Clever Conceits in Donne’s “Elegy 19. To his mistress going to bed”

This poem revels in its magnificent bawdiness and poetical explicitness.  Donne renders this age-old theme of admiring a woman and calling her to bed enthrallingly and entertainingly new through his use of extended metaphor or “conceit.”  Even though we know from the first two lines (“Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy/ Until I labor, I in labor lie!”) that the poem is about the poet calling his mistress to come and have sex with him, we keep on reading because he pours so much lushly descriptive language into every line. 

The poem starts off with a bunch of playful couplet similes describing the mistress’ attire and body with lines such as “Off with that girdle, like heaven’s zone glistering, /But a far fairer world encompassing” (5 and 6) and “Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals /As when from flowery meads th’ hill’s shadow steals.” (13 and 14)  But these are mere enticing comments compared to the full poetic force of Donne’s conceits that follow soon after his description of his mistress taking off her clothes.

The first conceit compares the experience of caressing his mistress to discovering and conquering a previously undiscovered land:

License my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America!  my new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious stones, my empery,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds is to be free;
There where my hand is set, my seal shall be. (25-32)

He is incredibly explicit here.  He obviously is having sex with this woman, but that’s not the extraordinary part.  The extraordinariness of this conceit is that he compares having sex to exploring a new country and claiming it for one’s own.  Even now, the metaphor retains its freshness among the million other trite euphemisms and metaphors constantly appearing and reappearing in love (and lust) poetry.   

This conceit is followed almost immediately by another which strangely uses religious references:

Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings, made
For laymen, are all women thus arrayed;
Themselves are mystic books, which only we
 (Whom their imputed grace will dignify)
Must see revealed…(37-41)

                Women, according to the poet, are like religious books made “for laymen.”  They may have “gay coverings” (clothes), but laymen (all men) won’t truly know them unless they are “revealed” (naked).   This very oddly juxtaposes the carnal with the sacred.  I’m sure this wasn’t a poem that Donne talked about very much after he became a clergyman.  I would guess that quite a few of his fellow clergymen would think it profane.  I think, though, that this extended metaphor is very witty.  Donne does an excellent job of displaying his cleverness without distracting us from the main point of the poem.  I would read this one again and again, not because it has any deep truths about life and death as some of his later poems do, but because it’s so full of wit.  It’s impossible to appreciate and enjoy all of it after reading it only once.

Another Exhortation to Make Good Use of Youth

Sonnet 3 reminded me of another, perhaps more famous, poem by Robert Herrick (1591-1674), one of Shakespeare's contemporaries:

TO THE VIRGINS, TO MAKE MUCH OF TIME.

GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may,     Old time is still a-flying : And this same flower that smiles to-day     To-morrow will be dying. The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,     The higher he's a-getting, The sooner will his race be run,     And nearer he's to setting. That age is best which is the first,     When youth and blood are warmer ; But being spent, the worse, and worst     Times still succeed the former. Then be not coy, but use your time,     And while ye may go marry : For having lost but once your prime     You may for ever tarry.

Making Use of Youth in Shakespeare's Sonnet 3

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 3 talks about using your youth unselfishly by creating children in your image to go on after you.  “Now is the time that face (the youthful you in the mirror) should form another” the speaker says.  This sonnet caught my interest because it goes so much against what our culture impresses upon us about how to best make use of our youth.  Young people in America are generally told to use their teens and twenties to get an education, have fun and “discover themselves”.  It’s a proven fact that people in our country are choosing to have children later and later in life. 

There is definitely a big difference between Shakespeare’s time and our own on the subject of when (and if) one should have children.  For one thing, back in the 15 and 1600s, people usually lived a good thirty or forty years less than the average middle-class inhabitant of the western world today.  Shakespeare was very much acquainted with death not just as an amorphous poetic idea, but an everyday reality.  For instance, he isn’t squeamish when he talks about dying in Sonnet 71 in quite graphic detail: “…I am fled/ From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell.” (lines 3 and 4)  Yuck!

The speaker in Sonnet 3 sees youth has a precious and fleeting thing to be used very wisely and not wasted on selfish pursuits.  Lines 7 and 8 ask the young man “Or who is he so fond will be the tomb/ Of his self-love, to stop posterity?”  In other words, the speaker asks rhetorically, “Are you so self-absorbed that you won’t use your youthful beauty and strength to carry on the human race?  If you don’t have children, you will die alone with nothing but your own narcissism to keep you company.”

“This is thy golden time” says line 12.  That simple phrase taken out of context would be read much differently by the young people of our time.  Our longer life-span and comfortable consumerist society support the pervasive mentality that we have plenty of time to enjoy ourselves now and take on the responsibilities of raising a family later (or not at all).  Unlike the people in Shakespeare’s time, we do our best to forget about death an inevitability.  If we are not confronted with death on a daily basis, why would we see the need to make the most of our limited time?  Why would we desire to create children to carry on after us if we cannot even conceive of a time when we will not be living?  It’s fascinating how much our culture (media, medical advancements, technology, access to goods and resources, etc.) can drastically change how we think about something as basic and essential as having our own children.

  

Sting's "The Soul Cages" as a Lyric Sequence

   Sting has always appealed to me because he can infuse his lyrics with his own experiences.  He then uses those lyrics to delve into his emotions and ultimately his conclusions about the way the world really is and effectively share them with his audience.  It takes some active listening, but all of his albums are accesible to enjoy and discover on many diffenent levels. 

   The Soul Cages, which came out in 1991, is a concept album that Sting wrote in response to his father's death.  Each of the songs follows his personal journey through extreme grief, fond memories, doubts about life and life after death and his eventual acceptance of death and a feeling of redemption and peace.

   The album starts off with "Island of Souls" in which his alter ego Billy thinks about setting sail across the sea with with his father.  However, his father is injured and can't live for very long.  He dies and, in the next song "All This Time", Billy (a.k.a. Sting) expresses his desire to burry his father at sea. I really like the video here.  It showcases Sting's ability to laugh (perhaps ironically) at the absurdities of life and death and ultimately put it all behind him.  It's one of his most entertaining videos as well.

 

   The next couple of songs focus on the town in which Billy grew up and all the people there.  Essentially nostalgic portraits of a his childhood until the introspective "Why Should I Cry for You?".  In "The Wild, Wild Sea" Billy gets lost at sea (metaphoricaly or otherwise) and is guided back home by the spirit of his father.



   For this point on, the tone of the speaker changes bit by bit from darkness, cynicism and despair to peace and acceptance of the way things are.  The lyrics of the last song, "When Angels Fall", end slightly ambiguously, but we get the feeling that Billy has come to some satisfactory conclusions.  The song remains tonaly ambiguous until it finally makes its way to a solid major G chord.  This "return to home" tonally is even more significant because it harkens back to the key of "All This Time", definitely one of Sting's focal points in the album.

   So to tie it all together, the common threads that run through The Soul Cages are: Sting's emotional and spiritual response to losing his father, motifs of the sea and boats etc. as well as various comments about and references to Catholicism which Sting strongly associates with his father.  There are definitely others (more technical stuff about musical motifs and themes etc.), but these are enough to prove that The Soul Cages is definitely a lyrical sequence.  It maintains and develops a certain focused, emotionally driven subject and presents it in first-person poetic narrative.  I love the way Sting continues in this very old poetic tradition to create a very modern and acessible album about his own life experiences.