Air and Angles

Twice or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name ;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be.
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing did I see.
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too ;
And therefore what thou wert, and who,
I bid Love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.

Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
And so more steadily to have gone,
With wares which would sink admiration,
I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught ;
Thy every hair for love to work upon
Is much too much ; some fitter must be sought ;
For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scattering bright, can love inhere ;
Then as an angel face and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
So thy love may be my love's sphere ;
Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air's and angels' purity,
'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.

There are several themes present in the poem "Air and Angels" by John Donne and each carries a particular meaning. Donne’s poem focuses in particularly on the medieval believes regarding angles as the messengers of God, which appear in a human form with wings. An old medieval believe said that angles under some circumstances would take the form of air, explaining the title chose by the poet regarding angles. The major theme in this poem is ‘love’. In this poem Donne’s theory regarding love is that love can not exist in a vacuum (because it has nothing to place it’s roots on) and in things (because they are two dense for giving the fertile terrain to true love), so he states that love can only exist in-between these two aspects of reality. The idea of love in this poem takes a shapeless and physical form which is Donne's idea of angles. Two clear examples of the form of love are shown in the fist stanza. In the first stanza of the poem the poet remembers the love for her lady before that he knew her face or her name(2), the effect of her upon him is compared to the singing of angles: ‘So in a voice, so…’ (3), in this line the poet is asking ‘love’ to possess the woman. In line 3 John Donne clearly illustrates that ‘love’ is in fact air and angels: ‘in a shapeless flame’ proving that air and angles are pure love.

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