Consider the presentation of desire in one drama text and one poetry collection that you have studied

The presentation of desire is interestingly raised in both “The Duchess of Malfi” by John Webster and in a selection of John Donne poems. In general, desire can take many forms, such as the lustful desire for a person, for wealth, power, for love, the list can go on. In the Duchess of Malfi, many of these varying forms arise, an example being the Duchesses desire for love from Antonio. Love is a main theme in both the play and the poems and it can be easily related to by an audience and by readers as everyone has at one point felt some sort of “love” for another. “The Sun Rising” is an excellent example of the desire induced by the speaker’s love for his lady in question. This love is more of a physical bond than it is spiritual as he chides the sun for disrupting his love making. His desire, being so plentiful, causes him to call the sun a “busy old fool” personifying it, and making it seem less powerful, and instead giving it the appearance of an old man. In context, this would have been quite a statement, as the sun would have been seen as one of the most powerful objects in the universe. The sun gives life to the earth, and to insult it is almost like insulting a God. But his desire to love his lady friend is so great, that he does not care what it does, he is already annoyed “Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run? Saucy pedantic wretch”. His argument only continues, his anger for this disruption fuelling his demands toward the sun, “go chide schoolboys…tell…the king…call country ants” he does not care what the sun does as long as it does not bother him and his lover anymore. This is a blatant disregard for social status, much like The Duchesses disregard for status. She does not care that Antonio is of a lower status to her, she only desires to love him, and for him to love her. The only problems that arise for her, come when her brothers’ desires conflict with her own. They wish for her not to “never marry” for they worry that if she were to marry, her heirs may take their inheritance which they so desire. Aside from their desire for their sister not to marry, Ferdinand and the Cardinal have their own personal, some would say, negative desires. Throughout the play, there is a hint that Ferdinand has his own lustful, incestuous desire for his sister, which becomes lightly apparent in his hyperbolic rants at her, there is even times when he makes lewd sexual references to her, “and women like that part, like the lamprey, hath ne’er a bone in’t”. This is obviously a phallic reference, and to a sister, is quite inappropriate. The Cardinal also has his own lustful desires, which in his case, should not even be a desire being that he is sworn to celibacy. His courtship of his mistress Julia, only proves his deceit and tendency to lie, and also shows how horrible of a man he actually is, “I have taken you off your melancholy perch…thou only had kisses from him and high feeding”. Constantly, while talking to her, he refers to her as some sort of animal that is to be owned and fed. Women throughout the play are treated as inferior citizens as well as inferior people, and in context, that is most likely exactly how it was in many societies. Even though the duchess is of a very high status, she is still being controlled by her brothers. Her desire for love could also be seen as a desire for independence, an independence from a male rule society, where she can freely love who she wants be it the stable boy or a prince, “Shall this move me?... so I… will assay This dangerous venture: let old wives report I wink’d and chose a husband”. She does not care what happens, because she has decided that this is what she wants, people can talk and gossip, but she has decided, with her newfound independence, that she would rather risk a “dangerous venture” if the result is that she was able to love again. Although, her desire for love could also be said to be the cause of her eventual ruin which results in the death of her, her love and a child. Desire in this way could be seen as quite destructive. The desire that her brothers feel only seems to bring destruction, mainly to their sister, but the destruction of themselves. The cardinal has gone against everything he is to stand for, consorting with women in lustful pleasures, and trying to control his sister in a manner that is closer to evil than good, giving her hypocritical tips like “wisdom begins at the end”, when he himself will not even look to the end of anything, only enforce people’s ends on themselves. Desire is seen as more positive in John Donne’s poems, for example, “The Good Morrow”, where the speaker writes of his love felt for his lover the night after consummating with her, “if ever any beauty I did see, Which I desired, and got, ‘twas but a dream of thee”. What the speaker is saying is that every past exploit he had before this love, was just in preparation for her, they meant nothing whereas she means everything. His desire for beauty has been encompassed in all his past endeavors, in this one woman. But there are examples in his poetry of a different type of desire. In the poem “Song”, the speaker is basically telling someone that there is no woman on earth that is “true, and fair”. In the last stanza, he goes to say that “if thou find’st one…she Will be False…to two, or three” which is saying that even if he were to find a “true and fair” lady, it would be to no avail because by the time she would be introduced to the speaker, she would have slept with two or three men. In both the poems and the play, there is this idea of women being lower people than men. The duchess’ brothers constantly try to control her, and John Donne, in the most part, sees women merely as sexual devices. For the most part, the way desire is used in the texts is convey the strong feeling of love that the characters and the speakers in the poem feel. In other cases, desire is shown in different ways, whether it is to prove a point about women in the song, or if it is the sexual desire of lust that the cardinal sinfully feels and acts upon. Bosola is also another character, striving for what seems to be revenge and power, revenge over the cardinal and Ferdinand for letting him fall for their own crime, and power so that something like that never happens. Desire for the most part is shown negatively in The Duchess of Malfi, as all those who desire in the play, meet their downfall, whereas in John Donne’s poems, desire is merely the key he uses to show his feelings.