Disjunctive Love: Philosophical Project and Poetic Experience in Donne's “The Ecstasy”

Donne’s “The Ecstasy” explores a love which is as virtual as it is actual, creating a life of love that is as absorbing inside the poem as it is impossible outside it, and raising a question about how poetry can think about love distinctively. To address that question, this chapter compares a specific poetic form, the quatrain, with philosophical dialogues by Marsilio Ficino, Tullia d’Aragona, and Leone Ebreo. “The Ecstasy” shares with these dialogues in imagining love as a phenomenon of non-sovereignty, of giving up the wish for mastery over the self and control over the beloved, with a key difference residing in how non-sovereignty comes about. For Ficino, Tullia, and Leone, love assumes the form of what Bataille would call a project: an undertaking with an aim over which lovers have at least some control—in this case, a project of self-transformation by which lovers become more perfect. “The Ecstasy” sometimes also makes love into a project, but in other places, the poem’s quatrains turn love from a project into an experience: (again, in Bataille’s terms) an aimless encounter in which lover and beloved become entangled in incomplete yet excruciating ways, ways that forge a distinctly poetic non-sovereign love.