“In forgetting thou rememb’rest right”

Abstract

This article revisits the preoccupation with impermanence central to John Donne's Songs and Sonnets by considering how Donne's speakers describe themselves as embedded in unstable metaphors of their own making. The speakers in “The Relic” and “A Valediction of my Name in the Window” use metaphor to navigate questions of romantic and erotic agency, deliberately metaphorizing themselves as a strategy for self-preservation that nonetheless renders them profoundly vulnerable. Their fears that their readers may misapprehend their metaphors – whether by accident or by design – are also legible, I argue, as concerns about the power that comes with understanding them correctly as metaphors.