Donne, Marvell and Time
death in many of his poems and sermons, perhaps most famously in his final sermon, ‘Death’s Duel’ , 9 where he impressed upon his listeners the horrors of physical decay and the inescapable nature of death, simplifying the road to salvation as a paradoxical idea that the best days towards salvation are those which you shake with fear, in reverence of God. Donne is familiar with death, losing six children over his lifetime, his wife when she was only 33, his brother in a plague-ridden prison, and his uncle to execution for harbouring a catholic priest. 10 This certainly affects his poetry, notably here in ‘The Flea’: where Marvell uses time to cajole and manipulate, Donne is more reverent, adopting optimism in the enjoyment of life, knowing that ‘from the womb to the grave we are never thoroughly awake’ (Donne’s sermon upon Easter Day 11 ) thus employing seduction for the motivation of pleasure (disregarding salvation) rather than in fear of time. D. W. Harding writes that Donne’s writings are ‘fantasies of permanence’ 12 that are employed to avoid change a nd the mutability of life. While we may see this in other examples of Donne’s poetry, like ‘The Sun Rising’ where Donne chastises the sun for invading and ending his time with his lover, ‘The Flea’ seems like an anomaly, with Donne’s attempt to embed love permanently within the flea, crushed. Within ‘The Flea’ there is no insistence on the fleeting nature of love, compared to ‘Coy Mistress’ where it already seems to escape us. Donne uses no temporal markers such as ‘now’ to bolster his encouragement of cons ummation, but only to remark on the process of the flea; ‘now sucks thee’. In fact, Donne’s poem progresses through and simultaneously disregards time: from the past tense ‘me it sucked first’, to the present ‘sucks thee’, returning to the past: ‘thou since/ Purpled thy nail’ and ‘say’st’. Donne’s defying of natural time impresses upon the reader a relaxation and eagerness for the future, where Donne looks forward to ‘then learn how false, fears be’ now that his love is no longer immortalized within the fle a. We should look to Donne’s ‘The Fever’ for an answer to compare to Marvell’s feeling of threat under the chariot of time. Donne wishes to possess his lover, to a stronger extent than the fever corrupting her, to ‘rather owner be/ of thee one hour, than all else ever’. Marvell is fearful that time will degrade his love (more accurately his lust), and while they both recognize that the quality of living triumphs over time, Donne recognize s that time’s progression is what causes love to exist. In this way, he need not fear the eternalization of his love within the flea, for the flea’s – and his own – advance towards death is what prompts love to grow. Marvell is a victim of his own conception of time (its bleak ‘Deserts of vast eternity’), whereas Donne in ‘The Good Morrow’ questions what meaning the past had ‘till we loved’, and in ‘The Flea’ questions the future: ‘we would do’ and ‘will waste’. Donne associates the hurrying of time, ‘sudden’, with cruelty, while Marvell associates immediacy with ethereal won der: ‘willing soul transpires’ and ‘instant fires’. Donne reveals his definition of ‘carpe diem’ as utterly different to Marvell’s, perhaps better summar ize d as ‘carpe vitam’, or ‘seize life’ – dismissing fear of time by imbuing moments of experience with eternal importance, namely, the fractional second upon which the flea intertwines him and his lover.
Eliot noted a change ‘which had happened to the mind of England’ in 17th -century poetry, exemplified between the time of Jonson, and that of the metaphysi cal poets. What he called the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ was the process by which there became a ‘difference between the intellectual and reflective
9 See Donne (1630). 10 See Bragg (2023). 11 See Donne (1619) . 12 See Waller (1974).
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