Love’s Growth
By John Donne

I scarce believe my love to be so pure
  As I had thought it was,
  Because it doth endure
Vicissitude, and season, as the grass;
Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore
My love was infinite, if spring make’ it more.

But if medicine, love, which cures all sorrow
With more, not only be no quintessence,
But mixed of all stuffs paining soul or sense,
And of the sun his working vigor borrow,
Love’s not so pure, and abstract, as they use
To say, which have no mistress but their muse,
But as all else, being elemented too,
Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do.

And yet no greater, but more eminent,
  Love by the spring is grown;
  As, in the firmament,
Stars by the sun are not enlarged, but shown,
Gentle love deeds, as blossoms on a bough,
From love’s awakened root do bud out now.

If, as water stirred more circles be
Produced by one, love such additions take,
Those, like so many spheres, but one heaven make,
For they are all concentric unto thee;
And though each spring do add to love new heat,
As princes do in time of action get
New taxes, and remit them not in peace,
No winter shall abate the spring’s increase.

About this Poem

“Love’s Growth” was originally published in Poems (John Marriott, 1633), the first comprehensive publication of John Donne’s poetry. In the poem, Donne examines the true nature of love and finds that it is mixed stuff, a mixture of both physical and spiritual elements. True love is both of the body and the mind, and to prove his point Donne gives a number of arguments and brings together a number of most disparate and varied elements. In “The Muse in Donne and Jonson: A Post-Lacanian Study,” published in Modern Language Studies, vol. 21, no. 4 (Fall 1991), Mark Fortier, a professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, Canada, writes (commenting on the last four lines of the second stanza), “The relation of poet and Muse is contrasted, derisively, to the relation between real lovers, which is Donne’s true subject. Where real love is complex and organic, love of the Muse is unreal, devoid of complexity, devoid of life. Love of the Muse is inactive: those who love, do; those who can’t, call on the Muse. Paradoxically the poetic ego identifies itself, at least here, with those who can. There is an estrangement from the Muse, an inability to sympathize with those who value her. To a large extent this will be the primary relationship between the poet and the Muse throughout Donne’s work: the poet never feels close to, never values his own Muse, although sometimes he can respect the Muse of others.”

Donne says that love is not a personification nor is love made of pure and simple elements that have sustaining and life-giving properties. Rather, it is a mixture of different elements, both spiritual and physical. The abstract nature of love is why it affects both the body and the soul. It causes both spiritual and physical suffering. It does cure not because it is the quintessence, but on the homeopathic principle, of “like curing the like.” It cures all sorrow only by giving more of it. Love is neither infinite nor “pure stuff,” but has a mixed nature like grass which grows with spring. Though like the grass in this respect, love is different from it in another way. While the grass loses its life and vitality with the winter, there is no such loss in the power of love. In this respect, it may be likened to taxes levied in an emergency, but never withdrawn even when the emergency is over.

About the Poet

John Donne was born in 1572 in London, England. He is known as the founder of the Metaphysical Poets, a term created by Samuel Johnson, an eighteenth-century English essayist, poet, and philosopher. The loosely associated group also includes George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, and John Cleveland. The Metaphysical Poets are known for their ability to startle the reader and coax new perspective through paradoxical images, subtle argument, inventive syntax, and imagery from art, philosophy, and religion using an extended metaphor known as a conceit. Donne reached beyond the rational and hierarchical structures of the seventeenth century with his exacting and ingenious conceits, advancing the exploratory spirit of his time.

Donne entered the world during a period of theological and political unrest for both England and France; a Protestant massacre occurred on Saint Bartholomew’s day in France; while in England, the Catholics were the persecuted minority. Born into a Roman Catholic family, Donne’s personal relationship with religion was tumultuous and passionate, and at the center of much of his poetry. He studied at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities in his early teen years. He did not take a degree at either school, because to do so would have meant subscribing to the Thirty-nine Articles, the doctrine that defined Anglicanism. At age twenty he studied law at Lincoln’s Inn. Two years later he succumbed to religious pressure and joined the Anglican Church after his younger brother, convicted for his Catholic loyalties, died in prison. Donne wrote most of his love lyrics, erotic verse, and some sacred poems in the 1590s, creating two major volumes of work: Satires and Songs and Sonnets.

In 1598, after returning from a two-year naval expedition against Spain, Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton. While sitting in Queen Elizabeth’s last Parliament in 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, the sixteen-year-old niece of Lady Egerton. Donne’s father-in-law disapproved of the marriage. As punishment, he did not provide a dowry for the couple and had Donne briefly imprisoned.

This left the couple isolated and dependent on friends, relatives, and patrons. Donne suffered social and financial instability in the years following his marriage, exacerbated by the birth of many children. He continued to write and published the Divine Poems in 1607. In Pseudo-Martyr, published in 1610, Donne displayed his extensive knowledge of the laws of the Church and state, arguing that Roman Catholics could support James I without compromising their faith. In 1615, James I pressured him to enter the Anglican Ministry by declaring that Donne could not be employed outside of the Church. He was appointed Royal Chaplain later that year. His wife died in 1617 at thirty-three years old shortly after giving birth to their twelfth child, who was stillborn. The Holy Sonnets are also attributed to this phase of his life.

In 1621, he became dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. In his later years, Donne’s writing reflected his fear of his inevitable death. He wrote his private prayers, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, during a period of severe illness and published them in 1624. His learned, charismatic, and inventive preaching made him a highly influential presence in London. Best known for his vivacious, compelling style and thorough examination of mortal paradox, John Donne died in London on March 31, 1631.