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The Full Text of “The Ecstasy”
1Where, like a pillow on a bed
2 A pregnant bank swell'd up, to rest
3The violet's reclining head,
4 Sat we two, one another's best.
5Our hands were firmly cemented
6 With a fast balm, which thence did spring;
7Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
8 Our eyes upon one double string;
9So to'intergraft our hands, as yet
10 Was all the means to make us one,
11And pictures in our eyes to get
12 Was all our propagation.
13As, 'twixt two equal armies, Fate
14 Suspends uncertain victory,
15Our souls (which to advance their state
16 Were gone out) hung 'twixt her, and me.
17And whilst our souls negotiate there,
18 We like sepulchral statues lay;
19All day, the same our postures were,
20 And we said nothing, all the day.
21If any, so by love refin'd
22 That he soul's language understood,
23And by good love were grown all mind,
24 Within convenient distance stood,
25He (though he knew not which soul spake,
26 Because both meant, both spake the same)
27Might thence a new concoction take,
28 And part far purer than he came.
29"This ecstasy doth unperplex,"
30 We said, "and tell us what we love;
31We see by this it was not sex,
32 We see we saw not what did move:
33"But as all several souls contain
34 Mixture of things, they know not what,
35Love these mix'd souls doth mix again
36 And makes both one, each this and that.
37"A single violet transplant,—
38 The strength, the colour, and the size,
39All which before was poor, and scant,
40 Redoubles still, and multiplies.
41"When love, with one another so
42 Interinanimates two souls,
43That abler soul, which thence doth flow,
44 Defects of loneliness controls.
45"We then, who are this new soul, know
46 Of what we are compos'd and made,
47For th' atomies of which we grow
48 Are souls, whom no change can invade.
49"But oh alas, so long, so far,
50 Our bodies why do we forbear?
51They'are ours, though they'are not we; we are
52 The intelligences, they the spheres.
53"We owe them thanks, because they thus
54 Did us, to us, at first convey,
55Yielded their forces, sense, to us,
56 Nor are dross to us, but allay.
57"On man heaven's influence works not so,
58 But that it first imprints the air;
59So soul into the soul may flow,
60 Though it to body first repair.
61"As our blood labours to beget
62 Spirits, as like souls as it can,
63Because such fingers need, to knit
64 That subtle knot, which makes us man:
65"So must pure lovers' souls descend
66 T' affections, and to faculties,
67Which sense may reach and apprehend,
68 Else a great Prince in prison lies.
69"To'our bodies turn we then, that so
70 Weak men on love reveal'd may look;
71Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
72 But yet the body is his book:
73"And if some lover, such as we,
74 Have heard this Dialogue of One,
75Let him still mark us, he shall see
76 Small change, when we'are to bodies gone."
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“The Ecstasy” Introduction
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In "The Ecstasy," the great Metaphysical poet John Donne (1572–1631) explores the transcendent power of love and the relationship between the body and the soul. The poem invites readers to listen in as a pair of lovers lie side by side on a flowery bank, holding hands and gazing into each other's eyes. Their overwhelming love for each other, the lovers explain, has made their two separate souls fuse into one new and better creature. For much of that poem, this new shared soul speaks in a paradoxical "Dialogue of One," describing how love has brought them together. Along the way, they make an impassioned case for the importance and value of the human body: for without the body, they observe, souls could never meet, and love could never come into the world. This poem becomes a mystical celebration of spiritual and physical love—and makes a witty case that the boundaries between the two are somewhere between blurry and nonexistent. Like the vast majority of Donne's verse, "The Ecstasy" wasn't published until after the poet's death. It first appeared in the posthumous collection Poems (1633).
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“The Ecstasy” Summary
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At a spot beside a river where a fertile hill of grass rose up like a pillow for a violet to rest its head on, my beloved and I (each other's dearest) sat together.
Our hands were glued together with the sweat that sprung from our palms. Our gazes twisted around each other to make one thread, stringing our eyes together like beads.
So far, the sweaty fusion of our hands was as close as we'd come to conjoining ourselves physically—and the only children we'd conceived were our tiny little reflections in each other's eyes.
Just as Fate holds up the prize of victory between two equally matched armies, waiting to see who wins, our souls (which had left our bodies in order to improve their circumstances) were suspended between us.
While our souls engaged with each other in this way, we lay there like stone statues on tombs. We didn't move a muscle all day, and we didn't say a word.
If anyone who has been purified and exalted by love—so that he has learned the language of the soul and has gained a perfect intellectual understanding of love—happened to be nearby to witness us;
If such a person were nearby (even if he didn't know which of our souls was speaking, because both of our souls had the same intentions and the same words), he would have gained a new and better understanding of love from our fused souls, and left even purer than he was when he arrived.
Here's what our souls would say to him: "Our ecstasy enlightens us and teaches us what it is that we love in each other. Through our fusion, we understand that our love didn't merely come from sexual passion; we understand that we didn't understand what actually moved us to love each other.
"We came to understand this: every individual soul contains a mysterious mixture of components. Love mixes up two already-mixed souls again, creating a new whole out of these two separate things.
"This works just like transplanting a single violet. Even if the violet was weak, pale, and small at first, once it's been transplanted, it doubles in strength and brightness and size, and grows more flowers.
"When love intertwines two souls and brings them to life as one new soul, the new stronger soul has none of the weaknesses that lone souls have.
"The two of us who go to make up this one new soul thus understand what we're made of. The separate particles of our souls, woven together into this new soul, are now beyond all change.
"But oh, why do we leave our bodies aside for so long? They're ours, though they're not us; if we're the angels, they're the celestial spheres through which the angels steer the planets.
"We owe a lot to our bodies, because they first revealed us to each other. Our bodies gave us power and sensation; they're not useless waste, they're part of a strong alloy.
"The powers of the planets and stars can't work on humanity unless they leave their mark on the air first. In just that way, two souls can only meet and become one if they first pass through the body.
"Just as our blood works to produce spiritual fluids that allow our bodies to match and enact our souls' wishes (because we need these kinds of careful metaphorical fingers to tie the delicate knot that links body and soul, and thus makes us human):
"In just that way, lovers' souls must use lowly bodily things like emotions and action—things that the senses can perceive and understand—or else Love, a powerful prince, languishes in prison.
"And so we must return to our bodies, so that weak, limited humanity can see love embodied in the world. The mysteries of love develop in the soul—but it's through the body that we can read them.
"And if some lover like us is overhearing this conversation of our single fused soul, he should keep watching us: he'll see that everything we've said remains just as true when we return to our bodies."
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“The Ecstasy” Themes
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The Unifying Power of Love
"The Ecstasy" describes a pair of lovers sharing a moment of transcendent bliss. As they lie together on a flowery bank, holding hands and gazing into each other's eyes, their souls leave their bodies, wind around each other, and fuse into one new soul. Their "ecstasy" (a word that can mean both "a transcendent, out-of-body spiritual experience" and "intense pleasure") demonstrates love's special power: to improve by fusing and combining. By uniting two different people, this poem suggests, love creates a new and better whole.
As they intermingle with each other, the lovers' souls speak as one, informing the reader that "this ecstasy doth unperplex" them. In other words, their ecstatic union does away with their confusion and enlightens them. Love makes them wiser, allowing them to see more clearly. Enlightened, they can speak a "Dialogue of One," saying and meaning exactly the same thing at exactly the same time, and trusting that everyone who hears their wisdom will learn something valuable about love from them.
However, the word "unperplex" offers a bit of a paradox. To be "perplexed" can mean to be confused, yes, but it can also mean to be tangled up or interwoven. And tangling and interweaving two souls is exactly what love does.
The reason that their souls can speak their wise, harmonious "Dialogue of One," the lovers declare, is because love "mix[es]" their separate souls and "makes both one." In other words, love creates a single, better, "abler" soul by combining them. Such a mixture does away with the "defects of loneliness," the flaws of a single soul on its own.
This power doesn't just work on the soul, either. The lovers' bodies intermingle just as their souls do. They don't merely hold hands, they find their palms "firmly cemented / By a fast balm, which thence did spring": in other words, their hands are fused together with amorous sweat. They don't merely gaze into each other's eyes, but feel that their "eye-beams" (the rays of their vision) become "twisted" and form "one double string" that "thread[s]" their eyes together like beads. And while they haven't had sex "as yet," the poem hints that "propagation" (or baby-making) is in their future. ("Propagation" itself, of course, is yet another way that love makes one new thing out of two parts: two people come together to create one new person!) Their bodies ecstatically mingle just as their souls do.
Both the lovers' bodies and their souls, then, show that love's great power is to combine, creating something new out of two parts. What's more, the experience of such unity is truly "ecstasy," transcendent pleasure. By removing the boundaries between two souls and two bodies, love allows true lovers to experience the bliss of oneness.
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The Relationship Between Body and Soul
"The Ecstasy" celebrates a spiritual union between two lovers' souls. But it also makes a strong case for the importance of the body to their love. Without their bodies, Donne suggests, these lovers' souls could never have come together, and their love could never have manifested on Earth. The body therefore isn't some lowly wad of matter that the lofty soul should strive to escape, but the soul's partner, an essential and beautiful part of love and life.
The fusion of the lovers' souls is a glorious thing, making a single new, stronger, better soul out of their two incomplete souls. But this spiritual marriage, Donne points out, had to begin with the lovers' bodies. As the intertwined souls put it, they "owe [their bodies] thanks," because they "did us, to us, at first convey": in other words, there was no way for them to meet each other except through the "forces" (the power to act) and "sense" (the power to perceive and feel) that the body offers. Human souls, in other words, simply can't come together on Earth unless the bodies that they inhabit meet first.
Therefore, the body isn't "dross," waste material to be cast aside, but "allay"—an alloy, a mixed metal. In other words, the mixture of body and soul produces a single stronger and more capable whole (much in the same way that the mixture of the lovers' souls produces one new stronger soul).
For that matter, bodies allow "weak men"—frail mortals—to look on "love revealed" and learn from it. At the end of the poem, the lovers' souls invite anyone who happens to be listening to them (like the reader, for instance) to watch as they return to their bodies and prove that their physical love is just like their spiritual love. And indeed, their bodily embraces mirror their souls' embraces. Across the poem, Donne stresses that the lovers' bodies fuse, much as their souls do: their palms are "firmly cemented" together with sweat, their eyes are threaded together like beads on "one double string" made of their adoring gazes.
The descriptions of the lovers' fused bodies suggest that their physical union mirrors, matches, and allows their spiritual union. Donne thus makes a case that the body isn't a lesser being than the soul, a lowly beast whose desires must be controlled (as certain branches of thought would have it). Rather, the body expresses and conveys the soul, and thus makes love between human beings possible.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Ecstasy”
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Lines 1-4
Where, like a pillow on a bed
A pregnant bank swell'd up, to rest
The violet's reclining head,
Sat we two, one another's best."The Ecstasy" begins by rooting its readers in one particular spot. "Where" is the poem's first word: physical location is going to matter.
Characteristically, John Donne—a 17th-century Metaphysical poet and a master of elaborate figurative language—sets his scene through a flurry of similes and metaphors. This poem, he says, is happening at a place where a metaphorically "pregnant bank"—a grassy hummock as round as a pregnant belly—swells up "like a pillow on a bed."
Already, these words summon up sexuality and fertility. The very earth is pregnant here, and its pregnancy turns it into a pillowy bed, a place where more pregnancies might come about. This is a romantic setting in other ways, too. Personified "violet[s]" rest their "reclining head[s]" upon this bank; the scene is all delicious flowery ease. The blooming violets let readers know it's spring, a season traditionally associated with romance and birth. (Violets also had some relevant symbolic significance in Donne's time: they were associated with Venus, the classical goddess of love and beauty, and were often used as images of romantic fidelity.)
This pregnant bank is the perfect setting, then, for the poem's main characters: a pair of lovers who finally make their entrance in line four. The speaker appears to be one of these lovers—or perhaps both of them. The couple arrives as a "we," and a "we" who are profoundly in love. "We two," the speaker says, are "one another's best."
That richly ambiguous turn of phrase might suggest a couple of different things. The couple could be each other's best in the sense that they're each other's best-beloveds: in other words, each would say that the other is the best thing they have or the best thing they know. But there's another possibility here, too. Perhaps each lover somehow manifests what's best in the other one. Looking at each other, they see their own best selves embodied. Love, in this reading, blurs the boundaries between this pair.
Across this heady poem, John Donne will explore the way that love unites human souls. But in its spiritual explorations, the poem will never forget about the role of the body, the thing that gives love a "where," a physical place in the world.
"The Ecstasy" explores its complex themes in a simple form. Donne often experimented with strange stanza shapes and unpredictable rhythms. But here, he keeps things straightforward:
- The poem is written in simple quatrains (four-line stanzas) of steady iambic tetrameter.
- That means its lines each use four iambs—metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "Sat we | two, one | anoth- | er's best."
The poem's form thus feels as steady and regular as a heartbeat—or, as readers will see, as constant as the lovers' adoring gazes.
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Lines 5-6
Our hands were firmly cemented
With a fast balm, which thence did spring;
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Lines 7-8
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string; -
Lines 9-12
So to'intergraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one,
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation. -
Lines 13-16
As, 'twixt two equal armies, Fate
Suspends uncertain victory,
Our souls (which to advance their state
Were gone out) hung 'twixt her, and me. -
Lines 17-20
And whilst our souls negotiate there,
We like sepulchral statues lay;
All day, the same our postures were,
And we said nothing, all the day. -
Lines 21-24
If any, so by love refin'd
That he soul's language understood,
And by good love were grown all mind,
Within convenient distance stood, -
Lines 25-28
He (though he knew not which soul spake,
Because both meant, both spake the same)
Might thence a new concoction take,
And part far purer than he came. -
Lines 29-32
"This ecstasy doth unperplex,"
We said, "and tell us what we love;
We see by this it was not sex,
We see we saw not what did move: -
Lines 33-36
"But as all several souls contain
Mixture of things, they know not what,
Love these mix'd souls doth mix again
And makes both one, each this and that. -
Lines 37-44
"A single violet transplant,—
The strength, the colour, and the size,
All which before was poor, and scant,
Redoubles still, and multiplies.
"When love, with one another so
Interinanimates two souls,
That abler soul, which thence doth flow,
Defects of loneliness controls. -
Lines 45-48
"We then, who are this new soul, know
Of what we are compos'd and made,
For th' atomies of which we grow
Are souls, whom no change can invade. -
Lines 49-52
"But oh alas, so long, so far,
Our bodies why do we forbear?
They'are ours, though they'are not we; we are
The intelligences, they the spheres. -
Lines 53-56
"We owe them thanks, because they thus
Did us, to us, at first convey,
Yielded their forces, sense, to us,
Nor are dross to us, but allay. -
Lines 57-60
"On man heaven's influence works not so,
But that it first imprints the air;
So soul into the soul may flow,
Though it to body first repair. -
Lines 61-64
"As our blood labours to beget
Spirits, as like souls as it can,
Because such fingers need, to knit
That subtle knot, which makes us man: -
Lines 65-68
"So must pure lovers' souls descend
T' affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great Prince in prison lies. -
Lines 69-72
"To'our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love reveal'd may look;
Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book: -
Lines 73-76
"And if some lover, such as we,
Have heard this Dialogue of One,
Let him still mark us, he shall see
Small change, when we'are to bodies gone."
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“The Ecstasy” Symbols
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The Violet
"The Ecstasy" uses violets as a symbol of new (but sturdy) love. The violets that grow all over the "pregnant bank" where the blissful couple lies are a spring flower, and they suggest a season of new life and growth. This love, then, might be in its freshest, earliest days. However, violets were also a traditional symbol of fidelity and constancy in love. The appearance of violets right at the beginning of the poem subtly hints that, while the poem's lovers might still be in the honeymoon phase, theirs is also a true, constant, and lasting love—not a mere fling.
An image of violets also returns in the complex simile at lines 37-44, where Donne imagines the lovers' soul as a violet transplanted to new soil, growing stronger and brighter. Here, the lovers seem to be plucking their figurative language right out of the landscape around them. The symbolic use of violets also subtly hearkens back to the "propagation" of the lovers' reflections in each other's eyes in lines 11-12—to propagate is to grow a new plant (like a violet) from the cutting or seed of another.
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“The Ecstasy” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Metaphor
This poem's metaphors work like the bodies of the poem's lovers: they give physical form to spiritual experience, and they elevate physical experiences to spiritual ones.
Two of the most arresting and vivid of these metaphors arrive early on, in the second stanza. Here, the speaker depicts himself and his lover holding hands and gazing into each other's eyes with these words:
Our hands were firmly cemented
With a fast balm, which thence did spring;
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string;In the first part of this image, the lovers' hands are glued together with a "fast balm." In literal terms, this "balm"—a word usually meaning a soothing cream or ointment—is palm sweat, sticking the couples' hands "fast" (or firmly) together. This surprising image stresses the fleshy physicality of this love early on. Love, this poem will argue, needs bodies and sex to come to its full fruition. And bodies sweat. By calling sweat a "balm" here, Donne makes something potentially sticky and embarrassing into something gracious and healing. These sweetly sweaty palms also hint that the lovers might be feeling pretty worked up, even if all they've done so far is gaze at each other and hold hands.
The second image draws on 17th-century beliefs about the nature of sight. One theory held that the eyes emitted vision-beams that touched what they saw. Here, these beams become physical strings, threading the lovers' eyes together as if they were beads.
The metaphor evokes a mutual gaze of piercing intensity: the lovers' eye-beams must penetrate each other's eyes to string them together. The intimate twisting of these eye-beams, like the fusion of the lovers' palms, also prefigures the interweaving of the lovers' souls. This unforgettable metaphor suggests that these lovers can wrap each other in an intimate embrace without doing more than look at each other. Their connection is so deep that even their gaze is tangible, fusing them together.
Related images of fusion and intertwining also appear later in the poem, illuminating the connection between the body and the soul. As the poem puts it, the lovers "owe [their bodies] thanks," because without them, the couple could never have known each other. Bodies are thus not "dross to us, but allay," Donne suggests, in a metaphor drawn from metalworking. "Dross" is waste material; "allay," here, is another spelling of "alloy," a stronger metal made from the fusion of two weaker components. The relationship between body and soul, in this image, is thus not unlike the relationship between the lovers. In both instances, a combination of two unlike things produces one stronger and more complete whole.
This fusion between soul and body is also, in line 64, the "subtle knot, which makes us man"—a metaphor that hearkens back to the intertwined eye-beams of the second stanza. The interwoven images here begin to suggest that the relationship between body and soul might also be a lot like the relationship between two lovers. In both relationships, two different things—whether body and soul or two people—join together to create one richer and more powerful whole.
These related fusions release "a great Prince"—a personification of love itself—from "prison." Presenting love as a powerful prince here, the speaker suggests that love is a governing, guiding, noble force. However, it's also one that can't act alone. Without the meeting of soul and body, and without the meetings of separate souls and bodies, this "great Prince" is helpless on Earth.
Similarly, "Love's mysteries" might grow in the "soul"—"but yet the body is his book." Again, "love" is a person here, a "he." But his "book," the means by which he communicates with human beings, is the body. In this image, the body becomes a holy text, love's Bible, the only place where love can be expressed and interpreted.
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Simile
Unlock all 755 words of this analysis of Simile in “The Ecstasy,” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.
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Anaphora
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Repetition
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Alliteration
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Allusion
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“The Ecstasy” 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.
- Cemented
- Fast balm
- Thence
- Eye-beams
- Intergraft
- Propagation
- 'Twixt
- Sepulchral statues
- Refin'd
- Spake
- Concoction
- Ecstasy
- Unperplex
- Several
- Redoubles
- Interinanimates
- Abler
- Thence
- Defects of loneliness
- Atomies
- No change can invade
- Forbear
- They'are
- Intelligences and spheres
- Did us, to us, at first convey
- Yielded their forces, sense, to us
- Dross and allay
- Heaven's influence
- Imprints
- Repair
- Beget
- Spirits
- Affections and faculties
- Which sense may reach and apprehend
- A great Prince
- Dialogue of One
Cemented-
Stuck together. Pronounced with the stress on the first syllable, SEH-men-ted.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Ecstasy”
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Form
This heady poem of love and transcendence takes a deceptively simple form. The poem is written in 19 quatrains (or four-line stanzas—though some editors choose to print it as one long stanza). Each quatrain uses a singsong ABAB rhyme scheme and steady iambic tetrameter (lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "That sub- | tle knot, | which makes | us man").
This simplicity makes the poem stand out among Donne's longer works. When he wasn't writing sonnets, Donne was inclined to invent elaborate new shapes for his verse, playing with unusual stanza forms and surprising rhythms. (The English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge remarked that Donne's poetic muse seems to ride on a "dromedary"—that is, Donne's rhythms are as wild and bumpy as a ride on a camel.) Here, however, Donne chooses a form of the purest simplicity and sticks to it for 76 lines.
This calm stability suits the poem's mood. With their souls intertwined and "interinanimate[d]" (woven into one new soul), the poem's lovers rest in perfect equilibrium, able to wisely declaim on the true nature of love from their ecstatic, transcendent new perspective. There's no rush in this poem (where the lovers can spend "all the day" lying on a flowery bank and gazing into each other's eyes). There's also no doubt. The form here is as stable and constant as the perfect mutual love the poem describes.
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Meter
John Donne often played elaborate games with meter, concocting complex patterns of rhythm to suit complex patterns of thought. In "The Ecstasy," however, his meter holds steady: the whole poem is written in iambic tetrameter. That means its lines all use four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds in lines 7-8:
Our eye- | beams twist- | ed, and | did thread
Our eyes | upon | one doub- | le string;This consistent meter gives the poem a steady, untroubled pulse, fitting for its image of two lovers' souls fusing seamlessly into one new and glorious whole.
Without disturbing that pulse too much, Donne sometimes introduces a little variation in the meter for emphasis. Lines 5-6 offer a good example:
Our hands | were firm- | ly ce- | mented
With a | fast balm, | which thence | did spring;(Note that Donne would have pronounced "cemented" with its stress on the first syllable: SEH-men-ted.) Line 6 pushes its first two stresses together into a spondee, a foot with a powerful DUM-DUM rhythm: the unforgettable image of palm sweat as a "fast balm" (or sticky substance) lands all the harder because of that extra bit of emphasis.
To keep his meter pulsing away, Donne often uses contractions—often ones that might look a little odd to a modern-day reader, though they sound perfectly natural read aloud:
- Donne's "They'are" in line 51, for instance, can just be pronounced "they're."
- And "to'intergraft" in line 9, "t' affections" in line 66, and "to'our" in line 69 simply invite readers to skim over the word "to" with a quick "tuh," just as they might in ordinary conversation.
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Rhyme Scheme
This poem's thought is complex, but its rhymes are simple. Each stanza uses this straightforward rhyme scheme:
ABAB
On one level, these rhymes feel unobtrusive. On another, they're rich with meaning. A back-and-forth interplay between two sounds mimics what this poem describes: a back-and-forth interplay between two lovers' souls. Just as the couple's souls fuse and create one new soul between them, the alternating rhymes fuse into melodious verse.
And while the pattern of the rhymes isn't too complicated, the language of the rhymes is often rich and surprising. Donne finds exuberant chimes between "one" and "propagation" (pronounced with five syllables, PROP-ah-GAY-see-un), "unperplex" and "sex," "forbear" and "spheres" (probably pronounced more like "sphares" in Donne's 17th-century London accent, and therefore a true rhyme, not a slant rhyme, though it may seem like a slant rhyme to modern readers).
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“The Ecstasy” Speaker
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This poem's speaker is a man so deeply in love that he feels as if his and his lover's souls have left their bodies, wound around each other, and fused into one new soul. For much of the poem, this new soul becomes the speaker: all the lines enclosed in quotation marks (line 29 onward) are this soul's "Dialogue of One" (a paradoxical kind of speech, considering a dialogue typically requires at least two participants).
This fusion of souls is one of the kinds of "ecstasy" the poem's title refers to. An ecstasy, etymologically, was originally a transcendent, out-of-body religious experience. But as the fused soul explains at length, souls can't experience love only in an out-of-body way. Souls need bodies in order to meet and love each other in the first place. Embodiment—and physical ecstasy in the sense of "overwhelming pleasure"—will thus be a necessary part of these souls' joy, too.
The fused soul's learned explanation of these principles reveal it to be a balanced, wise, witty, and joyful entity, a being whose own nature proves its thesis: love does away with the "defects of loneliness," the limits and failings of one lonely soul on its own.
Love raises the speaker and his beloved to new and glorious heights of delight, then, but also new heights of understanding. For this speaker, the joy of the intellect is as much a part of love as the joy of the soul and of the body.
It's difficult not to read the first speaker of "The Ecstasy," the man who says the first 28 lines of the poem, as a voice for John Donne himself. At once a passionate lover and a theoretician, a man who invests his description of love with heady Renaissance philosophies about the nature of the connection between body and soul, this poem's lover is at the very least a lot like John Donne.
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“The Ecstasy” Setting
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"The Ecstasy" is, in one sense, almost placeless. The speaker tells readers that he and his beloved sat together on a "pregnant bank" (a grassy riverside hillock as round as a belly) where violets grow, suggesting it's spring or summer. But that bank could be anywhere, and this poem could take place in any era. The speaker's description of the workings of love transcends time and space.
The violet-strewn "pregnant bank," however, does seem like a fitting symbolic place for this love song to unfold. In its fertility, the flowery bank suggests creation and new life. Though the speaker and his beloved haven't gotten around to any literal "propagation" (or baby-making) just yet, the fusion of their souls is itself a kind of birth: combined by the force of love, they make one new soul out of their two.
Eventually, such a love might also create new bodies, literal babies—a glorious thing, in this poem's view, since even the highest, purest, most spiritual human love must always pass through bodies. The poem's fertile, flowery setting thus celebrates the lovers' ecstasy while also reaching out to the ecstasies of the future: this love, the poem hints, will beget more love by one day producing future generations of lovers.
Though the setting is more archetypal than specific, the poem's language and its heady thought ground the poem in Donne's own time and place: 17th-century England. For instance, allusions to the "intelligences" who move the "spheres" refer to a piece of antique theology. Angels ("intelligences," beings of pure thought) were once said to spin the "spheres," the concentric crystalline globes that people once believed held the universe in shape.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Ecstasy”
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 sacred images with cheeky 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 irrational and obscure. 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 inspired later writers from T. S. Eliot to A. S. Byatt.
Like the vast majority of Donne's poetry, "The Ecstasy" didn't appear in print until several years after his death. (Many poets of Donne's time didn't widely publish their work, instead circulating it in manuscript among a few friends. See "The Triple Fool" for some of Donne's thoughts on the perils of poetic publication!) "The Ecstasy" was first collected in the posthumous book Poems (1633).
Historical Context
Much of John Donne's earlier verse draws on his youthful days as a notorious ladies' man. 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 furious father had him thrown in prison. Donne famously jotted down a little epigram about this personal disaster: "John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone." (The rhyme lets us know how the poet pronounced his name: DUNN, not DAWN.)
While Donne was eventually reconciled with his father-in-law, this was a rocky beginning to a marriage that would see a lot of difficulties. The Donnes and their many children lived in relative poverty. In order to stay financially afloat, Donne was 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. Many of his passionate love poems tell the stories of tearful farewells.
It was while Donne was away on one of his trips that tragedy struck back home: 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 10 surviving children. Under the patronage of King James I, Donne 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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More “The Ecstasy” Resources
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External Resources
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A Portrait of Donne — Admire a famous portrait of Donne (in which he poses as the ideal melancholic lover).
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to the actor Richard Burton reading the poem aloud.
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A Short Biography — Learn more about Donne's life and work via the Poetry Foundation's biography.
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A Donne Manuscript — Read an article discussing a rediscovered manuscript of Donne's poems (and learn more about his hesitation to publish his work during his lifetime).
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An Appreciation of Donne — Read the contemporary poet Linda Gregerson's reflections on what Donne means to her.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by John Donne
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