Analysis with clarity; commentary with heart.

This is Poetry Unpacked. 

“Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)”¹

Come on – I think we all have. Or did I just make some bad choices in my youth?

Instructions

I strongly recommend you read the poem (which appears at the end).

Preferably out loud, and even if you already know it. Poetry is an aural as well as a visual art form.

Then have a think about it for 5 minutes.

If you’re a student: do this. You will need to flex your muscles before your exams. Every new poem you read and think about will help.

Overview

In my reading, I’m looking at the poem as a more-or-less controlled rant by the persona at someone who loudly and publicly disapproves of his choice of lover.

If you’re reading this as a student, it’s a great opportunity to discuss AO1 as valuing ‘informed, personal and creative responses’, which you then validate with evidence and analysis (AO2).  

You can (perhaps should) find different interpretations of this poem online, and that’s fine – great, even. It’s AO5 in action.

Colour Coding?

AO1 – AO2 – AO3 – AO4 – AO5

Context

First, let’s build a contextual case to make my argument plausible. A great opportunity for me to show you how useful and influential AO3 can be. For my students, you can see ‘front-loading’ in action.

It’s difficult to say with any certainty when any of Donne’s poems were written.

We know that:

‘Donne did not write for publication. Fewer than eight complete poems were published during his lifetime, and only two of these publications were authorized by him.’ [1]²

And there are also dangers in assuming that any poem is autobiographical …

That said, we know that when Donne married Ann More, he was 29 and she was 17.

Famously, the marriage was secret; Sir George More (48 at the time) would never have approved, and he demonstrated this by having Donne imprisoned.

Why would Donne’s father-in-law?

Firstly, the age gap would certainly support someone who wanted to position the relationship as an innocent led astray. Katherine Rundell tells us:

‘Anne was still a minor, so Donne had broken canon law’³

And the more you know about Donne, the easier it is to accept that:

‘She had bound herself to a scribbling reprobate, without property and with a dead religious traitor for a brother’. (Rundell)

Sir George will doubtless have wanted a match which benefitted his family.

Instead he got someone who admitted, in that infamous letter revealing the clandestine marriage to his new father-in-law:

I knew my present estate less than fit for her; I knew (yet I knew not why) that I stood not right in your opinion; I knew that to have given any intimation of it, had been to impossibilitate the whole matter. (Rundell)

Let’s sum up. 

We have a mature man whose only claim to a younger woman (who he had wooed in secret, possibly from the age of 13 or 14 onwards) is that they truly love each other.

Then, we have a powerful, angry, and vengeful father. 

It’s plausible to suggest this poem is what Donne wished he’d been able to say to Sir George More, instead of begging for acceptance and leniency. We’ve all been there: thinking of brilliant, witty, and cutting remarks after the event!

As to writing these potentially damaging words down – remember, Donne wasn’t looking for publication and fame, but he did have:

‘an intimate and hyper-educated group of loyal friends’ (Rundell)

… who would have enjoyed not just his technical skill but the sentiments, too. It’s highly doubtful that the poem could have reached Sir George from them.

Here’s MY reading, then.

As usual, technical language (which students should use confidently and frequently in your own answers to improve your AO1) is in bold.

Analysis and Commentary

Donne displays typical expertise in maintaining a complex rhyme scheme and rhythm across the five stanzas. Coupled with a lack of caesuras, these factors suggest (despite the ebb and flow of the individual stanzas) an overall control of the persona’s emotions, as if the poem is written as a cool response to the situation, not in the heat of the moment.

The five-stanza structure echoes the five stages to sainthood (canonization). We might infer that Donne is caustically implying that a man would need to be a saint to get the other’s approval, or link it to the ‘after-life’ motif presented towards the end of the poem.

Assuming that the persona is addressing an older man, ‘For God’s sake’ opens with shocking strength of feeling and a lack of respect towards an elder. The verb ‘let’ could be a reaction to a nagging acquaintance, but its connotations of permission support an autobiographical reading that the subject of the tirade has the power to prevent or harm the match. 

That said, in the angry environment of the rest of the poem, it might just as easily be an imperative as a plea.

The persona seems self-aware he is not an attractive prospect.

Listing his perceived flaws, he admits being physically infirm, and the ‘five gray hairs’ if taken literally, could support a reading that his age is a factor in his unsuitability. Donne uses a second list to suggest a number of alternative diversions for the subject’s time an attention, with the repetition of ‘let me love’ to bookend the stanza strengthening the idea that the subject is impeding the lover’s ability to (at least) woo.  Interestingly, the first stanza is delivered in a single compound sentence, suggesting a breathless, if mostly controlled, resentment.

Abruptly, Donne changes the sentence structure in the second stanza to a series of five consecutive rhetorical questions, signifying confusion, frustration, even anger, although this might be tempered by the repetition of the sighing ‘alas’ as the stanza opens. The speaker attempts to use logos to minimise the scale and impact of his love. His message as the stanza ends – as they all do – with emphasis on the motif of ‘love’, is that the world still turns, that life goes on, however offended or upset the addressee is by the turn of events.

As we move into the third stanza, a calmer, more earnest tone adopts the conceit of birds to highlight one of Donne’s most frequent subjects – when ‘two become one’. His choice of eagle and dove combine connotations of majesty and power with the dove’s Christian links to peace and love, and there’s an echo of Shakespeare’s 1601 poem, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtl’e’ (dove). 

The result, in the persona’s argument, is the rebirth of the lovers as something mythical, rare, and splendid. The phoenix is commonly thought to be immortal, implying a meeting of souls, not bodies, in a way ‘mysterious’ to ordinary mortals.

Although ‘die’ can commonly be read as a subtle quibble on ‘orgasm’ in many of Donne’s early works, I’m not persuaded it does here – in the context of reading the meeting of these souls as something exalted. So when Donne repeats the idea of death from the end of stanza three into stanza four, we are more likely to read it literally.

This makes the stanza’s opening:

‘We can die by it, if not live for love’

… seem a little sinister, almost like a veiled threat and a return to the anger at the opening. However, he quickly turns the idea of the lovers’ deaths (like so many others in history and literature) into the stuff of legend and love poetry. 

It’s typical of Donne to jump nimbly from metaphor to image to metaphor, and his speaker seems emboldened and more confident in describing his love as the subject of ‘sonnets’, metaphorising it as an ‘urn’ which becomes a crucible and catalyst not just for future couples to enjoy the same passion, but the means by which these lovers will eventually be ‘canonized’.

The poem ends on a completely different note and tone to its uglier, more aggressive beginning. 

Having tried logos, we could say that the speaker (like any rhetorically trained gentleman of the era) switches to ethos to win the argument.

We suddenly find him in an almost delirious, heightened state, imagining his love to be held up as a kind of acme of relationships, which ‘countries, towns, courts’ can only ‘beg’ for. The decreasing order of this trio (in population size) matches an overall conceit in the stanza which emphasises the privacy and exclusive nature of the speaker’s love. Thus, each lover is metaphorised as the other’s ‘hermitage’, and ‘the whole world’s soul contracts’ in an atypical move from macrocosm to microcosm.

By the poem’s end, Donne’s persona seems to have forgotten his antagonist, but still leaves us with the message that his love is pure, rare, and particularly, a private matter.

The rhetorical rant becomes lyrical; indignation becomes inspiration.

Linked Poem(s)

John Donne, ‘The Sun Rising’. Another poem riffing on the privacy and intimacy of love, and scolding an intruding presence.

John Donne, ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’. A famous treatment of the pure and holy connection of two souls transcending the demands of the physical world.

Philip Larkin, ‘An Arundel Tomb’. Rounding off his collection, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, this is Larkin in typically oblique form. It works best viewed alongside the second half of ‘The Canonization’, meditating on the reality behind monuments to love. I leave it to you to decide whether to take the final line at romantic face value or view it with cynicism!

Can YOU suggest any other poems which might match this one? Which have I missed?

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The Canonization

For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,
         Or chide my palsy, or my gout,
My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout,
         With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,
                Take you a course, get you a place,                              [5]
                Observe his honor, or his grace,
Or the king's real, or his stampèd face
         Contemplate; what you will, approve,
         So you will let me love. 

Alas, alas, who’s injured by my love?                                           [10]
         What merchant’s ships have my sighs drowned?
Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?
         When did my colds a forward spring remove?
                When did the heats which my veins fill 
                Add one more to the plaguy bill?                                  [15]
Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still
         Litigious men, which quarrels move,
         Though she and I do love.

Call us what you will, we are made such by love;
         Call her one, me another fly,                                                 [20]
We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,
         And we in us find the eagle and the dove.
                The phoenix riddle hath more wit
                By us; we two being one, are it.
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.                                        [25]
         We die and rise the same, and prove
         Mysterious by this love.

We can die by it, if not live by love,
         And if unfit for tombs and hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;                                           [30]
         And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
                We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
                As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
         And by these hymns, all shall approve                              [35]
         Us canonized for Love.

And thus invoke us: “You, whom reverend love
         Made one another’s hermitage;
You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;
         Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove.    [40]
                Into the glasses of your eyes
                (So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize)
         Countries, towns, courts: beg from above
         A pattern of your love!”                                                        [45]

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1. Buzzcocks, ‘Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)’ (Love Bites, 1978) ↩︎
2. ‘John Donne’, at The Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-donne ↩︎
3. Katherine Rundell, Super Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (London: Faber & Faber, 2022) ↩︎

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