Elegy 8. To his Mistress
going to bed.
Commentary
Date and Circumstances
Richter (1902, 392) believes Donne wrote this elegy sometime during the years
1602–15.
Gardner (1957, 19) notes that ElFatal, ElPict, and ElBed are from “a set of Love
Elegies written probably between 1595 and 1598.”
LaBranche (1966, 357) suggests, without further elaboration, that this poem was
written “at the same time as some of the Songs and Sonets, with which the Elegies
were traditionally grouped by virtue of style and content.”
Parker (1975, 39) assumes that ElBed was addressed to Ann More and claims that
in the poem Donne “celebrates the almost magical marriage of the spirit and the
flesh which illuminates the moment of orgasm,” observing that it stands “strongly in
contrast with the post-coital melancholy” found in such poems as Fare, “in which the
magic did not take hold.”
Carey (1981, 104) maintains that ElBed is one of seven elegies that can be dated, on
manuscript evidence, before 1599. He further maintains that ElBed was likely written
when Donne was in his early twenties, while he was a law student at Lincoln’s Inn.
Carey (1990, 422) later dates the poem from 1593–1596.
General Commentary
Beside line 31 the manuscript HH1 (c. 1622–33 [Beal (1980, 253)]) contains a
marginal note in a contemporary hand that asks “why may not a man write his owne
Epithalamion if he can doe it so modestly.”
Jordan (1637) imitates this elegy in his poem, “To Leda his coy Bride, on the Bridall
Night,” which is found in his Poetical Varieties: or, Varietie of Fancies.
Chamberlain (1654) first published ElBed as a poem by “J. D.” in The Harmony of
the Muses, 15 years before the poem was included in the 1669 edition (G) of Donne’s
poems.
Campbell (1819b, 146) reads ElBed as Donne’s “own epithalamium,” in which
he expresses himself indelicately and outrageously but with an occasional “beauty of
thought.”
Grosart (1872–73, 1:224–25) comments that this elegy is “the most sensual ever
written” by a poet of Donne’s caliber.
Elegy 8. ElBed
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667
Corser (1873, 91, 227) objects to the printing of this poem “disfigured by . . .
grossness.”
Dodgson (1896, 504) characterizes ElBed as “the most audacious, the most frankly
pagan love-poem in the English language.”
Saintsbury (1896, 1:26) calls the poem “a piece of frank naturalism” and comments
that its “passion and poetic completeness” keep it from being coarse. For related commentary see Gardner (1965b, 131) and Menascè (1969, 62).
MacCarthy (1908, 284–85) includes ElBed among Donne’s sensual poems, which,
he suggests, range from the coarse to the sublime.
Aronstein (1920, 169, 177) says that the unveiled, often cynical freedom found in
ElBed is unmatched in English poetry. He argues that the sensuous love portrayed is not
frivolous lasciviousness but rather is a conscious resistance to the reigning conventions
of the Elizabethan love lyric, a kind of stubborn heresy that reminds one of Swinburne’s
Poems and Ballads (169). Aronstein thinks that ElBed, like ElProg, celebrates “true
orgies” (“wahr Orgien”) of sensuality (177).
Fausset (1923, 94) calls ElBed “a celebration of all that is purely sensuous in marriage” and suggests that the poem is “frank naturalism, accepted with exultancy.” He
observes, however, that at the same time Donne’s mind is “forever sneering at both
the tyranny and transiency of purely physical pleasure.”
Whitby (1923, 79) cites this elegy (which he mistakenly calls Elegie XX—ed.) as
an example of those elegies that are “in their outspoken sensuality calculated to shock
the morally sensitive.”
Fausset (1924, 61) says that in ElBed “the anatomy of the body is catalogued with
a ferocity beside which Carew’s ‘Rapture’ is a piece of dainty confectionery.”
Praz (1925, 19) observes that in this elegy Donne mixes the sacred and the profane
in his description of love, but he argues that Donne intends no deliberate profanation
of sacred things. He further notes that, unlike Baudelaire, Donne seems almost unaware
that he is employing Christian images and vocabulary as vehicles to discuss sexual love.
Sencourt (1925, 29) suggests that, when in ElBed Donne “writes a fiery elegy to the
Angel” who brings “A heauen like Mahomets Paradise,” he demonstrated the “same
frankness and intensity for which he made admirable his clerical career.”
Potter (1934, 13) claims that, like some of the other “most outspoken” of Donne’s
elegies, ElBed, “with its frequent transitions from the frankest eroticism to a mystical preoccupation with the significance of nakedness,” is “kept from sordidness and
obscenity by the fire of his desire to know.”
Coffin (1937, 150) thinks ElBed “needs no apology for treating love, unattenuated
and unrefined by spiritual encumbrances, in a robust and downright manner,” and he
maintains that its “refreshing realism is saved from being objectionable” because of
Donne’s “native vigor.” Coffin further suggests that the emotion in the poem is “kept
free from grossness by the witty and learned imagery through which it is communicated.” He concludes that the elegy is “a revelation of the worlds separating passion
from lust, separating the pure joy of the physical from sensualism abandoning itself to
the language of luscious suggestion.”
Bennett (1938, 86) argues, partly in response to Lewis (1938), that in ElBed, a poem
of “mere sensual delight,” Donne writes about the same kind of experience that one
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Commentary
finds in Carew’s “A Rapture” but thinks that, whereas Carew “expends his poetic gifts
in description of the exquisite body of the woman, so that the reader can vicariously
share his joys,” Donne “gives two lines to description” that “are not really about what
he sees” and “is content to suggest by analogy the delight of the eye when the woman
undresses.” Bennett maintains that the elegy is not about the body of the mistress but
about what the speaker “feels like when he stands there waiting for her to undress.”
She also argues that a woman may be more interested in knowing “what it feels like
to be a man in love” than in simply having her beauty and charms enumerated.
Lewis (1938, 75–76) calls ElBed a “celebration of simple appetite,” a “pornographic
poem,” by which he means it is “intended to arouse the appetite it describes, to affect not
only the imagination but the nervous system of the reader” (75–76). Lewis maintains,
however, that it is not an “immoral poem” and “contains nothing intrinsically evil”
but acknowledges that “under what conditions the reading of it could be an innocent
act is a real moral question.” The argument could be made, he points out, that Ecst
is “a much nastier poem” than this elegy (76). For a reply see Bennett (1938) above.
Hamburger (1944, 157) maintains that ElBed should not be called “sensual” because
it is “too anatomical”: its “geographical content, the delineation and mapping out of
the human body, is redeemed by Donne’s fancy,” an “intellectual quality.”
Tuve (1947, 42) points out that Donne, like other poets of his time, refused “to
narrow the task of images to that of a truthful report of experience” and notes that,
even in ElBed, he deserts “the particular for the personified universal,” apostrophizing
nakedness for 15 lines, and then using three analogies to show why “bodyes vncloth’d
must bee, / To tast whole ioyes” (ll. 34–35).
Fuson (1948, 59) finds Donne’s major contribution to the dramatic monologue to
be his unusual ability to fuse “internal drama with psychological subtlety—something
rare before Browning”—and points to the “notable current drama” that pervades ElBed.
Aliandro (1951, 34) thinks that in this poem Donne presents a detailed description
of sensuality that he voluptuously takes pleasure in.
Louthan (1951, 70–73) argues that the major part of ElBed is dedicated to “unblushing voluptuousness” (70). He also observes that the ambiguities “contribute richness to
the sensuous tone” of the poem. The real difficulty of the elegy, he maintains, is “not
primarily verbal” but is rather the obscure argument (ll. 33–45) upon which “the rest
of the poem operates.” Louthan also believes that the basic philosophical assumption
underlying ElBed is related to, but different from, that in ElProg. In ElBed, Louthan
says, the speaker does not insist on the “supremacy of the pudendum,” but rather exalts
the naked body, with the implication that most men are merely laymen, “ignorant of
love’s esoteric rites,” and thus prefer their ladies dressed, unlike the enlightened speaker,
who is among the elect in love and prefers his lady nude. Louthan points out that in
ElBed the “distractions from the true good” are not “objects of Petrarchan adoration,”
as they are in ElProg, but rather “objects or symbols of material wealth.” He concludes
that, although the philosophy of the poem is somewhat foolish, the rest of the poem
is “altogether delightful” (71).
Main (1951) believes that ElBed is a variation on the theme of Spenser’s Four Hymns
and that Donne is writing “in the courtly love tradition and utilizing the PlatonicChristian notions of Pietro Bembo in which the love of woman is transformed into a
Elegy 8. ElBed

669
religious symbol.” Main further claims that the elegy is also like much medieval allegory
with “its correspondences between the mundane and the divine” and suggests that,
with the arrival of the new philosophy, Donne simply “separated, without divorcing,
the medieval unity of faith and reason into duality and created in the process the socalled metaphysical poetry.” Main argues, therefore, that the action of the speaker’s
left hand (caressing the lady) and his right (making the sign of the cross), as well as
the general strategy of the elegy—oscillating between the physical and spiritual, the
sacred and profane—reveals Donne’s own dual vision of life and reflects the tension
between Jack Donne the pagan and John Donne the divine. Main concludes, however,
that the left hand is predominant in this elegy and cites several instances of how Donne
“irregularly alternates” between the physical and spiritual: how women are, by turns,
called voluptuous “Angels” (l. 19 ff.) and “mistique bookes” (l. 41), a “Myne of pretious
stones” (l. 28) and pure “innocence” (l. 46). Main observes that throughout the elegy
“the consummation of love” swings back and forth between “Full nakednes” (l. 33)
and “Soules vnbodied” (l. 34) and that love itself is called a “bonded freedom” (l. 31).
García Lora (1953, 3) argues that ElBed is both anti-Petrarchan and anti-Spenserian
and clearly reflects Donne’s interest in science.
Cruttwell (1954, 80) calls ElBed the “most unashamedly sensual of all of Donne’s
poems.”
Gransden (1954, 95) says that the tone of ElBed is “unmistakably established” in
lines 1 and 2 with their “witty, punning impatience” and is sustained “right up to the
matching final couplet.” He notes that, although many of the lines of the poem are
beautiful, “the mock-heroic imagery cannot have deceived its first readers,” who, “in
an age when style had to match substance,” would have realized that the poem could
not be “taken on a level higher than that of its last two lines.”
Hunt (1954, 18–19, 28–31, 40, 116–17, 127–28, 156, 186, 194, 214) calls ElBed “the
most astonishing performance” of Donne’s early period as a “brilliant practitioner in
the verse of wit and impudence” and maintains that the poem needs “no explanation
to anyone past the age of twelve.” After a “loosely written” and “relatively conventional beginning,” Hunt maintains, the elegy “suddenly rises to verse of passion and
power” and ends with “one of Donne’s most intricate and exciting pieces of intellectual
virtuosity,” which makes this poem “more than a piece of mere clever indecency”
(18). Hunt suggests that ElBed “seems to present an actual dramatic situation” but
points out that the latter part of the poem is “less a direct address” to the lady than “a
transcript of the private workings of the lover’s excited imagination as he anticipates
the successive stages of his love-making” and that at the conclusion of the poem the
lady is still undressing while the speaker waits for her. Upon finishing the poem, Hunt
says, one perceives the dramatic situation as less like a real experience and more like
“a vividly imagined fiction.” He calls the poem a “dramatized love letter, an Ovidian
epistle to an only moderately coy mistress” (19). Correspondingly, Hunt finds wrongheaded the annotation in HH1 that calls ElBed Donne’s “owne” “modestly” written
epithalamion (see above), suggesting that “modestly is hardly accurate for the sexual
braggadocio of the speaker in the poem” and observing that the word connotes “a social
attitude as well.” Hunt thinks it astonishing that the writer of the marginal note finds
this elegy “proper for a marriage gift to one’s wife” and as “a public document about
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Commentary
the marriage” and says this “unknown admirer” obviously missed “a good deal of what
goes on” in ll. 33–45 (214).
Hunt also calls ElBed the work of a “brilliant apprentice who is still short of technical mastery,” an “uneven performance, ordinary in some passages and dazzling in
others” (28). He maintains that it does not have “the clear imaginative organization
and precise formal definition” of Donne’s more mature poems, yet he argues that “in
its dramatic power, in the adventurousness of its imaginative conjunctions, and in the
vividness of its shock effects,” this poem clearly “belongs with Donne’s finest work”
(29). Ultimately, says Hunt, the “philosophic overtones” of the poem, especially at
the end, challenge Christian orthodoxy, forcing us to view the sex act itself “in a
metaphysical context” (3o). Hunt thinks that some of what may have begun as simply
a clever erotic poem finally came out, “for all its high-spirited gaiety, not light verse
at all.” Hunt says that the “artistic paradox” of the poem—“its mixture of bumptious,
perverse wit with excited philosophic speculation and strong emotion”—is never
quite resolved and that, “for all its brilliance,” this elegy “never quite assumes shape
as an artistic whole” (31). Hunt further finds that “the attitude of cheerful abandon
to mindless sexuality” in the poem is “merely a dramatization” (40) of Donne himself
in the role of “the sensualist lover” (116); Donne here speaks through that self “which
he thinks of as the Body or the World,” whereas in later poems he casts himself “in
the role of the other-self who is its opponent, of the Soul, who is arguing to fend off
the demands of the Body and the World” (117).
Hunt maintains that ElBed belongs to the Ovidian tradition of “witty and sophisticated treatment of physical passion in which Donne felt somewhat at home,” a fact
indicating that he was open to at least one part of the “characteristic sensibility of his
age” (127). For comparison, Hunt argues that, although Marlowe’s Hero and Leander is
similarly Ovidian, the two poems differ significantly: for example, when Marlowe portrays sexual ecstasy, he turns to “the vivid actuality of classical myth,” whereas Donne’s
mind, at this point, is “off on a passionate exercise in abstract theological speculation”
(128). Hunt finds in ElBed Donne’s “long philosophic struggle” to get free of the “suction of matter” and from the “practical claims” of the material world, a struggle that he
never fully succeeded in winning (156). He notes that the conceit of Platonic love in
ElBed is primarily an expressive vehicle for an emotional state, a literary formulation
in which “the statement of philosophic truth is not a major concern” and in which
Donne “has simply turned his imagination loose on ideas without bothering to observe
a preliminary check of intellectual responsibility” (186). Hunt further thinks that the
extended conceit about Platonic love shows Donne “pushing devices of structure into
minutiae of detail which might escape even the most careful reader” and suggests that
“the closest parallel” in English literature to Donne’s “almost obsessive” concern with
the intricate design of his verse is in the work of James Joyce (194).
An anonymous writer (1956, 164) argues that ElBed is a much better poem than
Clay Hunt (1954) allows and challenges Hunt’s view that, in comparing religious matters to sexual ones in the poem, Donne has exceeded the bounds of good taste. The
writer points out that, although Donne does so “most theatrically,” such comparisons
were frequent in the Renaissance and maintains that, “in discovering his situation as
a little world,” Donne needed “to provide it with a hagiology and an angelology” and
Elegy 8. ElBed

671
that his “sceptical frame of mind demanded parallel experience with the mystical ones
he could not achieve.” The writer further claims that throughout his poems Donne
evolves a “spirituality of the flesh” and suggests that Hunt fails to see lurking behind
all of Donne’s love poems “the ultimate reality of death and judgment.”
Empson (1957, 362–64), arguing that Donne believed in a plurality of worlds,
maintains that ElBed is Donne’s “first approach to his separate planet, no doubt a rather
unconscious one” (362), and agrees with Hunt (1954) that the poem “feels heterodox”
but disagrees that its effect is “mere jeering.” Empson contends that the first surprise in
the poem is its “high moral tone,” noting that Donne “loved to argue his way out of a
fix with defiant brilliance.” He further speculates that the poem “recalls the first sexual
success of a strictly-brought-up young man” who “doubts the value of the strictness
and has felt a certain shame at submitting to it.” Empson observes that the speaker
feels “proud,” “liberated,” and “purified,” noting that “the effects of unsatisfied desire
excite disgust, so that release from them can excite a keen sense of purity” (363).
Empson agrees with Hunt that the tropes in this elegy are not “merely emotive” but
rather “tell us a good deal about Donne’s attitude to theology” (362), but he disagrees
with Hunt’s explanation of the dichotomy of the physical and spiritual in the poem
and claims that such a dichotomy “leads to hopeless confusion when reading Donne,
because though he too is badgered by it he keeps playing tricks with it, feeling that it
ought to be transcended” (363–64).
Gardner (1957, 23) notes that ElBed was one of the five Elegies “excepted” in the
entry of Donne’s Poems in the Stationers’ Register in 1632 and thus was not printed
in the first edition of 1633 (A).
Kermode (1957, 24–25) calls ElBed “magnificently erotic” and notes that because of
some of the metaphors (e.g., the passage on “imputed grace” [l. 42]), some critics have
charged the poem with blasphemy, “a risk Donne often runs by the very nature of his
method.” Kermode suggests that Montaigne might have said that in this elegy Donne
“substitutes a new mythology and metaphysics of love for those he had abandoned,
new presbyter for old priest,” but he maintains that “it is impossible not to admire the
translation of sexual into mental activity” (24). Kermode also points out that later
this elegy was regarded as Donne’s “own epithalamion” (see HH1 above), noting that
such a claim is “a fancy as harmless as it is improbable” (25).
Legouis (1957, 115–16) finds ElBed the most blatantly licentious of Donne’s poems
and agrees with Hunt (1954) that the conclusion of the poem blasphemously uses
sacred vocabulary to speak of illicit sex (115). He maintains, however, that Donne
was young when he wrote the poem and that it is Hunt, not Donne, who places the
sexual act in a serious, metaphysical context that seemingly rejects the fundamental
values of Christianity (115–16). Legouis believes that Hunt himself recognized the
audacity of his analysis of the poem and that this realization led him to contend that
Donne had intended to write a clever piece of erotic verse in the manner of Ovid but
that philosophy and emotion overwhelmed him while he was writing (116).
Melchiori (1957, 78–80) considers ElBed as evidence of Donne’s rebellion against
the Catholic religion and an expression of materialism. Noting the mixture of the
sacred and profane, he points out that this is a common feature of the poetry of the
period. Melchiori further argues that the poem is a variation on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria but
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Commentary
that it is clearly written by a seventeenth-century man who is well-versed in medieval
theology and is a master of wit.
ul-Hasan (1958, 9–10) maintains that it is only in ElBed, ElComp, and ElProg that
Donne attempts “an unabashed and vivid description of the woman’s body” and that
even then it has “very little of a sensuous appeal.” He points out that these descriptions
have about them a “sense of awe and majesty” and show “a mood of ecstatic devotion
rather than one of mere visual enjoyment of the contours of the human body” (9).
Acknowledging that there are “a few irreverent and vulgar hints” in ElBed, ul-Hasan
says that nowhere else in Donne’s poetry do we get such a “full-blooded picture of a
real woman.” ul-Hasan further argues that such phrases as “a farr fayrer world” (l. 6)
and “such bewteous state” (l. 13) contribute a sense of wonder to the description and
that “this faint and intangible picture” suggests that behind the poem is “an adolescent
mind for which the mysteries of sex are all wonder.” He also maintains that the only
physical sensation mentioned is the speaker’s desire to let his hands explore the lady’s
body (ll. 25–26) because “all his sense and physical capacities are now overtaken by
a flux of wonder and joy,” as in lines 27–30. The last six lines of the elegy, ul-Hasan
maintains, are anticlimactic, for in these lines “the picture of unsophisticated innocence” and “perfect devotion” conjured up in earlier lines “vanishes.” He concludes
that in ElBed Donne presents the female body as “an unmapped sea” and that Donne’s
“greatest joy” is that of exploring and discovering it (10).
Brants (1959, 69) calls ElBed Donne’s most uninhibitedly erotic elegy (69).
Untermeyer (1959, 130) points out that, “weary of conventional wooing, its elegant
approaches and coy retreats,” Donne addresses his mistress in ElBed “with unconcealed
impatience, plain talk, and rough humor.”
Daiches (1960, 361) calls ElBed a “clever and lively piece of provocative bawdry.”
Ellrodt (1960b, 1, i:92–93, 142, 248) contends that in ElBed the strip tease to which
the poet invites us is itself happiness sensually prolonged and that the anticipation of
a future pleasure that this strip tease creates is actually a present satisfaction in itself
(92). He contends that Donne is not simply a voyeur who is willing simply to watch
the undressing of the mistress, but rather one who wishes to touch, to caress, and even
to penetrate the body of his mistress (142). Ellrodt further maintains that Donne does
not describe the actual nudity of the woman but that his evocation of this nudity
reveals how talented an erotic artist he really is. Donne, he says, reveals this talent in
the patient way he describes the woman slowly undressing and in how he even avoids
describing the woman’s nudity once she is fully undressed (248).
Martz (1960, 335), calling ElBed a “gay” elegy, suggests that “seeds of better arts put
forth sprouts among the weeds and thorns in full awareness of their ironical incongruity,” as is the case in “the angelic and mystical imagery” in this poem.
Skelton (1960, 209) says that ElBed at first seems like a straightforward erotic elegy
and that the exaggerated language produces “an atmosphere of half-amused tenderness,” maintaining that “the hyperbole is not excessive, but it is, just faintly, absurd.”
He observes that as the poem develops, the absurdity can be seen as a “bawdy” yet
“affectionate” awareness of “the actual facts of physical love,” which is prepared for
by a “sly reference” to the mistress’s “angelic appearance” and to her bringing with her
a heaven “like Mahomets Paradise” (l. 21). Thereafter, says Skelton, “fantasy gives
Elegy 8. ElBed

673
way to physical actuality.” He maintains that the occasion of the poem seems real,
not simply a poetic invention, and that this “sudden descent to the commonplace”
produces most of the “hyperbolic imagery.” He also argues that it is “in the facts, the
lover’s moving hands, the actualities of flesh, that the real wonder lies” and that this
wonder finds expression in a “sudden pyrotechnic burst of puns,” in a “brilliant enormity of language” that brings “complete and healthy joy” that is “forced upon us by
the gaiety of the wit” and “by the sense of wonder and awe which, however qualified
by sheer animal spirits, has a degree of reverence about it.”
Nelson (1961, 109) thinks that ElBed is reminiscent of Marino’s “Amori notturni”
because of both the subject matter and “the similarity of rhetorical development,”
noting, however, that Donne went on to achieve a “rhetorical complexity” and “evolution of attitudes” that Marino and other poets moved toward but “never attained.”
Warnke (1961, 35) suggests that the “blasphemous application” of eucharistic imagery in the opening of “Stances à l’Inconstance” by Etienne Durand recalls Donne’s
use of Christian references in ElBed.
Bryan (1962a, 171–72) points out that, of the 20 elegies ascribed to Donne by Grierson, 17 of them appeared in 19 seventeenth-century poetical commonplace books
discovered in private libraries in the United States. Along with ElAnag, he says, ElBed
was the most popular, appearing seven times. He describes ElBed as “a sensual address
to the poet’s mistress upon her preparation for bed” (171) and notes that it has much
of the “light-hearted wit, the sophisticated arguments, and the startling conceits” that
attracted commonplace book owners to love lyrics like Flea and Will. The poem, he
says, is not “profoundly serious” but is rather a “brittle and playful” tour de force (172).
Bullough (1962, 36) cites ElBed as an example of a poem in which Donne rates the
physical enjoyments of love higher than those of the mind or soul.
Karim (1964, 21) maintains that ElBed and ElProg are, in theme at least, companion poems and finds ElBed as “naughty” as ElProg but “less witty.” He states that in
ElBed Donne turns once more to the conceit of the lady’s body being a continent to
be explored, a “newfound land” (l. 27), but agrees with Louthan (1951) that the word
“zones” (l. 5) “brings in cosmic implications to outdo the geography” of ElProg. Karim
further maintains that the “near-ribaldry” and the “actual uninhibited voluptuousness”
of the two poems are “mitigated by the poet’s obvious pleasure in his own ingenuity
in amplifying his geographical metaphors to the farthest stage possible.” Karim argues
that they “are salvaged for even the most idealistic by the fact that the poet does not
once mention love to blaspheme it or even to belittle it,” adding that “his sights are
aimed much lower.”
Buckley (1965, 24) asserts that ElBed is “perhaps the most erotic poem in the
language.”
Chari (1965, 19–32) challenges those critics who find Donne’s poems highly
dramatic and argues that they are dramatic only in a very rudimentary way, that in
fact the mode is usually argumentative (20). Chari finds the most striking dramatic
element in Donne’s poetry to be his use of the speaking voice, noting that in ElBed
that voice is “outrageously playful” (24).
For Gorlier (1965, 71) the realistic references in ElBed to sexual intercourse are
overcome and almost cancelled by the use of metaphors and similes and are transferred
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Commentary
to a universal and absolute level without any loss of concreteness. He observes that
in line 5 the woman is described by a cosmic image, in line 20 she is compared to an
angel, and in lines 25–30 she becomes the symbol of new continents (71).
Gardner (1965b, 131) agrees with Saintsbury’s summary judgment of ElBed (1896),
observing that “the same praise could not be given to some of the imitations of this
Elegy” and pointing to Thomas Jordan’s “To Leda his coy Bride, on the Bridall Night”
in Poetical Varieties (1637) and Roxburghe Ballads, ed. Joseph Woodfall Ebsworth
(1871–1902, 7:458).
Le Comte (1965, 45) calls ElBed a “paean to undressing” that reflects how Donne
at times saw women as “the instruments of his lust.”
Empson (1966, 259–62) argues that ElBed is not jeering or ironical in tone, but
defiant, and therefore is not “simply a dirty poem” (259). He suggests that the poem
was not printed until the Restoration (in 1669) because it was probably thought “too
indecent” (260). Empson cites the marginal note in HH1 (see above) and argues that
the writer “probably invented” the theory that Donne wrote the poem for his own
marriage, but doubts that he invented the line “There is no penance due to innocence”
(HH1’s reading of l. 46), “on which his theory depends” (261).
LaBranche (1966, 363–64) points out that “the facetious erotic instructions” in
ElBed are simply elegiac conventions, derived from Ovid, and thus are not necessarily
records of actual experience. He suggests that “the literary reality is both less and more
serious than this, for the speaker’s facile knowledge of female geography and of erotic
psychology calls attention to its own superficiality,” and this suggests in turn “the difficulty of coming to a true knowledge of love.” Noting the speaker’s pose as praeceptor
amoris or tutor in love, LaBranche says that the concluding line of the poem points to
its opposite: “the whole position of praeceptor and of ‘free love’ has turned out rather
a sham, and the road to true union is longer and more difficult than expected” (364).
For LaBranche’s comments on the praeceptor amoris theme, see The Elegies: General
Commentary.
Andreasen (1967, 78, 115, 120–21, 178) identifies the speaker in ElBed as a Dionysiac praiser of the idea that “physical union is the major end” and “sole delight of love.”
She warns, however, that Donne creates a wide range of personae who are not to be
confused with Donne himself (78). Andreasen observes that even in this elegy, which
focuses on sexual consummation, “intense delight in physical gratification is not the
predominant mood” (115), and she points out that, although ElBed seems “somewhat
more spontaneously gay” than ElProg, it is “not without grim undercurrents” and a
“satiric tone.” For approximately 20 lines, she notes, the speaker, with “anticipatory
eagerness,” watches his mistress undress, and in the next 20 lines he philosophizes
about the “value and quasi-religious significance of nakedness.” Andreasen finds the
last half of the elegy “a ridiculously pedantic anticlimax” marred by a kind of “strained
intellectuality” (120), noting that the speaker clearly admits that the lovers’ behavior
is sinful. She thinks Donne wishes to say that although lust is “frequently and strongly
felt,” it is also often “violent, selfish, and cruel” (121). Andreasen maintains that this
elegy, unlike Canon and Ecst, handles Donne’s satire on the glorification of sex “more
narrowly and less psychologically” (178).
Gamberini (1967, 52) calls ElBed a triumph of sensuality, which is heightened by
Elegy 8. ElBed
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the violence of the desire expressed.
Shawcross (1967, 399) maintains that ElBed is built on sexual meanings appropriate to its title.
Standaert (1967, 28–30) calls ElBed a superbly erotic poem, in which the speaker
both lectures and pleads with his mistress with an emphatic and forceful voice.
Gregory (1968, 51–54) disagrees with Hunt (1954), arguing that ElBed has “precisely
the clear, imaginative organization” that Hunt says it lacks. Gregory shows how the
imagery of the poem, rather than progressing up the so-called steps of love in the usual
Platonic manner, presents “a constant interplay between inner and outer, between
covering and covered.” Gregory believes that the imagery is “coherent and unified”
and that “a balance between physical and spiritual is marvelously preserved” (51)
throughout the poem. He points out that, in addition to a “brief opening” (ll. 1–4)
and briefer conclusion (ll. 47–48), the main body of the poem contains three major
sections: “the geography section” (ll. 25–32), which is surrounded by two sections (ll.
5–24 and ll. 33–36) that treat Platonic ideas—“with the second amplifying dramatically
the emphasis of the first” (51–52). Gregory holds that Donne not only combines sex
and philosophy and the Ovidian and Platonic literary traditions in a single poem, but
that he also solves the problems of “proportion and emphasis” so that the whole poem
is “an aesthetic success.” Gregory also notes that, although the physical is kept before
the reader by the uses of imperatives, puns, and the blunt opening and conclusion, the
philosophical is preserved primarily by the careful choice of imagery and by the abstract
treatment of the mistress, observing that had Donne elaborated on his description of
the lady with “striking and precise detail,” he would have upset the necessary balance
required between the physical and spiritual. Gregory thinks an “intellectual tone of
light irony” contributes to the consistency of the poem, observing that the speaker’s
voice is recognized in each line “as one element is skillfully played off against the
other.” Gregory warns, however, that the reader must take the Platonism of the poem
neither too seriously nor too lightly and keep both the Ovidian and the Platonic in
mind in order to realize the poem’s “delicate balance, the subtle means by which the
artist has imposed his own particular order on the disordered materials of reality” (54).
Hughes (1968, 28–37, 82–84, 101) notes that, of the five elegies the licenser disapproved in 1632, ElBed is one of four that deal with love in playful, even blasphemous,
theological terms. He maintains that in three of these “outlawed” elegies (ElWar, ElProg,
and ElBed) the subtlety of the analogues between sexual and divine love grows out of
the “emblematic figure” who in these poems is on an erotic quest, not a spiritual or
religious one (32–33). Hughes further maintains that “the pilgrimage that ends at a
paradisal orgasm” is most fully developed in ElBed and that, at the same time, Donne
“offers a tantalizing intimation of the mystique of love that develops throughout his
career.” According to Hughes, “love as self-immolation, love as an ecstatic auto-da-fé
makes its debut” in this poem. Just as in ElBrac and ElProg, he observes, the mistress,
a city courtesan, is “invested with sacerdotal powers,” and she arrives like an angel,
but an angel of flesh (ll. 20–21) whose arrival turns the bedchamber into “a place of
erotic worship” (35). Hughes also notes that, as in the other poems, the mistress is
explored and becomes “both the journey and the quest” and that, like the woman of
the Anniversaries, the lady also is “both the object and the wit, the thing discovered
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and the instrument of discovery” (35–36). The mistress is thus given a double task,
Hughes remarks, as she becomes “the initiator into the mystery of love and the mystery itself,” the “priestess and temple at the same time,” and the “map to Paradise”
and “Paradise” itself (101). He observes that the mistress seems to become pure spirit
as she steps from her clothes, almost as if she were “stepping out of the fetters of the
body,” and that as “celestial spirit” the naked woman “can now initiate lovers into
the sacred mysteries forbidden to common men.” Once freed from the “clothes-body,”
says Hughes, “this houri transcends time and place” while the speaker “joins her in
ecstasy” and “transcends the material world (or expects that he will, if she would only
hurry into bed),” desiring to immerse himself into the mistress’s body (36). Hughes
says that the love act in ElBed, even though presented in a rather businesslike manner,
becomes “the fullest discovery” of self and “paradoxically the blissful extinction of self.”
He notes that the notion of lovers occupying a world different from that of others in
this elegy will show up in the later poems and says the main difference between this
poem and later ones is that of tone and belief, for the elegies are ironic, “a hyperbolic
exploitation of the concept for dramatic purposes.” Thus, to Hughes, what is simply
“brilliant boudoir bawdry” will become later on “an article of a strong faith” (37).
The “calculated blasphemy” of the poem, he contends, is only a “pale prelude” to the
seriousness with which Donne will treat the ecstasy of love in Ecst (84).
Kermode (1968, xv) notes the “authentically registered sexual excitement” of ElBed.
Menascè (1969, 62) finds ElBed different from the other Elegies because of its excited
passion and argues that the others are cold in spite of their sensuality.
Miner (1969, 221) calls ElBed “an impatient address to a woman of the town.”
Roy and Kapoor (1969, 356) find in ElBed “depth of emotion” and “force” and note
its “appeal of modernity.” They observe that those who love traditional Platonic lovepoetry may find the comparison of sexual enjoyment to the exploration of a new world
“far-fetched” and “absurd” and that the poem’s treatment of sex may seem “shameless” to some. They argue, however, that “sometimes honesty makes such demands”
and hold that the main attraction of the poem is its presentation of Donne’s typical
attitude toward love in which, rejecting adoration, he studies “complex feelings and
emotions” and then “bodies them forth as if he has experienced them himself.” Roy
and Kapoor further note that the elements of the mistress’s beauty are not itemized in
the typical Petrarchan manner, but are “presented as a collective unit responding to
the sexual provocation of the lover.” Unlike other poems, say Roy and Kapoor, ElBed
has “no clash between body and soul” and “no intellectual or pedantic touch.” They
claim rather that “simple facts” are clothed in “innovative” and “direct language” and
that “plainness” and “simple truth” are the main virtues of the poem.
Kranz (1970, 517) says that in ElBed Donne is studying intently the book of the
body and observes that such focus on the pleasure of the body is new. Donne’s contemporaries, he argues, created unreal personifications of women.
Sanders (1971, 104–06) argues that an adolescent might see ElBed as a “great and
glorious hymn in praise of sexual liberty and discovery” (104), whereas a mature person
would see that the “combination of emancipation and self-consciousness” in the poem
generates a “theological conceit” (105–06). He finds in the poem “no sophisticated
play with religious analogy” but rather “an attempt to weld sacred and profane into
Elegy 8. ElBed
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677
a single reality.” He concludes that ElBed is nearer to religion than all the conscious
spirituality of Ecst (106).
Everett (1972, 11) observes that ElBed, though generally considered one of
Donne’s more “sensual” elegies, has “the cool and amused element that one finds in
Shakespeare’s comic-erotic Mannerist poem Venus and Adonis or in Marlowe’s more
classical—but still funny—Hero and Leander.” He further maintains that ElBed is a
“surprisingly abstract” poem that plays “theme and variation on what passes for a concrete procedure.” Everett thinks that most first readers are surprised to discover that,
at the end of the poem, “the proposed event has yet to begin” and points out that the
narrator “has so far managed to undress no one but himself.”
Hardy (1972, 76) briefly points to a “rough ‘masculine’ force” in ElBed that is also
found in LovGrow 11–14 as well as in ElChange and ElProg.
Jha (1972, 67, 80–82) includes ElBed in a group of 18 poems (the others being Fever,
Dream, Flea, Damp, Will, Prohib, Compu, Para, ElPerf, ElComp, ElAut, ElJeal, Image,
ElWar, Token, ElExpost, ElVar) that are “exercises in praise of or persuasion to the mistress in order to induce her to unite herself with the lover” (67). He observes that the
speaker uses theological or spiritual arguments in praise of nakedness and that he twists
the usual metaphor of the body as a covering of the soul into a metaphysical conceit in
which he “proves” that being naked is similar to casting off the body so that the soul
can enjoy the whole joys of heaven (80). Jha says that Donne admirably constructs
his basic conceit out of Neo-Platonic idealism in lines 33–35 (81) and concludes by
calling the poem “one of the inimitable expressions of Donne’s paradoxical wit” (82).
MacColl (1972, 40–41) points out that, in the nearly 100 pre–1650 manuscript
miscellanies that he examined (containing over 90 of Donne’s poems), ElBed, along
with ElAnag, appeared most frequently (25 times for each) (40). He notes also that
only 33 of the poems appeared 5 or more times and that, of those, 9 were elegies (41).
Gill (1973, 169) traces Donne’s concept of his mistress as a world waiting to be
discovered to the spirit of the age of discovery, but locates its metaphysical content in
the medieval view of man as the microcosm that reflects the macrocosm.
Lewalski and Sabol (1973, 7) relate the poem to Ovid (see Classical Borrowings
and Literary Influences below) and observe that the speaker “interrupts the progress
of the bedroom scene to draw metaphysical analogies between undressing the lady
and geographical discovery,” or even the “revelation of Truth hidden under external
coverings or shadows” as found in Christian Platonism.
Tomashevskii (1973, 11) claims that in ElBed Donne destroys the traditional image
of flawless feminine beauty.
Kermode (1974, 58–61) argues that one can tell that ElBed is addressed to a lady
with whom the speaker has not yet gone to bed because in the first half of the poem
he addresses her as “you” but in the second half he calls her “thee,” “indicating thereby
a rapidly growing intimacy.” Kermode maintains that that alone should rule out any
notion that the poem is addressed to Ann More, and he suggests that it is addressed
rather to “a city madam of some kind,” perhaps, based on the way she dresses, the
“wife of some rich city tradesman.” Kermode calls attention to the sexual puns, as
seen, for instance, in the two opening lines; and he maintains that from line 25 on
the tone changes—“a kind of rapt quality comes into it” and “an authentic sense of
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Commentary
sexual excitement enters the poem” (59). Kermode finds in the poem Donne’s characteristic “infusion of a certain theological conceit” (60); and he concludes that it is
not the subject matter that distinguishes this poem but “the variations of tone” and
the persistence of “quasi-learned figures from theology, from geography, and so on,”
which, while lacking a “dry crackle of wit,” are “perfectly consonant in Donne with a
tone of authentic passion” (61).
Roston (1974, 130) says that Donne’s early libertine poetry embodies the tension
between fleshly delights and spiritual love, and he finds that in ElBed Donne truly
relishes the flesh, “his roving hands excitedly exploring the splendid curves and crevices
of the female body,” while, at the same time, “the devoted lover shares with his mistress
a refined spirituality of love by perceiving the celestial through and beyond the flesh.”
Sasayama (1974, 203–05) argues that ElBed is a kind of vers de société and an intellectual tour de force. He finds the inner drama of the poem filled with energy and
vitality and calls the elegy an anti-Renaissance piece that exploits stock images and
conventional ideas to achieve effects opposite to what is expected.
Cathcart (1975, 156–57) argues that the speaker of ElBed seems “more aware of
that which resists him and which resists his desire than that which supports him” and
maintains that the images of the poem—such as “girdle,” “breastplate,” “lace,” “busk,”
“gown,” “coronets,” “shoes,” “white robes”—“all point toward the variety of defenses
with which a woman may gird herself.” Cathcart maintains that the speaker, therefore, is “aware of that against which he must argue” and that “his effort is to come to
new and special truths surmounting old” (156). Cathcart contends that almost all of
Donne’s poems are intended to teach something and, in that sense, are moral (156–57).
Freitag (1975, 64–66) maintains that Donne’s mastery in building pictures through
language is such that the lesson of ElBed becomes a spiritual pleasure (65).
El-Gabalawy (1976, 108, 117) argues that, although Donne “echoes the moral
platitudes of his day” about Aretino in Sat5 and in Ignatius, ElBed (along with Carew’s
“A Rapture”) is an English equivalent—“without obscene words”—of Aretino’s I sonetti
lussuriosi. On the whole, El-Gabalawy notes, Donne’s approach to “the intimate relations between men and women” is “healthy” (108), and adds that even in his most
intense and passionate moments, Donne does not celebrate sex in “the uninhibited
erotic terms of ‘A Rapture’” (117).
Donald (1977, 266) reports that many readers consider ElBed to be as licentious as
ElProg, only “perhaps a little more subtle.” He argues, however, that, “judging by its
use of the blazon,” ElBed is “noticeably more traditional” than ElProg in its “head-tofoot movement” and “considerably less ironic” since the successive “discoveries” are
“devoutly to be wished for.”
Sinha (1977, 102–06, 125) divides the poem into three movements: (1) lines 1–24,
in which the “exaggerated language” at first produces “an atmosphere of half-amused
tenderness” that is also “faintly absurd,” especially in the bawdy parts of the section;
(2) lines 25–32, in which the pattern of the first section is repeated; and (3) lines
33–46, in which the apostrophe to “Full nakednes” (l. 33) must be viewed in light of
the two preceding sections (105–06). Sinha maintains that, although there is a pattern of logic in the poem, it is “the logic of feeling, of an individual involved in a real
situation, all of which together constitute the dramatic” (125).
Elegy 8. ElBed
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Benito Cardenal (1978, 232) sees ElBed as an example of Donne’s youthful paganized religiosity.
Hoover (1978, 15) calls ElBed the “most blunt” of Donne’s “challenges to Platonic
idealism,” quoting lines 1–2, 33–35, and 44–48 to show that Donne’s “explicitness” is
“shocking from beginning to end.”
Carey (1981, 105–08, 116–17) calls the speaker of ElBed a “despotic lover” and
a “perennial dweller in the shadow-land of pornography,” noting that this image is
“particularly attractive as a fantasy role to males who, through shyness or social circumstance, find relations with women difficult” (105). Describing the addressee as a
“submissive girl-victim,” Carey says that in the poem “sex exudes a strongly economic
flavour,” as seen in the emphasis on the richness of the mistress’s clothes, her chiming
watch, and her coronet, and he contends that her clothing, her various accoutrements,
and her elaborate coiffure indicate that this “luscious sex-symbol” is an aristocrat—a
fantasy in which Donne “gratifies not only his sexual but also his social and financial
ambitions.”
Carey argues, however, that more important than either is the speaker’s urge to
dominate not only the woman but also other men and to express his superiority over
both. By disparaging those who wear expensive clothing and precious stones, by exalting his own more “high-minded” values while actually revealing his dissoluteness,
and by alluding to religion in an essentially bawdy poem, Carey says, Donne’s speaker
establishes “ascendancy over mammon-worshippers and God-fearing souls alike,” while
at the same time presenting himself as “too refined to associate with the first” and “too
smart to be taken in by the superstitions of the second” (106). Carey further maintains
that by extending his contempt not only to his “mesmerized victim” but also to “large
sections of the human race” and by elevating himself above his purported subject
matter by his tone and style, the speaker “becomes more and more loftily engaged,”
and his immediate concern, the lady, “slips into abeyance” (106–07).
The climax of the poem, Carey remarks, is a “general eulogy of nakedness” and
not, as we might have expected, “an inventory” of the lady’s “anatomical assets”—a
surprising development given the theme of the poem and its “general air of lust.” In
comparison to the more typical Elizabethan survey of the female body, such as appears
in Thomas Nashe’s “The Choice of Valentines,” Carey finds ElBed “rarefied and abstracted,” noting that Donne keeps his eye primarily on the mistress’s clothes, not on
the mistress herself (107). Carey contends that another element of “transcendence”
(manifest in Fever, Anniv, and many other Donne poems) is the tendency to expand
the mistress into “something of universally acknowledged importance”—in this case,
“America” (l. 27); and he also claims that the language of this description allows
Donne “to enclose the public sphere in the private” and enables him to feel that he
has “scaled the pinnacle of worldly, as well as erotic, success.” According to Carey, the
exercise of power fascinated Donne and is “a crucial element in his art,” here revealing
itself in the “almost pathological imperiousness” of this “punitive poem” (116–17).
Empson (1981, 42–43) disagrees with Carey’s claims (1981) that Donne is “punitive”
and “almost pathologically imperious” toward his mistress while she cringes in fear.
Empson agrees, however, that the poem is pornographic: “it describes the greatest bit
of luck in this kind that a male reader can imagine, and eggs him on to be pleased.”
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Commentary
The young Donne, Empson maintains, wished to attract the kind of aristocratic lady
he portrays in the poem, but the speaker is not reporting an actual happening. Empson
disagrees with those who, in order to make the poem less shocking, claim that the
woman is a prostitute, arguing that the speaker would not be coaxing such a woman to
do things that professionally she would have understood. Empson thinks the speaker
might have begun by addressing a prostitute as if she were an aristocrat but says that, if
so, in the end he abandons the notion. Empson maintains that Carey is also incorrect
(1) in saying that the lady is afraid to answer the speaker, noting that love poets usually
do not get answered in their poems, and (2) in suggesting that Donne has no interest
in the lady’s body but only wishes to dominate her. Empson thinks that Carey goes
wrong, in part, because he endorses Gardner’s reading (1965b) of line 46: “Here is no
pennance, much lesse innocence”; on the contrary, says Empson, Donne is seducing a
married lady, one perhaps forced by parents to enter an arranged marriage, by arguing
that what she is about to do is not sinful (43).
Gardner (1981, 49) disagrees with Carey’s point (1981) that in ElBed Donne intends to punish, insult, and humiliate the woman addressed and thus shows his “lust
for power.” She maintains that the woman might just as well be seen as “an experienced sexual tease, if there is any point in indulging in these superfluous inventions,”
and she insists that there is no evidence of sadism in the poem, “except in a vulgar,
journalistic sense.”
Brodsky (1982, 833–34) observes that ElBed initially compares the clothed body of
the mistress to a picture, then further compares it to the covering of a book, the force
of the second image coming from the fact that “a book cover, unlike a picture, derives
its meaning from a content within” (833). Brodsky finds Donne’s comparison of bodies
to souls blasphemous and argues that the comparison “breaks down into deductive
circularity,” but maintains that the image of mystic books “works far more successfully.”
For her, however, the “conceit of the disclosed text” is only effective when “concealed
by a further ‘covering’”—“the body of the lover made seducer.” Brodsky maintains that
the poem ends by reversing the relevance of its major figure and concludes that “the
image of the book, of language made into meaningful, coherent form” finally turns
upon itself; the experience “runs contrary to the meaning the image evokes” (834).
Gardner (1982, 43) rejects the suggestion that the lady of ElBed may be a prostitute
and finds it more likely that she is a rich citizen’s wife rather than a court lady because
“the ambience of similar Elegies is rather that of the city than of the court.” Gardner
also points out that the discussion of the poem as Donne’s own epithalamium rests
entirely on the note next to line 31 in HH1 (see above) and maintains that if this
elegy, with all of its sexual innuendoes, was addressed to a young bride on her wedding night, then it deserves all that Carey (1981) says of it; but she finds that whole
notion “absurd.” She further contends that the “brilliantly improper wit” of the poem
is a “kind of linguistic foreplay aiming to excite the mind” as the speaker’s “roving
hands” (l. 25) arouse her body.
Miller (1982, 2:829) says that if Donne is ridiculing the Neo-Platonic school of
love by suggesting that the mistress’s baring her body to the speaker is analogous to
one’s baring her soul to God, as Clay Hunt (1954) suggests, then Donne also “is clearly
having it both ways and making the analogy available for its own sake as well.”
Elegy 8. ElBed
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Parker (1982, 200–01) argues that the success rate of explicitly sexual poems, as
opposed to “love” poems, is “much lower than with poems of similar ambition on
any other theme” and maintains that the truly “good serious poem about sex is rare
indeed.” Parker argues that in a good “sex” poet the “capacity for thought” must be
“matched by a capacity for conveying a sturdy sexual drive,” such as Donne exhibits
in ElBed. Parker describes the “constant juggling of the metaphysical with the carnal”
as a “titillating pleasure” for Donne and an equal pleasure for the reader (200). In this
poem Parker finds an “irresistible” combination of “language and thought, wit, nicety
of allusion, with the courtly compliment but also with the earthy” and suggests that
“in four hundred years few other poets, if any, have equalled it” (201).
Frontain (1984, 41–54), arguing that for Donne the erotic and the spiritual were
“mutually inclusive features,” both necessary if the experience of love is to be complete, maintains that “the extraordinary depth of Donne’s spirituality derives from its
comprehension of the erotic” and that “the satisfying quality of his eroticism” derives
from its being viewed in relation to other, usually different areas of experience (41).
Frontain believes that while “paradoxically describing Ovidian sexuality in language
drawn from Christian Scripture,” Donne “creates a poetic world spanning two poles”
and thus “resolves the traditional debate between body and soul” (44). Donne transforms the undressing of the mistress and “taking her to bed for sexual purposes into a
religious ceremony,” Frontain says, and overlays the sexual aspects of the experience
“with a spiritual—specifically scriptural—gloss,” establishing thereby the notion that
the sexual experience is not only physically pleasurable but also spiritually enlightening. Frontain maintains that women, therefore, are not at all “mere objects of passion
and conduits of its expression” but are “channels of spiritual revelation,” and he argues
that Donne ritualizes the sexual experience by making the participants anonymous.
Frontain maintains, therefore, that the speaker, though “brilliant” and “overwhelming,” is nonetheless “a voice” and the mistress merely “a set of actions,” noting that
the speaker’s imperatives “cause the action to take place as if before the reader’s eyes”
(47). Frontain holds that the various details in the poem come together in two ways:
“spatially, as the woman is led forward to the ‘temple’ which is their bed” (l. 19), and
“temporally, as her clothing is gradually removed.”
Although Donne intensifies the sexual nature of his experience, Frontain argues,
he, unlike Ovid, makes it clear that “the mysteries to be celebrated by the lovers are
spiritual as well as physical” and encodes “Pauline and Johannine biblical references
into the text” in such a way as to describe “a recognizable religious ceremony having
to do with Jesus Christ’s ‘Second Coming,’” which he charges with “an undeniably
sexual significance” (48). Frontain sees Donne’s opening as a parody of the Maranatha,
and he discusses various examples—the language of St. Paul’s admonition in 1 Cor.
16.13–14, (e.g., “watch,” “stand firm”), the importance of sight imagery in the Book
of Revelation and ElBed, the roles of both St. John and Donne as readers of “mistique
bookes”—to support his contention that ElBed is importantly associated with 1 Corinthians and the Book of Revelation and thus becomes a sort of “apocalyptic document.”
Arguing further the religious dimensions of ElBed, Frontain says that the speaker is
only a “powerless suppliant” in the poem, not the chauvinist that he is often made out
to be, and that “the ultimate action of the poem depends entirely upon the woman,”
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Commentary
who “possesses both the grace that the male suppliant requires if he is to progress any
further”—and also “control over its distribution.” Thus, he says, the speaker in entreating the woman to bed “employs the form of invocation used by early Christians when
appealing to their Savior,” and the poem itself “functions ultimately as a prayer, and
one of which the reader never knows the outcome” (51).
ElBed, Frontain observes, has evoked various reactions from critics—from those
like Saintsbury (1896) and C. S. Lewis (1938), who totally ignore its religious dimensions and see it as “frank naturalism” or pornography, to those like Andreasen (1967)
and Carey (1981), who recognize the poem’s religious elements but interpret them in
extreme ways (51–52). Frontain suggests that Donne deliberately mixed “the erotic
with the spiritual” as a challenge to the reader and that in “masking his helplessness”
from the woman, the speaker almost “masks it from the majority of the poem’s readers”
(52–53). Frontain further thinks that the speaker’s vulnerability is, in fact, “transformed
into almost offensive self-confidence” and that his “flamboyance” makes him seem
“less earnest in his love” than, for instance, the speakers in ValMourn or Ecst. Frontain
concludes that ElBed is Donne’s “first major attempt to represent the action of an erotic
spirituality” and remains one of his “most provocative” poems (53).
Raine (1984, 12) maintains that in ElBed we hear a “new note” in poetry, a note of
“sexual excitement.” He calls the poem “a great masterpiece of desire” and maintains
that in it Donne “captures exactly the psychological afflatus, the hyperbolic expansiveness that accompanies love” and also conveys “the explicit, full-frontal nature of desire.”
Sherwood (1984, 73–75) maintains that in ElBed the speaker’s “primary satirical
target” is not preoccupation with the female body but “the conscious opposition to
inherited values,” claiming that “one lifelong tenet of Donne’s epistemology, that the
body can be read as a language or a book, encourages a careful scrutiny of its experience.” Sherwood contends that the poem consciously parodies that principle and
“conveys a conscious sexuality . . . that would strangle traditional values,” and he
discerns a “religious parody” that substitutes “sexual exhilaration for spiritual vision,
offering the woman’s nakedness for the soul’s intuitive heavenly knowledge.” Sherwood
further maintains that the pace of the poem, the “titillation that simulates a ritualistic
progress to insight, prolongs the sexual anticipation while insulting a genuine spiritual
standard by breathlessly praising an expensive woman of easy virtue.” Sherwood calls
the speaker’s suggestion that discovering the mistress is like discovering the New
World “an achievement of religious insight,” and he notes that this reference to the
macrocosm “broadens characterization of her sexual person, centring a world of value
in her.” Sherwood also maintains that the speaker’s religious parody “carries sexual
exhilaration beyond rebellion into a new order that eschews guilt, because of the body’s
innocence, redefining thereby woman’s relationship to man” (73). He observes, too,
that the speaker undresses first to teach her “the new state without ‘covering,’” noting
that, “ironically, since Grace emanates from her, she needs none, especially in this
innocent New World where sexual knowledge is truth” (73–74). Sherwood believes
that this parody “blocks access to the old spirituality” while, at the same time, it points
to a “bogus, naturalistic world,” promising freedom by means of “sexual licence” but
also “inadvertently” admiting that “pregnancy could entrap her.” Sherwood concludes
that “the substitution of sexual exhilaration for spiritual freedom deludes the speaker”
Elegy 8. ElBed
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since “naturalistic preoccupation with a body prevents spirituality” (74), and he regards the poem as an attack on naturalism that acknowledges how dangerous it is to
traditional values (75).
Singer (1984, 198–203) maintains that in ElBed, as well as in such poems as
GoodM, LovInf, and Canon, Donne employs “the language of spiritualization” in order
to “manifest the goodness of wholly sexual love between man and woman.” He argues
that Donne “transcends libertine interests in the body by denying that love can be
reduced to lust alone” and that Donne’s view of merging “provides a philosophical basis
for those poems that are neither Platonic nor libertine but somehow both at once”
(198). Singer holds that by merging Ovidian and Platonic concepts of love, Donne
not only unifies the body and the soul but also interanimates “traditional distinctions
between time and eternity and between the microcosm and macrocosm” (199), and
he thinks that ElBed suggests that something like the mystical experience takes place
“when lovers merge in moments of orgasmic satisfaction.” Singer finds the poem, as
well as Donne’s general view that sexual ecstasy is both sacred and profane, reminiscent
of Titian’s painting Sacred and Profane Love—but with a difference: Donne “does not
claim that sacred love is like a beautiful nude who has nothing to hide in the face of
divinity” but argues instead that “profane love is itself sacred, that love is holy wherever
it appears and most obviously in sexual consummation” (202).
Bueler (1985, 73) argues that, unlike ElNat, ElBed is a genuine dramatic monologue
in which “the primary audience, a person other than the speaker, inhabits the poem
itself,” and she maintains that there is “direct evidence of that person’s immediate,
on-going response,” with the poem being “shaped according to that response.”
Docherty (1986, 78–83) calls ElBed Donne’s “most explicit articulation” of his
“colonialist” inclinations, his incorporation of the space of the other, “usually the
alien space of the body of woman,” observing that in this poem Donne “explicitly
relates the spaces of the alien female body to be overcome with that geographical space
which demands colonization.” Docherty observes, however, that the poem gives little
attention to the body (or space) of the woman, that in fact we see little of her, which
makes somewhat doubtful “her very ontological status.” For Docherty, the woman is
viewed “in the unrealistic terms of an entire cosmos,” her body becoming a kind of
“geometrical ‘encompassing’ of the world” (78). Docherty believes, moreover, that as
the poem progresses, the woman, in effect, disappears, being ultimately replaced by
the presence and body of the male speaker—by lines 13–14 the woman and her body
“have been replaced by a kind of ‘female landscape,’” and she becomes a “microcosmic
conception of the world of America or, more precisely, Virginia, a supposedly ‘virgin’
land.” Docherty claims that thereafter the speaker’s displacement or “covering” of
the woman proceeds, as she is transformed first into a “ghostly angel” and then into
“the form and figure of the male speaker himself ” (79). The metamorphosing of the
woman into the male speaker leads to a form of “auto-eroticism,” Docherty maintains,
the woman becoming “the imaginative instrument” by which the speaker “identifies,
names or blesses himself as male” (80–81). ElBed is not, Docherty argues, a study in
“sexual relation” but in “auto-eroticism, masturbation, talking to the isolated self,”
and because of this the woman has “no value” and “does not, in fact, even appear”
(81–82). Thus for Docherty the poem does not reveal a woman but is rather a “male
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striptease,” and he thinks that by the end of the poem it is clearly the male speaker
who is undressing and exposing himself. The woman, Docherty maintains, is only
“the literal extension of the phallus, representing the phallic erection,” and what
the speaker seeks is “recognition of his maleness,” his phallus, and of the power its
“potency” should give him (82).
Guinness (1986, 137–39) argues that Carey (1981) “misreads” the “jeu d’esprit”
in ElBed by “assimilating it to Donne’s overweening ambition” and maintains that
the argumentativeness of the poem reveals Donne as a player (137). He holds that
“never has there been a poet whose sexual powers were more centred in the tongue,”
and he notes how “one by one the impediments to fruition” (i.e., articles of clothing)
are “charmed off ” the lady, who is not an “unwilling opponent.” Guinness further
maintains that this “talking for victory” is what really matters and that here is where
Donne “outperforms Ovid, for whom words were merely the prelude to action.” He also
observes that in the poem there is “no cetera to be imagined since the two players never
reach fruition” (138). Guinness disagrees with Gill (1972), who suggests that Donne
shows contempt for the women he uses as merely sexual objects, and also with Brian
Vickers, who reports that his students observed that the woman was hardly present in
Donne’s poems and complained that the description of love was always from the male
speaker’s superior position (138–39). Guinness retorts that the woman in ElBed is not
an object so much as she is a “pretext,” pointing to the “competitive brilliance” of lines
33–46 and observing that the poem is not in fact “particularly erotic.” He argues that
the role of the speaker in ElBed is basically one of detachment and that “like a priest
on duty he lies in the ‘temple’ of his bed and by remote control instructs a sacrificial
lamb how to prepare herself for sacrifice”; “whimsically,” says Guinness, the speaker
“is arrayed in sheet instead of surplice” and “perversely persuades his acolyte to dress
down for church instead of up” (139).
Marotti (1986, 45, 53–55) finds ElBed “clearly Ovidian” (45) and part of “the same
social context” as ElNat since it “specifically dramatizes an encounter between a witty
young man and a middle-class city woman” (53). Marotti argues that ElBed “celebrates
wit as a way of mastering an erotic situation comically” and “does not offer the kind
of poetic sensuality found in the erotic epyllion of the 1590’s,” a tradition mocked, for
example, in Marston’s The Metamorphosis of Pygmalions Image. Instead of “passive immersion in sensual experience,” he points out, Donne portrays “the kind of confident
control of experience he and his audience of Inns-of-Court gentlemen desired” (1) by
using “brusque imperatives” (ll. 1, 5, 7, 9, 25, etc.), (2) by employing “witty metaphors
and allusions,” and (3) by depicting a kind of “aggressive (if comically self-aware)
male sexuality” (54). Marotti observes that Donne combines “phallic narcissism and
economic ambition” and that “sexual, economic, and legal/political power are wittily
confused” as the speaker triumphs “in a familiar, if fictionalized, social world” (54–55).
Merrix (1986, 11) points out that in Elizabethan erotic poems “disrobings often
follow universally-recognized techniques of titillation” with the female stripping “ever
so slowly, like a burlesque queen, to reveal the physical charms beneath the rhetorical
clothing.” He thinks the readers of ElBed follow “each discarded garment with hungry
eyes and sharp anticipation” from when Donne first asks the mistress to “unlace” herself
(l. 9) to “the happy apostrophe” to full nakedness (l. 33).
Elegy 8. ElBed
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685
Hester (1987, 49–64) argues that ElBed contains a “radical critique” of the English
imperialistic mission to Virginia and is, at the same time, an “Ovidian jeu” that “approaches the boldness of Catullus in its frank and graphic lasciviousness” (50). He
maintains that, without rejecting the poem as a jeu, the reader should also see ElBed
as “a hyperbolic send-up of Renaissance epithalamia,” in particular, Spenser’s Epithalamion, and also as “an equivocal rewriting of the English myth of America” (52).
Hester argues that Donne’s poem “displaces Spenser’s mythic high seriousness with
explicit Ovidian sensuality, countering the grand strokes of his poetic rival’s intellectual
hymn with a vivid, daring playfulness” (53). He points out, for example, that, just as
Spenser’s poem “dresses his beloved Elizabeth in the major vestments of Neoplatonic
adoration,” Donne “undresses his mistress in parodic reversal of the Neoplatonic ascent to ‘intellectual love’”; and whereas Spenser presents “learned rhymes” that “trace
the concentric circles of universal harmony,” Donne “envisions and encourages the
disrobing of his mistress as a descent through the celestial spheres to the center of his
universe,” that is, the bed (52). Hester maintains that Donne had political reasons
also to ridicule the poet of the Protestant establishment, who was prominently connected with Sir Walter Raleigh, the major political rival of the Earl of Essex. In other
words, Hester says, ElBed can be seen not only as Donne’s “corrective celebration of
the body and its claims” but also as “a critique of the Establishment poet and patron
who were rivals of his coterie” (53).
In particular, Hester argues, Donne’s poem presents a “blasphemous mimicry” of
Raleigh’s imperialistic ambitions in the New World. He maintains that in Donne’s
poem, the mistress, like Elizabeth I, is “consistently identified with iconography and
symbolism of the Virgin Mary,” and is also associated “with the New World as Eden
and with Eve,” while the speaker “exploits the same mythology and typology, assuming
comical, bawdy versions of Adam, the New World discoverer, Gabriel, and finally, even
the Word, which alone can serve as the proper ‘covering’ for mankind” (54). Hester
locates much of Donne’s wit in the poet’s sexual handling of various Marian legends,
most of them deriving from the Protevangelium and infancy gospels. He also notes
that the description of the mistress’s clothing is reminiscent of traditional paintings of
the Virgin and of Francisco Pacheco’s description of how she should be portrayed in
his El arte de la pintura (1649) (57). Hester maintains, in fact, that the entire address
of Donne’s speaker is “framed by embedded traces of Mary’s chronological movement from the Temple to Nazareth to Bethlehem” (58). Furthermore, Hester argues,
“the act of ‘going to bed’” is persistently compared in the poem to “the discovery of
America and to ‘knowing’ the Virgin Mary” and thus “the unvoiced word that lay
behind the poem from the beginning was the English name of the English colony in
America—Virgin(ia).” He maintains, therefore, that ElBed is “even more blasphemous
or outrageous than critics have heretofore suggested”; it is not only a “playful Ovidian
elegy” that offers a “spirited send-up” of Donne’s poetic and political rivals, but also
“a lampoon of the Establishment.”
Hester insists that “by inverting, redirecting, and rediscovering the hermeneutic
grounds of Neoplatonic codes of love and of English religious-imperial definitions of
America,” Donne “overcomes the rulers through their own rules” and that he, like
Essex, “knew that the future of the commonwealth might well be decided by whoever
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had personal admission to Elizabeth’s bedroom.” For that reason, Hester maintains, the
“specific features” of Raleigh’s career as the “discoverer” of America is “so revealing”
(59). Hester briefly outlines Raleigh’s career, noting that he was granted his “Letters
Patent” on the Feast of the Annunciation (March 25, 1584) and that one year later
Elizabeth gave him a seal designating him the Lord and Governor of Virginia. Pointing
out that originally the American colony was named Wingandacom (“covered with gay
clothes”), Hester concludes, therefore, that ElBed presents “a saucy and bold re-naming
of America, a new ‘Annunciation,’ or a renunciation of the bases of the original imperial act of linguistic erasure by which ‘people who wear gay clothes’ became citizens
(or slaves) of England.” In other words, according to Hester, Donne “literally re-enacts
this process of naming—urging the American native to remove her ‘gay coverings’ in
order to be recognized as the Virgin Mary, or as Virgin(ia)” (60). Hester admits that
Donne’s “hyperbolic displays of amphibolous wit” make it difficult to distinguish the
“extravagant bawdy play” from the “political and theological satire,” but he suggests
that perhaps Donne wanted it that way (61).
Kerrigan (1987, 2–5, 11) claims that certain feminists, following the lead of Carey
(1981), regard Donne as “a latent Jack the Ripper who brought serious frustrations
to the bedroom, and, as a substitute for more drastic forms of violent release, verbally
bullied his female victims into submission,” pointing out that the “stripped” lady of
ElBed, “commanded” to remove her garments by the speaker, “stands for such feminists
as the epitome of them all” (2). Kerrigan argues that, “by leaving us with a naked pair
in bed” and “bringing writing to the uttermost threshold of doing,” ElBed “announces a
great turning point in the history of the Renaissance love lyric.” He points out that its
“insistent sexual imperatives” move away from the “unconsummated Petrarchan verse”
of the sixteenth century and maintains that the poem “gestures toward the Ovidian
verse of the seventeenth century, which characteristically presupposes consummation,”
as seen, for instance, in Carew’s “A Rapture.” Kerrigan believes that ElBed evidences
an awareness of this “historical break” and claims that Donne’s “object of assault is
less a woman than a tradition of male desire” and that he “seeks an answerable female
desire in order to overturn this tradition.”
Kerrigan notes that in the poem “clothes mesmerize” (l. 8) and that “this obsession
with ornament amounts to either the substitution of courtship for consummation, or
. . . the metamorphosis of the sexual desire into greed” (l. 38). For Donne, he says, the
“target of desire” resides “in the unclothed or ‘dis-covered’ woman” (l. 33), indicating
that “all joys are therefore mutual.” Whereas in conventional Renaissance love poetry “the beauty of the woman compels and motivates the poet’s devotion,” Kerrigan
states, Donne typically avoids the “decked out, trope-encrusted visual image” (4) and
in ElBed does not describe the lady’s body as a “thing apart,” but rather “looks forward
to touching, discovering, exploring, seeking license for his roving hands, not his eyes”
(4–5). Asserting that Donne typically “prefers more intellectual or linguistic conceptions of love,” Kerrigan notes that “the anticipated touching of the elegy is imaged as
manipulation at its most sophisticated and semiotic—handwriting, seal-setting” (ll.
30–32), in which by his touch Donne both signs away his freedom and gains ownership
of what he touches. Kerrigan calls Donne’s description “brilliant and just” and holds
that it is presented with the “abstract crispness” and the “implied delight in achieved
Elegy 8. ElBed
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687
clarity” that can be associated with “phenomenology at its best, of making love, sexual
touching, as the simultaneity of serving another and possessing another—the union
incarnate of two extreme things one can do with a signature” (5). Kerrigan thinks
Carey (1981) “misses the whole poem” when he insists on Donne’s “excitement over
the richness of the lady’s dress,” for Donne, familiar with the “simpering idolatry”
evoked by clothes in the Petrarchan tradition, “judges his encomiums so that each
piece of sumptuous apparel is beautiful primarily because it touches her body, the
supreme determinant of beauty” (11).
Warnke (1987, 62, 64) calls ElBed “the most passionately physical” of Donne’s
erotic poems (62), one with a “strongly genital orientation.” In “more traditional love
poetry,” Warnke finds, the lady’s “secondary sexual characteristics”—“breasts, neck,
eyes, hair, etc.”—receive “the most attention,” whereas in this poem the genitalia are
of “paramount, almost exclusive importance” (64).
Young (1987b, 36, 42) argues that ElBed is more concerned with Elizabethan lust
for gold and power than with sexual desire and thus is “doubly ironic since its obsessive
preoccupation with un-covering is the guise for its covert intimations.” Furthermore,
Young maintains, Donne’s “flirtation with the grotesque, the obscene, and the blasphemous” in the poem conceals what Elizabethan England held to be “more dangerous
transgressions” (36). Young believes that the poem inverts the language of imperialistic
poems of the day—such as Stephen Parmenius’s De Navigatione . . . Humphrie Gilberti
. . . Carmen and George Chapman’s De Guiana, Carmen Epicum—in which the New
World and its riches are likened to a desirable female body and that he ridicules the
highly sexual language found in the accounts of the Guiana voyage by Sir Walter
Raleigh and Laurence Keymis (42).
Carr (1988, 106–07) calls ElBed “an openly erotic poem of masculine panache” that
“clearly owes far more to Ovid than to Petrarch.” She finds “the imagery of conquest”
in the poem “entwined” with a “desire of mutuality,” but points out that the “central
image is that of the conquistador” (106), seen most obviously in lines 27–30. Carr
further suggests that the mistress in the poem “becomes the English queen who permits
the voyage and the American territory to be possessed” (107).
Ricks (1988, 59) remarks on the “very beautiful high spirits” of the elegy that result
from “the act of love’s being all in prospect,” whereas the “sadder usual tale would be
‘To his Mistress Coming from Bed.’”
Easthope (1989a, 2–3) calls ElBed an example of “confessional discourse” in
which the speaker presents himself as “the interrogator to whom the woman should
reveal the inwardly concealed truth about her sexuality,” a truth “veiled in her but to
which he presumes immediate and transparent access” (2). The speaker’s “(would-be)
transcendental position,” Easthope says, is that of “a bearer of knowledge, a coherent
point for the intersection of a range of discourses (geographical, medical, theological, mythical)”; thus the speaker is “a mastering subject for whom his mistress is a
corresponding and complementary object” (2–3). Easthope points out that “there
cannot be a signified without a signifier, a represented without a representation,” yet
thinks “the rhetorical strategy” in ElBed is “to contain the process of representation,
to disavow it by promoting in its place a coherent represented.” He further points out
that, on one hand, “the speaker’s diegetic reality is substantiated” since his knowledge
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progresses from “clothed ‘appearance’” to “naked truth” behind which exists, as a “final
reality,” an object that reciprocally constitutes the speaker “as a fully present subject”;
on the other hand, “the linguistic process of the text” is itself “effaced by the vivid
dramatisation of speaker in a particularised situation.” Easthope claims, therefore,
that the reader “is interpellated into identification with a represented speaker who is
a full subject and the bearer of knowledge,” and thus the text “secures a position for
the classical humanist subject” (3).
Greene (1989, 135–43) says that on one level ElBed is a “progressive strip-tease
in which the removal of successive articles of feminine apparel focuses the running
play of salacious wit.” Greene points out that the mistress has “no audible voice,” but
is “reduced to passivity as her serial disrobing triggers tropes of joy and triumphant
instructions to continue,” with all the power belonging to the speaker (135). Greene
notes that the typical Latin elegy is “a voyeur’s delight” but finds the mistress in Donne’s
poem “oddly invisible,” arguing that the poem is, in fact, “a tissue of coverings, analogical
garments which apparel the ‘full nakedness’ the text seems to celebrate but actually
withholds.” Greene sees the tone as also problematic—as “the peremptory imperatives”
of the opening line give way to compliment in line 13 and then in lines 27 ff. yield
“to something like enthusiasm, if not rapture.” Greene notes that the poem can be
read “as the patter of a cynical seducer who merely feigns excitement” and “employs
his skill with rhetoric to gain his familiar goal”—a reading that might be supported
“by the triviality of the final quip” about the speaker “covering” the lady (136); he
believes, however, that the “rapturous elements” and the theological and ecclesiastical
imagery cannot be dismissed or regarded simply as blasphemous. He thinks it possible
that the metaphors, though “glib” and “ostensibly blasphemous,” nonetheless “provide
the most accurate index of desires that can only be admitted by this ribald seducer as
blasphemy” and that “the re-covering of the mistress’s body with analogies corresponds
to a swerve away from common carnality.”
As an initiate into “an elite priesthood” (137), Greene says, the speaker seems to
“sacramentalize” the flesh, “making his mistress the instrument of a priestly institution”
and causing sexual pleasure to become “‘dignified,’ paradisal, mystically ‘unbodied’”
(138); and the wish to possess the woman “becomes a synecdoche for ulterior fantasies
of possession,” her body becoming “the medium for an experience of sacred possession,
sacred knowledge, sacred revelation.” Greene maintains that the language of the poem
evinces an “incipient drift” toward the “magical fiat” that “brings into being the textual self’s deepest desires.” Thus this poem, which is “ostensibly directed” to a woman,
“ends by concealing her”; and though it “looks literally phallocentric,” says Greene,
it “drifts away from the phallic” to a conclusion that “serves to call into question the
most obvious functions of the speaker’s power.”
Greene insists that the present tense in line 30 (“How blest ame I in this discouering thee”) must be taken seriously: the speaker is “blessed” even before “his phallic
seal ‘shall be’ hypothetically set,” and the real discovery is not nakedness, but “the
utterance, the poem”; what “blesses” the speaker is “his self-discovery, his naming or
metaphorizing of his truest and deepest desires.” Thus, Greene argues, the textual self
can discover itself only through the talismanic function of the woman (whom the
poem conceals rather than reveals) (140), and the speaker “emerges somewhat at odds
Elegy 8. ElBed
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689
with himself, divided by cynicism and celebration, lust and triumph, accepting with
ambivalence that freedom won by entering into the bonds of poetry” (142).
Mackenzie (1990, 68–69) calls ElBed “uneven” and says that it is “one of those
poems that wears less well with prolonged acquaintance” (68). Its “joking,” he thinks,
“comes to seem less exuberant than smug”; and “the triumphal cry” of “O my America,
my newfound land” (l. 27), followed by the “suggestive paradox” “To enter in these
bonds, is to be free” (l. 31), finally “cannot mesh with what surrounds it” (68–69).
Coiro (1990, 87) calls ElBed “flamboyantly masculine” and says that the usual
reading of the poem angers contemporary female students. She maintains, however,
that, “when the metaphors of licensing and colonialization” are considered from the
viewpoint of the woman addressed in the poem, “the dramatic situation can become
one of mutual erotic play” or might be read as “an eroticized metaphor for the power
of women in the Renaissance, able to grant a license for new-found-land—and, one
presumes, to revoke it.”
Guibbory (1990, 821–23) argues that the political dimension of the Elegies is especially evident “in the sense of seduction as mastery” in this poem. Calling ElBed “witty”
and “exuberant,” unlike ElAnag and ElComp which degrade women and show disgust
with the female body (821), Guibbory insists nonetheless that in this poem, “as the
speaker commands his mistress to undress,” he “transfers power” from her to himself and
that, although she is “wittily idealized and commodified through a variety of stunning
conceits,” there remains “the desire to possess and thus master the colonized woman”
(821–22). Guibbory argues that the speaker affirms his power through “accumulated
verbal commands,” “repeated possessives,” and the “crucial shift in metaphor” found
in lines 25–32, as a result of which woman is dethroned and sovereignty is restored
to man. Once Donne sounds this “politically subversive note,” she states, he momentarily backs away from its implications and, “by flattering the mistress, restores her
confidence in female superiority”; nonetheless, in the “final twist of the argument the
man comes out ‘on top’” (822). Guibbory concludes that “seduction fantasies, even
as they represent woman as supremely desirable, complement Donne’s strategies of
debasement, for both aim at restoring male sovereignty” (822–23).
Classical Borrowings and Literary Influences
Leishman (1951, 73–74) argues that ElBed may have been suggested by Amores
1.5, in which Ovid describes how Corinna came to him one hot summer day while he
was resting, but he also points out English precedents for this kind of poem, especially
Thomas Nashe’s “The Choice of Valentines,” a poem for which both Nashe and his
patron were harshly criticized by Hall and other satirists.
Hunt (1954, 18–19, 31, 124, 214) maintains that in this elegy Donne wants his
reader to be aware of some “stock imagery” of Petrarchan love poetry as well as to
notice the “novelty” of his handling of “standard poetic propositions” (18). Hunt
points out that Donne is also writing against the body and soul debate (“the dominant intellectual issue in the treatment of love in the 1590s”) in which the Platonists
regarded the body as “inessential temporal clothing for the eternal reality of the soul”
and believed that “the rational lover” should aim to rise above sensuality and “even
a purely spiritual union with the soul of a woman” to achieve a mystical union with
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God, while the Ovidians regarded this notion of love as “absurd” and claimed that
true love was “bodily passion unhampered by reason,” the “irrational and satisfying
experience of mere lust” (18–19). Hunt points out that Elizabethans reading a poem
on love written in heroic couplets and called an “elegy” would have anticipated an
ingenious and witty style, with elaborate conceits, one indebted to the then fashionable literary form derived from Ovid’s Amores, adhering to the Ovidian position and
celebrating “the techniques of seduction from the sophisticated point of view of a
man about town” (19). For Hunt “the distinctive quality” in Donne’s handling of the
Ovidian materials can best be seen by comparing the poem to Carew’s “A Rapture,”
a poem in which Carew shows not only the “general” influence of Ovid, but also the
“particular influence of Donne’s work,” especially Ecst, ElProg, and ElBed. Hunt further argues that “the sustained lightness of tone” and “the effect of prettily decorated
indecency” of Carew’s poem put it in “the main stream of the Ovidian tradition” and
give it “a tonal quality” very different from that of ElBed (214).
Melchiori (1957, 80) says that the poem is a variation on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria but
that it is clearly written by a seventeenth-century man who is well-versed in medieval
theology and is a master of wit.
Brilli (1964, 125) points out that the tone of exhortation the speaker uses to
convince the mistress to disrobe is a variation on the tone of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria,
especially lines 17–18.
Gardner (1965b, xxi, 131) cites Amores 1.5, in which Ovid describes an encounter
with Corinna and observes that Donne translates Ovid’s poem into “an impassioned
address by the lover in which the tide of mounting passion is rendered in splendid
hyperboles” (xxi).
Rickey (1966, 186), pointing out the classical allusion in ElBed to Atalanta (l. 36),
also notes that over half of the Elegies contain classical motifs.
Gregory (1968, 51) maintains that, although the form and subject matter of the poem
are Ovidian, Donne’s “imaginative treatment” of his subject is “clearly Platonic” (51).
Gill (1972, 56–57, 62–64) maintains that the argument in ElBed contrasts sharply
with the approach of the Roman elegists, whose mistresses need no logical argumentation to be enticed into having sex (56). She maintains that Donne tries to shock his
reader but thinks his sentiments can only shock in a social context in which the “right
true end” of love is denied. Contrasting Donne’s “bold, self-conscious uneasiness” with
Ovid’s “casual and comic sensuality,” Gill notes in Donne a “fairly irrelevant nastiness”
that places him “firmly in his period” and “connects him with writers like Webster and
with plays like Troilus and Cressida” (57). Gill rejects Leishman’s association (1951)
of ElBed with Ovid’s Amores 1.5, noting that Donne’s elegy, after beginning abruptly,
“becomes a slow titillation as each Elizabethan garment is removed with deliberation
and relish” (62). Unlike Ovid’s mistress, she notes, Donne’s is modest and needs to
be coaxed to undress; furthermore, Ovid “narrates in the past tense a single action,
complete with beginning, middle and end,” whereas Donne’s poem is “double and incomplete—in fact only a prelude.” Gill also points out that the “verbal undressing” of
the lady in the first 24 lines of ElBed is followed by the speaker’s undressing, “while he
talks glibly, to distract her attention, of exploration and the philosophy of nakedness.”
Donne’s poem, she contends, is closer to Propertius’s Elegies 1.2 and 2.15 than to
Elegy 8. ElBed
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691
Ovid’s poem (63). Gill maintains that against the sexual jokes in the poem, the “inert
metaphor” (ll. 13–14), and the confused allusion to Atalanta (l. 36) must be set the
“active rhythm” of lines 25–26 and the “mock-solemnity of the final section,” but she
argues that “these alone are not enough to make the poem any more than a young man’s
efforts at erotic verse.” What Gill finds truly important in the poem is Donne’s image
of the lady as his “America” and “newfound land” (l. 27), and she says that this is one
of the earliest appearances of that “most magical of Donne’s concepts, the power of
love to annihilate space.” She contends that Donne’s images of maps, globes, and the
geography of the female body “draw their strength from the period” and that his “sense
of the blessedness” in “dis-covering” his lady “owes more to Drake and Hawkins, who
made possible the pun on ‘discovering,’ than to Ovid and Propertius” (64).
Jha (1972, 81) points out that ElBed has a fairly conventional, even Petrarchan,
beginning and agrees with those who think that the mistress’s undressing bit by bit
may have been inspired by Ovid’s Amores 1.5 (80–81). He maintains, however, that
unlike Ovid, Donne is not interested in describing the physical beauty of the mistress,
since “even by the end of the poem the mistress goes on undressing herself.” Jha calls
Ovid’s poem “pornographic” but finds Donne’s “impassioned.”
Lewalski and Sabol (1973, 7) maintain that, although ElBed is evidently based on
Ovid’s Amores 1.5, Donne “translates Ovid’s past-tense narrative into the dramatic
present” and “heightens the erotic wit by describing the removal of each item of clothing with a series of ‘off with,’ ‘unpin,’ and ‘unlace’ clauses, while never mentioning
what the clothing covers.”
Armstrong (1977, 431) observes that ElBed “takes off from the suasoria futilely
addressed by Petrarchan lovers to their chaste mistresses” and “wittily alters the conventional situation.”
Donald (1977, 266) observes that the discovery motif combined with the undressing catalogue in ElBed may have been suggested by Sidney’s “What tongue can her
perfections tell” in the Arcadia.
Frontain (1984, 44–48) argues that, although ElBed is clearly modelled on Ovid’s
Amores 1.5, Donne departs from Ovid by intensifying “an already highly suggestive
situation” and that Ovid’s poem appears “almost quaint in comparison to Donne’s more
explicitly sexual statement” (46–47). Frontain points out that ElBed differs from the
Latin elegy in the following ways: (1) the language of Donne’s poem “is charged with
an aggressive sexuality” and “subtle sexual double entendres,” while Ovid’s poem uses
language in a straightforward manner and employs metaphor “only to establish a mood
at the opening of the poem” and “as mythological ornament”; (2) the “explicitness of
the dramatized situation” in Donne’s poem is completely unlike the illusory or dreamlike dimension of Ovid’s poem, which suggests so much “while literally detailing very
little of the sexual experience” (46); (3) Donne, unlike Ovid, transforms “erotic action”
and sexual intention into “a religious ceremony,” thereby suggesting that sex is not
only “physically pleasurable” but also “spiritually enlightening” (47); (4) the action
of Donne’s elegy takes place in the present, Ovid’s in the past, and the ritual aspects
of Donne’s poem are reinforced by the use of imperatives, the speaker’s “descriptive
commands” actually determining the mistress’s actions (47–48). Frontain concludes
that this “ritual enactment” in ElBed has no precedent in Ovid’s poem and observes
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that, although Donne intensifies the sexual aspects of the experience, he also makes
clear its spiritual “mysteries” (48).
Guinness (1986, 137–39) says that the reader must be familiar with Ovid’s Amores
1.5 before he can fully enjoy Donne’s “supple sense of variation” on his model (137),
noting that Donne is a “more brilliantly egocentric player” than the Roman poet, his
performance “correspondingly showier” and his “stroke-play” calling “more attention
to itself ” (138). Guinness points out that Ovid’s poem is the “prototype” of the “erotic
dream” or “fantasy of ‘perfect enjoyment’” (137), noting that Ovid’s interest in seduction, his comments on Corinna’s garment, and his recounting of her beauties became
the “prototype for a thousand Renaissance erotic voyages-of-discovery.” Unlike the
writer of pornography, Guinness maintains, “after the winning smash” the erotic poet
“feels no need to leap the net,” though both Ovid and Donne play “to win.” Guinness further notes that, unlike Corinna, Donne’s mistress “does not come prepared
for a friendly match and dressed accordingly” but that her clothes must be “talked off
her piece by piece” (138). Guinness says that for the Roman poet words are “merely
the prelude to action,” whereas in Donne words “are the action,” and concludes that
Donne “upstages” Ovid primarily “by outtalking” him (139).
Marotti (1986, 45, 53–54) regards ElBed as “clearly Ovidian” (45) but, like Guinness
(1986) and others, he maintains that the differences between Ovid’s Amores 1.5 and
Donne’s imitation are “revealing”: (1) unlike Ovid’s narrative account of a past event,
Donne’s poem takes place “in the dramatic present, highlighting the comedy of the
lover’s erotically importunate commands” and “allowing for the surprising information
that the speaker is naked to be postponed to the end of the poem”; (2) whereas Ovid’s
Corinna arrives “lightly dressed,” Donne’s mistress is “elaborately clothed in fashionable garb”; and whereas Ovid’s speaker needs only to take off the lady’s tunic, Donne’s
mistress must go through a number of steps to undress; (3) unlike Corinna, who engages
in “a (sexually exciting) struggle,” Donne’s mistress shows almost no reluctance to
disrobe—“except perhaps in her hesitation in removing her last bit of clothing”; (4)
whereas Ovid’s lover describes rather fully his mistress’s nakedness before he actually
starts making love to her, Donne’s amorist “plays with his mistress emotionally and
intellectually more than sexually,” and his “erotic gestures are accompanied by humorous commentary” in such a way that there is “little sensuousness or prurience in the
poem”; (5) unlike Ovid, who focuses entirely on the “erotic scene,” Donne “fills his
poem with metaphoric distractions, using the mistress’s clothes and body as occasions
for witty metaphors”; and (6) whereas Ovid’s poem is “an imaginatively excited (if
brief) poem about satisfying sexual experience,” Donne’s elegy is “a curiously antierotic
treatment of a sexual encounter” (54).
Revard (1986, 69–71, 76) maintains that, although Ovid is often considered the
major model for ElBed, there is actually little semblance between his persona in the
Amores and Ars Amatoria and the speaker of Donne’s elegy. She argues that ElBed follows
Amores 1.5 “more in general subject matter than in dramatic development, rhetorical
strategy, or character delineation” (69). Revard points out that in Ovid’s poem Corinna
comes to the speaker’s chamber, undresses, and the two make love, whereas Donne’s
elegy “dramatizes only the disrobing” and “describes it from the lover’s point of view
as he urges his mistress to remove one garment after another.”
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Donne’s elegy, she maintains, may owe more to the second of a pair of elegies by
Propertius on making love to Cynthia than to Ovid. Revard finds Donne’s attitudes
“more contradictory” and “more elusive” than Ovid’s and sees “the constant shifting
of stance and of attitude” in Donne’s poetry as very different from Ovid’s assumption
that “sexual gratification is an obvious and wholly satisfactory goal for the lover” (70).
In Revard’s view it is Propertius who presents a lover similar to Donne’s—“neurotic;
intelligent; witty but eccentric; learned but difficult in his learning; cold and sensual
at the same time; forever defining and redefining his feelings and those of his mistress”
(70–71)—and a perspective that, like Donne’s, is metaphysical as well as physical (76).
Easthope (1989b, 53–59) calls ElBed an expansion of lines 26–48 of Ovid’s Amores
1.5 but argues that it needs to be read in the context of other English Renaissance
imitations of Ovid, especially Nashe’s “The Choice of Valentines,” Thomas Jordan’s
“To Leda His Coy Bride,” Carew’s “A Rapture,” and even perhaps Herrick’s “The
Description of a Woman” (53). Easthope notes that Donne’s poem, unlike Ovid’s, is
“full of innuendo and irony” and that “the meaning is kept hidden and suggested,”
rather than made explicit. Easthope maintains that the body of Ovid’s lady is “referred
only to itself,” whereas Donne’s metaphors suggest “a spiritual dimension.” These
“metaphoric substitutions of the body with something else,” Easthope claims, associate
the woman’s body with “spiritual value” and sexual intercourse with “transcendent
significance.” Easthope further points out that the Latin poet desires sexual intercourse
as a “day-dream” (55), whereas Donne’s poem dramatizes its action “as something really
happening in the present.” Moreover, Ovid’s speaker overtly boasts and fantasizes for
a male audience, whereas Donne’s speaker is “himself advanced in the role of confessional interlocutor” seeking “to elicit truth from the woman.” A Foucauldian analysis
of the two poems, Easthope claims, shows the contrast between Ovid’s attention to the
body and pleasures “primarily in relation to themselves” and Donne’s mobilization of
“a proliferation and heterogeneous range of discourses for and around sexuality” (56).
Drawing from psychoanalysis, Easthope notes that Donne’s idea of sexual intercourse
differs markedly from that of Ovid “in the degree to which sexual drive has been
transformed or sublimated into narcissism” (57) and thus, his poem, often singled out
for its notorious sexuality, is really “an expression of self-love” (57–58). Unlike Ovid’s
speaker, who wants transient and bodily sexual pleasure, says Easthope, Donne’s wants
neither the woman nor sexual satisfaction but rather desires “a transcendent object,
one whose perfect atemporal image may return to him an equally perfect reflection of
himself ” (58). Easthope concludes that this transformation of scopophilia into narcissism is a kind of fantasy that has no precedent in Ovid but that “conforms entirely to
the ideological promotion of individual inwardness in the courtly love tradition” (59).
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