Great Renaissance poets like John Donne have sung the praises not only of the joy and happiness of love but also its miraculous, eternal nature. In poems with titles like “The Good-morrow,” “Loves infinitenesse” and Love’s Growth,” Donne captures the ecstasy of human love and marvels at its spiritual richness. This supernatural, heavenly nature of love and marriage, also celebrated in “The Song of Solomon,” has been reduced and cheapened in modern culture that generally views these relationships as temporary and impermanent because single-parent and fatherless families and couples living in cohabitation continue to increase. Love is for a season and as transient as youth, not “till death do us part” or for this life and the next. Writers and poets in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries do not sing about “Love’s Growth” or “Lovers’ Infiniteness” as poets like Donne, Spenser, and Shakespeare do.
In “The Good-morrow” Donne compares the discovery of the beloved to a dream come true, the bliss of love to a joy that surpasses all others: “But this, all pleasures fancies bee./ If ever any beauty I did see,/ Which I desir’d, and got,/ t’ was but a dreame of thee.” All previous experiences of pleasure fade beside the wonder of love and amount to childish pastimes or mere “country pleasures.” Falling in love gives a rebirth to life that compares to awakening from a state of sleep and drowsiness to a full awareness of love’s keen sensations–from being asleep or half-awake to being fully and vibrantly alive. Donne compares the awe of love to an explorer’s discovery of a new land, a relationship between man and woman in which each person represents a plentiful little universe (microcosm) to enlarge the world of the other:
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have showne.
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.
This world of love is a universe filled with beauty and riches beyond calculation, a cosmos to be explored where new wealth and great discoveries await. Love is an inexhaustible joy with infinite sources of happiness for an entire lifetime and even throughout eternity:
What ever dyes, was not mixt equally;
If our loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.
The supernatural nature of human marital love arises from its bountiful, overflowing joy, from the miracle of the other person as a dream come true beyond one’s wildest hopes, and from the promise of an indissoluble union of man and woman. This transcendent dimension of love suffers a loss of vision in the culture of the sexual revolution where the other person is not a mysterious “world” to know and discover more deeply but an object of selfish desire for momentary pleasure, not a relationship bound for an eternal union that transcends time. The proliferation of divorce, serial marriages, and cohabiting relationships call into question the ideals of love in Donne’s poem and rob it of its spiritual substance.
In “Lovers infinitenesse” Donne depicts the paradox of love’s mysterious growth in the course of time, not its fading pleasures. The lovers give all yet always have more to give. They spend all their treasury of love but never suffer impoverishment. The speaker has no more words or ways to express his joy and has exhausted all the tokens of his love: “Sighs, teares, and oaths, and letters I have spent.” The beloved also gives all but only the fullness of love at that moment, only to be multiplied with more, greater love to come which always grows and bears fruit:
Or if thou gavest mee all,
All was but All, which thou hadst then,
But if in thy heart, since, there be or shall,
New love created bee . . . .
thy heart is mine, whatever shall
Grow there, deare, I should have it all.
Though both lovers give unconditional love at the time or moment, it does not exhaust the supply of love’s infiniteness that keeps coming in the days and years ahead. The speaker calls this paradox one of “Loves riddles,” the complete possession of all the other’s love and yet never its boundless fullness. To have all implies the end of the supply (“Hee that hath all can have no more”), yet love’s growth always has more to offer without ever emptying its riches. The new growth of love always accumulates more treasure. Love abides but multiplies. Love is constant but always new and creative. The lovers lose love in giving it all yet gain more love by spending all they possess: “Loves riddle are, that though thy heart depart, / It stayes at home, and thou with losing savest it.” This reciprocal, constant, endless giving and receiving enriches each person who feels inundated by the constant coming and going of love that stops to refill and leaves to come back with more surprises and gifts of love: “ . . . so shall we/ Be one, and one anothers All.” As Dante explains in Paradise, material goods like money that are spent impoverish the donor, but spiritual goods like love, friendship, kindness, and mercy never suffer loss or limit no matter the amount spent.
In “Loves growth”, the speaker observes the succession of the seasons and notices how love too changes in the course of years not in terms of amount or quantity but in terms of clarity and depth. Like stars that have not changed but shine brighter or purer and like blossoms that bloom from the life of the roots deep in the ground, love’s growth brings more fragrance and beauty with each passing year because of its constant revelations and strong bond:
And yet no greater, but more eminent,
Love by the spring is growne;
As, in the firmament,
Starres by the Sunne are not inlarg’d, but shown,
Gentle love deeds, as blossomes on a bough,
From awakened root do bud out now.
Donne compares love’s growth to a series of concentric circles in the water, each outward circle adding another ring of new love to the center, the beloved at the center always the object of love from the beginning but loved even more with additional years that produce more reasons to love and cherish in circle after circle. Love’s growth, Donne wittily argues, best compares to princes who raise taxes in war but continue to demand them in peace as each year combines old taxes and new taxes for additional revenue. Love’s stages of growth, then, bring closer and stronger unions, more profound depths of feeling in the heart, and the abundant fruitfulness of more layers, rings, blossoms, and flowers.
Donne’s poems illuminate the sacred, supernatural, and spiritual aspects of love and marriage that have all suffered diminishment in a hedonistic culture that lives for the moment, worships only the body, and reduces the person to an instrument of pleasure or utility. The beloved is not a gift, a “world,” a universe, or kingdom rich and abundant but of limited interest or low value. While the ancient Greeks saw love’s wondrous divine origin in the goddess Aphrodite and The Song of Solomon praises the beauty, goodness, and sweetness of the lovers’ rapturous union and undying love, these images and ideas are foreign in modern thinking about love and marriage. Phrases like “living together,” “safe sex,” and “hook-up culture” cheapen and demystify the grandeur of what Dietrich von Hildebrand called “The Magnificence of Marriage” in his book by that title. He writes, “A great thing is love” (Magna res est amor) and explains the consequences of reducing the greatness of love to banality:
He whose life is dominated by the intention of avoiding any possible cross excludes everything that gives human life grandeur and depth. He will never know real abandon, never know real, deep happiness. Remaining in a mediocre self-centeredness, he will never be able to do anything without a certain reserve; he will always provide for a possibility of retreat.
This sublime vision of love in poets like Donne makes human love divine, holy, and miraculous. It rescues the modern version of love from the cheap tawdriness to which it has stooped by rejecting the gift of self, the blessing of children, the bond of indissoluble love, and the sacrifice, abandonment, and commitment it demands.
Mitchell Kalpakgian, Ph.D. has completed fifty years of teaching beginning as a teaching assistant at the University of Kansas, continuing as a professor of English at Simpson College in Iowa for thirty-one years, and recently teaching part-time at various schools and college in New Hampshire. As well as contributing to a number of publications, he has published seven books: The Marvelous in Fielding’s Novels, The Mysteries of Life in Children’s Literature, The Lost Arts of Modern Civilization, An Armenian Family Reunion (a collection of short stories), Modern Manners: The Poetry of Conduct and The Virtue of Civility, and The Virtues We Need Again. He has designed homeschooling literature courses for Seton Home School, and he also teaches online courses for Queen of Heaven Academy and part-time for Northeast Catholic College.
