Two page short essay over one of John Donne’s poems. A list of poems you can use is: The Flea, The Good-Morrow, Song : Go and catch a falling star, The Undertaking, The Sun Rising, The Indifferent, The Canonization, Air and Angels, Break of Day, A Valediction of Weeping, A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, The Ecstacy, The Funeral, The Relic, or The Bait.
The only source should be the poem itself.
The directions from my teacher are: “For your short paper on Donne, choose one of his poems to analyze. You can provide background information from the Norton or other reliable sources and explore how the poem works to present its meaning. Look in the frontmatter of Norton for characteristics of Donne’s work and show us how you see those characteristics in the poem.
What characteristics of Donne’s poetry do you find listed in the frontmatter of our Norton, beginning on page 600? The opening paragraph gives us material for analyzing the poems. First is Donne’s “strange and playful intelligence, expressed in puns, paradoxes, and the elaborately sustained metaphors known as ‘conceits.'” Second is “his grasp of learned and obscure discourses ranging from theology to alchemy, from cosmology to law.” Third is his creation of “intense dramatic monologues in which the speaker’s ideas and feelings seem to shift and evolve from one line to the next.” Fourth is his remarkable prosody (rhythm or meter or accenting of the syllables in the line of the poem), which “is equally dramatic, mirroring in its variable and jagged rhythms the effect of speech.”