Love's Growth

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BBC Radio 4 - Love's Growth

Michael Symmons Roberts celebrates John Donne’s great poem of spring, Love’s Growth.

Michael Symmons Roberts invites Katherine Rundell, Simon Schama and Anthony Capildeo to explore John Donne’s brilliant and bold spring poem, Love’s Growth.

John Donne’s poem Love’s Growth is both a stirring celebration of the renewal and hope offered by the return of Spring, and also an intimate, sometimes erotic love poem written for his future wife, Ann More. When the two got married without her father’s approval, Donne was thrown in jail, but the intensity of the feelings shared by the couple, as expressed in the Love’s Growth, might suggest that was a price worth paying. 

Michael Symmons Roberts invites three other Donne fanatics to offer a close reading of the poem, not in the hope of pinning down its too-numerous nuances, but instead trying to illuminate its deft marriage of mind and matter - and also celebrating the swagger of its lines and the young man who wrote them. 

For Donne’s biographer Katherine Rundell, it's a punch of a poem with its opening stanza “all the oxygen in a five mile radius rushes to meet you.” For Professor Simon Schama, who “can’t think of life without him", Donne’s poem offers a radical break from those poets who until then had deliberately ignored the physical pleasures of love, as well as a riposte to the darkness of winter. For Anthony Capildeo, Love’s Growth also constitutes a foreshadowing of Donne’s later religious life and work. 

All agree that Love’s Growth is a work of genius - but when it comes to the poem’s final lines, who will consider it a playful and beautiful surprise, and who will regard it as an over-reaching and taxing disaster?

Produced by Geoff Bird
Executive Producer: Eloise Whitmore
A Naked production for BBC Radio 4

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