Donne is sick and his poetry is sick. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay: Stanley Fish's commentary, while extreme in its reductive assessment, is nevertheless understandable. You might find Donne's poetry objectionable in three respects: style, explicitness, and morbidity. As for style, Fish says Donne "is bulimic... someone who binge eats to a point beyond satiety, and then sticks their finger down their throat and vomits." And Fish is certainly not alone in this sentiment. C.S. Lewis called Donne the "saddest" and most "uncomfortable" of our poets, whose verse "exerts the same terrible fascination we feel in the grip of the worst kind of boredom: the hot-eyed, an inescapable kind." For his "not keeping the accent", Ben Jonson said Donne "deserved to be hanged". And if Jonson finds fault with the way Donne has trampled on the conventional rhythm, Deborah Larson finds his renegade semantic import disconcerting. “There is nothing,” Larson laments, “not even the ugly and the disgusting, that his verse will not say, no way, not even the rudest, that he will not adopt to achieve his almost impossible ends.” Added to this is Donne's apostasy. "The first thing to remember about Donne," writes John Carey, "is that he was Catholic; the second that he betrayed his faith" - of which there are plenty of examples. For example, the poet states: "As a Father, as a Master; I can preserve my Family from the attempts of the Jesuits: to let a Jesuit escape is like sparing a fox or a wolf." Such accusations, however, are hasty and subjective. . If the accusations of being "sick" hold up, they go hand in hand with the justification of Donne's desire to surprise his readers by causing them to reanalyze their faith and beliefs. In “Batter my Heart,” for example, Donne deliberately uses shocking imagery to convey a mystic's fervent desire to be alive in a faith that is indelicate, strong, and all-consuming. Certainly, the images - "burned", "battered", "broken", "raped" - are morbid, but through them Donne reveals the urgency of being overcome by God, and his images give us a sense of that moment when the self is absorbed into the whole, when the individual becomes an indistinguishable part of all time and creation. Beat my heart, God of the three people; for you do nothing but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; that I may arise, and stand, and overthrow,' and bend thy strength, to break, and blow, and burn, and make me new. I, like a usurped Towne, to another due, struggle to admit you, but oh, to no end, make your viceroy reason in me, I should defend myself, but he is a prisoner, and proves weak or false. Yet I "love you" dearly, and would be loved sincerely, but I am engaged to your enemy: divorce me, untie or break that knot again; mee, I will never be free, nor ever chaste, unless you rape me. To take Donne literally as a sick advocate of rape or sadism is to seriously misunderstand him. At worst the metaphors are surprising, but in doing so they remind us that one's faith is not always a comfort and invite us to recognize that true spiritual discipleship requires not only the acceptance of these contradictions in one's understanding of God, but also the willingness to let oneself be consumed by that divine entity that one can never fully understand. Indeed, if there is one "charge" that holds water, it would be that Donne's arguments are sometimes too perfectly scathing and almost mathematically persuasive in their proof. In themselves, however, Donne's metaphysical conceptions are interesting not only for their novelty but also for the breadth of their fields.from which they draw analogies: God as violent conqueror and rapist; the Holy Church as a bride made holier by her availability towards all men; the Sun as an exasperating "crazy old man" who disturbs a couple's intimate morning; a teardrop as a navigator's globe; separated lovers compared to the legs of a compass, the leg that draws the circle and ultimately returns home to the "fixed foot"; or a flea bite compared to the act of making love ("First he sucked me, and now he sucks you", is a good case in point, especially knowing that in 17th century typography, the printed "s" seemed like a very similar to the printed “f.” Donne's ideas range from the commonplace to the diminutive, and his comparisons are elaborately rationalized "playing out" terror in routine acts such as prayers through images of rape and rape, Donne is equally adept at "downplaying" terror in situations where it can truly be justified, "Death, do not be proud." for example, Donne cleverly inverts the threat of death onto death itself, when he says, "Death, you will die." Donne completes the idea that Death is the one to be feared, not the one to be feared: Death, not to be proud, although some have called you mighty and terrible, because you are not; for those whom you think to overthrow, they die not, poor death, nor can you kill me. From rest and sleep, which are but thy images, much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow, and soon our best men go with thee, rest of their bones and deliverance of the soul. You are the slave of fate, chance, kings and desperate men, and dwell with poison, war and disease, and the poppy, or spells can make us sleep even, and better than your stroke; why do you swell then? After a short sleep, we wake up eternally, and Death will be no more; Death, you will die. Donne subverts the standard perception of Death as powerful and terrifying, suggesting that instead of bringing people down, Death helps them get back up, to "awake eternally." The speaker's tone is condescending towards "poor Death" and culminates in saying that Death cannot kill him, so he has no power over the speaker. Personifying Death, using pejorative conceits ("And the poppy, or even spells can make us sleep"), Donne describes Death not as "powerful and terrible" but as a mere mortal - or rather less than us mortals, since he will die. an eternal death at the resurrection, while we mortals will enjoy eternal life. In summary, this is an interesting "Donnesian" play on words and concepts. For Donne, however, innovation does not stop at metaphysical concepts. Despite Jonson's complaint about the poet's "failure to maintain the accent," closer inspection reveals a method to his apparent madness. In "Batter my Heart", there is a conspicuous struggle between the pronouns "I" and "you", with the latter occurring significantly more than the other and revealing the predominance of God over the individual. Added to this is the effect of the poem's noticeably stumbling meter and short-breathed caesuras that emphasize the speaker's urgency to be kidnapped by God. This is not a sonnet with gently cadenced iambic feet, but a series of pentameters that they abuse the tradition of syllabic regularity. "Beat my heart, God of the three people; why you" defies poetic explanation. It is neither exclusively iambic nor exclusively trochaic, but rather a mixture of both. "Beat my heart" can therefore be read as a trochee followed by an iamb, or as two spondees placed side by side. This unidentifiable meter, it can be argued, transforms the.