The poem begins by situating Donne’s place in history as a poet with a metaphor suggesting that with his death, poetry itself has become a widow. This elevation of Donne to a position figuratively coincident with being the father of all poets who follow in his wake is followed over the course of the next ten lines with a series of rhetorical queries that cement the opening conceit that Donne’s place in the history of verse is singularly important and impressive. The line questioning becomes an interrogation of self leading the poet to finally muse over the possibility that none of those left in the wake of Donne’s departure have the proper quality of voice to equal that of Donne capable of making the effort to honor him in verse; any attempt is inevitably going to be out of tune.
The tune suddenly shifts to that of Donne as not poet, but preacher. The speaker recognizes that Donne’s death will result in sermons from the pulpit, but suggests that the content here will also be a failing in comparison to Donne. The speaker suggests that within Donne’s poetry, the message delivered in sermons reached a height of skill incapable of being met by any sermon by revealing dark truths that flights of fancy spoken within churches would not restricted from exposing. In other words, Donne was more than a poet, he was a master of rhetoric whose relationship to poetry was not just emotional, but intellectual.
This being settled, the speaker now offers evidence on how Donne revolutionized that intellectual foundation upon which emotional truths could be constructed. With a reference to the Muses, Donne is given credit for purging British poetry of empty imitation of classical poetic structuring. Allusions to ancient poetry by Anacreon and Pindar lead the speaker to hail Donne as the poet with the courage to stop relying upon wordplay and grammatical trickery instead of looking to write honestly and truthfully. In forging a new path not reliant upon the conventions in place for a millennia, Donne created his own legendary place in the history of poetry by eschewing dependence upon ancient forms that had developed into something akin to superstition rather than logical applications. The speaker credits Donne with recognizing that those ancient conventions were created for the purpose of writing in ancient languages, but that English is ill-suited for such adherence. In this manner, the poet implicitly credits Donne with being the creator of British poetry. This explication of what makes Donne such a singularly significant figure in the history of poetry comes to a conclusion with ten lines suggesting that when the English was still new and not yet used up by poets, those poets still failed to use verse for its full expression in the way that Donne was able to do even after all that previous poetry had already been composed. Donne, in other words, took a used language and made it sparkle like something new just driven off the lot.
The concluding section of the poem is broken off from the previous section with a convention of the elegiac form asking what comes next now that the subject is gone. The initial response is that Donne’s revolution of tradition will be far too difficult to live up to and new rules will be impossible to adhere to by those lacking the same desire for originality. The speaker predicts a long period in which British poets will revert back to the very same mimicry of ancient conventions that Donne worked so hard break from. The prediction for a bleak future goes beyond mere mechanics; these poets lacking originality in form can also be expected to reject the difficulty of seeking innovation in content. Subject matter will also revert to those already covered by the ancients. Having thus elevated Donne to his position of supreme individual accomplishment, the poem draws to an end with a four line epitaph that now moves Donne from husband of poetry to minister of verse to monarch. Donne dies as the king of poetry.
