The Full Text of “The Apparition”
1When by thy scorn, O murd'ress, I am dead
2 And that thou think'st thee free
3From all solicitation from me,
4Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
5And thee, feign'd vestal, in worse arms shall see;
6Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,
7And he, whose thou art then, being tir'd before,
8Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think
9 Thou call'st for more,
10And in false sleep will from thee shrink;
11And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou
12Bath'd in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie
13 A verier ghost than I.
14What I will say, I will not tell thee now,
15Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,
16I'had rather thou shouldst painfully repent,
17Than by my threat'nings rest still innocent.
The Full Text of “The Apparition”
1When by thy scorn, O murd'ress, I am dead
2 And that thou think'st thee free
3From all solicitation from me,
4Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
5And thee, feign'd vestal, in worse arms shall see;
6Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,
7And he, whose thou art then, being tir'd before,
8Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think
9 Thou call'st for more,
10And in false sleep will from thee shrink;
11And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou
12Bath'd in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie
13 A verier ghost than I.
14What I will say, I will not tell thee now,
15Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,
16I'had rather thou shouldst painfully repent,
17Than by my threat'nings rest still innocent.
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“The Apparition” Introduction
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In John Donne's "The Apparition," a heartbroken, furious, rejected speaker tells his one-time beloved exactly how he's going to get his revenge on her. When he dies of heartbreak—as he's certain he will—his ghost will haunt her, making her so miserable she'll be sorry she ever rejected him. Readers might smell an irony here: the speaker, not his beloved, seems like the haunted one, so consumed is he by jealous fury. Like most of Donne's poetry, "The Apparition" was first published posthumously in the 1633 collection Poems.
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“The Apparition” Summary
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When I've died of heartbreak from your rejection, you female murderer, and you think I'm never going to bother you again: that's when I'll visit your bed as a ghost, where I'll see you, you false virgin, in the arms of a worse man than I. Your weak candle will begin to flicker, and your new lover, who'll already be tired out from sex, will (if you try to wake him up) think you want more sex from him. He'll pretend to be asleep and move away from you. Then, shaking like a slender tree, you'll lie there all alone, drenched in freezing sweat, looking even more like a ghost than I do. I won't tell you the awful words I'll say to you, just in case they scare you so much that you change your mind about me now. Since I don't love you one bit anymore, I'd rather you suffer pain and regret later on than take me back because you're scared of my threats.
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“The Apparition” Themes
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Rejection and Revenge
Furious that he’s been rejected, the speaker of “The Apparition” warns his beloved that he’ll get his revenge: after he dies of heartbreak (as he’s certain he will), he’ll haunt her even as she lies in another man’s bed. Rejected love, this poem suggests, can sour into the bitterest hatred.
The poem’s speaker feels deeply wronged by his beloved: by rejecting him, she’s become a “murd’ress” (that is, a female murderer) in his eyes. His love for her was so strong that he feels as if he’s going to die now that she’s turned him down. Rather than pining away sorrowfully or bravely hoping that his beloved will be happier without him, however, this speaker plots revenge. When he inevitably dies of a broken heart, he warns, he’ll come back and haunt his beloved while she’s lying in bed with another man.
In a detailed and nasty fantasy, the speaker describes the scene: his ghostly form will appear, his beloved will try to wake her new lover up, her lover will pretend not to notice her, and she’ll be left alone in a terrified “cold quicksilver sweat.” Worst of all, the speaker says, he’ll whisper awful words to her—words so dreadful that he won’t tell her what they are now, in case she’s so frightened she tries to take him back now to save herself from her terrible fate. Rejection has clearly transformed the speaker’s intense love into equally intense hatred.
Of course, the speaker’s hyperbolic and melodramatic fantasy is just that: a fantasy. When he claims that his love is “spent” and gone and he wouldn’t take his lover back even if she begged him, readers get a distinct whiff of sour grapes. The pain of heartbreak leaves the speaker with nothing to do but retreat into his tormented imagination, darkly plotting a revenge he can (probably) never enact. Ironically enough, the speaker is the one who’s haunted by the dreadful visions he conjures up.
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Women's Hypocrisy and Male Jealousy
This poem’s speaker, a rejected lover, is outraged that his beloved has turned him down on the basis that she’s a “vestal,” a virgin. In the speaker’s mind, she most certainly isn’t (or at least won’t be for long): she’ll turn right around and sleep with someone else, mark his words. Drawing on 17th-century stereotypes about women’s lust and deceitfulness, this poem’s speaker suggests that women are often untrustworthy and hypocritical in love. Of course, the speaker's diatribe might say more about himself than it does his beloved; what he calls hypocrisy is just as likely his own jealous insecurity about her sleeping with another man.
According to this poem’s speaker, his beloved is only a “feign’d vestal”: that is, she’s pretending to be a virgin, falsely claiming that she cares too much about her chastity to sleep with him. The angry speaker is certain this can’t be so and imagines that she’ll soon fall into bed with some other, “worse” guy. Such two-faced cruelty, the speaker declares, make his one-time beloved a “murd’ress”: he’ll die of love for her while she blithely goes off with someone else.
Of course, the speaker has no apparent evidence for this fear besides his own fevered imagination. In making these accusations, he’s playing on 17th-century stereotyping: women were once considered to be the more insatiably and dangerously lustful of the sexes. Furious and hurt, he falls back on angry generalization. In this poem's world, the speaker's beloved could easily be lying about her chastity simply because she’s a woman—and women are invariably sexual hypocrites. Readers, meanwhile, probably get the sense that the issue might just boil down to the speaker's jealousy and bruised male ego.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Apparition”
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Lines 1-3
When by thy scorn, O murd'ress, I am dead
And that thou think'st thee free
From all solicitation from me,"The Apparition" begins with a bang. The speaker, a scorned lover, confronts the woman who rejected him, abruptly telling her she's nothing better than a "murd'ress," a female murderer. Any moment now, the speaker assures her, he'll die of a broken heart.
That idea might feel more than a little hyperbolic. No matter how much heartbroken lovers claim they're about to keel right over, it doesn't happen all that often. As a wise woman once said, "Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love." Rather than suggesting that this speaker is at death's door, this declaration merely shows that he's in a real state, all worked up about being rejected.
His bitterness and fury come through in the next lines, too. When he's dead, he says, his beloved will believe that she's "free / From all solicitation from me." In other words, she'll feel safe from any more of the speaker's advances. The speaker's petulant tone implies that he's thinking something along the lines of: And you'll LIKE that, won't you?
However, there's a key word here: if the beloved dare "think'st" (that is, think) herself free of the speaker after he's dead, she think'st wrong. The beloved will only think the speaker is out of her hair. He, however, has other posthumous plans—plans which he'll unfold at length over the course of this vengeful poem.
A number of clues here suggest the speaker himself isn't thinking totally clearly. Notice the jolting meter, for instance:
- The poem starts out in iambic pentameter. That means this is a line of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm: "When by | thy scorn, | O murd'- | ress, I | am dead." So far, so familiar.
- The second line, though, gets abruptly shorter, shrinking down to just three iambs (iambic trimeter, that is): "And that | thou think'st | thee free."
- The fourth line swings right back to pentameter again—or does if you read it as the 17th-century John Donne would have pronounced it, with six (!) full syllables in the word "solicitation": "From all | soli- | cita- | tion | from me"
Similar unpredictable metrical lurches will appear all through the poem. The rhyme scheme isn't any more reliable: there's plenty of rhyme here, but it never resolves into a single steady pattern.
All these strange sounds suggest that the speaker is losing it a little in the wake of romantic rejection. The next lines will reveal just how frantic he's become.
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Lines 4-5
Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
And thee, feign'd vestal, in worse arms shall see; -
Lines 6-10
Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,
And he, whose thou art then, being tir'd before,
Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think
Thou call'st for more,
And in false sleep will from thee shrink; -
Lines 11-13
And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou
Bath'd in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie
A verier ghost than I. -
Lines 14-17
What I will say, I will not tell thee now,
Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,
I'had rather thou shouldst painfully repent,
Than by my threat'nings rest still innocent.
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“The Apparition” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Hyperbole
This whole poem rests on a foundation of wounded, indignant hyperbole. Rejected by his beloved, the speaker tells her that she's no better than a "murd'ress," a female murderer: he'll die of his heartbreak, no doubt about it, and won't she be sorry then?
As Shakespeare's Rosalind once put it: "Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love." The speaker might feel wretched, but suggesting he's going to actually keel over from his misery is putting things a bit strongly.
His whole revenge plot, however, rests on his faith that he'll die and return as a sinister ghost to haunt his beloved while she lies in bed with another (and "worse") man. The most dreadful part of his visit, he imagines, will be when he says terrible words to his one-time beloved—words so terrible, in fact, that he won't even warn her what they are now, in case she's scared into changing her mind and accepting him. He wouldn't want her now even if she begged him to take her back, he claims.
Again, readers might detect just a sniff of hyperbole here. The speaker clearly still has some feelings for this woman, even if they've taken the form of hatred. His equally hyperbolic claims that he'll die of love and that he doesn't love her anymore at all add up to one darkly funny picture of crazed heartbreak.
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Metaphor
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Allusion
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Irony
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"The Apparition" 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.
- Apparition
- Thee, Thou, Thy
- Murd'ress
- Think'st
- Solicitation
- Feign'd vestal
- Taper
- Tir'd
- Call'st
- Shrink
- Poor aspen wretch
- Bath'd
- Quicksilver
- Verier
- Lest
- Preserve
- Spent
- I'had
- Shouldst
- Repent
- Threat'nings
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A ghost—so named because ghosts appear unexpectedly.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Apparition”
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Form
Like many of John Donne's intricate, witty poems, "The Apparition" uses a form of Donne's own invention. Written as one 17-line stanza, the poem darts unpredictably back and forth between longer and shorter lines, suggesting the feverish, lurching movements of the speaker's imagination.
"The Apparition" is unlike many of Donne's poems in one important way: it doesn't use a particularly elaborate conceit, an overarching extended metaphor (like the suggestive compasses in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," for instance; he compares rejection to murder, sure, but this more hyperbole than conceit). Perhaps that's because this speaker's thoughts, unlike the thoughts of many of Donne's speakers, aren't particularly complex, elegant, or high-flown. His feelings, on the contrary, are pretty straightforward: rejected by his beloved, he's one squirming mass of helpless rage, pain, and vengefulness.
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Meter
"The Apparition" is written in an iambic meter. That means that each line is built from iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm (as in "my ghost"). However, the number of meters in a line here often changes without warning. The poem starts out in good old iambic pentameter—that is, five iambs in a row. This is one of the most common meters in English-language poetry, and it sounds like this:
When by | thy scorn, | O murd'- | ress, I | am dead
The next line, however, is written in iambic trimeter—a mere three iambs in a row, like this:
And that | thou think'st | thee free
Such sudden changes give the poem a lurching, crazed rhythm that reflects the speaker's fits of pain, jealousy, and rage. Variations in the meter also help to bring the speaker's voice to life on the page. Listen to line 4, for instance:
Then shall | my ghost | come to | thy bed,
The first foot in this line of four-beat tetrameter isn't an iamb, but its opposite: a trochee, a foot with a DUM-da rhythm. That choice gives a little extra spiteful force to the speaker's fantasy: Then I'll haunt you, cruel lady!
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Rhyme Scheme
This poem's tortured rhyme scheme runs like this:
ABBABCDCDCEFFEGGG
Like the speaker's stricken, raging mind, this pattern lurches around irregularly. The rhymes never resolve into a clear pattern for long; new rhymes spring up unexpectedly as poisonous mushrooms. All these unpredictable rhymes suggest that, though the speaker has only one thing on his mind—getting revenge on the woman who rejected him—he's not exactly thinking clearly.
The most focused series of rhymes appears right at the end of that poem, when, in an intense triplet, the speaker insists that he wouldn't take his former lover back even if she changed her mind. (He might, readers imagine, protest a little too much to be believed.)
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“The Apparition” Speaker
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This poem's speaker is a man who's been rejected by the woman he was in love with. He's not taking it well. Miserable and melodramatic, he's certain he's going to die of heartbreak. If he does, he reflects, at least it'll give him a chance for revenge: he can haunt his one-time beloved and whatever awful guy she ends up with, appearing at their bedside to whisper words so dreadful he can't even say what they'll be now.
The speaker's revenge fantasy also has a distinct note of self-torture. In his vision, his beloved's next boyfriend—while he might be a "worse" man than the speaker (and apparently not that into the beloved)—is still definitely in bed with her. Though the speaker presents himself as a vengeful ghost, he's really the haunted one, tormented by ghastly imaginings.
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“The Apparition” Setting
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There's no clear setting in this poem—unless readers count the speaker's imagination. Envisioning how he'll haunt his one-time beloved after he dies of heartbreak, the speaker pictures his beloved's bedroom in grim detail, from the flickering bedside candle to the "cold quicksilver sweat" that will stand out on her forehead when his ghost turns up to say boo.
Some of the speaker's reflections on lyin', cheatin' women come straight out of Donne's 17th-century English world. Donne wrote more than once on the theme of female infidelity; so did plenty of his contemporaries. Perhaps surprisingly for modern readers, the 17th-century stereotype was that women, not men, were unquenchably lustful—and thus often deceitful.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Apparition”
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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 writers who wrote witty, passionate, intricate, cerebral poetry about love and God; George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Thomas Traherne were some others.
Donne was the prototypical metaphysical poet: a master of elaborate conceits and complex sentences, a great writer of love poems that mingle images of holiness with filthy 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. Like the vast majority of his poetry, "The Apparition" didn't appear in print until several years after his death in 1633, when his collection Poems was posthumously published.
Donne's mixture of cynicism, passion, and mysticism fell out of literary favor after his 17th-century heyday. Johnson, for instance, a leading figure of the 18th-century Enlightenment, did not mean "metaphysical poet" as a compliment, seeing 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 Yeats to A.S. Byatt.
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.
By the time he was released, reconciled with his father-in-law, and returned to polite society, he had to work his way into the favor of a new monarch: James I, who took the throne in 1603. The new king's court was worldly, intellectual, and superstitious all at once. James was pious in a rather paranoid way, anxious about demons and witches. Luckily for Donne, James was also a good judge of talent and a great patron of the arts and sciences; he respected Donne's poetry and valued his general brilliance.
However, he refused to accept Donne as a run-of-the-mill courtier: he was canny enough to see that Donne would make an outstanding clergyman. The reluctant Donne eventually had to bow to the king's will, and he was appointed Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London in 1621. Just as James had predicted, Donne became a passionate and influential Anglican priest. Today Donne lies buried in the very cathedral where he once preached.
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More “The Apparition” Resources
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External Resources
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Donne in Print — See images of the first published collection of Donne's works, Poems (1633).
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A Brief Biography — Learn all about Donne's life and work at the British Library's website.
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Donne's Tomb — Donne didn't die of love—but he did leave behind a striking and eerie tomb in St. Paul's Cathedral. Learn more about this tomb and its history from the Church Monuments Society.
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More Donne Resources — Visit the Poetry Foundation to read more of Donne's poetry and learn more about his life.
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Donne's Legacy — Learn more about Donne's lasting influence in this article by Katherine Rundell.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by John Donne
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