Death And Resurrection In Donne's Religious Poems

As one of the outstanding writers in the Elizabethan age, John Donne and his works have been always in the center of controversy. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, many critics were quite unwilling to offer Donne a seat among the great poets of English language. Donne study abroad mainly focuses on his sermons, prose and love poems, and the study on Donne in China is mostly limited to his love poems.Therefore, this thesis attempts to investigate Donne's religious poems from the perspectives of close reading and culture study. The reason for close reading lies in the fact that the research on Donne's religious poems is so little that the reference is very limited, and therefore close reading is of help in finding out the ideological content and the artistic values. And the reason for culture study is the requirement of the key concepts to be studied because both "death" and "resurrection" are heavily related to culture both as background and as theme.On the one hand, "death" and "resurrection" are the main subject matter in Donne's religious poems; on the other, "death" and "resurrection" are seen as two in one in the religious sense. "Death" in Donne's religious poems is treated as decay, rest and life—on the one hand, decay and sleep are the temporary state of the body and on the other, the soul will be saved and step into the eternal life. Therefore "resurrection" is the highly remarkable unity of the resurrected body and soul.