Presenting Donne Undone: Donne’s exploration of the erotic and love relationships.

As a poet who could often write of the man-woman relationship with ‘misogynistic sarcasm’ and ‘Petrarchan idealism’, Donne often resorted to the metaphors of divine love to explain the human bond.

Donne is unusual, if not unique, for his context, as courtly love merely appears in poetry in the slightest. Courtly love seems to depend on the lover being unsuccessful , whereas Donne rejoices in success at every level. He challenges stale, conventional poses, including the literary posturing of courtly love poets by offering more realistic visions of the relationship between men and women and by applying ingenious scholastic subtletities to the analysis of the emotions of lovers.

This is seen in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” where the poem is a farewell, but on...