John Donne's Erotica
Donne was, in fact, a rake and a bawd
before he became a preacher and,
in the fullness of time, the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral,
famous for his sermons and celebrated at court.
He wrote poetry throughout this checkered, picaresque career.
Almost none of it was published in his lifetime.
But the range of the work that survives
does include not only canonical love poems like
“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”
but erotica also both intricate and raw.