Jack the Rake's poems get me hotter than the kitchen oven, but then I turn to the end of the book and I'm broken, blown (?!) burned, and made new again by some serious holiness.

Let me start by saying I enjoyed John Donne’s Holy Sonnets as much as his sexy romps, and I hope to discuss both (as well as the less interesting verse letters and songs) with equal fervency and attention, but for now I want to talk just about the sexy romps.

Mostly, Donne is a hoot, a dirty dawg. In

It's crazy how many interpretations have been made of these lines. All put in vastly different contexts and so vastly different from each other that if you focus on one meaning, you completely zone out that the other exists too (and then your head will start hurting). The interpretations make it see

I read these poems in high school and had a really, really hard time with them. I honestly have never gone back to them but perhaps I should. I guess if I read Milton's Paradise Lost/Gained, I will also reread Donne who was roughly his contemporary. I do recall him being highly quotable though:

No ma

What is it that infects the iconoclasts? What is it unrelenting that they cannot be the same?

John Donne was a colossus, straddling the channel. To be born English and Catholic meant he never had a unified identity. Sometimes it troubled him, but to be no one man became his greatest gift. Most people

Had to read some of Donne's poems for the literature class I'm taking this semester, we also had to read Shakespeare and I think I enjoyed this more (yeah I know, shocking)

Here's a poem that I'll be reading to the first person that I fall in love with:

The Good-Morrow.

I wonder by my troth, what thou