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A NEOPLATONIC UNDERSTANDING OF BODY, SOUL, AND LOVE IN JOHN DONNE’S POETRY | Qualitative Research Journal For Social Studies
Abstract
Abstract
This article examines how Platonic and Neoplatonic concepts of love figure John Donne’s love and divine poetry. Its essential claim is that Donne sees love as a gradual ascension. It commences in the logical love between two people, expands into spiritual bond, and ultimately embraces Divinity. On the Platonic side, love is based on mutual cooperation, reason, equality, emotional, sympathetic, and a common decent life. Whereas the Neoplatonic side accounts for how that love relation can ascent beyond physical experience toward divine truth, celestial perfection, and union with God.
The poems observed are “The Sunne Rising,” “The Good-Morrow,” “The Sweetest Love I Do Not Goe,” “A Valediction: Of Weeping,” and “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” together with the Holy Sonnets and devotional pieces such as “Death, Be Not Proud,” “A Hymn to Christ,” and “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness.” Examination of these poem shows that Donne never presents human and divine love as two unconnected practices. In each, the soul is searching for something permanent: salvation, accomplishment, and union with God. The article proves that Donne’s paradoxes, conceits, , and religious metaphors are the devices that connect the intellectual, human, emotional, and divine aspects of love into a single whole.
This article examines how Platonic and Neoplatonic concepts of love figure John Donne’s love and divine poetry. Its essential claim is that Donne sees love as a gradual ascension. It commences in the logical love between two people, expands into spiritual bond, and ultimately embraces Divinity. On the Platonic side, love is based on mutual cooperation, reason, equality, emotional, sympathetic, and a common decent life. Whereas the Neoplatonic side accounts for how that love relation can ascent beyond physical experience toward divine truth, celestial perfection, and union with God.
The poems observed are “The Sunne Rising,” “The Good-Morrow,” “The Sweetest Love I Do Not Goe,” “A Valediction: Of Weeping,” and “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” together with the Holy Sonnets and devotional pieces such as “Death, Be Not Proud,” “A Hymn to Christ,” and “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness.” Examination of these poem shows that Donne never presents human and divine love as two unconnected practices. In each, the soul is searching for something permanent: salvation, accomplishment, and union with God. The article proves that Donne’s paradoxes, conceits, , and religious metaphors are the devices that connect the intellectual, human, emotional, and divine aspects of love into a single whole.