Death
It's almost always a safe bet that a Donne poem will be about a woman, God, or death—or some combination. So, even though this is a love poem, it's not too surprising that we start off with a met...
Natural Phenomena
Donne contrasts earthly natural disasters with the bigger, grander motions of the heavenly bodies (planets, stars, moons). He lived in an age of discovery, an age in which people were thinking and...
Gold
Really, this is about the leftover obsession from medieval days with alchemy, or the attempt to transform other metals into gold. Scientists (or pseudo-scientists) made some of the most important c...
Compass
No, not the compass you'd want if you were lost in the woods. This is more like the compass for finding your way out of a geometry book. A mathematical compass (like this one) is used to draw perfe...