Aesthetics Of Life:A Thematic Study Of John Donne’s Elegies

John Donne’s Elegies are an essential component of Donne’s love poems.However,they have long been regarded as secondary to Donne’s Songs and Sonnets which,to most people,are Donne’s best love poems.This thesis argues that the Elegies embody strong passions,intellectual doggedness,and complex themes that center around Donne’s aesthetics of life,serving as a backbone of his complicated thoughts that ran through out his entire life.By conducting a thematic study,this thesis extracts Donne’s aesthetics of life from three aspects: beauty,wholeness,and change,in order to appreciate the Elegies and his early love poems in depth,and to further understand Donne’s poetic wit of integrating his philosophical perception into an intense passion.Beauty,as an essential quality of human beings,is the fundamental basis of Donne’s aesthetics of life.From the comparison of beauty and ugliness to the discovery of the power of inner beauty,Donne aims to highlight the unbeatable qualities of inner beauty.Beauty is analyzed as a combination of outer beauty and inner beauty in the Elegies.In this combination,outer beauty is unreliable and temporary,and inner beauty is the essence and decisive element of beauty.This thesis finds that Donne exposes two aspects of the construction of beauty by deciphering the process of rearranging letters in “The Anagram”.One is the process of forming the inner virtues,the other is the unification of outer beauty and inner beauty which contains three states: wholeness of all elements of beauty,a good balance between outer beauty and inner beauty,and oneness of the two parts of beauty.In Donne’s views,there is an ideal time of human beauty.In “The Autumnall”,this ideal state occurs at the age of fifty,which follows a moderate principle: a stately outer beauty with a virtuous inner beauty.Human wholeness is a vertical extension of Donne’s aesthetics of life in terms ofone’s whole life,which is a practical way to live a fulfilling life.Human wholeness contains two aspects: the completeness of men’s personality and women’s personality,and the harmonious unification of human desires.In the Elegies,Donne depicts complete images of men and women separately.The hidden personalities,femininity in men and masculinity in women,are important for human beings to build a complete self and to create a harmonious relationship between men and women.The second aspect is about human desires,including secular desire and spiritual pursuit.From Donne’s justification of secular desire,especially his assertiveness of the sexual desire,this thesis finds that having a clear understanding of secular desire and pursuing it positively,secular desire can be transferred into a powerful motivation for the spiritual pursuit.The wholeness of human desires is not one-sided satisfaction;instead,it is a never-ending pursuit of a unification of both secular desires and spiritual pursuit.Change,the ultimate pursuit of human beings,reflects the attribute of the transcendence and creativity of Donne’s aesthetics of life.Change is a natural law of the world both in real life and Donne’s world of poetry.In the Elegies,different changes in the social environment are depicted clearly,which has great influence on human life and the inner world of human beings.Moreover,change is highly valued for nursing variety and eternity.For one thing,it makes nature more beautiful;for another,it enables human beings to experience greater joyfulness and freedom in love.In the Elegies,change is eternity,which makes everything keep moving forward.As to the way to change,this thesis concludes two steps specifically.The first one is the preconditioning stage which mainly focuses on the liberation of oneself and the discovery of life’s variety;the second step relates to practical actions that acted in a continual process of negation and selection.The three themes above reveal the core of Donne’s aesthetics of life which aiming at knowing a real self and living out a real self.The first level is on beauty and wholeness,including knowing the essence of beauty,building up one’s inner virtues,liberating the hidden personality of men and women and pursuing secular desire and the spiritual pursuit properly.Fully knowing oneself provides a fundamental basis of keeping a real and complete self.Living out a real self is experienced in a constantly changing process,from which one can continually re-know oneself,further develop abetter self and reconsider the relationship between human beings and the world.