SOURCE: Young, R. V. “Love, Poetry, and John Donne in the Love Poetry of John Donne.” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 52, no. 4 (summer 2000): 251-73.

In the following essay, Young examines Donne's complex and ironic treatment of love in his poetry, focusing on “The Bracelet,” “Loves Growth,” “The Sunne Rising,” and the Elegies.

Taken together, John Donne's Songs and Sonets, along with many of the erotic elegies, constitute a varied, even sporadic meditation on the experience and significance of love.¹ Despite the apparent contradictions in the collection—the outbursts of bawdiness, arrogance, and cynicism 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...