Poems of Love

This selection gathers Donne's secular love poems, chiefly the Songs and Sonnets and the Elegies written around the turn of the seventeenth century. Speakers argue a beloved into bed, claim that two lovers make a world, or compare parting to the motion of a compass. Typical pieces include The Flea, The Sun Rising, The Canonization, and A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning. Conceits drawn from alchemy, law, and cosmology sit beside cynical songs about inconstancy. The poems are lyrics and dramatic monologues, not a narrative sequence. The book is a gathering of erotic and marital argument, not the Holy Sonnets and not the sermons.

A photolithographic reprint of 1963. Full dark green cloth binding decorated in gold. Yellow-green endleaves. Pale green slipcase. Folio Press.