The amount of space opened by a rhetorical statement or question reflects how much room there is to fill in a poem. A small question or statement may merit a simple, small image. A more grandiose rhetorical movement may call for long lists of images. Walt Whitman’s lists are a good example; he posits something and then lists sometimes hundreds of variations on the theme. This way of looking at the placement of an image into a poem is somewhat limiting and by no means exhaustive.
The key to using images well in a poem is to remember that images tend to produce gut-level responses in our readers. They feel the most real. They do, ultimately, convey a complete human experience in words. And that is why a study of poetry almost always begins with the image. It is the backbone, the grounding rod of the poem. Few other aspects of our language can boast such strength [3].
2 Introduction of John Donne
John Donne established what has become known as the Metaphysical style of poetry which was taken up by later poets, the two under consideration here being George Herbert and Henry Vaughan [4].Some of the chief characteristics of Donne's style are: the abrupt opening of a poem with a surprising dramatic line, the use of colloquial diction; the ideas in the poem being presented as a logical and persuasive argument, the purpose of which is to aid his wooing, whether of a woman or God. Donne took metaphors from all spheres of life, especially from crafts and the sciences, and made frequent use of the ‘conceit’: a surprising, ingenious, far-fetched turn of ideas. Often a whole poem is an extended ‘conceit’, and frequently a poem ends with a final “conceit” in the last two lines. Donne developed his technique writing love poetry, and later adapted it to the writing of religious poetry; he lived and wrote during the succeeding reigns of Elizabeth 1, James1 and Charles1. His early life was passes in dissipation and roguery, imprisonment, and lawsuit over his marriage, but he later turned a saintly divine and ended as the illustrious dean of St. Paul’s cathedral, London. His poems can be divided into two categories: the youthful love lyrics, published after his death as songs and sonnets in 1633, and the later sacred verses, published in1624 as devotions upon emergent occasions, which show the intense Donne took in the spectacle of mortality under the shadow of death, a vision that haunted him perpetually, and inspired the highest flights of his eloquence. Donne loves the extravagant. Sometimes he goes to preposterous dimensions. In his poetry, sensuality is blended with philosophy, passion with intellect, and contraries are ever moving one into the other. But Donne is not only an analytical sensualist. His later poems, as holy sonnets, are also touched with profound religious thought. most of his poems contained either cynical comments on the inconstancy of women in love or fiery utterance of unruly passion mixed with coarse suggestion of sensual love and morbid thoughts of death, and we may find in them almost always rather complicated reasoning through far fetched comparisons or conceits and in strange imageries and obscure [5].
2. 1 John Donne’s life
John Donne was born in London, England, sometime during end of 1571 or between January and June 19 in 1572, the third of six children. His father, of Welsh descent, also called John Donne, was a warden of the Ironmongers Company in the City of London and a respected Roman Catholic who avoided unwelcome government attention, out of fear of being persecuted for his Catholicism.John Donne Sr. died in 1576,leaving his wife, Elizabeth Heywood, the responsibility of raising their children Elizabeth Heywood, also from a noted Catholic family, was the daughter of John Heywood, the playwright, and sister of Jasper Heywood, the translator and Jesuit. She was a great-niece of the Catholic. This tradition of martyrdom would continue among Donne’s closer relatives, many of whom were executed or exiled for religious reasons. Despite the obvious dangers, Donne’s family arranged for his education by the Jesuits, which gave him a deep knowledge of his religion that equipped him for the ideological religious conflicts of his time. Elizabeth Donne nee Heywood married Dr John Syminges, a wealthy widower with three children, a few months after John Donne Sr's death. The next year, 1577, John Donne’s sister Elizabeth died, followed by two more of his sisters, Mary and Katherine, in 1581. Before the future poet was ten years old he had thus experienced the deaths of four of his immediate family. After three years at Oxford he was admitted to the University of Cambridge, where he studied for another three years. He was unable to obtain a degree from either institution because he refused to take the Oath of Supremacy required of graduates. In 1591, he was accepted as a student at the Thaive inn legal school, one of the Inns of Court in London. In 1592 he was admitted to Lincoln’s inn, another of the Inns of Court legal schools. His brother Henry was also a university student prior to his arrest in 1593 for harboring a Catholic priest. Henry Donne died in prison of bubonic plague, leading John Donne to begin questioning his Catholic faith [5].
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