Persona and parody in Donne's the anniversaries

Abstract

In each of the poems the speakers reveal their responses to the death of a young girl. The first persona is a puritanical and overly rational speaker who employs rhetoric and scientific thought to explain her death; the second, a speaker of mystical tendencies who tries to transcend the pain of life and death religiously. Donne seems to have composed these poems as a way of examining and parodying opposing seventeenth century philosophies of life and art, a process that leads him to the middle way of Anglicanism and a career as a preacher.