Research Paper on:
Love Poetically Approached by John Donne

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conform his spiritual beliefs to Roman Catholic or Anglican conventions. Despite his preoccupation with theology, Donne was equally passionate about pleasures of the flesh, as revealed when he married  sixteen-year-old Ann More and enjoyed what was, for all intents and purposes, a happy marital union. But Donne was grappling with conflicting emotions, which manifest themselves most poignantly in  his love poems, divine works and sonnets. Donnes approach to love in these verses were just as radical as his religious practices, and his unique style "represents a sharp  break with most of that written by his predecessors and contemporaries" (Mack 1180). Unlike the flowery verses his Elizabethan contemporaries cultivated, Donne had no interest in amorous gardening (Mack  1180). As Maynard Mack observed, in Donnes "love poetry, one never encounters bleeding hearts, cheeks like roses, lips like cherries, teeth like pearls, or Cupid shooting the arrows of  love" (1180). Donne believed love was constantly fraught with tension (Young 251), and that human existence was but an exercise in reconciling diametrically opposed entities, whether they be between  childhood and adulthood (or child longing and adult eroticism), sexual (or profane) and sacred, ideal (beauty) and real (nature) and most significantly for a spiritual thinker, body and soul. In  "The Good Morrow," Donne immediately established what critic Susannah B. Mintz refers to as "polymorphous, sensual pleasure that is childlike and erotic at once" (577). Donne wrote, "I wonder,  by my troth, what thou and I / Did, till we loved; were we not weaned till then, / But sucked on country pleasures, childishly? / Or snorted we in  the Seven Sleepers den? / Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be. / If even any beauty I did see, / Which I desired, and got, twas but a