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Twice or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame,
Angels affect us oft, and worshipped be;
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is,
Love must not be, but take a body too;
And therefore what thou wert, and who,
I bid love ask, and now
That it assume thy body I allow,
And fix itself to thy lip, eye, and brow.
Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
And so more steadily to have gone,
With wares which would sink admiration,
I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught
Every thy hair for love to work upon
Is much too much, some fitter must be sought;
For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere.
Then as an angel, face and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
So thy love may be my love's sphere.
Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air and angel's purity,
'Twixt women's love and men's will ever be.
John Donne
Read poems about / on: angel, women, work, child, hair, love, woman, children
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Click here to write your comments about this poem (Air And Angels by John Donne)
Jamila Claire (6/3/2008 10:02:00 PM)
omg this is a beautiful poem |
Michael Pruchnicki (6/3/2008 1:33:00 PM)
A perfect title 'Air and Angels' for a major concern of the 17th century English metaphysical poet John Donne whose poems have been divided into early ironic love poetry and later religious poetry-the profane and the sacred, one might say. The poet used the language of both science and everyday life in powerful and intellectual ways to express his ideas using striking and original imagery.
Love is both spiritual and physical, he asserts in the first 14 lines which constitute in effect an irregular Italian sonnet rhyming ABBA BCDE DECF CFFF. The argument is complicated but amounts to the poet's assertion that mortal love is partly of the angelic realms but is substantially physical and earthly, as he sees in the visage of his beloved.
The next 14 lines launches into an extended metaphor wherein he uses the imagery of shipping goods by sea. He has overloaded 'love's pinnace', a small sailing vessel, with 'wares', the language of literary love, with weight that would sink his message, the ship and its cargo. He must rework his words of love into even smaller things, yet there is an almost contradictory force at work. Donne is skeptical of women's love which he considers to be insubstantial, like the air which takes no form, while men like the speaker in the poem (perhaps Donne himself) operate with an'angel's purity', which points up the fickleness, the inconstancy of women in love. Remember that this is an attitude popular with poets who wrote about romantic love in Donne's day, but with his emphasis on the complex nature of love becomes almost modern in its ironic stance!
Poetry of men, I say, since I never read a poem written by an angel! |
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