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Michael Symmons Roberts and Wendy Cope represent two very different strands of contemporary English poetry, and both, in their different ways, place love under pressure. Symmons Roberts writes with theological seriousness, but his "To John Donne" is no simple hymn to sacred love: it is a dark, ironic confrontation between Donne's erotic conceits and the twenty-first-century commodification of the human body by genetic science. Cope writes with disarming lightness, using a tight traditional stanza to catch the comedy and vulnerability of falling in love on a London bridge. Together they show the range of contemporary love poetry — from the unsettling and metaphysical to the intimate and wittily plain.
Paper 1, Love Through the Ages: poetry (post-1900). On this paper love poetry is examined by comparison across the ages, and this pair is valuable because both poems are explicitly in dialogue with the older tradition — Symmons Roberts parodies a specific Donne poem, while Cope's compact rhymed lyric belongs to a long line of poems about the heart overruling the head. The dominant assessment objectives in this lesson are:
Quotation note (read first). Both poems are in copyright, and this lesson corrects a serious error in earlier teaching of "To John Donne." That poem is not a devotional verse-epistle affirming the continuity of erotic and divine love; it is an ironic poem about genome mapping and the genetic commodification of the body, parodying Donne's elegy "To His Mistress Going to Bed." Short verified phrases are quoted; elsewhere the poems' patterns are paraphrased.
Michael Symmons Roberts (born 1963) is a poet, novelist, and librettist whose work is deeply concerned with the body, incarnation, and mortality, and informed by a Christian sensibility. His collections include Corpus (2004), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award, and Drysalter (2013), which won the Forward Prize; he has also collaborated extensively with the composer James MacMillan. "To John Donne" comes from Corpus, a collection preoccupied with the human body as flesh, matter, and — increasingly — data.
The crucial context is scientific and recent. The Human Genome Project, which produced its first draft of the complete human genetic sequence in 2000–2003, transformed the body into something that could be mapped, read, owned, and sold. The turn of the millennium saw fierce ethical debate about the patenting of genes, the commercial ownership of genetic information, and the prospect that a person's most intimate biological material could be commodified. Symmons Roberts's poem responds directly to this: it imagines the body of the beloved not as a private erotic territory but as a colonised, charted, commercially exploited landmass.
The title "To John Donne" announces a dialogue with the tradition, but a combative one. John Donne (1572–1631) wrote, in his elegy "To His Mistress Going to Bed," the famous lines casting the lover-as-explorer over the beloved's body: "O my America! my new-found-land … How blest am I in this discovering thee!" Donne's conceit makes the woman a continent to be possessed by the male lover. Symmons Roberts seizes this exact conceit and turns it inside out for the genetic age: the body is still a "new found land," but now it is paced out and sold by medics and corporations, not lovers. Where Donne's exploration was an act of erotic wonder, the modern "discovery" of the body is an act of commercial colonisation.
The poem is built from tercets (three-line stanzas) across roughly forty-five lines, without a fixed rhyme scheme but with scattered full and slant rhymes that create local moments of unity within an open structure. The tercet form gives the poem a measured, almost argumentative tread — appropriate to a poem that reasons with a dead poet — while the irregular rhyme keeps it from settling into anything too consoling. The intermittent rhyme is itself thematically apt: just as the genome promises a perfect, complete "mapping" of the body but cannot capture the person, so the poem offers moments of formal unity (a rhyme falling into place) without ever resolving into the tidy, total order of a fixed scheme — the form, like the body it defends, exceeds the system that would chart it. The address to Donne is sustained throughout, so the poem reads as a contemporary poet's unsettling letter back across four centuries: this, John, is what has become of your "new found land."
The poem opens by re-voicing Donne's striptease elegy for the genetic era. As the mistress undresses, Symmons Roberts notes that "her body is already mapped" — the moment of erotic unveiling has been pre-empted by science, which has charted her before the lover can. Donne's thrill of "discovering" the beloved's body is gone, because there is nothing left to discover: the genome has got there first. The "new found land" of Donne's conceit is, in Symmons Roberts's phrase, "paced out, / sized up, written down" — surveyed and recorded like territory for sale or settlement, reduced to data ("written down as hope / or prophecy," the genetic readout becoming a forecast of the life and death encoded in it).
The conceit darkens as the body becomes property. The beloved's charts, Symmons Roberts writes, are "held on laptops, / mastered by medics, laid bare" — the intimate body now exists as files on a screen, "mastered" (owned, controlled, but also reduced to a master-copy) by clinicians rather than cherished by a lover. The verb "laid bare" reactivates the erotic undressing of Donne's poem only to strip it of eros: this baring is clinical exposure, not desire. The poem imagines even the tenderest particulars of the body — a "breast's curve" — as subject to a "patent," as though a corporation could own the shape of a woman's body the way it owns an invention. The horror is precise: in Donne, the lover possesses the beloved through love; in Symmons Roberts, capital possesses the beloved through law.
Against this commodification the poem sets what cannot be bought. The deepest argument of "To John Donne" is that the genetic map is not the person — that authentic human connection, love and the bond to the natural and human world, exceeds and resists the patent, the chart, the laptop file. The poem's irony is that it must use Donne's own erotic-colonial conceit to mount this protest: the very metaphor that once celebrated possession is repurposed to expose a more total and more sinister possession. The address to Donne is therefore genuinely dialogic — Symmons Roberts inherits Donne's method (the extended conceit, the body-as-territory) while turning it against the modern world Donne could not have imagined, and implicitly asking the older poet whether his confident metaphor of discovery did not always carry the seed of this colonisation.
It is worth being precise about the Donne source, since the comparison is the heart of the poem's method. In "To His Mistress Going to Bed" (Elegy XIX), Donne's male speaker watches his mistress undress and exults: "Licence my roving hands, and let them go / Before, behind, between, above, below. / O my America! my new-found-land …" The woman's body is a continent, and the lover a Renaissance explorer-conqueror, thrilled to "discover" and possess virgin territory. The metaphor is buoyant, witty, frankly acquisitive — and entirely confident that discovery is a delight. Symmons Roberts keeps every structural element of this conceit — the undressing, the body-as-land, the act of "discovery" — and changes only the agent and the purpose: now it is genetic science, not a lover, that surveys the body, and the purpose is patent and profit, not pleasure. The horror is generated by the exactness of the parallel. Because the modern "explorers" do precisely what Donne's lover did — pace out, map, claim, own — the poem suggests that Donne's erotic conquest and the geneticists' commercial conquest are versions of the same impulse, and that there is something faintly predatory latent in the original conceit. This is creative criticism of the highest order: the contemporary poem reads the canonical one and finds in its delighted possessiveness the seed of a modern dread. A strong answer will hold both poems in view and show how the re-voicing — same conceit, altered agent — is the whole point.
The poem's tone is correspondingly difficult and worth getting right. It is not warm, not devotional, not consoling; it is controlled, ironic, and quietly appalled. The measured tercets and the address to a long-dead poet give it the air of a sombre verse-letter, but its burden is a warning about the present. Students who expect a love poem to be tender will misread its register entirely; the feeling here is closer to elegy for a body that has been turned into property — a lament not for a person who has died but for a whole understanding of the body that genetic capitalism is dissolving.
The indispensable comparison is with Donne's "To His Mistress Going to Bed" itself, the pre-1900 source the poem parodies: setting the two side by side lets you trace exactly how a conceit of erotic wonder ("O my America! my new-found-land") is converted into a conceit of commercial dread. Strikingly, Donne's "new-found-land" line is also one of the fragments embedded in Duffy's "The Love Poem" elsewhere in this anthology — so the same Donne phrase is curated nostalgically by Duffy and weaponised ironically by Symmons Roberts, a rich point of contrast. The poem's anxiety about the body reduced to data and ownership links it, more loosely, to the broader tradition of love poetry that insists the beloved exceeds any system of possession — from the Song of Solomon to the modern lyric. Within this lesson, the contrast with Cope is stark: Symmons Roberts darkens and complicates the inherited conceit, where Cope sheds conceit altogether for the plainness of felt experience.
Wendy Cope (born 1945) is one of the most popular English poets of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her collections — Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986), Serious Concerns (1992), and If I Don't Know (2001) — are characterised by wit, formal skill, emotional directness, and a willingness to write about subjects that "serious" poets often disdain: romantic disappointment, everyday pleasures, the comedy of social life. "After the Lunch" appears in Serious Concerns, whose very title teases the assumption that comic verse cannot be serious.
Cope's light tone has often led critics to underestimate her, and she has written sharply about the condescension directed at "light verse" and at women poets who are funny. But her formal command is genuine — she is a master of the villanelle, the sonnet, and the parody — and her apparently simple surfaces conceal real craft. Her humour is strategic rather than superficial: it lets her address painful subjects (loneliness, ageing, unrequited love) without self-pity or sentimentality, and it is exactly this discipline that A-Level examiners should reward.
"After the Lunch" is set on Waterloo Bridge, in London, immediately after a lunch date with someone the speaker is beginning to love. The poem is an internal monologue of denial turning into acceptance: across the span of the bridge, the speaker argues herself out of resisting, and into admitting, that she has fallen in love.
The poem is three quatrains rhyming AABB (rhyming couplets within each four-line stanza), in a light, swinging, song-like metre. The regularity and the chiming rhyme create an air of control and composure that is in deliberate tension with the emotional upheaval the speaker is describing — the neatness of the form is the "head" doing its "best," even as the content records the heart winning. The structure is a three-stage argument, one stanza per stage: stanza one resists the feeling, stanza two begins to credit it, stanza three concedes it. Each stanza opens with the refrain-like anaphora "On Waterloo Bridge," so that the bridge — an image of crossing, transition, passage from one state to another — frames every stage of the emotional journey. By the time the speaker reaches the far side, she has crossed from denial to admission.
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