John Donne's Satires
Author: first_name: John
last_name: Donne
Language: English
Year: 1912

Donne’s Style<br>
In John Donne’s day, a satire was such a poem as a satyr might compose.  Satyrs were rough, savage creatures in Greek mythology, human to the waist but goat from there down.  That is the reason that Donne’s style in these poems exceeds his normal difficulty in syntax, vocabulary, thought, and meter.  His age enjoyed untangling such puzzles, and some poets cultivated obscurity as an art, called asprezza.  Wordplay like “while bellows pant below” (Satyre 2), where the same sylla