The Politics of Love: The Imagery of Kingshop in the Love Poetry of John Donne and Sir Philip Sidney

Abstract

In many of the love poems of John Donne and Sir Philip Sidney kingship is used as a metaphor to describe passionate love relationships. Kingship and the imagery of monarchy appears in a variety of forms in twelve of Donne's fifty-six love poems, and over thirty of the one hundred-twenty sonnets and songs in Sidney's Astrophel and Stella. However, in only a few of these poems is kingship used metaphorically to show the way power is held and exercised between a man and a woman in love. In five of the Donne poems and nineteen of the sonnets and songs in Astrophel and Stella kingship and the politics of monarchy illuminate how the love relationships between the speaker of the poems and his beloved are constituted •