SOURCE: Gorton, L. M. “Philosophy and the City: Space in Donne.” John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne 18 (1999): 61-71.

In the following essay, Gorton discusses Donne’s sense of place, use of space, and spatial imagery in “The Sunne Rising,” “Breake of Day,” “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward,” and the Anniversaries.

John Donne was a Londoner born and bred, and his poems take much of their life from the life of that city.¹ His lovers think of taxes, coins, and compasses. They know boys go to school, lawyers make money, ships come in; the business of life goes on outside their rooms. His most tender poems have that satirical edge—the awareness of an outside world that has no time for love.² It makes them seem real, and immediate. Such immediacy is all the more striking, however, because Donne's poems are rarely simply immediate...