THE ECSTASY

JOHN DONNE
The poem, “The Extasie” deals with John Donne’s metaphysic of love. It
presents the communion of two souls of a loving couple on a grassy turf beside a
river, untouched by carnal passions. The physical aspect of love-making finds no
mention here. The lovers are engrossed in the thought of an abiding union and are
animated by the impulse to coalesce and fuse into one:

So to engraft our hands, as yet

Was all our meanes to make us one?

The poem presents the lovers in a trans-like state when both of them appear
to be verging on being oblivious of their fleshly life.

John Donne’s typical method is to present an idea in terms of concrete

images. The images become the emotional equivalent of his thought. Let us see
how he presents the unforgettable idea of a beatific experience through the image
of ‘extasie’ reinforced by a wealth of images culled from different spheres of live.

There is a pun on the title word, ‘extasie’. In the modern sense it refers to
the trans-like state the lovers have entered into. But the original Greek meaning
takes us to the heart of the poem. The Greek word, ‘ekstasis’ means ‘going forth’.
The souls go out of their respective bodies. They have a dialogue ruminating over
their communion, and surprisingly enough, there is a bystander who is within a
convenient distance from there. This third person is no impediment in their love-
making on the spiritual plane. He appears to be a device invented by the poet,
adding substance to their highfalutin experience, either by testifying to the veracity
of the experience of by also coming under the spell of their ecstatic vision. Here
the poet’s mood is serene, probably in keeping with the sublimity of the
experience. The poet presents a romantic background, bringing in the violet, a
conventional image of love, reclining on the pregnant bank, but the pictorial
description of the visual beauty simply enhances the intensity of their love without
any romantic gloss, and it is much in keeping with the mood of the poet. The
expression, ‘balm’ also rightly finds company in the sweet-smelling violet evoking
the right ambience. This image of the violet which has a visual beauty recurs later
in the poem with a changed connotation without any romantic association. Here
we have the botanical expression, ‘grafting’, as a variation in a different way on
the image, ‘to engraft our hands’, used at the outset of the poem. The two images:
the images of engrafting hands and transplanting of a violet-work in conjunction
with each other. The former implies the removal of their separateness and their
emerging into a single identity and the latter speaks of the strengthening and
enriching of the weaker breed of the violet in a richer soil. It is symbolic of the
creation of a new soil that is bereft of all weaknesses:

A single violet transplant,

The strength, the colour, and the size,

(All which before was poore, an scant,)

Redoubles still, and multiplies.

The poet does a remarkable feat of imagination by finding the image of a

jeweler threading pearls on a string. The lovers are lost in gazing at each other in
such a way that there is, perhaps, the optical illusion of their eyes being on a
double string. It appears to be hyperbole that the eyeballs are on the string, and the
only justification for this image is that it is suggestive of their becoming one. The
lovers find themselves on the same emotional wave-length, and from this rapport
they establish it appears that all hostilities cease, and the truce thus effected rests
on a lasting foundation. The pictures of each other reflected in their eyes suggest
an addition of pictures. The word ‘propagation’ apparently suggests an increase in
spiritual grandeur.
 The fourth stanza presents the core of the experience of oneness of the
lovers. The soul here takes the lead and the body lies still and inert. The soul is
engaged in a mission and accomplishes the task with a remarkable serenity and
aplomb. The image comes to us in an expanded form. It is the image of two equal
Armies, arrayed against each other and awaiting the announcement of victory in
the battlefield by fate. The expression, ‘equal Armies’ shows the attitude of the
poet towards lovers in the sense that in the Petrarchan vein there is one-sided love
making, that is, the lover adores the beloved as if the latter were a deity and the
former a vassal, but here both are on par with each other without having an edge
over the other. The body becomes quiescent and the soul is resplended with
spiritual ecstasy. In stanza V we have another elaborate simile that describes the
physical condition of the lovers. They are compared to statues in a tomb from
where the soul has gone out.

The image of ‘transplant’ is picked up in stanza XI in a different manner.

The concept here is of ‘interinanimation’, and this is on physiological as well as
metaphysical plane. It is the rejuvenation of the phoenix-like soul ravaged by
loneliness. With this reshaping of the soul in a new mould the lovers have the
feeling that they are beyond the inexorable law of change, decay and death. Time
has not effect on them, because they have reached the state of timelessness. They
have passed beyond the confines of the temporal world and enjoy a state of bliss,
and the poet rightly says, “…..whom no change can invade”.

But later in the poem there is a transition from the world of timelessness to
the mortal coil of life. The poet talks about the descent of the soul into the body.
Many critics take it to be a denouncement that after celebrating the ecstatic union
on the spiritual plane the poet talks about their coming back to the body. It is no
anti-climax because in the Donne universe there is no segregation of soul and body
in hermetically sealed boxes. In the poem, “Aire and Angel” the poet deals with an
identical theme. Angles leave their imprint on the air and the air passes on the
celestial span into the body, and this interanimation is a subtle process which
invigorates and enriches the life. Without the incarnation of the beatific vision in
the body it remains shadowy, chimerical and ethereal, Stanza XVI is pregnant with
deep physiological implication:

As our blood labours to beget

Spirits, as like souls as it can

Because such fingers need to knit

The subtile knot, which makes us man.

The blood begets spirit, the spirit goes into the brain, the brain gives
direction to the muscle and this gives rise to an interrelated being. This
interrelationship brings the image of ‘subtitle knot’. This complex character of
man envisages a blend of soul and body: “the union of soul and body, through the
working of the spirits ‘makes us man’.” (Helen Gardner).
 THE CANONIZATION
The composition of Donne’s poem, The Canonization is after his marriage
with Anne More. It is because he in this poem at the very outset speaks of his
ruined fortune and he ascribes the blight upon his fortune to his marriage. Though
he feels quite undone, he does not know any abatement in the intensity of his love
for Anne. He is so lost in his amours that he does not care a hang for the carping
tongue of others and the opening line appears to be bursting with loving impulses
laced with impatience and defiance:

“For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love”. The ruling passion of his life is
love and he has no regard for the riches of the world. He does not envy those who
amass fortune by currying favour with the royalty. In a veiled tone of disdain the
speaks of their craving for earthly gains and forbids them to interfere with his love-
making.

With wealth your state, your minde with Arts improve,

Take you a course, get you a place,

Observe his honour, or his grace,

Or the Kings reall or his stamped face

Donne says that his world has contracted to his companionship with his
wife, and he looks upon her as his anchorage. This experience of oneness in love
is a recurrent motif in his love poems. In The Anniversaries he makes an emphatic
declaration of this primacy of love that admits of nothing else in life. “Here upon
earth, we are Kings…” It is also akin to the idea of self-sufficiency in love that
finds an expression in “The Sunne Rising: She’ is all States, and all Princes, I”.
This theme of the supremacy of mutual love is not in the vein of Petrarch who, in
terms of extravagant hyperboles, writes complimentary verses of adoration. In the
third stanza the poet talks about the nature of love in terms of a host of images.
First he presents the traditional image of the fly and the taper with a slight
variation. Here the lover and the beloved are flies and tapers.

Call her one, mee another flye,

We’ are tapers too, and at our own cost die

Love is no mere transient passion. It is not the passion which slackens in the
least and has the readiness to go to the extreme even to embrace death for its
consummation.

In support of a further explication of his love experience, the poet reinforces

three more images. “The Eagle”, “The Dove” and “The Phoenix”. In the medieval
fable the old eagle flies up to the sun and is scorched and then plunges into a well
to renew it youthful energy. This image explains the central idea of love that
hopes to renew itself through dying. The image of a dove has a religious overtone
and sheds ample light on the loftiness of love the poet and his wife have for each
other. In The New Testament there is an account of the Holy Ghost descending
upon Christ at the time of his baptismal ceremony, like a dove. T.S. Eliot uses this
image of the dove upon Christ in Four Quartets as a symbol of the purifying fire of
God’s love and looks upon it as “The only hope, or else despair”. Donne correlates
this meaning of dove with his love and the love they exhibit has a purgatorial
value. The phoenix image also explains the basic idea of love that discovers a
sense of fulfillment in undergoing pain. The phoenix renews her youth only when
she is burnt, burnt alive. It is also regarded as “one neutrall thing (sex)”. The poet
uses the images of ‘eagle’ and “phoenix” because both are images of renewal or
resurrection. In his poem, phoenix, D.H. Lawrence says, “…she is renewing her
youth like the eagle”. The idea of death is ambient: partly negative and partly
positive, and the poet plays on the duality of implications:

We dye and rise the same and prove

Mysterious by this love.

 The expression, ‘we dye and rise the same’ is paradoxical in the sense that
the poet feels crucified to the world, but he gains by cleansing himself of the dross.
The poet feels the consecration of love and becomes a saint or martyr of love:

And by these hymnes, all shall approve

Us canonized for love.

A.J. Smith rightly avers,

…at one level there is a consummation of ‘religio amoris’

On which the poem is built.

The poet does not have any regret that the lovers do not have any glamorous
trappings of a hero recorded in a legend or a chronicle. He says that their
canonization for love is without any fanfare, without any pretensions. It comes to
them through their steadfastness and constancy in love in the face of all adversities.
The experience has nothing transcendental about it. It is rooted in the stark reality
of life. It becomes an archetypal pattern of love worthy of emulation, if others
choose so:

And thus invoke us; you whom reverend love

Made one another’s hermitage

This apotheosis of love intercedes with the god of love himself on behalf of
the lovers still struggling for the heroic resolution to make their love complete.
 It is difficult to isolate this mystique of love from the interaction of the
speech rhythm with the continuous logical structure of the poem. It is a practice
with the poet to bring in a bystander or an overhearer in a poem to give it a
dramatic cast. The poet issues a stream of shifting injunctions, such as ‘take you a
course’, ‘get you a place’ and ‘observe his honour, or his grace’. These injunctions
impart a vibrant dramatic life to the poem. A.J. Smith rightly points out that the
poem has a dramatic syntax. This dramatic syntax inheres in the modulations of
grammatical moods, now of command, now of defiance, now of pathos and now of
elation. The other person is perhaps a wiseacre. Each address to the person fixes
its own degree of tension by developing an interaction of opposing views resulting
into a richer harmony at the end. Overruling the skepticism of the other person, the
poet develops a magnificent vision that incorporates the whole world consisting of
countries, town and courts into its capacious domain. The poet, in terms of the
image of the ‘glasses’ of the eyes says that the whole world shrinks and becomes
reflected in the eyes of the beloved.