Break of Day

John Donne is and is not a Renaissance poet. That historical context is problematic. The Renaissance did not happen over a weekend. What contemporary historians term the Renaissance was in fact an evolutionary transition within European culture from a theocentric civilization to a broad humanitarian civilization, a movement away from the logic and assumptions of a culture that collectively positioned the Christian God at its center and one more intrigued by the complexities of humanity itself, informed but not limited by assumptions about a Creator.

John Donne’s historical context is his position now as one of the foremost poetic voices of the Elizabethan Era, important not so much because of how he embodied that historical era as by how his poetry, particularly his love poetry, anticipated its ultimate collapse. “Break of Day” suggests exactly this historical positioning. The poem both summarizes the love poetry of Donne’s historical era—as part of the sea-change brought about by nearly two centuries of evolutionary thought and radical challenges to more than a millennium of theocentric writing, the poem explores a decidedly secular kind of love; the two lovers here represent something other than sacred love. Rather this love is expressed in the muscle and friction of physical love.