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The Complete English Poems Preface Table of Dates Further Reading A Note on the Metre
Songs and Sonnets
Air and Angels The Anniversary The Apparition The Bait The Blossom Break of Day The Broken Heart The Canonization Community The Computation Confined Love The Curse The Damp The Dissolution The Dream The Ecstasy The Expiration Farewell to Love A Fever The Flea The Funeral The Good Morrow The Indifferent A Jet Ring Sent A Lecture upon the Shadow The Legacy Lovers' Infiniteness Love's Alchemy Love's Deity Love's Diet Love's Exchange Love's Growth Love's Usury The Message Negative Love A Nocturnal upon S. Lucy's Day The Paradox The Primrose The Prohibition The Relic Self Love Song (Go, and catch a falling star)
Song (Sweetest love, I do not go)
Sonnet. The Token The Sun Rising The Triple Fool Twicknam Garden The Undertaking A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning A Valediction: of the Book A Valediction: of my Name in the Window A Valediction: of Weeping The Will Witchcraft by a Picture Woman's Constancy
Elegies
1. Jealousy
2. The Anagram
3. Change
4. The Perfume
5. His Picture
6. Oh, let me not serve so
7. Nature's lay idiot
8. The Comparison
9. The Autumnal
10. The Dream
11. The Bracelet
12. His Parting from Her
13. Julia
14. A Tale of a Citizen and his Wife
15. The Expostulation
16. On his Mistress
17. Variety
18. Love's Progress
19. To his Mistress Going to Bed
20. Love's War Sappho to Philaenis
Epithalamions or Marriage Songs
Epithalamion Made at Lincoln's Inn An Epithalamion, or Marriage Song on the Lady Elizabeth and Count Palatine being Married on St. Valentine's Day Eclogue 1613. December 26
Epithalamion
Epigrams
Hero and Leander Pyramus and Thisbe Niobe A Burnt Ship Fall of a Wall A Lame Beggar Cales and Guiana Sir John Wingfield A Self Accuser A Licentious Person Antiquary Disinherited Phryne An Obscure Writer Klockius Raderus Mercurius Gallo-Belgicus Ralphius The Liar Manliness
Satires
1. Away thou fondling motley humourist
2. Sir; though (I thank God for it) I do hate
3. Kind pity chokes my spleen
4. Well; I may now receive, and die
5. Thou shalt not laugh in this leaf, Muse Upon Mr. Thoms Coryat's Crudities
The Progress of the Soul (Metempsychosis)
Verse Letters
The Storm The Calm To Mr. B. B.
To Mr. C. B.
To Mr. S. B.
To Mr. E. G.
To Mr. I. L. (Blessed are your north parts)
To Mr. I. L. (Of that short roll of friends)
To Mr. R. W. (If, as mine is, thy life a slumber be)
To Mr. R. W. (Kindly I envy thy song's perfection)
To Mr. R. W. (Muse not that by thy mind thy body is led)
To Mr. R. W. (Zealously my Muse doth salute all thee)
To Mr. Rowland Woodward To Mr. T. W. (All hail, sweet poet)
To Mr. T. W. (At once, from hence)
To Mr. T. W. (Haste thee harsh verse)
To Mr. T. W. (Pregnant again with th' old twins)
To Sir Henry Goodyer A Letter Written by Sir H. G. and J. D. alternis vicibus To Sir Henry Wotton (Here's no more news)
To Sir Henry Wotton (Sir, more than kisses)
To Sir Henry Wotton, at his going Ambassador to Venice H. W. in Hibernia Belligeranti To Sir Edward Herbert, at Juliers To Mrs. M. H.
To the Countess of Bedford at New Year's Tide To the Countess of Bedford (Honour is so sublime perfection)
To the Countess of Bedford (Reason is our soul's left hand)
To the Countess of Bedford (Though I be dead)
To the Countess of Bedford (To have written then)
To the Countess of Bedford (You have refined me)
To the Lady Bedford Epitaph on Himself A Letter to the Lady Carey, and Mistress Essex Rich, from Amiens To the Countess of Huntingdon (Man to God's image)
To the Countess of Huntingdon (That unripe side of earth)
To the Countess of Salisbury
Epicedes and Obsequies
Elegy on the L. C.
Elegy on the Lady Markham An Elegy upon the Death of Mistress Boulstred Elegy upon the Untimely Death of the Incomparable Prince Henry Obsequies to the Lord Harrington, Brother to the Lady Lucy, Countess of Bedford An Hymn to the Saints, and to Marquis Hamilton
The Anniversaries
An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary
To the Praise of the Dead, and the Anatomy An Anatomy of the World A Funeral Elegy
Of the Progress of the Soul: The Second Anniversary
The Harbinger to the Progress Of the Progress of the Soul
Divine Poems
To E. of D. with Six Holy Sonnets To Mrs. Magdalen Herbert: of St. Mary Magdalen Holy Sonnets
La Corona Divine Meditations
1. Thou hast made me
2. As due by many titles
3. O might those sighs and tears
4. Oh my black soul!
5. I am a little world
6. This is my play's last scene
7. At the round earth's imagined corners
8. If faithful souls be alike glorified
9. If poisonous minerals
10. Death be not proud
11. Spit in my face ye Jews
12. Whyare we by all creatures waited on?
13. What if this present were the world's last night?
14. Batter my heart, three-personed God
15. Wilt thou love God, as he thee?
16. Father, part of his double interest
17. Since she whom I loved
18. Show me dear Christ
19. Oh, to vex me
A Litany The Cross Resurrection, imperfect Upon the Annunciation and Passion falling upon one day. 1608
Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward To Mr. Tilman after he had taken orders Upon the Translation of the Psalms by Sir Philip Sidney, and the Countess of Pembroke his Sister The Lamentations of Jeremy, for the most part according to Tremellius A Hymn to Christ, at the Author's last going into Germany Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness A Hymn to God the Father
Notes Index of Titles Index of First Lines
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Jacqueline Harrison
reviewed Complete English Poems on December 20, 2012
Complete English Poems
A friend of mine who's learning English has been reading sci-fi hit To Your Scattered Bodies Go, and they asked me in passing why the title is the way it is: some kind of quotation? English graduate Warwick sprang into action, because this is a sonnet whose opening lines I have had by heart since the first time I read it:
At the round earths imagin'd corners, blow
Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise
From death, you numberlesse infinities
Of soules, and to your scattred bodies goe…
…although I forget how it goes on; something something fire shall o'erthrow. This is, please excuse my language, a fucking brilliant way to begin a poem - the protoscientific precision of the first line, the frenzied enjambment and repetition, the dark horrified sweep of the vision being described. Like all the best poetry, it gets memorised by accident: the lines lodge in your brain and refuse to let go. When I pulled out my copy of Donne to check it, I ended up spending more than an hour flicking through the pages here, consumed with total pleasure - he's just so intense, utterly obsessed with sex and utterly terrified of death.
The Holy Sonnets (the above is number VII) are often overlooked when people think of Donne, who tends to be associated primarily with his Songs and Sonnets (none of which, strangely enough, are true sonnets). The most anthologised by far is The Flea, which is one of those 'male poet tries to talk his way into girl's knickers' type of poems, and builds on a weirdly long tradition of erotic verse about fleas (especially popular in France, where puce 'flea' usually involved some pun on pucelage 'maidenhead'). Donne's effort, though, is so technically flawless and so pitch-perfect in its mixture of careful reasoning and subterranean desperation that it does stand out:
Marke but this flea, and marke in this,
How little that which thou deny'st me is;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee;
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sinne, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,
 Yet this enjoyes before it wooe,
 And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two
 And this, alas, is more then wee would doe…
Donne is lying through his teeth, because he is not the sort of person who thinks sex is something free and easy. He wants to, but he can't: he just finds it all too disgusting, too animal, and it's this internal conflict which makes him so fascinating. There's one poem he writes from the point of view of Sappho writing to her female lover (and which has been called 'the first female homosexual love poem in English') where he gives free rein to his feelings of disgust for male sexuality:
Thy body is a naturall Paradise,
 In whose selfe, unmanur'd all pleasure lies,
Nor needs perfection; why shouldst thou than
 Admit the tillage of a harsh rough man?
Men leave behinde them that which their sin showes,
 And are, as theeves trac'd, which rob when it snows.
But of our dallyance no more signes there are,
 Then fishes leave in streames, or Birds in aire.
Dude, you make us sound like snails.
Oh, I haven't even talked about all the early scientific experimentation in these poems - Galileo, telescopes, microscopes ('I am a little world made cunningly / Of Elements'), astrology, biology, geology, he is so open to new knowledge and new ideas, anything to take his mind of the inevitability of his own extinction.
Everyone needs some Donne in their lives - the perfect expression of aesthetic pleasure poised over an underlying sweaty terror.
So, lovers dreame a rich and long delight
But get a winter-seeming summers night.
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Add Complete English Poems, 'The first poet in the world in some things', is how John Donne was described by his contemporary Ben Jonson. Yet it is only this century that Donne has been indisputably established as a great poet—and even, many feel, the greatest love poet of them a, Complete English Poems to the inventory that you are selling on WonderClubX
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Add Complete English Poems, 'The first poet in the world in some things', is how John Donne was described by his contemporary Ben Jonson. Yet it is only this century that Donne has been indisputably established as a great poet—and even, many feel, the greatest love poet of them a, Complete English Poems to your collection on WonderClub |