1/15/16
Poet John Donne’s Hard Sell of Sex

Update the language, and John Donne’s “To His Mistress Going to Bed” could be an R&B sex song on the radio today. All about trying to get his lady buck nekkid, this late 16th/early 17th-century British elegy employs hilarious metaphors and euphemisms for body parts and bodily functions (e.g. his soldier is tired of standing, aw yeah). Elegy XIX can be interpreted many different ways: one reading gives you a lecherous, older man using his patriarchal power to pressure a young virgin to have sex with him; another gives you a pathetic guy so desperate to have sex he gets totally naked while she’s still fully dressed; yet another gives you a narrator who’s an Elizabethan hippy trying to even the playing field gender-wise and extolling the lofty idea that erotic love and spiritual love are two sides of the same coin. Whatever your take, you can’t deny that it’s one of the best poems ever written about the power of desire. 

Elegy XIX: To His Mistress Going to Bed
by John Donne

johndonnepoetry150Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,
Is tir’d with standing though he never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven’s Zone glistering,
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,
That th’eyes of busy fools may be stopped there.
Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime,
Tells me from you, that now it is bed time.
Off with that happy busk, which I envy,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals,
As when from flowery meads th’hill’s shadow steals.
Off with that wiry Coronet and shew
The hairy Diadem which on you doth grow:
Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread
In this love’s hallow’d temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes, heaven’s Angels used to be
Received by men; Thou Angel bringst with thee
A heaven like Mahomet’s Paradise; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know,
By this these Angels from an evil sprite,
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
    Licence my roving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d,
My Mine of precious stones, My Empirie,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.
    Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be,
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are like Atlanta’s balls, cast in men’s views,
That when a fool’s eye lighteth on a Gem,
His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them.
Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings made
For lay-men, are all women thus array’d;
Themselves are mystic books, which only we
(Whom their imputed grace will dignify)
Must see reveal’d. Then since that I may know;
As liberally, as to a Midwife, shew
Thy self: cast all, yea, this white linen hence,
There is no penance due to innocence.
    To teach thee, I am naked first; why then
What needst thou have more covering than a man.

Want more hard sells from the 17th C?
A Poem About Love Being Nothing Without Sex



2 Comments

  1. Pretty crass advertising, Mr. Russell. The only ‘spirit’ you share with Donne, I’m afraid, is an interest in sex; your free verse certainly shares nothing poetic with such classic poetry.

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