The Four Natural Elements In John Donne's Philosophy

John Donne is renowned for being one of the major metaphysical poets of the 16th century. While he is best known for his poetry featuring love, death, and religion, all of these themes are encompassed by his extensive use of the four natural elements: earth, wind, fire and water. Donne was well versed in the sciences, and his use of the natural elements demonstrates his ideas that the natural and the metaphysical fit together to create a bigger picture. Donne accomplishes this by using each element to simultaneously represent both its literal definition as well as a much more abstract connotation. He does this in order to illuminate the overlap between the physical nature of the elements and the alternative, highly spiritual side of the natural

This idea is articulated by Donne in one of his poems when he says, “I am a little world made cunningly / Of elements, and an angelic sprite” (1-2). This concept seemingly correlates with the long held religious belief of the time that when God created the Universe, he gathered all of the elements together and then separated them to create the various parts of the world (Macauley 278). Since man is often viewed as the centerpiece of God’s creation, it is only logical that he should be the sum of all of the natural elements. John Donne was incredibly educated and well informed on the matters of the body, and medicine (Allen 331). However, it is interesting that he chose to play with the concepts of what a man was made up of so frequently despite his extensive knowledge of how the body worked. His playful exploration of the body and the natural elements is a direct reflection on the way he showed the tensions between scientific advancements and the much more mystical side of knowledge. Donne combines all the elements in one epigraph he did called “Hero and Leander”, which is a short description of an old myth. In the myth, Leander swam across the oceans to visit his love, Hero. However, the light she usually left out for him burned out, and he drowned on his way to see her. The poem about this tale reads, “Both robbed of air, we both lie in one ground; / Both whom one fire had burnt, one water drown’d.” Here, the fire and water follow the same patter of destruction, being the elements that caused the deaths of Hero and Leander; the ground is a place of final death and imprisonment; and the air represents life, since the absence of it obviously represents death. These concepts are in line with how Donne expresses these elements throughout the rest of his