John Donne: Poem analysis » Elegie XIX: Going to Bed » Structure and versification in Going to Bed
All Donne’s elegies are written in non-stanzaic form, basically as iambic pentameters rhyming as couplets. It is a very basic poetic form, but suitable for longer poems, a famous example being Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Donne tends to package his sense into couplets, ll.19-23 being a rare exception, moving the form towards the later development of the heroic couplet. And, of course, this enables the poem to finish with a neat couplet to round it off.
Investigating Going to Bed
- Look at the structure of Going to Bed
- Does the poem seem about the right length: i.e. finishing a little before we would like it to?
- Or does it seem to ‘labour’ a joke?
- Is there anything in the poem to suggest that Donne is anything more than a rakish man about town?
- What does the range of subject matter that Donne covers in the whole body of his poetry suggest to you about poetry as a whole?
The technical name for a verse, or a regular repeating unit of so many lines in a poem. Poetry can be stanzaic or non-stanzaic.
A term used of speech rhythms in blank verse; an iambic rhythm is an unstressed, or weak, beat followed by a stressed, or strong, beat. It is a rising metre.
A line containing five stressed syllables or feet.
A rhyming 2-line unit of verse.
Lines of iambic pentameter (i.e. lines containing five metrical feet each consisting of a short followed by a long syllable) which rhyme in pairs (aa, bb, cc).
Bookmark this page with: