WOUNDED HEARTS AND WITTY TEARS: EXPLORING MELANCHOLIC LOVE IN JOHN DONNE

John Donne (1572–1631), the foremost metaphysical poet of the English Renaissance, repeatedly intertwines erotic love with a pervasive sense of melancholy. This paper examines how Donne’s poetry presents love not as uncomplicated joy but as an experience inseparable from anxiety, mutability, absence, and the anticipation of loss. Drawing primarily on the Songs and Sonets, Holy Sonnets, and selected elegies, and verse letters, the study argues that Donne’s melancholy is neither incidental nor merely fashionable but structurally essential to his conception of love. Love, in Donne, is ecstatic precisely because it is precarious; its intensity derives from the ever-present shadow of death, separation, faithlessness, and cosmic decay. The paper concludes that Donne transforms the conventional Petrarch an melancholy of unrequited love into a metaphysical melancholy that interrogates the nature of being, time, and salvation itself.