“The Ecstasy” is set alongside “a pregnant bank” (2), likely that of a flowing river. The presence of a violet indicates that it is spring or summer, and because of Donne’s background, one can presume that this pastoral scene takes place in England during the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. The fact that the poem opens with the relative adverb “Where” (1) illustrates the importance of this setting; its description receives pride of place in the poem. And yet Donne presents this pastoral scene more like a bedroom scene, rounding out the poem’s first line with the simile “like a pillow on a bed” (1) to describe how the riverbank “swell’d up to rest / The violet’s reclining head” (2-3). This simile, along with the personification of the violet, grant the scene a more intimate and domestic quality, while the use of “pregnant” (2) to describe the...