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Questions tagged [john-donne]

Questions about the works of the English poet and cleric John Donne (1572 – 1631) and his life as a writer. Donne is remembered both for his poems and his sermons.

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What does "living walls of jet" mean in Donne's "The Flea"?

In John Donne's "The Flea", there's an extended conceit where the speaker and whoever he's speaking to are compared to a flea biting the woman, their blood mingling in the flea. The second ...
Mithical's user avatar
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7 votes
1 answer
587 views

Trouble understanding two lines from John Donne's poem "The Good Morrow"

I cannot work out how to parse these two lines from "The Good-Morrow": Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown Here's the whole stanza, ...
Thomas's user avatar
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5 votes
1 answer
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Has the Melford Hall manuscript poem "Whoso terms love a fire" been attributed to any poet—Donne, Roe, or other?

The Melford Hall manuscript, discovered in 2018 and referred to in this earlier question, contains 145 poems by John Donne among sundry other poems by divers poets such as Thomas Overbury, Francis ...
verbose's user avatar
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6 votes
1 answer
192 views

What were the poems other than those by Donne in the Melford Hall manuscript?

In November 2018, the Guardian reported that a 400 year old manuscript volume containing several poems by John Donne had been recently discovered at Melford Hall in Suffolk, England. In addition to ...
verbose's user avatar
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19 votes
1 answer
9k views

No mayonnaise in Ireland?

Apparently there is some kind of running joke about John Donne's famous line "No man is an island", prose sometimes quoted as poetry, being misquoted as "No mayonnaise in Ireland". ...
Rand al'Thor's user avatar
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21 votes
1 answer
3k views

When and why did "No man is an island" start being regarded as a poem?

John Donne's "Meditation XVII" from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624) includes the following well-known passage: No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the ...
verbose's user avatar
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3 votes
1 answer
5k views

Explain the third stanza of Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"?

This is the third stanza of John Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning": Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears, Men reckon what it did, and meant; But trepidation of the spheres, ...
ahmed's user avatar
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0 votes
1 answer
159 views

How can "Death be not proud" be related to the areas of exploration?

Here is the summary of the poem "Death Be Not Proud" by Jon Donne (Source - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44107/holy-sonnets-death-be-not-proud)- “Death Be Not Proud” presents an argument ...
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