John Donne

Air and Angels

TWICE or thrice had I loved thee,

Pre-incarnate love

Donne claims he loved her before meeting her—a paradox setting up the theological argument. Medieval philosophy held souls could love ideals before encountering their earthly forms.

{{gap|1em}}Before I knew thy face or name;
{{gap|1em}}So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame

Angelology reference

Angels were thought to appear as voices or flames because they lack bodies. Donne's using scholastic theology—angels need to 'assume' physical forms to interact with humans.

Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be.
{{gap|1em}}Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing did I see.
{{gap|1em}}But since my soul, whose child love is,

Incarnation logic

The soul takes flesh to act in the world; therefore love (the soul's 'child') must also take a body. He's applying Incarnation theology to romance.

Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
{{gap|1em}}More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too;
{{gap}}And therefore what thou wert, and who,
{{gap|2em}}I bid Love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.
Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
{{gap|1em}}And so more steadily to have gone,
{{gap|1em}}With wares which would sink admiration,
I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught;

Nautical metaphor shift

A pinnace is a small ship; 'overfraught' means overloaded. He thought her beauty would stabilize ('ballast') his love, but it's too much—the ship's sinking from excess cargo.

{{gap|1em}}Thy every hair for love to work upon
Is much too much; some fitter must be sought;
{{gap|1em}}For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scattering bright, can love inhere;
{{gap|1em}}Then as an angel face and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
{{gap|1em}}So thy love may be my love's sphere;
{{gap|2em}}Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air's and angels' purity,

The turn

After 26 lines of intellectual foreplay, Donne lands his real point: women's love is to men's love as air is to angels—less pure, but necessary for incarnation. Casual misogyny dressed as metaphysics.

'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Scholastic Theology as Pickup Line

Donne wrote this around 1600, fresh from his Catholic education and steeped in medieval angelology. The poem's built on a technical theological question: how do immaterial beings interact with matter? Angels, being pure spirit, must 'assume' bodies of air to appear to humans—they wear air like clothing, making themselves less pure but visible.

He applies this framework to his own problem: abstract love (his soul's 'child') is useless without a body to fix on. So love 'assumes' her physical form—'fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.' The first stanza works through Incarnation logic: just as Christ took flesh, just as angels take air-bodies, love must take her body.

But the second stanza flips the script. Her physical beauty overloads the system—'every hair' is too much material for love to work with. He needs something less overwhelming. Enter the angel analogy: her love (less pure, like air) will be the 'sphere' containing his love (pure, like an angel). The final couplet makes explicit what he's been building toward: women's love is inherently inferior to men's, but necessary as the medium through which men's love operates. It's scholasticism weaponized for gender hierarchy.

What 'Sphere' Meant

'Sphere' in line 25 carries specific cosmological weight. In Ptolemaic astronomy (still current when Donne wrote), celestial spheres were transparent shells carrying planets through space. Each sphere contained and guided the heavenly body within it. Angels were thought to govern these spheres—hence the pun on 'angel.'

So when Donne says 'thy love may be my love's sphere,' he's positioning her love as the container and vehicle for his—necessary for motion, but subordinate in purity. The sphere is less refined than what it carries, but it does the actual work of movement through space.

The poem's rhetorical trick is making this hierarchy sound like mutual necessity. Yes, angels need air-bodies to manifest, but the air remains less pure than the angel. The final line's 'disparity' isn't just difference—it's ranked difference, permanent and natural as the gap between spirit and matter.