Ghostly Affective Futures in John Donne's Songs and Sonets (1633)

John Donne's love lyrics in the Songs and Sonets (1633) are intense expressions of feeling, whose affective charge is frequently founded on a temporal balancing act.Typically, Donne's speakers find themselves torn between the transcendence of the moment into a state of eternal bliss and the necessity of futurity, or the 'death' of the moment, for the bodily experience of erotic desire.It is precisely in this paradoxical in-between-ness that the poems' affective force unfolds: in Donne's poems, love is at the hinge between a material, impermanent, affective momentary experience and an immaterial perpetual state.Paradoxically, for Donne's speakers, love both depends on temporal change, i.e., on the existence of a future in which the lovers will be together, and envisions its own atemporal, future-less eternity.Affect therefore is at the threshold between the now and the future.The Songs and Sonets illustrate this with ghostly images: affect is what affords an imagined future a ghostly presence in the current moment and conversely allows for a spectral return of the present in the future scenarios Donne imagines.