Difference between shakespearean love and canonised love
Answers
I am writing my point of view :
If William Shakespeare and John Donne were to go head-to-head in a love sonnet battle, Donne would be Chuck Norris and Shakespeare would be Screech from Saved by the Bell. More simply put, Donne would whoop Shakespeare. While I of course still appreciate and love the work of Shakespeare, Donne’s love sonnets strike a deeper cord within me. His use of metaphorical “conceits” and playful paradoxes speak to a deeper, more spiritual love which truly connects the reader to his personal feelings and affections for his beloved.
The first sonnet I read, “The Sun Rising”, instantly sparked my interest in Donne’s poetry. He speaks of a moment in which most of us are all to familiar with when you are laying in bed in the morning with the person you love in the most comfortable state of bliss and the sun bursts through the shades to torment you. He pleads for the sun to “go chide/late schoolboys and sour prentices” and to just leave him and his beloved alone to sleep. He quips how he could easily “eclipse and cloud” the sun with a mere wink, but that he dares not for he would lose sight of his beloved for a fraction of a second. He then compares the love he shares to princes and kings. The rule of a prince or king over a land and all the wealth and possessions they have are simply “play” compared to what he has, true love. However, the final 2 lines strikes me as one of the deepest lines of poetry pertaining to love. Donne beckones the sun to “Shine here to us” (in bed) and if the sun does so then the sun would be “everywhere”, as if Donne’s entire world is contained within the walls of his room in which he beloved resides:”This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.” Only a truly spiritual and deep love would drive someone to write a sonnet such as this.
The second sonnet, “The Canonization,” is Donne speaking to someone who clearly objects to his relationship with his beloved. Donne questions what momentous life cycles are being tampered with by his love for his beloved. He asks when his love caused someone to die of the plague, when his tears have flooded grounds, and when his “sighs” have caused merchant ships to sink. “Though she and I do love” the world still goes on unaffected. Similarly to Shakespeare, Donne attempts to eternalize his love by building “in sonnets pretty rooms” in which they can love forever. To me, the type of eternalization that Donne attempts here is far more sincere and heart-felt than that of Shakespeare. While Shakespeare seems to boast that he can make things eternal by writing about them, Donne simply wants to love her forever: “And by these hymns, all shall approve/Us canonized for love.”
The final sonnet highlights an aspect of love that everyone hates: separation. This sonnet also speaks of a love that transcends all the physical and carnal aspects of love and really gets at a more spiritual type of love. The sonnet is full of metaphors and comparisons that are meant to be a way for the lovers to see their separation in a way that avoids any mourning or sad feelings. In the 4th stanza, Donne compares the type of love he and his beloved have to a type of ‘common’ love. While he and his lover have a love that is “so much refined” and “Inter-assured of the mind” that being separated will not affect that love at all, “Dull” lovers cannot not deal with separation because it would remove “those things which elemented it”, it would remove the very love itself. However, Donne and his lover need not worry about missing “eyes, lips, and hands” because they both know that their love is strong and can endure any type of separation. Donne goes on to compare their love to a compass, with she being the “the fixed foot” and he being the needle that rotates around it. He describes her as being the stabilizing rock within his life, with her “firmness” allowing him to make his “circle just”. These metaphors and comparisons make up one very good love sonnet. But again, these are simply my thoughts on the matter.
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