“Poetry is a counterfeit creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were.”~John Donne

Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?
Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide
Late school boyes, and sowre prentices,
Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,
Call countrey ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme,
Nor houres, dayes, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beames, so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou thinke?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a winke,
But that I would not lose her sight so long:
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Looke, and to morrow late, tell mee,
Whether both the India’s of spice and Myne
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with mee.
Aske for those Kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,
And thou shalt heare, All here in one bed lay.

She is all States, and all Princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes doe but play us; compar’d to this,
All honor’s mimique; All wealth alchimie.
Thou sunne art halfe as happy’as wee,
In that the worlds’s contracted thus;
Thine age askes ease, and since thy duties bee
To warme the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare.

You can read the poem here with updated spelling, but I rather think the seventeenth century spelling adds to the spirit of the thing.

Arrogant, heedless, self-centered love, true love! And we moderns thought we invented the worship of romantic love! The sunne itself is servant to the lovers in their bed and restricted to their bedroom. And thereby the sunne warms the world, which is also captive to the lovers themselves. In fact the poet and his love are the entire world. Nothing else matters.

Really? Yet, don’t many, many couples, enamoured of one another, freshly in love, thinking that no one else has ever loved as they love, feel exactly like the speaker in Donne’s poem? Lovesickness is a common malady that only the lovers themselves take to be uncommon.

As a poet, Donne has had his admirers and his detractors. Here are a few varying opinions from influential critics.

The “Aginners”:
Ben Jonson: “Don[n]e for not keeping accent deserved hanging.”
Samuel Johnson: ““The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions.”
Stanley Fish: “Donne is sick, and his poetry is sick.”

The Fan Club:
Izaak Walton: “The recreations of his youth were poetry, in which he was so happy, as if nature and all her varieties had been made only to exercise his sharp wit and high fancy; and in those pieces which were facetiously composed and carelessly scattered, – most of them being written before the twentieth year of his age – it may; appear by his choice metaphors, that both nature and all the arts joined to assist him with their utmost skill.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots, / Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots; / Rhyme’s sturdy cripple, fancy’s maze and clue. / Wit’s forge and fire-blast, meaning’s press and screw.”
T.S. Eliot: “Expert beyond experience, / He knew the anguish of the marrow / The ague of the skeleton; / No contact possible to flesh / Allayed the fever of the bone.”
A.S. Byatt: “His great love poems stir both body and mind in an electric way that resembles nothing else.”

If you’re a part of the latter group, you can get your own John Donne T-shirt here. Or here. Amazing, what you can find, while exploring poetry on the internet.