What are some characteristics of the imagery found in John Donne's poetry?

As is true of the writings of many good poets, John
Donne’s imagery can be highly various and diverse.  Yet Donne’s poems, far more than
those of many other writers, often seem especially unpredictable in the kinds of images
they employ.  Donne was an innovator who extended the breadth and depth of the sorts of
imagery that could be used in English poetry.  Whereas some of the poetry of the
sixteenth century uses imagery in fairly conventional ways, Donne’s imagery is often not
very conventional at all.

In his famous poem “The Flea,”
for instance, Donne’s speaker compares the act of sex to a flea bite. While poems about
fleas were not entirely original, certainly Donne’s is the most famous such poem ever
written, particularly in English. Partly this is because of the unconventionality of
some of the poem’s other imagery, as when the speaker
says,

This
flea is you and I, and this

Our marriage bed and marriage
temple is . . .
(12-13)

Equally unusual is
the poem’s later accusation that the woman who has just crushed the flea has “Purpled
[her] nail in blood of innocence” (20). The examples just quoted illustrate several
characteristic traits of Donne’s imagery, including its vividness, its cleverness, its
wit, its inventiveness, and its capacity to surprise and even to
shock.

Another famous trait of Donne’s use of imagery
involves his ability to extend and develop a single image over many lines.  Such an
image (called a “conceit”) is especially obvious in the final twelve lines of Donne’s “A
Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” in which the male speaker compares his spiritual link
to his female beloved to the link that exists between the two legs of the kind of
“compass” used for measurement and for drawing circles
(25-36).

Donne’s imagery can also be suggestively allusive,
as when, in “Elegy 19. To His Mistress Going to Bed,” he thrice uses imagery of standing
to allude to a male’s erection (4, 12, 24).

Yet Donne could
also use imagery that would have been instantly recognizable to his readers, even as he
develops that imagery in striking and memorable ways.  Thus, it was common during
Donne’s period to imagine Truth or Reason as residing at the top of a mountain, but it
was Donne who breathed great life into that image by writing (in “Satire
3),

. . . On
a huge hill,

Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that
will

Reach her, about must, and about must
go,

And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so . . . .
(79-82)

Here, the repeated
“about must, and about must” mimics the very action it describes, so that the imagery is
memorable in part because it is so literally energetic.  Donne’s images are almost
always vital and striking; one senses that one is dealing with a poet who saw life and
the world freshly for himself, and who could ingeniously communicate that kind of fresh,
vivid vision to others.