Love- Lost and Eternal: The Melancholy of John Donne

I am going to give you literature lessons here. Welcome to the 1st episode of Dying in Literature with Diya. To you who knows, there is no better way to start this series than with John Donne. The only poet who, in my extremely supreme opinion, is the most miserable of all poets who ever lived. 

John Donne didn’t just write about love—he let it consume him, tear him apart, and stitch him back together in ways that still feel too raw centuries later. His poetry does not merely explore love—it dissects it, holds it under a microscope, and allows it to bleed onto the page in all its torment and glory. His love is never simple. It is at once an exalted, divine force and a cruel, consuming fire. These poems aren’t about fleeting romance or easy devotion. They’re about love that fights the world, love that begs to stay, love that wrecks everything in its path and still isn’t enough. If you’ve ever loved someone so much it felt like your heart might break under the weight of it, Donne has already put it into words. For those who have ever loved with reckless devotion, his words are not merely metaphors; they are wounds reopened, desires that refuse to die, ghosts that refuse to leave.

The Canonization: Love That Defies the World

"For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love." It’s not a request—it’s a demand. The Canonization isn’t just a love poem; it’s a desperate stand against a world that refuses to understand. Donne writes as if love itself is a prayer, a faith stronger than reason. Here, love is a rebellion, a thing so pure that the world does not deserve to question it. Two souls fold into each other, their love immortalized beyond time and logic. And yet, what does it mean to love so fully when the world does not permit it? When hands that were meant to hold remain empty, and when devotion itself becomes an elegy? Love, here, is sacred, untouchable, something too big for the small-minded rules of society. And yet, Donne asks, what happens when the world doesn’t care? When love is real but still isn’t enough? There’s defiance in his voice, yes, but also quiet devastation. Because sometimes, no matter how hard you hold on, love slips through your fingers anyway.

The Flea: Love, Bargained and Lost

On the surface, The Flea is playful, even cheeky—a man trying to convince a woman that love (or at least desire) should follow logic. The flea has bitten them both, and their blood has already mingled, so what’s stopping them from being together? But underneath the wit is something deeper: an unwillingness to accept the inevitable. In his plea, there is a quiet panic, a refusal to accept separation. Love, he insists, should not be bound by arbitrary constraints. But love, no matter how passionately argued, is often at the mercy of forces greater than itself. The beloved resists, the world remains unmoved, and what should have been a simple union becomes an impossibility. A last-ditch argument against a world that says no. Because isn’t that what we do when we know we’re losing someone? We reason. We make our case. We try to believe that if we say the right thing, if we plead just enough, they’ll stay... or they'll let us stay.

Is that not the nature of love sometimes—to hold on with every ounce of wit and reason, to craft arguments as though words alone could change fate? But words do not always bend the world to our will. Sometimes, love dies despite every plea, every carefully constructed argument. And what remains is the echo of what was once so certain. 

Batter My Heart: Love That Wrecks and Consumes

If The Canonization is a fight and The Flea is a plea, Batter My Heart is surrender. Love, here, isn’t soft. It isn’t kind. It’s brutal. It tears down walls and leaves ruins in its wake. "Take me to you, imprison me, for I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free." Love in this poem isn’t something you hold—it’s something that holds you. That breaks you. It breaks, it demands, and it burns away everything that came before. The speaker begs not for peace, but for ruin, because ruin is the only proof that love ever existed at all.

Perhaps this is the cruellest part of love—the way it refuses to leave quietly. The way it lingers in the spaces between breaths, in the hollowness of rooms once filled with laughter. The way it does not fade like a story neatly concluded but instead implodes, leaving behind wreckage no one else can see, the wreckage of something that once felt like home.

The Ghost of Love

Donne’s poetry does not offer solutions, only truths. That love, when it is real, does not disappear. That absence does not mean an ending, only a haunting. That some loves are meant to be whispered in defiance, some are fought for until voices go hoarse, and some are surrendered to, even when they destroy us.

Perhaps that is the only comfort left—to know that love like this has been felt before, has been written about, has been immortalized in words that will outlive us all. And if Donne’s lovers could endure, even in the face of impossible odds, perhaps there is some solace in that. Perhaps love, even lost, is never truly gone. I'm not okay.