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Two Poems by John Donne

This paper will discuss the images of astronomy in John Donne's The Anniversaries and Songs and Sonnets. John Donne was an English poet who lived during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. From 1615 until his death in 1631, Donne devoted most of his time to the work of preaching. Therefore, the majority of his poems were written prior to the year 1615. The poems in Songs and Sonnets, for example, were composed between the years 1598 and 1605. The Anniversaries was composed in about the year 1610.

The early 1600s, when Donne was writing his most important poems, was a time of rapid scientific development in the Western world. Many of the scientific discoveries of that period were shocking in terms of the traditional beliefs of the Catholic Church. One of the most shocking discoveries of that time was in the field of astronomy. In the early 1500s, Nicolaus Copernicus developed a model of the universe which sharply contrasted that of ancient tradition. The ancient model of the universe was known as the Ptolemaic model, because it was named after Ptolemy, an astronomer of ancient Greece. According to Ptolemy's view of the universe, which was adopted by the official Church in medieval times, the earth stands still at the center of the universe, with the sun and planets revolving around it. Nicolaus Copernicus contested this point of view by introducing a new model of the universe, which also happens to be the true scientific model. According to Copernicus, the sun is the center of the solar system, and the earth and planets revolve around it.

During Donne's time in the early 1600s, the scientists Galileo and Johann Kepler provided support for the Copernican theory. Even though their research was based on the use of the most advanced telescopes and mathematical calculations of the time, both Galileo and Kepler were persecuted by the Church for their controversial beliefs. The views of the astronomers of...

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Two Poems by John Donne. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 15:01, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1704916.html