1. Love and Death
in John Donne
Tyrone Kennedy
107540078

2. Formulating
Ideas:
 General Interest
 Undergraduate Studies
 Further Reading

3. First Encounter
 John Donne and the Metaphysical
Presentation

4. Why?
Goe and Catch a Falling Starre The Good-Morrow
“If thou be’st born to strange sights “I wonder by my troth, what thou,and I
Things invisible to see Did, till we lov’d? were we not
Ride ten thousand days and nights, wean’d till then?
Till age snow white hairs on thee, But suck on countrey pleasures,
childishly?
Thou, when thou return’st, will tell me,
Or snorted we in the seven sleepers
All strange wonders that befell thee,
den?
And swear,
Twas so; but this, all pleasures
No where fancies bee
Lives a woman true and fair.” If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desir’d, and got, t’was but a
dreame of thee.”

5.  Intensive use of A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
ingenious conceits
“If they be two, they are two so
As stiffe twin compasses are two,
Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no
show
 Famous turns of wit To move, but doth, if the’other doe.”
 Use of Metaphysical

6. Further Study:
 Donne’s fascination with death, sex and the
connection between the body and the soul
 Deeper look into Donne’s love poetry
 Donne’s philosophy of love

7. Moving Forward
Other elements of Donne:
 From poetry to prose
From love to death

8. Fourth Essay
 Religious Writing: Meditations, Devotions,
Sermons
 Moral Aspect
 Influenced by Donne’s fixation with death?

9. Connection between Love and
Death
 Holy Sonnets
 Body and Soul
 Death not Love

10. Donne’s Strategies
 Conquering Death
 Love Poetry
 Similarities and Reasoning

11. Aspects to Consider
 Urge to battle death  Overwhelming
directly concern for the
 Desire to take his material decay of
death into his own corpse
hands
 Longing above all
 Loathing of
for resurrection
separation of body
and soul

12.  Donne’s fear of  Links in Devotions
damnation and between joy of
longing for salvation unifying body and
 Links to suicide and soul
Christ in Biathantos  Donne’s strategies in
(Essay 4) ‘Death’s Duell’
 Fear of decomposing  The ‘we’ in ‘Death’s
beyond possibility of Duell’
resurrection in ‘The
Relic’

13. Possible Questions
 Do these aspects contradict each other?
 Is there a lack of Christian morality in
Donne’s work? Or is it the opposite?
 Do they show a lack of interest in the
mortal life?

14. Summary
 Where am I?
 Progression of thought
 Moving towards the thesis

15. Bibliography
 Bloom, Harold. John Donne and the Seventeenth Century
Metaphysical Poets. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.
Text.
 Carrithers, Gale H. Donne at Sermons. New York: State U of New
York P, 1972. Text.
 Gardiner, Helen. John Donne: The Divine Poems. New York:
Oxford UP, 2001. Text.
 Smith, A. John Donne, Essays in Celebration. London: Methuen &
Co. Ltd., 1972. Text.
 Targoff, Ramie. John Donne Body and Soul. London: U of Chicago
P, 2008. Text.