other: from woman-as-goddess to woman-as-
whore. This hints at a way of thinking, of how
men respond to women, that is found many
times in Renaissance literature, and elsewhere.
A woman may be held up as a divine ideal, an
image of spotless purity, by men who like to
adore distant objects. The presentation of Eliza-
beth I as the Virgin Queen is an example. But a
real woman, in all her power and complexity, is a
different matter. One false step and she becomes,
well, nothing better than a tramp.
This psychological pattern suggests the anger
and rage that can take possession of the male who
has his fantasy ideal disturbed by the presence of
real flesh and blood—by a woman who is a com-
plex human being, just as he is. One does not have
to look further than the works of Donne’s con-
temporary, William Shakespeare, for examples. In
Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra is both goddess
and harlot. She is decked out as the Egyptian
goddess Isis, but when she appears to betray Ant-
ony, he condemns her venomously as a ‘‘triple-
turn’d whore,’’ which was what the Romans were
saying about her all along. The same applies to
Desdemona, inOthello, according to which char-
acterisdescribingher.Othello idealizes his beau-
tiful wife, but look what happens when Iago
convinces him of her infidelity. Desdemona suffers
the fatal consequences of this split in the male
psyche that results in deadly rage when women
do not act as men think they ought to.
This may perhaps be taking Donne’s little
song, ‘‘Song’’ too seriously, but the psychology
described above is clearly present in it. Men who
fear or condemn women for their volatility, their
changeability (as happens in both those plays by
Shakespeare) are in fact as subject to irrational
and dangerous change as the women they com-
plain about—as any woman who has been the
victim of male violence knows very well.
Whether he means his cynicism seriously or is
just adopting a pose, there is no doubt that Donne,
in his persona as the speaker of these love poems,
can sometimes sound a very embittered fellow
indeed. ‘‘Song’’ is only one example. ‘‘Woman’s
Constancy’’ is even more savage. It begins, with
heavy irony, ‘‘Now thou hast loved me one whole
day, / Tomorrow when thou leav’st, what wilt thou
say?’’ In the remainder of the poem, the speaker
anticipates the excuses he thinks the departing lady
will offer to justify her hasty ending of their relation-
ship. He includes a typical ingenious twist, saying
that perhaps she will argue that since her nature is to
be false, by being false to him she is being true to
herself. Finally, calling the lady a ‘‘vain lunatic’’—
nothing gives such satisfaction, when lovers are
about to split, as the carefully honed insult—the
speaker says that he could argue with her if he
chose, and demolish all her excuses and justifica-
tions, but he is not going to do so. Why should he?
By tomorrow, he may want to end their relation-
ship, too. The poem is petulant, clever, amusing,
and psychologically accurate about the way people
may behave when their love, once so bright and
eager, is rejected. Donne’svoice, reaching across the
centuries, still sounds so very modern.
Source:Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on ‘‘Song,’’ inPoetry
for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.R. V. Young
In the following excerpt, Young discusses John
Donne’s wit and use of irony.
Taken together, John Donne’s Songs and
Sonets, along with many of the erotic elegies, con-
stitute a varied, even sporadic meditation on
the experience and significance of love. Despite
the apparent contradictions in the collection—
the outbursts of bawdiness, arrogance, and cyni-
cism among the reiterated, if often problematic,
assertions of love’s transcendence of what is base
and banal—these poems finally evoke a unified
vision of what Monsignor Martin C. D’Arcy
calls ‘‘the mind and heart of love.’’ In fact, it
is precisely the candid acknowledgment of the
contradictions in human attitudes that enables
the complex irony of Donne’s witty eloquence to
dramatize the approach to that ‘‘decisive moment’’
when a man genuinely recognizes the common
human identity of the desired other, and ‘‘‘love’
now takes on its proper meaning’’ (244). As
D’Arcy also says, ‘‘It is always, we must remem-
ber, a full human person who is loving, and in that
love there are sure to be many different strands’’
(69). Love is an arresting exemplar of the para-
doxical structure of reality as it is perceived by
men and women; and poetry, understood broadly
as a creative literary fiction (a ‘‘golden world,’’ if
you will), is our most compelling means of mani-
festing that perception for the contemplation of ‘‘a
full human person.’’ Few poets have achieved
more in this line than John Donne.
Amid the current atmosphere of ideological
intimidation, which looms...over...Donneschol-
arship, these must seem quixotic assertions. This is,
after all, the same John Donne who has been
accused of apostasy (Carey 15–36), phallocentrismSong