Love In The Odyssey

The purity of love appears as pure as the actors that are required to perform it. Donne borrows inspiration from the Homeric epic The Odyssey and patterns of Ovidian lyric to express both disappointment and frustration due to its impurity, stemming from the goal accomplished through bodily reality. While Donne is able to attain love through its consummation, he expresses conflict in attempting to avoid deviation from the pursuit of love caused by a woman’s features in Love’s Progress, which draw men to the circular love in Love’s Growth unable to transform from the physical to the transcendent metaphysical. Both poems express a progression towards Donne’s idealised love as a religious experience, transcendent of the physical realm, which I
Donne parodies Odysseus’ adventure and applies it to the consulting tone present in Ovidian lyric. The elegy incorporates motifs of “the dramatic qualities of marvel, risk and triumphant adventure” (Dean 229) in Homeric epic, already present from the elegy’s introductory lines: “Whoever loves, if he do not propose / The right true end of love, he’s one that goes / To sea for nothing but to make him sick.” (Lines 1-3). The journey to reach the woman as the “right true end of love” (Line 2), specifically in fluid terms, requires discipline through consistent awareness of the goal, consistent with Odysseus’ consistent “pressure to return” (Dean 231) not just to any single unoccupied location, but towards a specific feminine figure. The woman acts as the anchor to the marvellous yet unattainable ideal, and the pursuit takes with it risk, and triumph reached through the fulfilment of
While Donne appears to hold a holistic, unified view of love, undivided by the physical and made whole by the spiritual, the body of the woman is ironically the real obstruction of the abstract. Donne discards human bodies for celestial figures: “..free spheres move faster far than can/Birds whom the air resists…” (Lines 87-88). Air is yet another element that taints and obstructs the ‘free sphere’, yet it is vital to note the similar inhumanity of the poet in being described as a bird. Instead, both lovers described as celestial ‘spheres’ denotes transcendence from earthly ties, advancing instead along an “empty and ethereal way” (Line 89). Love, in its emptiest form, also appears at its purest. However, transformation of the poet, framed as the epic hero, prevents Donne from having a firmer grasp on pure