earticle

영어

That Donne possessed dramatic power has generally been ackowledged. In his fervid youth Donne was "a great Frequenter of Plays," so might be credited with some measure of the instinct at work in Shakespeare and so many lesser playwrights. If by "dramatic" one means what stirs the emotions through the sight, especially, of attitudes and gestures, in Donne's love poetry there are characters, besides poetic protagonist. Donne makes the speaker of his poem a sharp dramatic character. Usually the second character is a mute woman, but we are enabled to guess how she acts and what she would say. The way in which Donne gives us those hints is both very clever and very modern. Though a good part of the comedy of Donne's poetry depends on the reader's familiarity with the literary fashion of Petrarchism, Donne presents lovers who differ from the fashion. Since the Petrarchan love poems usually dealt with a love affair which was not consummated and which might even be entirely imagianary, they tended to treat love as more spiritual than physical. By simply inverting the stock attitudes and values of the Petrarchan lovers, Donne dramatizes vividly not only the lovers' passionate excitement but also their bitter expression of disillusionment.