This is a poem about a dream which Donne had. He was greatly in love, but when he awoke he was still in great love. However, he realized that love is not without pain and fear. Nonetheless, those feelings will not break his spirit and he will continue to dream of how great love is and can be.
"The Dream" is a two stanza poem with twenty lines...More
John Donne (22 January 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet, scholar, soldier and secretary born into a Catholic family. He is considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His poetical works are noted for their metaphorical and sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, and satires. He is also known for his sermons.
Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of...More
John Donne (22 January 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet, scholar, soldier and secretary born into a Catholic family. He is considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His poetical works are noted for their metaphorical and sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, and satires. He is also known for his sermons.
Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society and he met that knowledge with sharp criticism. Another important theme in Donne's poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and about which he often theorised. He wrote secular poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly famous for his mastery of metaphysical conceits.
Book Summary
This is a poem about a dream which Donne had. He was greatly in love, but when he awoke he was still in great love. However, he realized that love is not without pain and fear. Nonetheless, those feelings will not break his spirit and he will continue to dream of how great love is and can be.
"The Dream" is a two stanza poem with twenty lines in the first and ten in the second. The rhyme structure is ABBACCDDFFGAAGHHIIAA. However, a couple of those are actually imperfect rhymes (suffice and histories, for example). ABBACCAADD is the rhyme structure for the second stanza (again, imperfect rhymes).
John Donne
