Metaphor, resurrection, and the body in John Donne’s poetry and prose

Abstract John Donne’s poems, both religious and secular, reveal that metaphor does not utilize more accessible bodily experiences to explain abstract concepts. Instead, metaphor in his verse challenges the apparentness and familiarity of bodily experience, forcing readers to apprehend figuration at a distance and at the same time as it occurs within a poem. This essay explores how this vision of metaphor affects the portrait of consolation in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, as well as the account of the Resurrection in his sermons. Donne’s poetry, then, exposes the extent to which metaphor encourages readers to consider the world as a synchronic system without hierarchy, particularly the hierarchy of means and ends.