This is my presentation of The Renaissance Literature submitted to Prof.Dr Dilip Barad,MKBU

2. Welcome
 Name :- Aarti Hareshbhai Vadher
 Sem :- 1 M.A (English)
 Roll no :- 9
 Paper no :- 1
 Topic :-John Donne’s Treatment of Love
 Email Id :- artivadher10@gmail.com
 Submitted :- Smt.Gardi MKBU, Department of English,
 Year :- 2016-2018

3. John Donne’s Treatment of Love
John Donne
 Born : 22 January 1573, London, England
 Died : 31 March 1631 (aged 58)
 Occupation : Poet, Priest, Lawyer,
 Nationality : English
 Genre : Satire, Love poetry, Elegy, Sermons
 Subject : Love, Sexuality, Religion, Death
 Literary movement : Metaphysical poetry

4. Introduction
• Love, the most felt and discussed emotion of human mind
• Its dominant theme of all branches of literature of all ages
• The treatment of love has been different from writers to writers and poets to poets
• John Donne has also used ‘love’ to be an important theme of his poetry
• Love may be different from man to man, time to time, Donne has also treated
realistically love to be different from one poem to others
• It is not very easy to find out a simple definition of the love from Donne’s poems

5. Three main strands in Donne’s poems
 The first is cynical attitude which is anti-woman
and hostile to the fair sex
 The second strand is of happy married life or of
mutual love
 The third is regarding supremacy of love with
philosophical interpretation

6. Cynical attitude
 In the poems of first strand i.e. in the poems marked by cynicism and scorn,
we see the poet’s contempt towards love itself and a gaiety and playfulness.
 For example , the poet begins ‘Go and Catch a Falling Star’ with an
impossible imagery followed by many others only to prove the impossibility
of discovering a true and faithful women,
“Go , and catch a falling star
Get with child a mandrake root”
Since it is impossible to catch a falling star and to produce a child with
mandrake root, it is also impossible to find “a woman true, and fair”.

7. Mutual love
 The second group of poems upholds the simple, pure, mutual love and the
best in conjugal love. Many of them are addressed to his wife Anne More.
‘The Anniversary’, written to celebrate the second anniversary of his weeding
, gives a fine picture of domestic bliss.
In ‘The Sun Rising’ the poets says,
“she’s is all states, and all princes, I,
Nothing else is”.
Here the lover does not know anything except his beloved.

8. Physical Love
 As for the supremacy of love, the poet sometimes says that physical love is the best,
elsewhere says spiritual love is the best and again says that spiritual love out of
physical love is the best .
 In “ The good Morrow”, the speakers says,
“ If ever any beauty I did see
Which I deserved , and got, was but a dream of thee”
And, “ If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike , that none so slacken, non can die”.
 Here we see the supremacy of spiritual love.