SOURCE: Mintz, Susannah B. “‘Forget the Hee and Shee’: Gender and Play in John Donne.” Modern Philology, no. 4 (May 2001): 577-603.

In the following essay, Mintz discusses gender ambiguity in Donne's poetry.

Donne's ambivalence about self-other relations is well known to readers of Songs and Sonets. Poised at the brink between leaving and lingering, Donne's speakers navigate the competing urgencies of intimacy and autonomy, what Roy Roussell has described as “the twin inevitabilities of distance and desire.”¹ In fact, we can think of the dilemma as a quadrupled one, overdetermined by the paradox that staying behind with the beloved entails both the pleasure of contact and the risk of being consumed by that contact, while parting rewards the adventurer with independence but no guarantee of his lover's faithfulness. To strengthen a self made vulnerable by the conflictual demands of this crowded psychical threshold, Donne deploys his linguistic skill—the...