To His Mistress Going to Bed (Elegy 19) Quotes

Quotes

"Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread In this love’s hallow’d temple, this soft bed."

lines 17-18

In this quote, Donne is making a Biblical allusion to Exodus 3, where Moses is commanded to remove his shoes because he is standing on holy ground. In telling his mistress to remove her shoes to climb into bed, the narrator is making the claim that, since sex is a holy act, the place where it is consummated must be holy as well, and therefore a bed is "love's hallow'd temple." This appeal seems grossly misused, and more than a little heretical, but it seems to be working for him.

"As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be, To taste whole joys."

lines 34-35

Here Donne is almost referencing a bit of Platonic philosophy, or at least a Neoplatonic element of the Christian religion. This line insinuates that souls must be "unbodied" to experience the highest form of joy. This points either to Platonic philosophy, which contends that the pleasures of the intellect are purer and more powerful than those of the body, or to a particular sect of Christianity that believes in the ascension of the soul and the complete discarding of the body in the afterlife, referencing a completely immaterial Paradise. Either way, he's saying that nakedness is the most natural state from which to experience full joy.

"To teach thee, I am naked first; why then What needst thou have more covering than a man?"

lines 47-48

In this quote, the narrator reveals his last strategy: "I've done it, so it's your turn!" The final line, moreover, has a double entendre: "more covering than a man" means both "wearing more clothing than the man is" and "having anything besides a man for covering," both of which are certainly sexually suggestive on multiple levels.

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