John Donne's Treatment of Male-Female Relationship in Love - Essay Example

? John Donne is one of the most read and criticized poets of seventeenth century. The first thing to strike the reader is Donne’s extraordinary frankness and penetrating realism. The love poems of Donne idealess women and the sexual relations as spiritualized one. To those contemporaries who in their love poetry, made of every women either goddess or an unreal personification of chastity, Donne announced ‘Love‘s not so pure and abstract as they use To say, which have no Mistress but their muse “ Donne stressed love’s dualism of body and soul, flesh and spirit, its subtle passion and cynical bitterness. The treatment of love and the male and female relations in poems like ‘The Canonization’ and ‘The Flea’ is poles apart. Ther Canonization is based on the religion of love. The poem considers the marital relation as saintly and the lover and the beloved are saints. They represent the true love in the world. The poem begins with the unusual colloquial yet stressing addressing “For God’s sake hold your tongue and let me love”. Thus the poet straightly introduces the subject matter ‘love’. The lovers here burn like candles that will burn out of their own. Thus the lovers are beautiful examples of immortalized, canonized love. ‘Love’ is treated as a holy passion. Here the poet extols love-making as a divine act, an act of worship to God. But the poet does not become emotionally excited, nor does he get into an ecstatic mood when he describes love as a passion the merits canonization for the lovers. The male and female relation is not an excitement or bodily passion for him, but the reunion of two divine beings. So, he says, his love will not injure anyone. He does not upset the scheme of life in any way. In the second stanza he clears this idea. The relations are not for making war or interfering with commerce or spreading disease. The pairs restrict their love to their world. They take their own chances together in their fleeting lives. To the rest of the word they are tiny flies or candles burn together in peace. The burning passion of love in the male female relation is at a higher plane. First he compares the lovers to the eagle and dove, according to the Renaissance idea, eagle flies in the sky above earth while dove transcends the skies to reach heaven. The image of Phoenix is also something which exponents true love. Even though they will be burned to ashes by passion, they will reborn from the ashes of their love. . The divinity of love reaches the peak here . We feel to remember the references given in the Holy Bible about marriage . A human being is the union of both sexes. Platonic love is also the search of the other to attain divinity. The poet creates the idea that true relations will last forever, even after death. The temporary relations in married life based on passion will not last . In the last stanza the poet stresses the idea that they may not pass into history or be immortalized in history . But there will sonnets and love-lyrics perpetuating their history . “And by these hymnes , all shall approve , Us canonized for love”. Thus in Canonization we see the spiritual aspects of love ,which makes it transcend time and space. ‘The Flea ‘is another love poem in which the male and female relations are dealt in a worldly way. Contrary to Canonization the participants of love making are different here. This poem is a temptation to get the love of his female partner. The flea is a medium to transmit the love of one to another. The flea causes both of them to unite in its blood. The union is already happened. So it is not sinful to unite their bodies in the sexual act. In the first stanza Donne urges his girlfriend to watch the union of their blood inside the flea. He see the process of mixing up is blood as a natural thing , so it is not a sin “Mark but this flea, It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee”, ‘this cannot be a sin’. The poet argues here to present his wish to physically unite in the process of love making. First of all he seems to present the wish in the form of a kiss like the sucking of the flea. It would not be shameful to his young girl friend since she would not lose her virginity. But her moral beliefs prevent her from entering into such illegal relations. It is true for a flea, but natural.”Yet it enjoys before it woo”. The kind of temptation he gives is unpreventable. This is totally against the concept of pure divine love in “The Canonization”. The call for intercourse without the legal consent is evident in the lines. “Swells with one blood” In the second stanza of ‘The Flea’ Donne requests his lover not to kill the flea.”O stay, three lives in one flea square”. “The Flea is you and I’, Thus Donne expresses his sexual demands in a positive way that he even raises the flea to a higher level. The Flea is a holy ‘temple’ or the marriage bed where the union had already happened. Donne urges his girl friend to accept that the flea is a symbol of their reunion. The poem is strongly a call for seduction. Here we see the worldly love where the lovers are pure human being. Just opposing to the views presented in the poem Canonization, we can hear the call for bodily pleasures. Thus reduces marital relation to a physical or sexual act. For him now the reunion is just a matter of pleasure. When the poet compares the love making to that of saintly hood in Canonization, the poem Flea reduces that to such a low level as that of a flea. Canonization brings godly essence to love, but ‘The Flea’ a worldly one. Morality and honor in Canonization is replaced with seduction and immature love. For him love is for pleasure and enjoyment. “And Pampered swells with one blood made of two; this line suggests the satisfaction attained through seduction. It is clear from the approach of the poet that he has strongly different outlook about love and marital relations. The tone of Flea is sometimes persuasive and mocking. The comparisons used in both the poems are poles apart. The Canonization is the union of loves even in heaven. But here the small trivial flea is compared to the marriage bed because it mixes blood. The body of flea is a monastery for him where the wedding takes place. Thus both the poems use unusual comparison which is known as conceits, which is characteristic feature of Donne poetry. The Essay re-written The writers or authors were considered as divinely inspired individuals before the century. But the conventional view about the writers has changed and they were considered as product of their own culture and society. Dr James E Porter opines about authors as “a quilt maker” who takes various traces of the existing cultural interest and makes discourses combining their natural experiences. This theory is also applicable in the creation of Donne’s ‘The Canonization’ and ‘The Flea’. Porter, James. "Intersexuality and the Discourse Community." Rhetoric Review Fall 1986: 34-47. The poems ‘The Canonization’ and ‘The Flea’ are bold steps to violate the existing belief of the century about male female relations and sex before marriage. The people of that time were unaware of safe sex and believed that almost all sexual relations will end in childbirth. The diseases associated with it and the fear of the lack of physical health was also common at that time. In this context the poem “The Flea” is a question in front the then society. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage In England 1500- 1800. Abr. Ed. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1979. When ‘Canonization’ raises the lovers to that of saints ‘The Flea’ talks about the worldly love. In the poem ‘Canonization’ the poet spiritualizes the love and raise it to that of saints . Critic Clay Hunt opines that the entire poem gives “a new twist to one of the most worn conventions of Elizabethan love poetry by expanding “the lover-saint conceit to full and precise definition. The images of candles, eagle, dove, phoenix and saints given in the poems gives more power to the divinity of the love and sex. For Stephanie Smith Alexander the use of two unlike birds evokes a sense of equality in two things that are dissimilar just like the two sexes of the lovers. Cleanth Brook also argues that phoenix stands for rebirth, and it combines the imagery of candles and birds and expresses the power of love According to Leonard Unger even though the poem has exaggerated metaphors which results in absurdity, the poet is able to convey the actual message that the lover is detached from the world. For David Kelly the poem stresses on the interference of the external world in the world of lovers. Hunt, Clay. Donne’s Poetry: Essays in Literary Analysis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954. Alexander, Stephanie Smith.” A Critical Look at John Donne’s The Canonization” Acadia University 2006. Brooks, Cleanth ,”The language of Paradox: ‘The Canonization”. John Donne: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Helen Gardener. Englewood Cliff, N.J: Prentice Hall, 1962 Unger, Leonardo. Donne’s Poetry and Modern Criticism. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1950.. Kelly, David. “The Canonization of John Donne”. Sydney Studies in English. Web 2012 In the poem ‘The Flea’ the poet treat the theme of love in a different way. The request for the physical union is made with the help of a flea. Grierson observe this as a “strange choice to our mind, but apparently the poem was greatly admired as a masterpiece” The poem gives different meanings to love depending on the mood of the reader. Thus the poem achieved many critical meanings. The critics view the sex in the poem differently. In the opinion of James Keeve the poem is cynical and unpleasant. But for A J Smith it is anti-courtly and anti- petrarchan. When poets argues that his and his lovers blood is mixed up, it is an insult to a the lady since it mentions about surrogate motherhood. The word ‘suck’ also shows the desire of the body. Thus the two poems deal with male and female relations in very different way. M H Abrams, The Norton Anthology of English Literature New York, W. W. Norton and Company 1993 Grierson Herbert J C , Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of Seventeenth Century, 1921 The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Volume 2. ISBN 978-1-55111-610-5 Read More