Closely aligned to the theme of romantic love is that of desire, and across the centuries poets have written about the ...

Seamus Heaney’s love-poem to marriage, The Skunk, combines exile and erotica, moving from an American wilderness image ...

Mark but this flea, and mark in this, How little that which thou deny'st me is; It sucked me first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea, our two bloods mingled be; Thou knowest that this cannot ...

Finally a biography of John Donne that captures his eccentricities ... that she offers corrections to the hackneyed interpretations of the split between Donne’s love poetry and his spiritual poetry as ...

Both poets explore love as a transformative and omnipotent force, delving into its complexities and transcendence. Donne ...

As virtuous men pass mildly away, And whisper to their souls, to go, Whilst some of their sad friends do say, The breath goes now, and some say, no: So let us melt, and make no noise, No tear ...

Did, till we loved? were we not weaned till then? But sucked on country pleasures, childishly? Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den? 'Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.

John Donne, poet and priest, so wrote in one of his “devotions” in 1623 (which were published in January 1624 as Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions). I may be mistaken about the date ...

A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead. Yet this enjoys before it woo, And pampered, swells with one blood made of two, And this, alas, is more than we would do. Oh stay, three lives in one flea ...