John Donne (​1572-1631) was a prominent metaphysical poet who wrote witty, rakish, and striking love poems and ingenious devotional writings. His “Songs and Sonnets” were published in 1633 posthumously.

What physical features and attire choice do you find striking in the younger John "Jack" Donne's portrait (the one on the left)? 

This introduction is reproduced from Norton Anthology of English Literature (666-668):
 
         Lovers’ eyeballs threaded on a string. A god who assaults the human heart with a battering ram. A teardrop that
         encompasses and drowns the world. John Donne’s poems abound with startling images, some of them exalting
         and others grotesque. With his strange and playful intelligence, expressed in puns, paradoxes, and the elaborately
         sustained metaphors known as “conceits,” Donne has enthralled and sometimes enraged readers from his day to
         our own.
 
As a Catholic in Protestant England, growing up in decades when anti-Roman feeling reached new heights, Donne could not expect any kind of public career, nor could he receive a university degree. What he could reasonably expect instead was prejudice, official harassment, and crippling financial penalties. He chose not to live under such condition. At some point in the 1590s, having returned to London after travels abroad, and having devoted some years to studying theological issues, Donne converted to the English church.
 
If Donne’s conversion to the Church of England promised him security, social acceptance, and the possibility of a public career, that promise was soon to be cruelly withdrawn. His secret marriage in 1601 to Sir Thomas Egerton’s seventeen-year-old niece Ann More enraged Donne’s employer and the bride’s wealthy father; Donne was briefly imprisoned and dismissed from service. The poet was reduced to a retired country life beset by financial insecurity and a rapidly increasing family; Ann bore twelve children by the time she died at age thirty-three.
 
Given the shape of Donne’s career, it is no surprise that his poems and prose works display an astonishing variety of attitudes, viewpoints, and feelings on the great subjects of love and religion. ​

Conceit
Coming from the Latin term for “concept,” a poetic conceit is an often unconventional, logically complex, or surprising metaphor whose delights are more intellectual than sensual. Petrarchan (after the Italian poet Petrarch) conceits figure heavily in sonnets, and contrast more conventional sensual imagery to describe the experience of love.
Less conventional, more esoteric associations characterize the metaphysical conceit. John Donne and other so-called metaphysical poets used conceits to fuse the sensory and the abstract, trading on the element of surprise and shock to hold the reader’s attention. In “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” for instance, John Donne envisions two entwined lovers as the points of a compass.