Poem of the Day: ‘Air and Angels’

Among the knotty metaphysical poets who populated the first literary generation after Shakespeare, John Donne (1572–1631) is easily the knottiest. His poems are marvels of mental engineering, balancing extended constructions on a single striking conceit, as one might build a cathedral on the foundation of a single Lego brick. Today’s Poem of the Day, “Air and Angels,” is no exception.  
 
Characteristically, even on the level of its form, “Air and Angels” is a love-knot of a poem. Each of its two stanzas constitutes a sonnet, albeit a quirky one. The rhyme scheme begins, in the first stanza, by suggesting a Petrarchan sonnet, with an abba quatrain, but quickly complicates the reader’s expectations by making the quatrain a sestet: abbaab. A quintain follows, cdcdd, and a final tercet, eee. The meter, too, through both stanzas, shifts from tetrameter to pentameter, then contracts to trimeter in line twelve of each stanza. At every moment, the form itself refuses to lull us with its regularity, but instead presses itself on our attention.

But then so does the poem’s thought process, inextricable from the form. It begins with the idea of love as a sacramental presence, everywhere invisible and incorporeal, as angels are. Met with a particular you, however, the poem’s speaker modifies this initial idea. As his soul’s “parent” and creator is not merely love, but love incarnate, so he accepts the necessity of his own body — his own embodiedness — as also expressive of love, as is his beloved’s body. She may be like an angel, but she is not an angel. Love, for the two of them, is suddenly not only transcendent, but immanent. It is somewhere in particular, and something in particular. It is someone in particular. Though it lives and moves in a larger element, human love has, and is, matter.

This epiphany brings us to the end of the first sonnet-stanza. It might seem to us to be epiphany enough. But Donne, unsatisfied, presses on. Having identified love as something universal and spiritual, but also something particular and incarnate, he proceeds to parse the structure of the particular love, between the two embodied people. Again the angel conceit presents itself: angels are like air, but they aren’t air. The two exist in relationship. One forms an element, and the other, though it’s like the first, moves within it, as the earth turns at the center of its atmosphere. “So thy love may be my love’s sphere,” he says. Her love wears his love as angels wear the air.