John Donne's Deathly Language of Love by Iain Bernhoft

John Donne's love poetry in Songs and Sonnets is replete with images of death. Killing and dying, ghosts and corpses, tombs and epitaphs recur frequently. He seems to dwell on, or at least speak in terms of, death a good deal, titles such as "The Legacy," "The Apparition," "The Funeral" and "The Expiration" suggest as much. Almost half of the Songs and Sonnets refer to or deal with the subject of death in some substantial way. He does not just melodramatically compare separation or scorn from his beloved to dying, however. Those are present, certainly, but he also reflects on posterity, the afterlife, even the idea that love itself is a kind of death. Linking love to death is not necessarily unique phrases such as "dying of a broken heart," "being love-sick" and "'til death do us part" are commonplace but Donne's focus and insistence on the connection is unusual. The bent of his images and language is often far more obsessed with death itself, with executors and autopsies and graves, than it is with the mere poetic comparison. Also, considering that "to die" was contemporary slang for sexual intercourse, there is an amount of ambiguity, possibly even eroticism, in much of his talk of death. In this essay, I will examine the various categories of Donne's morbid love-speak, noting his general themes, tendencies, and characteristics.

One of the deathly conceits that Donne returns to repeatedly is the notion of separation from the beloved being tantamount to death. He does not usually maintain that leaving his lover is like death (a common enough idea, perhaps), but rather that it is death. In Songs and Sonnets, the similarity is first raised in the "Song" beginning with the lines, "Sweetest love, I do not go/ For weariness of thee" (lines 1-2). However, he only maintains that taking leave of his mistress is a "feigned death" to help him grow accustomed to actually dying. Nevertheless, a tangible connection between the actions of the beloved and death is raised, as he says, "When thou weep'st, unkindly kind,/ My life's blood doth decay" (27-8). "The Legacy" is far more dramatic, however. Not only does the poet die whenever he is parted from his lover, "though it be but an hour," he dies again on attempting to leave his heart for her in his will and finding it missing (line 3). What is particularly notable about this is that while the principle ideas may be typical romantic fodder, the images the poet conjures up are not. He speaks of writing a will and "ripping" open a cadaver; such talk is much more evocative of actual death than death-as-romantic fancy. Donne does not merely pay lip-service to ideas concerning death he often follows them to their more grisly conclusions.

Donne's preoccupation with the painful parting of lovers is demonstrated in his four "Valedictions," or farewell speeches. Not surprisingly, three of these involve the idea of death in some way. "A Valediction: Of My Name, in the Window" finds the speaker speculating that his carved signature will serve as a memento to "Lovers' mortality," but that "muscle, sinew and vein" will return to its skeleton eventually (lines 22, 29). In the end, he blames this rumination on the fact that he is, due to his impending departure, near death. He sings a different tune in "A Valediction: On Weeping," in which he insists that weeping only encourages the sea to drown him, and sighing cruelly shortens the lovers' lives. Furthermore, "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" advocates that their parting should be as "virtuous men" who "pass mildly away" (line 1). While Donne's main arguments shift, his use of death to convey an aspect of love does not: he draws for the reader scenes of skeletons and flesh, drowning at sea and friends gathered somberly round a death-bed.

If, in Donne's poetry, being temporarily separated from one's beloved amounts to death, what can possibly be said of permanent bereavement? "A Fever" and "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day" go far in answering this question. In the former, the speaker is faced with the potential death of his lover, and sees in it the death of the entire world. Again, his language is forceful, even distasteful: the world becomes only "thy carcass," and even the best men are "corrupt worms" (lines 10, 12). It is by using such disturbing imagery that the full-force of the speaker's desperation and horror can be felt. He does not employ euphemisms such as "the light going out;" he speaks of rotting flesh and maggots. In "A Nocturnal upon St Lucy's Day," the much-feared death of the beloved has become a reality. The grief-stricken speaker admits that, in the past, their tears had often "drowned the whole world," and absences "made us carcasses" (lines 24, 27). Struggling to find words to describe this new condition, he calls himself "every dead thing" and even "the grave/ Of all that's nothing" (12, 21). In this nadir of existence, he struggles to find something even more dead than dead. Only thus can he convey the profound deadness that has replaced his love.

Beyond the conception of separation causing untimely demises, Donne also plays with the notion that the object of his affection has the power to kill him through rejection or general "loving" domination. He does not stop at the idea of the beloved as killing through neglect, but often takes it one step further to picture her as a murderer. While this is implied in "Twickenham Garden," wherein the speaker laments that his loved one is only true "because her truth kills me," it is sketched far more vividly in "The Apparition" (line 27). There, the speaker addresses his scornful love as "murd'ress" and paints the macabre picture of his ghost returning to torment her in her bedchamber. "The Damp" also plays on the idea of murder, as the speaker accuses his beloved of hoping to "massacre" his friends and doctors when they perform an autopsy on him and find "your picture in my heart" (lines 8, 4). Perhaps most confusing is "The Expiration," another poem of the "parting is such sweet sorrow" variety. There, the speaker says it would be just for his love to kill him, since he is "a murderer" for killing her by leaving. Killing him turns out to be impossible, however, because he is "double dead, going, and bidding go" (line 12). Clearly, in love, opportunities for death abound.

The speaker does not always take his slaughtering passively, however. In "Witchcraft by a Picture," he takes his leave of his lover lest she kill him through a voodoo-like destruction of his image in her eyes. Although "The Funeral" first appears to express tender and affectionate sentiment “ the speaker will be buried with "a subtle wreath of hair" that will serve as his "outward Soul" and keep "these limbs, her provinces, from dissolution" the conclusion takes a different tone (lines 3, 5, 8). It is actually a gesture of bravado, he says, "That since you would save none of me, I bury some of you" (24). Again, his language is strong, as he speaks of replacing his spinal cord and of manacled prisoners waiting to die. "The Will" is much more bitter, as the love-injured speaker claims he will "undo/ The world by dying, because love dies too" (lines 46-7). Another thing that is anomalous about "The Will" is that he seems to place as much blame on Love for making him yearn for the neglectful lover as he does on the neglectful lover herself.

This idea that Love itself can somehow be responsible for one's death leads into another area of Donne's love poetry, wherein the actions of love are seen as violent or fatal. In "Love's Exchange," the speaker compares himself to a small town bombed by heavy artillery, and submits himself as an example to those who would fight love:

if the unborn

Must learn by my being cut up and torn,

Kill, and dissect me, Love (lines 38-40)

Once more, his descriptiveness is arresting. Images of "racked carcasses" being poor cadavers to dissect are not typical for love poetry, but here with Donne they do not seem misplaced. He also compares himself to a fish, "amorously" swimming to be caught ("The Bait"), and speaks of the action of love in terms of grapeshot obliterating ranks of infantry ("The Broken Heart"). Ultimately, in "The Paradox," the speaker maintains that lovers without exception are dead, and that any appearance to the contrary is an illusion. Death in this poem is no longer associated with separation or rejection, but rather with loving itself. The speaker proclaims that he as become his "epitaph and tomb ¦ Love-slain, lo, here I lie" (lines 18-20).

"The Prohibition" neatly summarizes exactly this. He sternly warns the other to "take heed of loving me," since "so great joy our life at once outwears" and he would frustrate her by his death (lines 1, 6). The next stanza, however, equally enjoins against hating him, since he would "perish" by it and no longer be a conquest. The speaker playfully recognizes the impossibility of the situation, as he concludes:

Love me, that I may die the gentler way;

Hate me, because thy love's too great for me.

Oh let me live, yet love and hate me too (19-20, 24)

Donne's language of love is so laden with elements of death that such a paradoxical "prohibition" is almost unavoidable. Indeed, in "The Paradox" and "The Prohibition," it is no longer clear that death is a bad thing “ it seems instead to be ubiquitous and inevitable.

Intertwined with all this talk of death are notions of sex that were prevalent in Donne's day. First, it must be noted that to "die" or "kill" was popular slang for engaging in sexual intercourse. It may well be this that Donne is playing off in the passage quoted above, "Love me, that I may die the gentler way" ("The Prohibition," line 19), and again what the speaker may be hinting at in "The Damp," saying, "Kill me as woman, let me die/ As a mere man" (lines 21-22). Also, more than one meaning is possible in the phrase, "Love-slain, lo, here I lie" ("The Paradox," line 20). This terminology may have stemmed from popularly-held myth that the sexual act shortened one's lifespan by a day. Donne makes reference to this belief in "Farewell to Love" the speaker asks, "cannot we jocund be/ After such pleasures?" but admits that "each act, they say,/ Diminisheth the length of life a day" (lines 21-23, 24-25). This notion further unites the talk of love and death, and helps to permeate Donne's love poetry with references to death. The speaker in "The Canonization" openly admits to willfully engaging in a small degree of self-destruction. "Call her one, me another fly,/ We're tapers too, and at our own cost die," he gleefully proclaims (lines 20-21). A particularly famous example of Donne arguing against the connection between sex and death can be found in "The Flea." After pleading with his overly-chaste companion that, in killing a flea which has sucked their blood, she is guilty of a triple-murder (the flea, him and herself), he changes his approach dramatically. "Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thou,/ Find'st not thyself, nor me, the weaker now," he points out (line 24). Though her honor also appears to be of some concern, Donne once again sets up the dilemma in terms of life and (particularly) death.

Given the preoccupation with aspects of death that fills many of the Songs and Sonnets, it is not surprising that a number of the poems have an eye to posterity and the afterlife. As the title suggests, the speaker of "The Canonization" argues that, once he and his beloved are truly dead, the verses he writes about them will cause posterity to canonize and "invoke" them. "The Anniversary" looks at what will transpire in the afterlife, and the speaker optimistically suggests that, although "Two graves mist hide thine and mine corpse," their souls will enjoy "a love increased there above" (lines 11, 19). Although this sentiment is neither revelatory nor necessarily denotes a fascination with death, it is perhaps unusual that the speaker should mark their one-year anniversary with such speculation. It is markedly different than "The Good Morrow," the first poem in Songs and Sonnets, wherein the speaker makes a claim for immortality based on the doctrine of decay only affecting unequally mixed elements. "If our two loves be one, or, thou and I/ Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die," he says (lines 20-21). A more characteristic sentiment (for Donne) is expressed in "The Dissolution," where he states that he will overtake his lover's departed soul because he will be so much more eager to go. Even here, however, a certain fascination with death is evident, as he starts the poem with a rather philosophical discussion of her returning to her elements and thus restoring him physically (since they were "mutual elements" to each other).

"The Relic" invokes a theme similar to "The Canonization," but it dwells far more on the specifics of death. Instead of being canonized for verse, the speaker imagines being disinterred so that a second corpse can be buried, and says that the gravedigger will find "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone" (line 6). The stark contrast presented in this image between "bright hair" and "bone" makes the deathliness of the whole scene even more shocking (Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets"). The reason for the combination is a practical one, however it ensures that the speaker and his beloved will meet when re-constituting themselves at Judgment Day. He thinks that the find would have a profound effect on a potentially devotion-less society, and that they would be venerated as relics.

Thus, throughout the Songs and Sonnets, we hear the voice of a man whose thoughts are never far removed from death. Whether he be poetically exaggerating the pain of departure or lamenting a tragic loss, feeling injured by rejection or bowled over by love, advocating procreation or pondering his impact on future generations, the motif of death returns over and over. Furthermore, his language and images contain a freshness and power not to be found in more traditional poetic combinations of death and love. The zealous lover of Donne's poems never dies "of a broken heart;" he die again because, after ripping open his own chest, he is so mortified that his heart is already gone and thus not available to leave to his beloved in his legacy. This lover does not merely die from being scorned; he promises to come back as a ghost and make his scorner, in bed with another man, more ghostlike than himself. Love does not shoot him with "Cupid's Arrow," it obliterates him with cannon fire and alternately racks and dissects his corpse. In short, Donne uses death in a way that is violent, vivid, and memorable. In attempting to convey his thoughts and emotions, he taps into one of humanity's fundamental source of fear, horror and curiosity 'death itself' but he does so in a way that is powerful and alive.