Written with a musical setting in mind, this metaphysical celebration of 'everlasting' fidelity sings with love and intellectual honesty
'Only our love hath no decay /This, no to-morrow hath, nor yesterday' … 'love locks' on the Pont des Arts in Paris. Photograph: John Van Hasselt/Corbis
John Donne was the grandson of last week's poet John Heywood. It's not impossible that Heywood saw the young boy who would turn out to inherit his talents, growing up to take the verbal wit he so enjoyed to bold new heights of poetic expression. Donne was born to Heywood's daughter, Elizabeth, in 1572. Although by this time, Heywood was in exile in Malines, and had only six years or so to live, he had permission from Elizabeth I to visit England. John Donne, of course, was also a child of precarious political times.
The Anniversary appears in Songs and Sonets, Donne's second collection, published in 1601. Theodore Redpath, editor of the Methuen University Paperback edition (1987) suggests it recalls the poet's first meeting with his teenaged wife-to-be, Ann More, in 1598. Autobiography can never be assumed, but fidelity in love is clearly the poem's major, anxious theme.
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The Anniversary appears in Songs and Sonets, Donne's second collection, published in 1601. Theodore Redpath, editor of the Methuen University Paperback edition (1987) suggests it recalls the poet's first meeting with his teenaged wife-to-be, Ann More, in 1598. Autobiography can never be assumed, but fidelity in love is clearly the poem's major, anxious theme.
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