John Donne's Songs and Sonnets | Themes
Love
Some of John Donne’s love sonnets describe an exalted love that insists on and celebrates the body. Sexual love, expressed through metaphysical conceits (a type of extended metaphor), enables a union that mind alone cannot achieve. “The Canonization,” for example, suggests that the physical union of true lovers raises them to sainthood because the experience exceeds anything else offered on earth. Thus, the mutual pleasure in physical union transforms love into a religious experience, transgressing the conventional moral attitudes of Donne’s day in very...
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