“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 more divine and the earthier, 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.