The Full Text of “Air and Angels”
1Twice or thrice had I lov'd thee,
2Before I knew thy face or name;
3So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
4Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be;
5 Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
6Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.
7 But since my soul, whose child love is,
8Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
9 More subtle than the parent is
10Love must not be, but take a body too;
11 And therefore what thou wert, and who,
12 I bid Love ask, and now
13That it assume thy body, I allow,
14And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.
15Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
16And so more steadily to have gone,
17With wares which would sink admiration,
18I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught;
19 Ev'ry thy hair for love to work upon
20Is much too much, some fitter must be sought;
21 For, nor in nothing, nor in things
22Extreme, and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere;
23 Then, as an angel, face, and wings
24Of air, not pure as it, yet pure, doth wear,
25 So thy love may be my love's sphere;
26 Just such disparity
27As is 'twixt air and angels' purity,
28'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.
The Full Text of “Air and Angels”
1Twice or thrice had I lov'd thee,
2Before I knew thy face or name;
3So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
4Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be;
5 Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
6Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.
7 But since my soul, whose child love is,
8Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
9 More subtle than the parent is
10Love must not be, but take a body too;
11 And therefore what thou wert, and who,
12 I bid Love ask, and now
13That it assume thy body, I allow,
14And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.
15Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
16And so more steadily to have gone,
17With wares which would sink admiration,
18I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught;
19 Ev'ry thy hair for love to work upon
20Is much too much, some fitter must be sought;
21 For, nor in nothing, nor in things
22Extreme, and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere;
23 Then, as an angel, face, and wings
24Of air, not pure as it, yet pure, doth wear,
25 So thy love may be my love's sphere;
26 Just such disparity
27As is 'twixt air and angels' purity,
28'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.
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“Air and Angels” Introduction
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John Donne's notoriously complex poem "Air and Angels" explores the connection between spiritual and material love, as well as the contrast between male and female love. The speaker argues that love, like a soul, needs a body in order to enter the physical world and act. He initially says that love itself has come to live in his beloved's body, but goes on to reject this idea. Love is like an angel, he argues, building on Renaissance theologians' belief that angels are beings of pure thought who can only appear to people by taking on bodies made of air (considered the purest of the traditional elements, though not quite as pure as angels themselves!). Likewise, love can't just take on mortal flesh, but rather needs a body that's nearly as pure as love itself in order to walk the earth. Exactly how such a miracle might come about becomes the theme of this brain-twisting poem. Like the vast majority of Donne's verse, this poem wasn't published until after his death; it first appeared in the 1633 collection Poems.
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“Air and Angels” Summary
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Before I ever knew you, I'd already loved you two or three times. We meet angels in just the same way; they appear to us as a voice, or as a wavering tongue of fire, and we worship them. Likewise, when I met you, what I saw at first was some gorgeous, immaterial thing. But my soul (the parent of Love) has a body—if it weren't, it couldn't do anything, after all. And since Love is my soul's child, it can't be less material than my soul; it needs a body, as well. I thus asked Love to reveal to me who you were and what your background was. Now, I believe, Love has taken shape in your body, affixing itself to your lips, your eyes, your forehead.
I thought that, once my love was embodied in you, it would travel along more steadily, like a loaded and well-balanced ship, carrying glorious goods that would sink the metaphorical ship of a mere crush. But then, I understood that I had loaded love's boat too heavily. Even a single hair of yours is too overwhelming for love to work on; I need some more fitting vessel for my love. For love can't live in nothing, but it also can't live in something so extraordinarily, gloriously bright as your hair. When angels take on bodies, they make them out of air, which (though it isn't as pure as the angels themselves) is still pure. In that case, rather than taking on your body, my love must embody itself in your love. The difference between the purity of air and the purity of an angel is just the same as the difference between the purity of women's love and the purity of men's love, and always will be.
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“Air and Angels” Themes
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Spiritual and Physical Love
“Air and Angels” explores the spiritual and physical dimensions of love. The poem's speaker argues that, just as a soul can’t do anything unless it has a body, love can’t act without some kind of physical form. In this way, the speaker suggests, love is like an angel. According to Renaissance theology, angels are beings of pure thought; they appear to people by taking on bodies made of air. The speaker concludes that the immaterial ideal of Love must therefore act similarly: it must become embodied in order to enter the world.
At first, the speaker believes that his love has come to life on earth by manifesting in his beloved’s body, taking shape in her “lip, eye, and brow.” She, in other words, strikes him as the glorious embodiment of Love itself. But he ultimately decides that this idea doesn’t quite work. Love, as something ideal and divine, can’t live purely in the physical world any more than it can live in “nothing.”
Here he turns again to the idea of how angels work and suggests that, rather than his beloved’s body, his love might take its shape through his beloved’s love for him. Just as an angel takes on a body of air—imagined as the purest and most refined element in Donne's day—the speaker's love will take on a body made of his beloved’s feelings for him. Their two loves have to come together in order to exist in the world; one can’t exist without the other.
Besides expressing a complex philosophical idea, this is the speaker’s way of celebrating the fact that his beloved loves him back. And the speaker's vision of his beloved's feelings physically encompassing his, becoming their "sphere," also suggests that sexual connection might also be involved in wholehearted love!
In this poem, the speaker's love involves the intersection of two different components, a connection that produces something new. Love lands right between the physical and the spiritual, neither purely bodily nor purely intellectual.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Women's Love vs. Men's Love
In “Air and Angels,” women and men must rely on each other to bring love into the world. In a complex conceit, the poem’s speaker imagines his love as something like an angel—in Renaissance theology, a being of pure thought that had to take on a body of air in order to appear to human beings and act on earth. If his love is going to live, the speaker realizes, then it will need to take some kind of body too. And while he at first imagines that his beloved’s body is the right medium to give his love shape, he at last decides that it’s “much too much” to ask that love should take on human flesh, no matter how beautiful that flesh might be. Instead, he concludes that his beloved’s feelings for him can be the “air” to the “angel” of his feelings for her. Rather ungallantly, then, he appears to conclude that love can come into the world precisely because there’s a “disparity” between the “purity” of love that women and men feel for each other. His love, in this vision, is something as pure as an angel, while his beloved’s love is merely as pure as air: something very refined and ethereal, but physical nonetheless.
That “disparity” isn’t a problem, though. In fact, it’s necessary if love is going to exist. The difference between the love that women and men feel, the speaker suggests, is necessary if love is going to come into the world. Women and men rely on each other to give love shape and life. A very simple way of approaching this idea might be: love in the abstract is a beautiful idea, but it’s not exactly full-fledged love unless it can come to life between two different people.
While this vision draws on some rather misogynistic Renaissance ideas about women as more fleshly and men as more spiritual, it also cuts against the grain of those ideas by suggesting that women and men aren’t locked in some terrible battle of the sexes, tormenting each other by their difference. Far from it: they depend on each other to bring an angelic, divinely beautiful love to life on earth. And if women's love isn't as pure as men's, it's still pretty darn pure!
Readers should also note that there’s a whole lot of critical debate about whether the speaker is saying that men’s love is purer than women’s, that women’s love is purer than men’s, or (paradoxically) both at once! While the former reading is the most obvious, it’s far from the only possible interpretation here. What really matters in “Air and Angels” is not which of the parties in a heterosexual romance has the more or less refined flavor of love. It’s that love comes from a meeting of differences, a merging in which two separate people’s loves bring each other to life.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Air and Angels”
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Lines 1-6
Twice or thrice had I lov'd thee,
Before I knew thy face or name;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be;
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.“Air and Angels” is a passionate love poem—and one of metaphysical poet John Donne’s trickiest, shiftiest works. Its complexities unfold from its very first lines. As the poem begins, the speaker, a lover, appears to be paying his beloved a tremendous compliment. But he might also be trying to excuse his own past romantic dalliances. For that matter, he might be doing both of these things at once.
He begins by telling his beloved that he had already loved her “twice or thrice” before he even knew her “face or name.” This is possible, he says, because that’s how angels work: they appear from time to time in a “voice” or a “shapeless flame,” calling out to people or dazzling them without fully revealing themselves. They appear and they “affect us,” the speaker says—language that means two things at once:
- Angels “affect” people in that they have an effect on them, certainly.
- But they also “affect” people in the sense of “have affection for”: angels put in their benevolent appearances on earth in order to share divine love.
The speaker, then, is telling his beloved she’s nothing less than an angel, a being of heavenly intensity. Readers here might want to think about what that would mean to a Renaissance Christian theologian like Donne (who served as an important Protestant clergyman in 17th-century London):
- A Renaissance-era angel wouldn’t be a winged lady in a white robe twanging on a harp, but a dazzling, brilliant force, a herald of God.
- The imagery of that “shapeless flame” gets at how awe-inspiring a visitation from such an angel might feel: the flame’s shapelessness conjures up an ever-shifting billow of fire, something ungraspable, powerful, bright, and dangerous.
If the speaker has already met his beloved “twice or thrice” as one might have first contact with an angel, then, he’s had some “shapeless,” mighty-but-elusive glimpse of his love for her before. In other words, he’s perhaps imagined what it might be like to love somebody like he loves her, or he’s had some hint of what his heart is capable of. But never until she came into his life did he experience the full force of love—a force, he suggests, that’s past full human comprehension. At the beloved’s first appearance to the speaker, she struck him as “some lovely glorious nothing,” a paradoxical image that suggests her loveliness was so transcendent it was beyond him, perhaps even beyond this world. He loved her so much he felt he was seeing something unreal.
This is a deeply passionate image of romantic love bringing heaven to earth. But there’s a twist in its tail. When the speaker says that he felt he’d encountered his beloved “twice or thrice” before he knew her, he might also be making an excuse for having been with two or three other ladies before she turned up! In this reading, those other women were heralds of his true beloved; he caught a glimpse of her beauty in their mere prettiness, maybe, or a hint of his feelings for her in a brief moment of passion. Certainly this is still a compliment, but one that vibrates at a very different pitch.
Both of these possibilities, the divine and the earthy, are present at the same time—and that is all part of what makes this poem as dizzying and dazzling as it is. “Air and Angels” will go on to contemplate the relationship of heavenly and earthly love through a series of double meanings and elusive metaphors, attempting to represent a love so great that—like a “shapeless flame”—it just can’t be grasped.
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Lines 7-14
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too;
And therefore what thou wert, and who,
I bid Love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow. -
Lines 15-20
Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
And so more steadily to have gone,
With wares which would sink admiration,
I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught;
Ev'ry thy hair for love to work upon
Is much too much, some fitter must be sought; -
Lines 21-25
For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere;
Then, as an angel, face, and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure, doth wear,
So thy love may be my love's sphere; -
Lines 26-28
Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air and angels' purity,
'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.
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“Air and Angels” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Conceit
The poem’s central conceit (or elaborate extended metaphor) draws on an esoteric point of Renaissance theology. In the Christian belief of Donne’s era, angels were said to be creatures of pure thought: living divine ideas. In order to serve their role as God’s messengers and appear to human beings—lower, fleshier creatures—angels had to build themselves bodies of air (considered the purest of the four traditional elements in Donne's day, more refined than fire, water, or earth). As a material thing, air could never be as exalted and pure as an angel is, but it would be the best of the available options! Both of the speaker’s major arguments to his beloved rest on this idea.
In the first stanza, the speaker suggests to his beloved that she has appeared to him “twice or thrice” before he met her—just in a different form. Readers might interpret this statement in one of a couple of (contradictory!) ways:
- He’s had two or three lovers before her, but he knows that they were just imperfect manifestations of the love she finally revealed to him in its most perfect form. In that sense, these earlier lovers were the “air” to the “angel” that is his beloved.
- He’s had imaginative glimpses of a love as perfect as the one he felt for her before, but never found it manifested in this world until she appeared and embodied perfect love for him. In this sense, the beloved is the “air” to the “angel” of pure love.
Either way, the speaker realizes that this idea won’t quite do. In the second stanza, he observes that love can’t “inhere” (that is, become spiritually manifest) either in “nothing”—for it needs a body to work through—or in mortal flesh like his beloved’s. The only “air” that can embody the “angel” of love fittingly is the beloved’s love for the speaker.
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
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Metaphor
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Imagery
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Repetition
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Personification
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"Air and Angels" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Thee, Thou, Thy
- Affect
- Wert
- Else could nothing do
- Subtle
- Bid
- Assume
- Fix
- Ballast
- Pinnace
- Overfraught
- Scatt'ring bright
- Then, as an angel, face, and wings / Of air, not pure as it, yet pure, doth wear
- Sphere
- Disparity
- 'Twixt
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Old-fashioned ways of saying "you" and "your":
- "Thee" is the object form of "you," as in "I love thee"
- "Thou" is the subject form of you, as in "Thou art my beloved"
- "Thy" means "your"
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Air and Angels”
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Form
“Air and Angels” is divided into two 14-line stanzas. Those 14 lines might ring a bell for readers familiar with English poetry: they hint at the sonnet form, calling up a kind of poem often used to discuss matters of love. But Donne picks up the sonnet shape only to turn it topsy-turvy. Besides the strange, irregular rhyme scheme and meter here, these stanzas resemble Italian sonnets turned upside down:
- An Italian sonnet begins with an octave (an eight-line passage, in which the speaker introduces a problem or a question) and ends in a sestet (a six-line passage, in which the speaker resolves that question, often in a surprising way).
- The stanzas in this poem, by contrast, open with sestets and close with octaves—and they raise more questions than they answer!
The unexpected complexity of this poem’s form matches the complexity of the speaker’s thought. Heaping metaphor on metaphor, calling up the traditional sonnet form and then turning it on its head, the speaker attempts to capture love: a force too airy and pure for this world. Just as the speaker does his best to figure out how his love can take shape on earth, this poem does its best to embody dizzying thought in an unpredictable and elusive shape.
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Meter
Like many of Donne’s poems, “Air and Angels” plays complex games with meter. The poem is mostly iambic—that is, written in iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “Before”—but dances between lines of trimeter (three feet in a row), tetrameter (four feet), and pentameter (five feet). Lines 11-13 provide a sample of each:
And there- | fore what | thou wert, | and who,
I bid | Love ask, | and now
That it | assume | thy bod- | y, I | allow,The pattern in which Donne deploys these changing rhythms is a little different in each stanza. He often breaks from the soothing pulse of pentameter, too—even in his very first line, which runs like this:
Twice or thrice had I lov'd thee,
These complex rhythms carry complex thoughts! Rather than sinking into an easy, gentle, predictable meter, Donne here asks his readers to stay on their toes. The dodge and weave of the poem’s meter suits the speaker’s ethereal, intricate conceit.
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Rhyme Scheme
The strange, weaving rhyme scheme of “Air and Angels” runs as follows:
ABBABACDCDDEEE
This pattern is deceptive in that it might at first trick the reader into expecting one of the traditional rhyme schemes of a sonnet: alongside the 14-line stanzas here (each of which is the length of a sonnet), the ABBA with which the poem begins might suggest the start of an Italian sonnet (a kind of poem whose rhyme scheme always begins ABBA ABBA). But the speaker soon dances out of the way of that pattern, teasing readers of this notoriously complex poem: Keep up!
Note that, while some of the rhymes here might sound slant to a modern-day reader's ear (like "wear" and "sphere" in lines 24-25), many were likely perfect in Donne's 17th-century London accent.
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“Air and Angels” Speaker
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This poem's speaker is a lover who seems to unite extreme and disparate qualities: he might be exalted or jaded, idealistic or cynical, or all these things at once. It's almost impossible to pin this guy down. His love poem may argue that women's love is less pure than men's, that men's love is less pure than women's, that women and men purify each other's imperfect love—or, mysteriously and paradoxically, all these things at once!
In one reading, this poem's speaker is so profoundly in love that he at first feels his beloved might be the very embodiment of Love. But he at last comes to the conclusion that love can't "inhere" in (or spiritually imbue) a lovely mortal body like his beloved's, which is simply "much too much" for love to "work upon." Just as an angel (a being of pure thought) has to build itself a body of air (the purest and most rarified of the traditional four elements), his love needs to make itself a body of something almost, but not quite, as pure as itself.
The speaker decides at last that this substance is his lady's love for him—for women's love, he appears to conclude, must always be just that little bit less pure than men's. Here, the speaker seems to be drawing on an old Renaissance trope (or anxiety) that women's love was weaker and more changeable than men's—a point that Donne memorably groused over in "Go and catch a falling star" and Shakespeare's Viola and Orsino debate in Twelfth Night.
But this is only one reading of the speaker's closing lines—and one that seems rather out of tune with the rest of the poem, in which the speaker suggests that his beloved is an angel come to earth! This notoriously complex poem can also be read to say precisely the opposite thing about the relative purity of men's and women's love. Some critics interpret the words "thy love" and "my love" in line 25 to mean, not that the woman's less pure love will become the medium in which the speaker's love can take shape, but that the speaker himself—his lady's "love" in the sense of her beloved—will become the medium for her more perfect love to take shape in.
However one interprets this poem, there's a complex, sexual image at its heart, in which one love penetrates and gives form to another. As is so often the case in Donne, that passion gets aligned with the divine and the angelic; spirituality and sexuality harmonize here.
As in much of Donne's love poetry, it wouldn't be unreasonable to interpret this speaker as Donne himself, a man whose passions and intellect were equally powerful and dazzling.
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“Air and Angels” Setting
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There’s no clear setting in the poem; the action all takes place in the speaker’s mind, heart, and imagination. But the contents of that mind, heart, and imagination all suggest that the poem is set in Donne’s own time and place: 17th-century England. Through allusions to Renaissance theology (such as the belief that angels became visible by assuming bodies made of condensed air), merchant ships overloaded with wares (like the ones Donne himself sailed on in his youth), and the heavenly spheres (the crystal orbs once thought to hold the planets in their orbits), the speaker makes it clear he's a man of his times.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Air and Angels”
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Literary Context
John Donne (1572-1631) is remembered as one of the foremost of the "metaphysical poets"—though he never called himself one. The later writer Samuel Johnson coined the term, using it to describe a set of 17th-century English poets who wrote witty, passionate, intricate, cerebral verse about love and God. (George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Thomas Traherne were some others.)
Donne was the quintessential metaphysical poet: a master of elaborate conceits and complex sentences, and a great writer of love poems that (as this one does) mingle images of holiness with cheeky puns. But during his lifetime, he was mostly a poet in private. In public life, he was an important clergyman, rising to become Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London.
Donne's mixture of wit, passion, and mysticism fell out of literary favor after his 17th-century heyday. For instance, when Johnson (a leading figure of the 18th-century Enlightenment) coined the term "metaphysical poet," he did not mean it as a compliment; Johnson saw Donne and his contemporaries as obscure and irrational. But 19th-century Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge were stirred by Donne's mixture of philosophy and emotion, and their enthusiasm slowly resurrected Donne's reputation. Donne is now remembered as one of the most powerful and influential of poets, and he's inspired later writers from T. S. Eliot to A. S. Byatt.
Like the vast majority of Donne's poetry, "Air and Angels" didn't appear in print until several years after his death; his collection Poems was posthumously published in 1633.
Historical Context
In his youth, John Donne was a notorious ladies' man with plenty of experience both breaking hearts and having his heart broken. His sometimes foolhardy decision-making around women came to a head in an oddly touching way: when he fell deeply in love with Anne More, an important official's daughter, he eloped with her without getting her family's permission. This romantic leap of faith backfired on him when his wife's angry father had him thrown in prison.
While Donne was eventually reconciled with his father-in-law, this was a rocky beginning to a marriage that would see many difficulties. The Donnes lived in relative poverty for most of their relationship. They had many children, and both of them suffered from various illnesses. In order to stay financially afloat, Donne was often forced to be literally afloat: he sailed on endless business trips all over Europe, and was often away from home for long stretches of time. His passionate love poems often tell the story of tearful farewells.
It was while Donne was away on one of these many business trips that tragedy struck: Anne Donne died giving birth to a stillborn child in 1617. The heartbroken Donne turned to his religious faith for consolation—and to support his surviving children. Under the patronage of King James I, he became a prominent and successful Anglican clergyman, the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. In that capacity, he wrote devotional verse every bit as passionate as his love poetry.
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More “Air and Angels” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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A Portrait of Donne — See a famous portrait of Donne in which he poses as the ideal Renaissance lover.
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Donne's life and work via the Poetry Foundation.
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Donne's Legacy — Read a review of a recent Donne biography that discusses his enduring influence.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by John Donne
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