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The language of John Donne's poetry is provocatively unique. Its singularity tempts readers to imagine that our minds are in touch and tune with an extraordinary individual, whose speech-rhythms and tone of voice can be heard in a more than abstract way, as if they rose off the page as sound-waves, to resonate in the body's as well as the mind's ear. This impression is reinforced by the dramatic situations in which the language is rooted, generating the sense of an immediate moment in a continuum of time. The blank spaces on the page before and after the event of the poem seem like a cover of white silence over the activities and circumstances which initiated and will flow out of the speech-act. We people these silent spaces with inferences deduced from the poem and in our mind's eye glimpse the shadowy ‘she’ or ‘thou’ of the woman or man addressed as a fugitive presence just beyond the margin of the book:
I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I
Did, till we loved? …
(’ The good-morrow’, ll. 1–2)Stand still, and I will read to thee …
(‘A Lecture upon the Shadow’, l.1)Busie old foole, unruly Sunne …
(’ The Sunne Rising’, l.1)For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love …
(’ The Canonization,’ l.1)Colloquial spontaneity salted with an oath; the sudden imperative; an exclamation of comic impatience or spleen; all these give us a shining conviction of the intensely lived reality of a voice which seems to imply, at the moment of reading, less a persona than a person; less of a literary fabrication than an urgent speaking voice. ‘For Godsake hold your tongue’ drowns out the garrulity of an implied speaker, the drift of whose harangue we construct from the expostulations of the reply. The amused and marvelling reader tastes the pleasures proper to eavesdropping from the dramatic immediacy of the words-on-the-page. Each opening is a challenge to the imagination. It records the passionate assertiveness of an identity which demands to be heard now, imposing its claims, needs, arguments or boasts upon the reader's attention, with violent intensity or tender intimacy.
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