selected poems · donne

John Donne, lawyer, rake and finally Dean of St Paul's, wrote the most intellectually strenuous lyrics in English, yoking sex, science and theology in a single conceit. The Songs and Sonnets argue love into metaphysics; the Holy Sonnets turn the same violence of wit on God, in poems of fear, sin, mortality and a faith that has to be wrestled for.

John Donne, The Complete English Poems, edited by A. J. Smith (Penguin Books, 1996). Read in Sophomore Spring at Torrey Honors. From Songs and Sonnets: Air and Angels; The Anniversary; The Apparition; The Blossom; The Canonization; The Curse; The Damp; The Ecstasy; A Fever; The Flea; A Lecture Upon the Shadow; Love's Alchemy; A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day; The Primrose; The Relic; Song (Go, and catch a falling star); Song (Sweetest love, I do not go); The Sun Rising; Twicknam Garden; A Valediction: forbidding Mourning; A Valediction: of Weeping; Woman's Constancy. From the Elegies: The Perfume; To his Mistress Going to Bed. From the Divine Poems: La Corona; Holy Sonnets 1 to 7, 10, and 13 to 17; A Litany; Upon the Annunciation and Passion Falling Upon One Day, 1608; Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward; A Hymn to Christ, at the Author's last going into Germany; Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness; A Hymn to God the Father.