The Ecstasy

The Ecstasy is John Donne's love poem in which an apparently still encounter becomes an extended philosophical argument. Two lovers sit on a riverbank while the speaker imagines their souls meeting beyond ordinary bodily action. The argument then returns to the body as a necessary means through which spiritual affection becomes known. Its deliberate movement between abstraction and physical presence gives the poem a characteristic tension, asking how different dimensions of human love can belong to the same relationship.