understandable. He may find Donne's poetry objectionable for three reasons: style, explicitness, and morbidity. As for style, Fish says Donne "is bulimic...someone who gorges himself beyond satiety, then sticks his finger down his throat and vomits." And Fish is certainly not the only one who shares this sentiment. CS Lewis called Donne "the saddest" and most "uncomfortable" of our poets, whose verse "exerts the same dreadful fascination that we feel in the grip of the worst kind of boredom - hot" . -eyes, the unmissable kind." For his "lack of an accent," Ben Jonson said Donne "deserved to be hanged." And if Jonson finds fault with the way Donne flouted conventional rhythm, Deborah Larson finds his renegade semantic scope baffling “There is nothing,” Larson laments, “not even the ugly and the disgusting that his verse does not say, any way, not even the crudest, that he does not adopt. to achieve his almost impossible ends." Added to this is Donne's apostasy. "The first thing to remember about Donne," writes John Carey, "is that he was a Catholic; the second is that he betrayed his faith" - examples of which are numerous. For example, the poet declares: "As a Father, as a Master, I can protect my family from the attempts of the Jesuits: let a Jesuit escaping is like sparing a fox or a wolf." Such accusations are, however, hasty and subjective. If the accusations of "disease" remain, they add to the justification of Donne's desire to surprise. his readers and cause them to reanalyze their faith and beliefs. In "Batter my Heart," for example, Donne deliberately uses shocking imagery to convey a mystic's fervent desire to be alive in a faith that is indelicate, powerful, and powerful. Certainly the imagery – “burned”, “beaten”, “broken”, “raptured” – is morbid, but through it Donne reveals the urgency of allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed by God, and his images give us insight. of that moment when the self is absorbed into the whole, when the individual becomes an indistinguishable part of all time and creation. Beat my heart, God of three persons; because you still only strike, breathe, shine and seek to repair; so that I can rise and stand, throw myself and bend your strength to break me, blow me, burn me and make me new. I, like a towne usurper, to another due, work to admit you, but oh, without end, reason your viceroy in me, I should defend myself, but is captivated and proves weak or false. Yet, tenderly, I love you, and would be well loved, but I am betrothed to your enemy: divorce me, untie or break this knot again; take me to you, imprison me, for if you do not captivate me, I will never be free, nor ever driven out. , except that you delight me. To take Donne literally as a sick believer in rape or sadism is to seriously misinterpret him. At their worst, the metaphors are startling, but in doing so they remind us that faith is not always a comfort and invite us to recognize that true spiritual discipleship requires not only accepting these contradictions in understanding God, but also to be ready to let yourself be consumed. by this divine entity that we can never fully understand. In fact, if there is one "accusation" that holds water, it would be that Donne's arguments are sometimes too perfectly persuasive andalmost mathematically convincing in their proof. In themselves, however, Donne's metaphysical ideas are interesting not only for their novelty but also for the breadth of areas in which they draw analogies: God as violent conqueror and rapist; the Holy Church as bride made holier by her availability towards all men; the Sun as an exasperating “old fool” who disrupts a couple’s intimate morning; a teardrop as a navigation globe; separated lovers compared to the legs of a compass, the leg tracing the circle and finally returning to the "fixed foot"; or a flea bite compared to the act of making love ("It sucked me first, and now you suck yourself", is a good example, especially since we know that In 17th-century typography, the printed "s" looked a bit like the printed "f"). Donne's ideas range from the banal to the diminutive, and his comparisons are carefully rationalized. When they work, metaphysical views have a surprising relevance that prompts us to examine topics in entirely new ways. While he can "play up" terror in routine acts such as prayers through images of rape and rapture, Donne is also adept at "downplaying" terror in situations where it can genuinely be justified. In “Death, Be Not Proud,” for example, Donne cleverly reverses the threat of death onto death itself, when he says, “Death, thou shalt die.” Gives completeness to the idea that death is what should be feared, not death. one to fear: Death, do not be proud, although some have called you Mighty and formidable, for you are not; For those whom you think to overthrow, Do not die, poor Death, and you cannot yet kill me. From rest and sleep, which are but your images, much pleasure, then much more must flow from you, and soon our best men with you depart, rest to their bones and deliverance to the soul. You are a slave of destiny. , chance, kings and desperate men, and dwell with poison, war and disease, and the poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well, and better than your stroke; why are you swollen then? A short sleep past, we wake up eternally, and death will be no more; Dead, you will die. Donne subverts the standard perception of Death as powerful and terrifying, suggesting that instead of knocking people down, Death helps them get back up, to "eternally wake up." The speaker's tone is condescending with "poor Death" and culminates in saying that Death cannot kill him, and therefore has no power over the speaker. By personifying Death, using pejorative conceits ("And the poppy, or the charms can also make us sleep"), Donne depicts Death not as "powerful and terrible" but as a mere mortal - or rather less than us , mortal, since he will die. eternal death at the resurrection, while we mortals will enjoy eternal life. In summary, it is an interesting play on words and “Donsian” concepts. For Donne, however, innovation does not stop at metaphysical conceits. Despite Jonson's complaints about the poet's "lack of accent", closer analysis reveals a method in his apparent madness. In "Batter my Heart", there is an obvious struggle between the pronouns "I" and "you", the latter being much more recurring than the other, and revealing the predominance of God over the individual. Added to this is the effect of the poem's noticeably stumbling meter and short-breathed caesuras which emphasize the speaker's urgency to be ravished by God. This is not a sonnet of softly lilting iambic feet, but a series of pentameters that abuse the tradition of syllabic regularity. “.