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Reading Donne

Even at this age, both my parents can recite a few poems from memory. Things they had read in their childhood and youth. This is not a talent I inherited. While talking to them recently, I asked them how they did it and they could not explain - one theory was they had far less distraction in their day, so it was easier for things to stick and make a permanent impression. 

After that conversation, I recalled the arresting first line of John Donne's Canonization "For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love".  That is a line  I never forgot. Most of his poems felt out of reach when I first read them as a teen but this line definitely grabbed attention. I wanted understand the poem and what he meant to convey. Back then, the metaphysical aspects of Donne's work completely escaped me - the poet had exalted the feelings of infatuation I was very familiar with to something grand and sensual.

We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized for Love.

In The Rising Sun too, his directness was remarkable for the times. 

Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?

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