The Songs and Sonets of John Donne

by Theodore Redpath

There is perhaps no superior edition of Donne's Songs and Sonets than Theodore Redpath's wonderful annotated volume. Out of print for a decade, the book is reprinted here in its second, revised edition. The book's twofold origin is evident on every page of Redpath's limpid it arises partly out of a life of scholarship and partly from Redpath's experiences and concerns as a teacher. The volume contains notes "on every point likely to cause difficulty to a reader of average intelligence."

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Renaissance, 17th Century, Fiction, British Literature

392 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1633

About the author

Robert Theodore Holmes Redpath

Reviews

[Alok Mishra · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can only admire when I read the poems by John Donne and then try reelin into the depths of his detailed imagination that was well beyond the comprehension of his time and still remains the same for the most. This edition of his Songs and Sonnets is wonderful and as rightly asserted in the introduction, an authentic one.

[Elizabeth Shafer · Rating 5 out of 5]

While these poems are noted for their sexuality, I've always felt they encompass both sex and love in their widest senses. I wrote part of my college thesis on "The Exstasie", and over the past fifty years I've loved and admired these poems.

[Karen Belmonte · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Los misterios de amor se escriben en el alma,
pero el cuerpo es el libro en que se leen". ❤️‍🩹

[Minnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"If ever any beauty I did see,/ Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee" one of my favorite quotes from "The good-morrow" No love exists without a prior history of other loves yet in these two lines he gives them value, merely as a precursor to this one great love. John Donne wrote love poetry with his intellect,with refinement and with an awareness that passion has a life of its own. His intellectual games, as present in "The Flea" are not really intended to be convincing but rather love at play. In another sonnet, "Woman's constancy" he writes a measured and well modulated poem filled with irony and sarcasm, showing that he is in control not only of his language but his emotions as well.
Any poetry lover could do well to read this excellent volume of great poetry as practiced by a true master

[Navy heart HamlinNBCT · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ahhh the art of argument is the food of intellect but metaphysical poetry is a delightfully evil ambition for those of us who are unconventional strategists. Is Diplomacies Timepiece , Donne's Song, relevant as a result of intellectual spark or emotional heart cord strings stroked by empathy? Ahhh sweetest love-Collectively perhaps is money, power or in its simplest reduction survival. SAHNBCT2018

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love anything by John Donne. I had a beautiful edition of his poetry that I kept locked in my classroom, and a student somehow stole it. I'll never be able to replace that exact edition, but I plan to find another edition of his poetry soon. He was a genius.

[PJ Jelének · Rating 5 out of 5]

When sex and love collide. One could say it's more like poetical pornography (mostly about cheating and how it is absolutely normal no matter what you've heard in a church) and yes it is and it's perfect.

[Carlo Mayer]

Finiti

[Tsvetelina Mareva · Rating 5 out of 5]

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[Junia Makeda · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved?”
The Good-Morrow was my first encounter with John Donne, and it changed everything. As a high school student, I was struck by its audacity: love is not a fleeting passion but a universe entire, where two souls awaken into a world that is both intimate and infinite. That poem planted the seed for my own writing journey, showing me how language could be both intellectually daring and emotionally raw.

Donne in Context
John Donne, often called the father of metaphysical poetry, broke away from the smooth conventions of Elizabethan verse. His Songs and Sonnets are bold explorations of love, mortality, and spirituality, fusing sacred and sensual imagery and creating paradoxes that still feel startlingly modern. His conceits—extended metaphors that stretch the imagination—invite readers to think and feel simultaneously.

Highlights from the Collection
The Good-Morrow: Love as cosmic expansion, intimacy as a complete world.

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning: Love transcending physical distance, captured in the famous compass conceit.

The Canonization: Love as sacred, defying societal judgment, elevating passion into spiritual devotion.

Each poem thrives on paradox: love as both fragile and eternal, joy entwined with suffering, intimacy bound to mortality. Donne’s language is dense, but his imagery lingers long after the page is closed.

Personal Resonance
What draws me in—and keeps me returning—is his ability to make abstract feelings visceral. His paradoxes mirror the themes I explore in my own writing: transformation, mortality, and emotional depth. Just as Donne’s lovers inhabit a universe of their own, my characters move through worlds shaped by atmosphere and myth, where intimacy and transcendence collide. Donne taught me that writing can be both intellectual and haunting, a lesson I carry into every page of my supernatural thrillers.

Why It Still Matters
Four centuries later, Songs and Sonnets remain vital because they refuse simplicity. Donne reminds us that love is not one thing but many—sacred and sensual, fragile and eternal, joyful and painful. For readers who crave layered, haunting writing, Donne offers a timeless reward.

For anyone who loves poetry that challenges and moves, Donne’s Songs and Sonnets are essential.

[T. Tokunaga · Rating 5 out of 5]

【The Songs and Sonnets of John Donne (ed. Theodore Redpath, 2nd ed., 1983) 】

--Good we must love, and must hate ill,
For ill is ill, and good good, still,
But there are things indifferent,
Which we may neither hate, nor love,
But one, and then another prove,
As we shall find our fancy bent. (P138, 'Community')

This would be a great example of how a Renaissance semi-rogue expressed love: a street smart one from the early 17th century.

--Poor victories; but if you dare be brave,
And pleasure in your conquest have,
First kill the enormous giant, your Disdain,
And like a Goth and Vandal rise,
Deface records, and histories
Of your own arts and triumphs over men,
And without such advantage kill me then. (P153, 'The Damp')

However, he couldn't always rely on simple dualist metaphysics of good and bad, so he also used historical / literary metaphors. But still, he was, and did fashioned himself as a street smart rogue, a handsome, young, lean version of Falstaff.

--Ah, what a trifle is a heart,
If once into love's hands it come!
All other griefs allow a part
To other griefs, and ask themselves but some; (P166, 'The Broken Heart')

--It as a given death's head keep,
Lover's mortality to preach,
Or to think this ragged bony name to be
My ruinous anatomy. (P186, 'A Valediction: of my name, in the window)

--The Phoenix riddle hath more wit
By us; we two being one, are it.
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit,
We die, and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love. (P238, 'The Canonization')

This would be the Jacobian version of gangster rapper's love confessions; which still hits home with self-fashioning of gangster, as well as being an unseasoned one with a higher education.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a review of Donne's poems, not the critical edition.

With the possible exceptions of Shakespeare in the sonnets and Adrienne Rich in 21 Love Poems, no poet surpasses Donne's engagement with the complications of erotic love in the Songs and Sonets. (Faced with the more than slightly problematic implications of his youthful lust-life, he would later turn to broader notions of love in the Holy Sonets.) For example, from"The Extasie":

Our hands were firmly cemented
With a fast balme, which thence did spring
Our eye-beams twisted, and did three
Out eyes, upon one double string;
So to'engraft our hands as yet
Was all the meanes to make us one.

And no poem hymns constancy in love as profoundly as "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" with its use of the compass (drawing variety) as constituting image.

But Donne was equally capable of playing the role of something disturbingly like a stalker and there's more than an undercurrent of misogyny in his constant harping on women's inconstancy. "The Flea" is as precise an image of a hustler willing to employ any rhetoric that might help get a woman into bed. "Love's Growth," "The Good-Morrow," "The Sunne Rising," "The Relique": somewhere in the Songs and Sonets you'll encounter pretty much every season of erotic emotion.

If you stick to the hits--and the anthologies for the most part have it right (cf. the poems noted above), Donne's simply breath-taking. Read as a whole, the balance of the book's a bit disturbing, suggesting that the poet who loved women so profoundly probably didn't like any particular woman very well.

[Delanie Dooms · Rating 5 out of 5]

Songs and Sonnets is a book of love poems posthumously collected by the poet John Donne.

Written over many years, the poems describe various elements of love, and are not self-cohesive. Within the same volume are poems describing the differences of gender be erased in a loving relationship and the proclamation that all women are untrue and lesser. Within the same volume is advocation for flings of love and a deeply jealous and possessive desire for control. In one poem, the author flatly states that his love poems--poems which the narrator wrote to entrap his feelings, to neutralize them--should not be put to music, for otherwise they would gain redoubled emotive power.

Donne's wording and imagery are sometime quite profound. In one poem, "The Broken Heart", he describes a heart that is as fragile as glass. When the lover he addresses breaks his heart, it crashes to pieces. It can never be put together again nor yet are the pieces gone. His heart is still capable of affection but never as vehement a love. Beautiful.

Donne's poetry is extremely good. His themes, if sometimes disagreeable, always desirous to be read.

[kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone is sexy but no one is horny.

“The Flea" and "The Ecstasy" are so sacred yet profane and prove that real eroticism isn’t neat or sanitized but rather raw and human. You think you’re a divine ape that scrubs itself clean and perfumes its own skin, trying so hard to hide the truth that you’re disgusting and and forgetting that that’s what makes you desirable. John Donne is truly an indisputable paragon of his genre. Reminds us to embrace the grotesque and carnal, rather than hiding from it. He fucks HARD and writes it loud. Doing so makes the grotesque divine and the divine delightfully dirty. I love you John Donne.

Home in three days, don’t bathe.

[Keerthi Vasishta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truly some of the best love poetry ever written. Complex, skilful and luscious in imagery and feeling. Donne truly stands the test of time. The only impatience in reading these comes from the sentimentality and intentional patheticness of the voice of the poems. That can be forgiven given the subject. Especially as he manages to squeeze some spiritual poems between the many letters to his lover.

[Anna Mowery · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Donne is such a freak. I love it.

[Mubtasim Fuad · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a father of Metaphorical conceit i expected more from him tbh! Whatever!

[Brandon DeJong · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Donne... where do I even begin? To be fair, John Donne was not as misogynistic as others who lived back then. He seems to be genuinely in love with the woman and seems to view her respectfully. However, that said, that doesn't mean that he wasn't problematic. He was a fantastic poet who had an affinity for words, but just like every poet at the time, he had his issues.