Colonization Masqueraded as Love: A Discourse-Semiotic Approach to Donne’s Selected Poems

Poems with their imaginary language and figures of speech mirror poets’ reflections on their personal and social experiences which have been yielded in association with governing discourses in a society. These discourses are involved in perpetual discursive practices to achieve a stable locus via highlighting their main concepts and through diminishing any kinds of oppositions. This study is to provide a pristine reading of Donne’s selected love poems with regard to Laclau and Mouffe’s key concepts in discourse theories. The purpose is to reveal that those poems which include purposeful utilization of sub-discourse of love can be regarded as treatises that provide instructions on treating the subordinate sub-discourse of women by masculine hegemony which is analogous to the function of grand discourses of British colonialism and imperialism in dealing with the Native Americans in the seventeenth century. Through the usage of specific words, figures of speech, and myth makings, the persona of Donne’s selected poems devises a lover identity which apparently seems to be natural and consequently the reader would glorify such a rendered love. However a deeper exploration of the available discursive practices in the poems reveals that love has been employed as a soft strategy to colonize and silence the beloved. Finally, as the orders of sub-discourses are explored, discursive practices in the private society of the persona are supplemented with the discursive struggles of grand discourses in the public society of the poet.