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Elegy V Summary & Analysis
by John Donne

Elegy V Summary & Analysis
by John Donne

  • Intro
  • Summary
  • Themes
  • Line-by-Line
    Explanations
  • Poetic
    Devices
  • Vocabulary &
    References
  • Form, Meter, &
    Rhyme Scheme
  • Speaker
  • Setting
  • Context
  • Resources
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The Full Text of “Elegy V: His Picture”

1Here take my picture; though I bid farewell

2Thine, in my heart, where my soul dwells, shall dwell.

3'Tis like me now, but I dead, 'twill be more

4When we are shadows both, than 'twas before.

5When weather-beaten I come back, my hand

6Perhaps with rude oars torn, or sun beams tann'd,

7My face and breast of haircloth, and my head

8With care's rash sudden storms being o'erspread,

9My body'a sack of bones, broken within,

10And powder's blue stains scatter'd on my skin;

11If rival fools tax thee to'have lov'd a man

12So foul and coarse as, oh, I may seem then,

13This shall say what I was, and thou shalt say,

14"Do his hurts reach me? doth my worth decay?

15Or do they reach his judging mind, that he

16Should now love less, what he did love to see?

17That which in him was fair and delicate,

18Was but the milk which in love's childish state

19Did nurse it; who now is grown strong enough

20To feed on that, which to disus'd tastes seems tough."

  • “Elegy V: His Picture” Introduction

    • In John Donne's "Elegy V: His Picture," a young lover about to depart on a long sea voyage offers his beloved a portrait of himself. He warns, though, that it's only going to look like him for a brief moment: people, unlike pictures, change. Though he knows he'll come back from his difficult journey physically transformed (and not for the better), his parting words to his lover suggest that this hardly matters. Only a "childish" new love feeds on flawless physical beauty, the speaker declares; mature love grows, ripens, and persists past such superficial concerns. Like most of Donne's poetry, "Elegy V" didn't appear in print until years after his death, when it was collected in his posthumous Poems (1633).

  • “Elegy V: His Picture” Summary

    • Here, take this portrait of me. Though I'm saying goodbye to you, your image will live with me in my heart, alongside my soul. This portrait I'm giving you looks a lot like me now, but when I'm dead, it will look even more like me: we'll both be ghostly shadows, then. When I return from my travels much the worse for the wear—with my hands ripped up by crude oars and browned by the sun; my beard and my chest hair all matted; my hair grey from sudden shocks and troubles; my body nothing more than a beat-up sack of bones; and my skin stained with bluish gunpowder—then, if my rivals for your affections tease you for loving a man as ugly and rough as (oh yes) I might look by then, you can show them this portrait so they can see what I used to look like. And you can tell them: "Does the wear on his body mean his feelings for me have worn away? Does my value fall in his eyes? Do his weatherbeaten looks reflect a weatherbeaten mind, a change that means that he doesn't love to look at me any more? No! The elegant, refined looks of his youth were just the milk that nursed our love when it was young. But now, we're both grown, and we're strong enough to eat heartier food—which is only hard to chew if you're not used to it."

  • “Elegy V: His Picture” Themes

    • Theme The Persistence of Love

      The Persistence of Love

      About to depart on a long sea voyage, the speaker of "Elegy V: His Picture" offers a portrait of himself to his beloved so that she can remember what he looks like—or rather, what he looked like. He knows very well that years at sea are going to transform him: he'll come back "tann'd," grizzled, and battered. But this outer transformation, he feels certain, will not create an inner one. He and his beloved will go on caring for each other even when they're so changed as to be practically unrecognizable. Deep love, in this poem, persists long after the charms of unmarred youthful beauty are gone.

      The portrait the speaker offers his beloved, he points out, only looks like him "now." It won't look so much like him again until he's dead, when it will resemble his beloved's memory of him in his dashing youth—a "shadow" of what he became as he aged. This complicated idea makes a simple point: living people change! Only remembered people and painted people go on looking just as they ever did.

      The speaker feels particularly conscious of that fact because he's about to go on a journey that will change him substantially. He's off to sea, on what sounds like a long and dangerous voyage. He expects that he'll come back a "weather-beaten" old "sack of bones," covered with "powder's blue stains"—the marks of gunpowder. The picture he's giving his beloved now might barely resemble him when he gets back (if he gets back).

      Still, he's not worried that his beloved will take one look at him and flee into the arms of some "rival fool[]"—some younger and more dashing man. That's because their love is deep enough, he says, to endure superficial change. In its early stages, love might feed on "fair and delicate" beauty, but that's just baby food, "milk" for newborn feelings to grow on. A mature love like his and his beloved's can "feed on that, which to disus'd tastes seems tough": in other words, it has teeth, and can easily digest what superficial "tastes" would reject. It can even appreciate a "foul and coarse" old face—one that's as rough to look at as "tough" meat is to chew. Only immature lovers demand perfect beauty of their beloveds; deep love persists through change, time, and loss.

      However, readers might note a hint of anxiety here. Not only does the speaker vividly imagine the scene in which "rival fools" rush in to steal his beloved's heart, he prepares a little speech for her with which she can turn those fools away—you know, just in case. This poem can thus be read as both a statement of faith in enduring love and a touching moment of worry at parting. Perhaps that worry speaks to the speaker's certainty that he'll go on feeling the same about his beloved, no matter what.

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Elegy V: His Picture”

    • Lines 1-4

      Here take my picture; though I bid farewell
      Thine, in my heart, where my soul dwells, shall dwell.
      'Tis like me now, but I dead, 'twill be more
      When we are shadows both, than 'twas before.

      “Elegy V: His Picture” begins with a tender goodbye. The poem’s speaker is about to “bid farewell” to his beloved and set out on a journey. But before he goes, he gives her his “picture,” a painted portrait for her to remember him by. She doesn’t have one to give him in return, but that doesn’t matter: he keeps an image of her with him in his heart, “where [his] soul dwell[s].”

      A painted “picture,” then, has something in common with the metaphorical picture of a person that lives in one’s memory. In a sense, the speaker and his beloved will both carry an image of each other with them. These literal and figurative pictures have something else in common, too: they’re quite separate from the person they represent.

      The speaker makes that point though another metaphor. His portrait is “like [him] now,” he says—that is, it’s a good likeness, it captures him accurately. But when he’s dead, his portrait will look even more like him. That’s because then both he and the portrait will be “shadows,” dim traces of the person he really was.

      A portrait and a memory, then, can be simultaneously a lot like a person and not very much like that person at all. That’s because living people—unlike painted people or remembered people—change. The portrait and the memory capture someone at one particular point in their lives. But a real, live person isn’t static that way. The speaker will one day look quite different from his portrait, and his beloved will one day look quite different from the speaker’s memory of her.

      No wonder change is on the speaker’s mind. As he’ll soon reveal, he’s off on a long journey, one that might change him substantially. But he’s prepared to promise his beloved that, even if he’ll no longer look just like his portrait when he comes home, one thing won’t change: his heart. She’ll go on “dwell[ing]” in there right next to his soul, no matter what.

      The speaker will make his witty, self-deprecating promise of romantic constancy over the course of twenty lines of iambic pentameter—that is, lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, like this:

      Here take | my pic- | ture; though | I bid | farewell

      He won’t stick to that rhythm strictly. Donne gives his speaker a light, natural-sounding voice through metrical variations, like those in line 2:

      Thine, in | my heart, | where my | soul dwells, | shall dwell.

      The first foot there is a trochee (the opposite foot to an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm), and it lays a special fervent stress on the word “thine,” emphasizing how dearly the speaker will treasure his beloved's image. Then, after two iambs, comes an intense spondee (a foot with two strong stresses, DUM-DUM) on "soul dwells." As a result, the line strings together three strong beats in a row ("my soul dwells")—an emphatic rhythm to match a passionate sentiment.

    • Lines 5-10

      When weather-beaten I come back, my hand
      Perhaps with rude oars torn, or sun beams tann'd,
      My face and breast of haircloth, and my head
      With care's rash sudden storms being o'erspread,
      My body'a sack of bones, broken within,
      And powder's blue stains scatter'd on my skin;

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    • Lines 11-16

      If rival fools tax thee to'have lov'd a man
      So foul and coarse as, oh, I may seem then,
      This shall say what I was, and thou shalt say,
      "Do his hurts reach me? doth my worth decay?
      Or do they reach his judging mind, that he
      Should now love less, what he did love to see?

    • Lines 17-20

      That which in him was fair and delicate,
      Was but the milk which in love's childish state
      Did nurse it; who now is grown strong enough
      To feed on that, which to disus'd tastes seems tough."

  • “Elegy V: His Picture” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • Metaphor

      The first of the poem's many metaphors links painted portraits to memories. In lines 1-2, the speaker offers his beloved a literal picture of himself, then tells her that her picture will go with him "in [his] heart." A portrait, in other words, is much like a memory, an image of a person captured at a particular moment in their life.

      In that way, says the speaker, a portrait is only a metaphorical "shadow[]" of its subject—it's more like the person's ghost than like the living person! As the speaker puts it, his portrait will be much more "like" him when he's dead than it is while he's alive (even though it's a pretty good likeness now).

      These intricate, interweaving metaphors all get at one big idea: people, unlike pictures and memories, are always changing. So when you try to hold onto a memory of someone far away, you can only cling to a "shadow," a hazy outline of what that person really is.

      It's remarkable, then, that the speaker trusts his and his beloved's feelings for each other to endure unchanged when he goes away to sea. He'll go through a lot of changes then, as he observes in a series of self-deprecating metaphors:

      • His "face and breast" will look as if they're made of "haircloth," a coarse, dense cloth made of horsehair. In other words, his beard and chest hair will grow long and matted.
      • His head will be "o'erspread" with "care's rash sudden storms": worries and fears will scatter grey hairs over him like rainclouds. (This metaphor also hints that literal storms could be one of the worries that turn you grey at sea.)
      • By the time he comes home, his body will be little more than a "sack of bones, broken within"—a metaphor that captures the gaunt, ungainly sagginess of a guy who's been fighting sea battles and living on ship's biscuit for too long.

      In short, the portrait he gives his beloved now will seem truly ghostly when he comes back: his body will be so transformed (and not for the better) that he'll look like a different person.

      But his physical decay, he insists, won't make his beloved's "worth"—her value—"decay" in his mind. A changed body won't change his heart. He hopes very much that she'll feel the same way about him, and trusts she will. Their mature love, he feels, has gotten far past some childish need for a pretty face.

      He makes that point in what might be the most striking, funny, complex metaphor in the poem. The "fair and delicate" beauty of youth, he says, is just baby food: the "milk" that "nurse[s]" love in its "childish state." In other words, people might first fall in love because they think their beloved is beautiful—but that's not what keeps them in love. As their love grows, it becomes "strong enough" for food that would seem "tough" to someone still drinking the milk of youthful beauty.

      Here, physical appearance is like food: beauty goes down as sweet as milk, while leathery old faces are tough meat. But even more meaningfully, new love is like a child. The kind of love that outlasts physical beauty, then, is adult in more than one sense. Stronger, wiser, and more capable than young love, mature love is an advance, a gain—not a sad falling-away from the joy of a new relationship.

    • Imagery

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    • Rhetorical Question

    • Repetition

    • Alliteration

  • “Elegy V: His Picture” Vocabulary

    Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

    • My picture
    • Thine, Thee, Thou
    • Dwells
    • 'Tis
    • 'Twill
    • 'Twas
    • Weather-beaten
    • Rude
    • Breast
    • Haircloth
    • With care's rash sudden storms being o'erspread
    • Body'a
    • Powder's blue stains
    • Rival fools
    • Tax
    • To'have
    • Coarse
    • Shalt
    • Doth
    • Disus'd
    My picture

    • A painted portrait of the speaker, in other words.

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Elegy V: His Picture”

    • Form

      "Elegy V: His Picture" sounds less like an elegy as we'd define it now—a poem of mourning—than a love poem. But the term "elegy" used to be broader, referring to any poem of serious reflection. This particular elegy comes from a sequence that Donne likely wrote as a young man: erotic, witty, and intricate, these poems ponder sex, love, and parting.

      There's a sprinkling of mortality here too, though. Over the course of these 20 lines, the speaker observes that the portrait he's giving his beloved will look a lot more like him when he's dead (because then his memory and the portrait will both be "shadows" of what he really was). Yet the rest of the poem is a monument not to death, but to loyal affection. The speaker's insistence that he and his beloved will go on caring for each other even when they're much the worse for wear is at once comic and tender.

      Though the speaker makes plenty of jokes at his own expense across the poem's 10 snappy rhymed couplets (for instance, imagining his beard and chest hair matted into "haircloth" and his body little more than a "sack of bones" after hard years at sea), he also has something serious to say here. To him, the "fair and delicate" beauty of youth is only a kind of baby food, a "milk" that nurses young loves until they're strong enough to endure. Deep love of the kind he and his beloved share is more than strong enough to endure a grizzled head and a weathered face.

    • Meter

      "Elegy V" is written in iambic pentameter. That means that each of its lines uses five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds in line 7, for example:

      My face | and breast | of hair- | cloth, and | my head

      As in a lot of iambic verse, this pattern doesn't stay totally constant across the poem; Donne varies his rhythms for effect. For just one example, listen to the jagged sounds of line 9:

      My bo- | dy'a sack | of bones, | broken | within,

      The word "broken" is a trochee—the opposite foot to an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm. Fittingly enough, it breaks the iambic flow here, reinforcing the speaker's vision of his future self as a bag of broken old bones.

      Note, as well, the contraction of the words "body a" into "body'a," which allows Donne to condense three syllables into two. This colloquial-sounding, naturalistic effect makes it feel as if the speaker is teasing a little here: he's speaking informally, joking at his own expense. (He does the same thing in line 11, where he contracts "to have" into "to'have," pronounced "toove.")

    • Rhyme Scheme

      "Elegy V" is written in rhyming couplets. That means its rhyme scheme runs AABBCC, and so on. This jaunty pattern feels fitting for a poem that's as witty as it is tender: each pair of rhyming lines works rather like the setup and punchline to a joke.

      Almost all of these rhymes are perfect. There is, however, a single slant rhyme in lines 11-12:

      If rival fools tax thee to'have lov'd a man
      So foul and coarse as, oh, I may seem then,

      That lone off-kilter rhyme arrives in a moment of unease. As the speaker imagines the future, he pictures a time when his love rivals will point out to his beloved that he's looking pretty rough after years at sea. The variation in the rhyme, fittingly enough, marks a worry about inconstancy: the thought that other people might try to get between the speaker and his beloved, and just might succeed. The speaker will look pretty rough, after all.

      But the rhymes get right back on course in the next couplet, as the speaker reassures himself that his beloved will know exactly what to say to such callow remarks. (Indeed, he spends the rest of the poem instructing her in advance on how best to answer those "rival fools.")

  • “Elegy V: His Picture” Speaker

    • The poem's speaker is both a passionate romantic and a worried man. About to go away to sea, he offers his beloved a portrait to remember him by—but he's quick to note that it won't look like him for long. His voyage will change him; he might be "fair and delicate" now, a lovely young man, but he'll return a grizzled old "sack of bones."

      This change, he feels sure, will not alter his feelings for his beloved, nor hers for him. A love as deep-rooted as theirs, he's certain, has grown past the need for youthful beauty. Good looks are just baby food, "milk" for a "childish" love to nurse on until it can handle tougher cuts of romantic meat.

      He sounds constant, mature, and confident—but is he, totally? He declares his belief in persistent love in the context of an anxiety: he worries that "rival fools" will dash in to steal his lover's heart, and that they'll have a lot to say about how "weather-beaten" his voyage will have left him. He even prepares a dismissive speech for his lover to use when those rivals try to get at her, just in case. All this preparation might hint at a rather touching worry. The speaker is sure that his feelings won't change; he just hopes that his beloved's won't, either.

      Note that we're calling the speaker's beloved "she" here, even though she's not gendered in the poem. We've made that choice for literary and biographical reasons. In the linked sequence of elegies from which this poem comes, the speaker is almost always explicitly addressing a woman. What's more, this poem draws on Donne's own seafaring adventures. It's reasonable to interpret this speaker as a version of Donne himself—a notorious ladies' man.

  • “Elegy V: His Picture” Setting

    • While there's no specific setting in this poem, readers will likely imagine that it takes place in Donne's own world: England around the turn of the 17th century, an era when one might have one's portrait painted before a journey, set off to sea, and return years later, marked with the "blue stains" of gunpowder.

      The speaker's allusions to a tough life of seafaring might even suggest episodes from Donne's own biography. He twice went to sea as a privateer (in essence, a glorified pirate), once under the command of the Earl of Essex and once under Sir Walter Raleigh. He would have had a detailed idea of what life at sea can do to a man's face—and personal experience of bidding a beloved farewell before heading out for a long voyage.

  • Literary and Historical Context of “Elegy V: His Picture”

      Literary Context

      John Donne (1572-1631) is remembered as one of the foremost of the "metaphysical poets"—though he never called himself one. The later writer Samuel Johnson coined the term, using it to describe a set of 17th-century English poets who wrote witty, passionate, intricate, cerebral verse about love and God. (George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Thomas Traherne were some others.)

      Donne was the quintessential metaphysical poet: a master of elaborate conceits and complex sentences, and a great writer of love poems that mingle images of holiness with filthy puns. But during his lifetime, he was mostly a poet in private. In public life, he was an important clergyman, rising to become Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London.

      Donne's mixture of wit, passion, and mysticism fell out of literary favor after his 17th-century heyday. For instance, when Johnson (a leading figure of the 18th-century Enlightenment) coined the term "metaphysical poet," he did not mean it as a compliment; Johnson saw Donne and his contemporaries as obscure and irrational. But 19th-century Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge were stirred by Donne's mixture of philosophy and emotion, and their enthusiasm slowly resurrected Donne's reputation. Donne is now remembered as one of the most powerful and influential of poets, and he's inspired later writers from T. S. Eliot to A. S. Byatt.

      Like the vast majority of Donne's poetry, "Elegy V" didn't appear in print until several years after his death; his collection Poems was posthumously published in 1633. It's hard to say exactly when he wrote this poem, but critics suspect it might have been during his own seafaring years. As a young man, Donne sailed under the command of the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh, adding "genteel piracy" to his long, wild, romantic resume.

      Historical Context

      In his youth, John Donne was a notorious ladies' man with plenty of experience both breaking hearts and having his heart broken. His sometimes foolhardy decision-making around women came to a head in an oddly touching way: when he fell deeply in love with Anne More, an important official's daughter, he eloped with her without getting her family's permission. This romantic leap of faith backfired on him when his wife's angry father had him thrown in prison.

      While Donne was eventually reconciled with his father-in-law, this was a rocky beginning to a marriage that would see many difficulties. The Donnes lived in relative poverty for most of their relationship. They had many children, and both of them suffered from various illnesses. In order to stay financially afloat, Donne was often forced to be literally afloat: he sailed on endless business trips all over Europe, and was often away from home for long stretches of time. While he probably wrote this poem before he knew Anne More, it captures the kind of sad parting that the two would endure over and over again; Donne would write many poems on the same theme.

      It was while Donne was away on one of these many business trips that tragedy struck: Anne Donne died giving birth to a stillborn child in 1617. The heartbroken Donne turned to his religious faith for consolation—and to support his surviving children. Under the patronage of King James I, he became a prominent and successful Anglican clergyman, the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. In that capacity, he wrote devotional verse every bit as passionate as his love poetry.

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