'Sexual possession of the female is characteristically equated with territorial acquisition'

'His masculinity of expression'

'sexualised vision Donne puts forward in his poetry'

'Coterie poems were written as performances'

'Donne's contradictoriness... bespeaks a penchant for bravura, virtuosic performance'

'Intensely lived reality of voice'

'The spontaneity and linguistic surprise that characterises his best wrought lyrics'

'able to synthesize the essence of drama into his work'

'as readers we are cast into the role of the audience'

THCM 'conveys a mood of majestic endurance that innovatively explicates the 'Carpe-Diem' motif

TSR 'the argument is provocative, given the sun's normal role as a King of the heavenly bodies... and even blasphemous'

TSR 'It is because she moves him to this dramatic urgency that we know her influence... her value is his veneration'

TSR 'The poem's strange power is to cancel, or transcend, or to mock the obvious'

'a question gender criticism raises is how far the love poetry of Donne is written for women at all, or whether its written for other male members of his coterie'

'Donne treats argument not as an instrument for discovering truth but as a flexible poetic accessory'

'We are almost always aware of where Donne's speakers are'

'The lovers confidence is a kind of courage'

'Donne's poetry plays on the uncertainties of the time'

'We feel the conflict between space and time as a premonition of failure or decline'

TSR 'Our pleasure in the imaginative power of the lover is undercut by our knowledge of the sun's unstoppable passage'

'Colloquial immediacy and freedom from metrical regularity'

'Donne satirises worldlings and makes fun of the besotted lover'

'The poem as a vehicle of persuasion'

TSR 'The opening is a deliberate downgrading of the aubade, or dawn-poem, inversion of hierachal associations of the sun with virtue, kingship and authority'

'intellectual rigour which characterises Donne's poetry'

'His commitment to reason is fundamental... his poetry employs a linguistic mode dedicated to the arts of argumentative persuasion'

TSR 'a poem of conversation and wild, joyful hyperbole'

TSR 'The poet's ecstatic happiness is expressed in wild exaggeration to the point of self-mockery'

NUSLD 'gives sense of total loss both intellectual definition & emotional intensity'

NUSLD 'The poem begins quietly w/ heavy stresses, slow movement & repetition which produce a sense of deep melancholy'

THCM 'The range of emotions & evocative power makes the poem one of the greatest expressions of basic opposition of human life; love versus death'

'Donne's famous roughness & irregularities of rhythm are a part of his profession of masculinity of language'

NUSLD 'A fine, tender expression of love in the form of a meditation for nocturn'

NUSLD 'The speaker is lying on the bed, so drained of life, he seems to be the 'epitaph' for the general interment of the world'

TF 'a witty attempt of a lover to convince his lady to be in his body as well as spirit'

TF 'The speaker is involved in a dramatic dialogue with his mistress, where she is given the opportunity to answer back, though her replies are inaudible to us'

TF 'The stanza is linked to the movement of the action between persona and the implied participant'

BMH '14 verbs, dominated by command... introduce us to a sphere of powerful emotional activity'

'climactic sexuality of the sestet'

BMH 'he relishes the idea of being manned'

THCM 'Time is bearing down, and with it the entire weight & fury of the patriarchal tradition'

THCM 'Time is bearing down, and with it the entire weight & fury of the patriarchal tradition'

THCM 'Marvell takes the conventional plea to new heights of imaginative wit'

THCM 'The lightly teasing tone, the easy fluidity of the argument'

THCM; 'He reflects the earnest dream of every lover; timelessness'

THCM 'Marvell's poem, in its listing of the parts of the mistress' body to be praised is dismemberment comparable to a doctor's dissection'

THCM 'In a world where riches were for male possession, it seems reasonable to assume the female reader may have had a cynical view of imagery which equates the woman with wealth'