How does John Donne use artifice?
John Donne was famous for his metaphysical poetry in the 17th century. His work suggests a healthy appetite for life and its pleasures, while also expressing deep emotion. He did this through the use of conceits, wit and intellect — as seen in the poems “The Sun Rising” and “Batter My Heart”. Donne is considered a master of the metaphysical conceit, an extended metaphor that combines two vastly different ideas into a single idea, often using imagery.An example of this is his equation of lovers with saints in “The Canonization.” Unlike the conceits found in other Elizabethan poetry, most notably Petrarchan conceits, which formed clichéd comparisons between more closely related objects (such as a rose and love), metaphysical conceits go to a greater depth in comparing two completely unlike objects, although sometimes in the mode of Shakespeare’s radical paradoxes and imploded contraries. One of the most famous of Donne’s conceits is found in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” where he
