Critical Analysis Of The Indifferent By John Donne

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Term Paper Title	Critical Analysis Of The Indifferent By John Donne
# of Words	1124
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	4.5

Critical Analysis of "The Indifferent" by John Donne

Critical Analysis of "The Indifferent" by John Donne

        "The Indifferent" by John Donne is a relatively simple love poem in
comparison to his other, more complicated works.  In this poem, "he presents a
lover who regards constancy as a 'vice' and promiscuity as the path of virtue
and good sense" (Hunt 3).  Because of Donne's Christian background, this poem
was obviously meant to be a comical look at values that were opposite the ones
held by Christians.  According to Clay Hunt, "['The Indifferent'] is probably
quite an early poem because of the simplicity and obviousness of its literary
methods, its untroubled gaiety, and its pose of libertinism, which all suggest
that Donne wrote [the poem] when he was a young man about town in Elizabethan
London" (1-2).  The poem "mocks the Petrarchan doctrine of eternal faithfulness,
putting in its place the anti-morality which argues that constancy is a 'heresy'
and that 'Love's sweetest part' is 'variety'" (Cruttwell 153).  The first two
stanzas of the poem seem to be the speaker talking to an audience of people, w
hile the last one looks back and refers to the first two stanzas as a "song."
The audience to which this poem was intended is very important because it can
drastically change the meaning of the poem, and has therefore been debated among
the critics.  While most critics believe that the audience changes from men, to
women, then to a single woman, or something along those lines, Gregory Machacek
believes that the audience remains throughout the poem as "two women who have
discovered that they are both lovers of the speaker and have confronted him
concerning his infidelity" (1).   His strongest argument is that when the
speaker says, "I can love her, and her, and you and you," he first points out
two random nearby women for "her, and her", then at the two that he is talking
to for "you and you."
     The first stanza begins rather simply.  Donne starts every line with
either "I can love" or "Her who."  According to Hunt, the tone of the first
stanza goes from "weary and patient entreaty" to "a climax of irritation at the
end" (4) in the lines "I can love her, and her, and you and you / I can love any,
so she be not true."  The first eight lines simply list opposite character types,
but the last two lines go to "her, and her, and you and you", then to any, "just
before Donne springs the shock statement in the last line" (Hunt 5).  Donne uses
the concept o...

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