"Love's Deity" is an anti-lyrical poem; Rather than lament the inconstancy of love or celebrate the union of love, Donne questions the nature of love itself. Donne presents the poem as a theogony, an account of the origin of the god of love. For Donne, Love is a pagan god, operating in a wonderfully imagined pre-lapsarian world in which all love is corresponding. However, the god of love, a tyrant, comes to abuse his powers, leading to unrequited and unequal love as well as the fall of man. But there is no retrograde action; men cannot return to the mythical garden of corresponding love. Disparity, Donne writes, is the "fate" of love, and so over the course of four stanzas, the poem expands from a theogony, an account of the creation of a god, to a theodicy, an attempt to justify the ways of God. to men (5). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The opening lines of “Love’s Deity” are astonishing. I wish to speak to the ghost of some old lover, / who died before the god of love was born, the speaker implies (1-2). We are thrown into a strange and paradoxical world: can love exist before the god of love exists? Did lovers and the beloved predate the god of love? Donne argues that this is the case. Not only does love exist before the birth of the god, but it exists in an unlimited and elevated state: I cannot think that the one who then loved the most, / should have sunk so low, as to love the one he despised (3-4) . If so, if love precedes god, how did the god of love come into being? Donne suggests, perhaps, something similar to the transmigration of souls: the ghost of the old lover, with pure and elevated love, dies, and the god of love is born (1-2). The divinity of love, the subject of Donne's poetry, is similarly the theme of Plato's Symposium, an account of a banquet hosted by the young poet Agathon in which the guests discuss the origin of love. The mythical quality of Donne's poem and the obscuration that accompanies the birth of the god recall the Platonic debate. Phaedrus argues, from Hesoid's Theogony, in favor of the age of Love: We honor him as one of the most ancient gods, and the proof of his great age is this: the parents of love have no place in poetry or legend ( p.9). While the parentage of Donne's god is similarly uncertain, Donne follows Agathon's speech more closely: he is the youngest of the gods, Agathon states, and the most delicate; furthermore it has a fluid, flexible shape; he is balanced and fluid in his nature (32-33). His work is the work of moderation. This is also the work of Donne's divinity in the second stanza. The young deity is conceived as a bureaucrat, who takes true loves who observes a uniform flame that two hearts have touched and confirms them (9-10). Donne writes: His task was to leniently adjust the assets to the liabilities. Correspondence / Only its subject was (11-14). God adapts active lovers to passive lovers. His job, correspondence, is a matter of weight and balance. Donne's god of love practices in a world where love already exists out of necessity; it is inherent in human nature as a desire for the integrity of the whole. Here Donne recalls the myth proposed by Aristophanes in the Symposium: Love is born in every human being; it calls together the halves of our original nature; tries to make two into one and heal the wound of human nature. Each of us, therefore, is the corresponding half of a human whole. (27)Love, says Aristophanes, is the name of our search for completeness, of our desire to be complete (29). Donne's divinity works with this material: half ofwhole, putting them together. His work is simple, good and beautiful in its tranquility; therefore it is also lenient (11). The god of love is a lucky god. In this pre-lapsarian world of corresponding love, there is no need for lyric poetry. Unrequited love is absent from the vocabulary of men and gods; the law is: I love her, who loves me (14). What causes the fall? AS narrated in the third stanza, the god of love ends up abusing his powers. Like a tyrant, he demands more than he is rightfully entitled to. The god of love grows; become "modern" and greedy. Donne writes, every modern god will now extend / His vast prerogatives, up to Jupiter (15-16). Perhaps he is tired of the simplicity and serenity of his job; maybe he is mischievous, still young. In any case, the god of love creates an unequal love, lovers who love the one who has despised (4). This is the fate of the god foretold by the speaker in the first stanza. Vice, custom, validates this destiny, and the new law becomes, I must love the one who does not love me (5-7). Donne suggests that the fall of the god of love leads to a fall into tyranny and dark frivolity and a parallel fall in man; To rage, to desire, to write, to praise, / All is the task of the god of love (17-18). Anger, lust, poetry, praise: Donne aligns the new representation of divinity with the traditional tropes of the unrequited courtly lover. We should revisit Agathon's speech at the Symposium. Agathon's speech follows that of Aristophanes, in which Aristophanes describes love as a desire for completeness, and Love, the god, not as a creator but as a matchmaker: he attracts us towards what belongs to us (30). Agathon rejects Aristophanes' account of love; his Eros is a creator-god, the source of all arts and crafts, archery, medicine and prophecy, music, metallurgy and weaving (36). Agathon reflects that the god is such a skilled poet that he can transform others into poets: once Love touches him, anyone becomes a poet (35). And in a comical gesture, Agathon, while speaking eloquently and generously about Love and its territories, says: I am suddenly struck by the need to say something in a poetic meter (36). God's fall to tyranny translates into man's fall to poetry. The god of love, playful and poetic in his invention of unrequited love, pushes man to poetry, to anger, to lust, to write, to praise (17). Hence the lyrical love poem, the sonnet sequence that traces the changing forms and faces of a lover and his beloved, of creation as lack of fulfillment. Lyrical poetry is therefore a property of a fallen world. The speaker is aware that he is no more able to free himself from the grip than he is able to free himself from the grip of a woman who does not return his love, resulting in the pathos of the last lines of the third stanza: Oh if we had woken from this tyranny To destroy this child again, it couldn't be that I loved her, who doesn't love me. (19-21)But it is impossible to take God away from this child, to take back his claims and his creations. To do so would be to give up love, something the lover is not willing to give up: Why do I murmur, / As if I feel the worst that love can do? Love could make me abandon love (22-24). The god of love, taking his powers further, could take away love from men. This, the absence of love and its progeny, poetry, is terrifying to Donne, and would seem to be the ultimate fear, but Donne declares that there is an even worse one. The god of love may feel a deeper plague, to make her love me too, / which, since she loves first, I am reluctant to see (25-26). Love could force correspondence where it is illegitimate and unnatural, taking.