What are some common themes in the poems of John Donne?Please discuss in particular the following poems: "The Good-morrow," "The Sunne rising,"...

One theme found in many of the poems of John Donne, both
the secular and religious, is the theme of love. However, love in Donne’s day was often
divided into two kinds. True, selfless, and godly love was often called
caritas, or charity. False, selfish, and ungodly desire was often
called cupiditas. Caritas meant loving God and
God’s creatures as God would love. Cupiditas
was often mere lust rather than genuine affection.

Using
this broad theme as a way of examining some of the poems you mention, one might say the
following:

• “The Good-Morrow” celebrates and
  exemplifies caritas, or true love, as the reference to the lovers’
  “waking souls” (8) suggests.


• The kind of love depicted in
  “The Sun Rising” is more difficult to determine. A case can be made that this poem
  depicts a mild form of cupiditas, especially since the speaker
  seems self-absorbed and also since he disparages honor (24). Donne may be mocking the
  narcissism of this speaker.


• Once again, the kind of love
  depicted in “The Canonization” is not obviously either caritas or
  cupiditas.  Cases can be – and have been – made for both of these
  possibilities.


• In “The Flea,” the love depicted is almost
  certainly mere sexual lust – that is, cupiditas. The speaker merely
  seems to want the woman’s body, and the woman’s rejection of him (along with her desire
  not to engage in “A sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead”[6]), supports this argument.
  At the end of the poem, the speaker has not achieved his objective, having been
  continuously and successfully rebuffed by the virtuous woman.  In poems such as this
  one, Donne seems to mock his cocky speakers and have fun at their
  expense.


• “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” quite
  unambiguously celebrates caritas. It celebrates a love anchored in
  the souls of the two lovers, and it announces that since the love these two share is
  

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Inter-assurèd of the mind, [these
lovers]

Care less eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
(19-20)

• “To His
  Mistress Going to Bed” seems quite clearly a poem emphasizing
  cupiditas and featuring a speaker whose lust becomes almost
  blasphemous by the end of the poem.  It seems safe to assume that Donne is satirizing
  this speaker by letting him show his extreme pride.


• “The
  Relic” is in some ways one of the most interesting poems Donne ever wrote, because it
  begins by presenting a speaker who seems cynical and misogynistic (that is,
  woman-hating), but it ends by revealing that this speaker once shared genuine love,
  rooted in caritas, with a woman who is now
  dead.


• “The Holy Sonnets” and the other religious poems,
  almost by definition, feature caritas. Thus in sonnet 7, the
  speaker shows true love of God when he asks God, “Teach me how to repent” (13). In
  sonnet 10, the speaker expresses faith that God can defeat death:
  

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One short sleep past, we wake
eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt
die.

• “The
  Ecstasy” seems to celebrate caritas (because of all its language
  emphasizing a connection of souls).


• “Love’s Deity” seems
  a meditation on cupiditas (especially because of the references to
  “rage” and to “lust” (17).

Love, then, is a
central theme of Donne's works; the key question, however, is which
kind of love.