"The Divinity of Love" is an anti-lyrical poem; rather than lamenting the fickleness of love or celebrating 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 beautifully 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 like the fall of man. But there is no retrograde action; men cannot return to the corresponding mythical garden of love. Disparity, Donne writes, is the "destiny" of love, and so over the course of four stanzas the poem moves 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 Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The opening lines of “Love’s Deity” are surprising. I want to speak with the ghost of an old lover, / Who died before the god of love was born, the speaker suggests (1-2). We are thrown into a strange and paradoxical world: can love exist before the god of love exists; are lovers and beloveds prior to 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 a free and elevated state: I cannot think that he who then loved most, fell so low, that he loved him who loved him despised (3-4). If this is so, if love is prior to god, how was the god of love born? Donne perhaps suggests something akin to the transmigration of souls: the ghost of the old lover, with pure and lofty love, dies, and the god of love is born (1-2). The divinity of love, the subject of Donne's poem, is also the theme of Plato's Symposium, an account of a banquet given by the young poet Agathon during which the guests debate the origin of love. The mythic quality of Donne's poem and the obscuration that accompanies the birth of the god recall Plato's debate. Phaedrus argues, from the Theogony of Hesoid, 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 the following: the parents of love have no place in poetry or legend (p. 9). If the parentage of Donne's god is also uncertain, Donne follows Agathon's speech more closely: he is the youngest of the gods, Agathon declares, and the most delicate; in addition it has a fluid, flexible shape; it is balanced and fluid in nature (32-33). His work is a work of moderation. This is also the work of Donne's divinity in the second stanza. The young deity is conceived as a bureaucrat, taking the true loves he observes with an equal flame that two hearts have touched and confirming them (9-10). Donne writes: “His office was indulgent in matching assets to liabilities. Correspondence / Only its subject was (11-14). The god adapts active lovers to the passive ones of their beloved ones. His work, his correspondence, is a question of weight and balance. Donne's god of love operates in a world in which love already exists by necessity; it is rooted in human nature as a desire for the integrity of the whole. Donne recalls here the myth proposed by Aristophanes in the Symposium: Love is born in every human being; it recalls together the halves of our original nature; he tries to do one out of two and heal the wound of human nature. Each of us is therefore a corresponding half of a human whole. (27) Love, says Aristophanes, is thename of our quest for fullness, of our desire to be complete (29). Donne's divinity operates with this material: halves of wholes, putting them together. His work is simple, good and beautiful in its tranquility; thus, 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 him, he who loves me (14). What causes the fall? As told in the third stanza, the god of love comes to abuse his powers. Like a tyrant, he demands more than what is rightfully his. The god of love grows; he becomes “modern” and greedy. Donne writes that every modern god will henceforth extend his vast prerogative to Jupiter (15-16). Perhaps he is tired of the simplicity and serenity of his work; maybe he is mischievous, still young. In any case, the god of love creates unequal love, lovers who love the one who despises him (4). This is the fate of the god as predicted by the speaker in the first stanza. Vice-nature, custom, validates this destiny, and the new law becomes, I must love him, who does not love me (5-7). Donne suggests that the fall of the god of love brings with it the descent into tyranny and dark frivolity. to a parallel fall in man; To rage, to covet, to write, to congratulate, / All are the domain of the god of love (17-18). Rage, lust, poetry, praise: Donne aligns the new game of divinity with traditional tropes of the courtly unrequited lover. We should revisit Agathon's speech at the Banquet. Agathon's speech follows that of Aristophanes, in which Aristophanes describes love as the desire for fullness, and Love, the god, not as a creator but as a matchmaker: he attracts us towards that which we belongs (30). Agathon rejects Aristophanes' account of love; his Eros is a creator god, source of all arts and crafts, of archery, medicine and prophecy, music, metallurgy and weaving (36). Agathon reflects, the god is such a gifted poet that he can make others into poets: once Love touches him, everyone becomes a poet (35). And in a comic gesture, Agathon, as he speaks eloquently and generously about Love and his domain, says: I am suddenly struck by the need to say something in poetic measure (36). The fall of the god into tyranny brings about the fall. from man to poetry. The god of love, playful and poetic in his invention of unrequited love, pushes man to poetry, to rage, to lust, to writing, to praise (17). Hence is the source of lyrical love poetry, of the sequence of sonnets tracing the changing forms and faces of a lover and his beloved, of creation as lack of fulfillment. Lyric poetry is therefore a property of a fallen world. The speaker is aware that he is incapable of freeing himself from its influence, any more than he is capable of freeing himself from the influence of a woman who does not return his love, hence the pathos from the last lines of the third stanza: Oh was we awakened by this tyranny. To disobey this child again, it couldn't be possible for me to love her, she who doesn't love me. (19-21)But it is impossible to dedicate this child, to take up his pretensions and his creations. It would be to renounce love, something the lover does not want to renounce: Why do I murmur, / As if I felt the worst that love could do? Love could make me leave loving (22-24). The god of love, by pushing his powers further, could take love away from men. This, the absence of love and its offspring, poetry, terrifies Donne and would seem to be the ultimate fear, but Donne states that there is an even worse one. The god of love could try.