that time were discarded by the Church because they conflicted with the official model of the universe which made the earth and humankind the center of everything. John Donne was aware of the controversy between the astronomers and the Church, and this awareness can be detected in his poems. There is evidence that Donne was keenly interested in the scientific developments of his time, although as a religious man he was somewhat skeptical of them. In addition, because he was a religious man, Donne considered the scientific developments of his age to be signs of God's plan falling apart. Because of this, in The Anniversaries, Donne referred to the new astronomy as being a sign of the decay and decline of Western civilization. Nevertheless, for the most part, Donne kept an open mind about the new developments in astronomy and science despite his religious orientation to life. In the course of his poems, Donne showed a growing awareness of the new views in astronomy in which he reserved judgment while at the same time acknowledging the destructive influence of the new views on the traditional structures of the Church. Because of his open-minded attitude toward the subject, it has been noted that "Donne was an Elizabethan who became a modern, in the sense of his response to the great breakthroughs of scientific knowledge and the expanding world sense of his age" (Fuller 90).
Donne's early poems, such as those contained in Songs and Sonnets, show a strong traditional orientation. His use of astronomical images in those poems assume a Ptolemaic view of the universe. This can be seen, for example, in the poem "Love's Growth." In this treatment of the love of a woman, Donne indicates that, just as the light of the sun enables us to see the stars in the night-sky, the light of the soul within the body enables us to see the material manifestations of love. A.J. Smith, in his notes to Donne's poems, points out that the idea that all...