John Donne: John Donne And Geography As A Hyperbole

Donne And Geography As A Hyperbole

Something that John Donne continually does successfully in his poetry is using an altered reality via an extended metaphor to make seemingly complex, yet simple arguments. The motif of geography and mapmaking is one that persists in Donne’s poems even as he and they evolve from a secular tone to a more serious, religion oriented one in the latter years of his life. Much like his employment of the eroticism in both secular and religious poems, Donne uses cartography to create a paralleled understanding of reality and the abstract. He chooses to evoke geography and mapmaking as much as he does in his poetry because the illusions of maps and provide the kind of emphasis of space and distance that he requires for his visions of love and the metaphysical world. “The Good Morrow” is one of Donne’s earliest poems that uses geography as a tool for emphasis. An analysis of the poems form, structure and overall meaning shows just

It is one of the earliest poem that Donne wrote while he was a law student at Lincoln’s Inn. This was a time in Donne 's life where he was young, unmarried man, who spent most of his nights studying. In John Donne: The Reformed Soul John Stubbs describes this habit of Donne’s: “By compressing his study into several airtight early hours, Donne could emerge into the jostling world beyond his mind, and his books, just as life was warming up again”(6). He was a man preoccupied with the scholarly world which could explain why he uses science and religions to write his love poems. Instead of flowery love poems that were standard of that era, Donne’s poetry was characterized by his ability to use abstract and metaphysical understanding of the world to convey they obvious declarations of love. At least for his secular poems, geography and maps serve to create an understanding of the magnitude and perfection of