John Donne Drunk Analysis

John Donne crafts an anti-love poem of warning by expressing all the same immediate sentiments of love and longing while also subverting the original love poem genre through drunken expression. This is why no word better encapsulates the overall tone and intention of the poem than “drunk” in the first stanza: “The general balm th ' hydroptic earth hath drunk” (6). The word holds an immense amount of weight as it rests heavy on the tongue. This aforementioned heftiness correlates to the enormity of love’s impact on a person—the substantial weight of love that intoxicates a person. However, there is still a sinister vulgarity that encompasses the loss of control over basic mental facilities and, by extension, mind and self through the comparison to alcohol.
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The C lines are the warning or core of all notions of love Donne hopes to deconstruct. Furthermore, the rhymed stanza simultaneously creates a sense of drunken repetition. In the first stanza, there is an emphasis on the crushing weight of love and how “life is shrunk.” The poem successfully does this with the tongue heavy end rhyme words of sunk, drunk, and shrunk. It also leaves no room for interpretation by turning each line into a proclamation or, rather, a list of undisputable facts through the utilization of “is” and “hath”. “Is” puts you into poem’s mindset while “hath” also creates a sense of learned permanence—both words creating an abject presentation of realism in regards to the perpetuity of love. The creation of absolute statements speaks to the theme of drunkenness as alcohol often times creates an alternate vision of reality and blurred vision that feels true to the individual. These C breaks claim that love, regardless of awareness of the opposing opinion in the piece of those who “all these seem to laugh,” remains is futile due to the temporality and the drunken haze that continues to weave throughout the