Abstract
Donne's strategies to win the authority of the 'domain' of love in his poetry are attempts to claim a personal domain for himself. This essay focuses on this personal domain in order to analyse the concept of self in Donne's poetry. Lakoff and Johnson's discussion about the basic metaphors embedded in our childhood by which we conceptualise the notion of self presents the cognitive bases of Donne's different metaphors of self. Significantly, as a poet of late Renaissance, Donne's metaphors have close association with imperial and colonial patterns. Combining insights from cognitive poetics and Edward Said's views about culture and imperialism, the writers try to look into the way the poet uses these metaphors to fashion a sense of communal/national identity. The essay will further focus on the multiple representations of self in Donne's poetry and the paradoxical signification of his identity. Keywords: John Donne; cognitive poetics; metaphor; self; empire; Renaissance; colonial discourse
Highlights
The poetry of John Donne, a great late-Renaissance poet, is the product of the epoch's emergent imperialism and colonisation
Any cognitive discussion of the self is strongly associated with what Lakoff and Johnson (1999) call the “General Subject-Self Metaphor” which divides a person into a Subject and one or more Selves
This identity, is bound to the nature of Donne's beloved as something outside of the limits of his self. Donne describes his beloved as America, India, and some Oriental entities, to name a few. It is at this juncture that Said's views about the relation between culture and imperialism come to focus
Summary
The poetry of John Donne, a great late-Renaissance poet, is the product of the epoch's emergent imperialism and colonisation. In many of his love poems, Donne defines himself as having power over his beloved, addressing her as his ‘empery’ or ‘America’. John Donne is preoccupied with the question of ‘domain’ as an imperial pattern of his age. The lover in his poetry claims a personal domain for himself. These metaphors of domain can further reveal how this imperial pattern constructs the identity of the poet. We can uncover Donne's different witty metaphors for his identity, as well as the lovers and the bond between them which will reveal an array of meanings regarding the political patterns of the age
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