From the Archive: Donne (1999)

Billy Schraufnagel

English 125-8, Fayen

December 7, 1999

Donne Paper

“If Our Two Loves Be One”

At the beginning of Donne’s poem, “The Dreame,”[1] the persona wakes from a blissful dream of love to an even happier reality– his lover lying beside him in bed. As “a theame / For reason, much too strong for phantasie,”[2] his lover’s presence both breaks the dream and surpasses it. However, Donne quickly modifies this idea. In a response that suggests dialogue (either with himself or with his lover), Donne rephrases his waking as a fluid continuation and enhancement of the dream as opposed to an abrupt shift: “thou brok’st not, but continued’st it,”[3] The lover, by being present in both dream and reality, contains both fact and fiction and serves as a space in which the dream is converted to reality: “To make dreames truths; and fables histories;”[4] His first stanza ends with a prompt to action, emphasizing a physical realization as superior to his dream.

For the second stanza, Donne retracts to the point of awakening, explaining that the persona first sees his lover as an angel. Then, as he notices a connection with his lover resembling the telepathic: “But when I saw thou sawest my heart, / And knew’st my thoughts, beyond an angel’s art.”[5] Calling his lover an angel, after this point, would be “prophane,” disgracing his lover. Donne’s misguided act of looking upon his lover as an angel is a continuation of the dream-like love he has just awakened from. Missing from idealized love is the spiritual connection described in this stanza between two sensitive, responsive human beings

The third stanza provides an abrupt shift in both tone and action: “But rising makes me doubt, that now, / Thou art not thou.”[6] Here, rising is the key action, although Donne does not specify who rises for what reason. One can assume from the change in tone that perhaps his lover is rising from the bed, as Donne explains that “love is weake,”[7] or that all physical love is transitory. The third stanza thus exposes the seemingly perfect mixture formed in the first two stanzas to be inadequate: “‘Tis not all spirit, pure, and brave, / If mixture it of Feare, Shame, Honor, have.”[8] Donne laments the fact that love cannot be ideal when it involves complicated human emotions (such as fear, shame, and honor). When his lover leaves him, all the persona can hope for, then, is to “dreame that hope againe,”[9] that she will return. The poem thus forms a complete cycle, returning to the dream.

We see, then, how Donne uses dreams and the image of himself waking as concrete focal points of his broader discussion of love in general. This practice is common among Donne’s poems– in fact, he uses almost identical images and terminology to approach the same issue from a different angle in his poem, “Elegie X: The Dreame.”[10]

The first 8 lines of this poem establish a conceit of the persona’s heart as a medal, upon which is imprinted his lover’s image. However, Donne warns that his lover’s image has bestowed such a large value on this medal (his heart) that he is overwhelmed: “Which now is growne too great and good for me: / Honours oppresse weake spirits.”[11] He goes on to suggest that close contact with his lover is too blinding, and he doesn’t realize the fullness of his love for her when she is too close.

The following four quatrains expand on the idea that the perfect love exists in idealized form without the actual presence of the lover: “So, if I dreame I have you, I have you, / For, all our joyes are but fantasticall.”[12] Idealized love (through dreams), according to Donne, is the only way to escape the pain of the transitory nature of earthly love. By locking himself within himself, the persona can gain the same benefit as from idealized love without the misery: “And shall to love more thankfull Sonnets make, / Then if more honour, teares, and paines were spent.”[13] In this poem, as opposed to “The Dreame,” discussed earlier, the moment of waking is a disappointment, the only moment that he truly repents.

However, as in the first poem, Donne arrives at a point of retraction as he realizes the flaws in his conception of perfect love. The source of his idealized love is the image of his lover, which slowly fades as time passes: “Though you stay here you passe too fast away:”[14] Idealized love, Donne discovers, is unsubstantiated, and therefore as fleeting as the physical love that he fears. In the final couplet, Donne concedes his frustration while recognizing that he is fortunate to have loved at all: “Fill’d with her love, may I be rather grown / Mad with much heart, then ideott with none.”[15]

In these two poems, Donne uses dreams in two different manners to test different concepts of love. In “The Dreame,” the persona’s dream is at first just a precursor to the stronger experience of physical love. At the end of the poem, the dream is a regression after his lover has left him, carrying value only in its expectation of another physical experience. In “Elegie X: The Dreame,” the persona’s dream is an isolated, but perfect world in which love is experienced just as fully as it would be in real life. The most wonderful aspect of dreams in this poem is that they bring all the joy of love without the pain of separation. By the end of the poem, however, the dream (or his lover’s image) begins to fade away without reinforcement from a physical experience.

Many of Donne’s love poems are an attempt to reconcile physical love with idealized love through the form of conceits, common everyday objects that represent a broader, more philosophical phenomena– in Donne’s case, the mixture of two souls in a perfect love. The mixture of two peoples’ blood in a flea; the union of the eagle and the dove to form the phoenix; a woman’s face reflected on a glass pane upon which her lover’s name is carved; a book containing the chronicle of two lovers’ relationship; a woman’s face imprinted on the coin of a man’s soul; a compass with two movable legs that is fixed at the top– all these are conceits which Donne struggles with in an attempt to approximate love.

Donne’s poem, “A Valediction to his Booke,”[16] addresses the issue directly by clearly differentiating between idealized love and physical love: “Whether abstract spirituall love they like. / Their Soules exhal’d with what they do not see,” or “they chuse / Something which they may see and use.”[17] These lines are followed by a couplet that summarizes the entire dialogue between the first two poems discussed in this paper: “For, though minde be the heaven, where love doth sit, / Beauty a convenient type may be to figure it.”[18] As in “The Dreame,” Donne here suggests that a physical realization is necessarily an enhancement of love that exists only in the mind. The poem “The Extasie”[19] confirms the necessity of physical contact in order for two souls to combine: “For soule into the soule may flow, / Though it to body first repaire.”[20] The bodies are the manifestations of the souls and the only means by which love can develop.

Donne represents the pain accompanying realistic love just as frequently as he glorifies it. In his “A Lecture Upon the Shadow,”[21] he implies that once a relationship reaches a climax (like noon during the day), it is doomed to descend thereafter: “But oh, loves day is short, if love decay.”[22] He also considers the horrifying potential for unrequited love in “Twicknam Garden,”[23] which is never a concern in idealized love. In this poem, the persona feels empty and isolated because the object of his affection is unavailable to him.

The same argument that plagued Palamon and Arcite in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale is now an internal argument within Donne– that between physical love and idealized love. Donne is trapped between the agonizing pain of actual love and the emptiness of abstract love. Both types have positive aspects, but both are ultimately dissatisfying. It is the resolution of this conflict that drives Donne to love poem upon love poem, all with the same theme– an attempt to explain and/or understand the perfect mixture of two souls.

[1]The Complete English Poems, p.34-35

[2]Lines 3-4                                          

[3]Line 6

[4]Line 8

[5]Lines15-16

[6]Lines 22-23

[7]Line 24

[8]Lines 25-26

[9]Line 30

[10]The Complete English Poems, pp. 96-97

[11]Lines 6-7

[12]Lines 13-14

[13]Lines 19-20

[14]Line 23

[15]Lines 25-26

[16]Complete English Poems, pp.26-28

[17]Lines 30-31 and 33-34

[18]Lines 35-36

[19]Complete English Poems, pp. 48-50

[20]Lines 59-60

[21]Complete English Poems, pp. 69-70

[22]Line 24

[23]Complete English Poems, pp. 25-26