Donne's "Love's Usury"

This poem is John Donne's plea to personified Love, in the form of a god, to allow him to indulge his lust for awhile yet before settling down in old (or perhaps middle) age with love. The first two lines of the poem contain both middle and end rhyme with the word "thou," "now," and "allow," all of which also share assonance with "hour." The are also the important words of meaning in these lines; Donne is basically asking Love to give him time. The third line reveals the true bargaining nature of the poem, when the speaker offers Love twenty hours later for each hour now, along with the gripe of calling him a "usurious god," as though the terms of Love were unfair and even illegal.

But the speaker agrees to pay Love his due, even the unfair amount he requires, if the speaker is free to "let his body range" until he has as many gray hairs as brown. The continuing rhyme in the poem, as well as the iambic pentameter of all but two of the lines (including, significantly, the last) add to the wheedling tone of the poem, like a child explaining why he should have another cookie, and promising to be really good for weeks and weeks if only they could have this one cookie. This speaker is after something slightly more adult than cookies, of course, but this just makes the humor of the rhyme stand out more. His desire to "travel, sojourn, snatch, plot, have, forget" in line six details his desires of infidelity, and the basic lack of any sort of unity in these words -- there does not appear to be more than the accidental alliteration -- also reflects the speaker's disconnect from the many conquests he hopes to make by striking this bargain with Love. The last two lines of the poem reveal that the speaker is not really this cynical, however; he desires to "think that yet / We'd never met." He admits to having met Love; it is too late for him, which is why the bargaining seems so comically desperate.

The tone is very different in the Holy Sonnets, which seem fearful of death and sin, though some of the humor is still apparent if carefully looked for. The tone is somewhat more serious, but never entirely so.