John Donne: Love’s Philosophy (1969)

… Donne’s love-poems take for their basic theme the problem of the place of human love in a physical world dominated by change and death. The problem is broached in dozens of different ways, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, sometimes by asserting the immortality of love, sometimes by declaring the futility of love. Thus the Songs and Sonets hold within themselves every conceivable attitude toward love threatened by change. At the one extreme lie the cynical, cavalier songs, the famous ‘Goe, and catche a falling starre’, or ‘The Indifferent’, spoken by one who can ‘love any, so she be not true’.