Life & Wisdom Quote by John Donne

Donne’s line doesn’t serenade love so much as pick a fight with the calendar. “Love, all alike” is a provocation: real love, he insists, refuses to be sorted into moods, weather, anniversaries, or the sentimental bookkeeping of “our song” and “our date.” By stripping love of “season” and “clime,” he rejects the idea that emotion is merely atmosphere - a thing that changes because the air changes. The claim is audacious in a poet who made a career out of volatility, desire, and spiritual whiplash; that tension is part of the point. Donne wants love to feel bigger than the body that hosts it.

The insult lands in the phrase “rags of time.” Hours and months aren’t neutral units; they’re shabby clothing draped over something more serious. It’s classic metaphysical swagger: taking an abstract enemy (time) and reducing it to a prop you can sneer at. The rhythm piles up measurements - “hours, days, months” - like a bureaucrat’s list, then punctures it with contempt. Love becomes an absolute, time a human superstition.

Context matters: this comes from “The Sun Rising,” where Donne scolds the sun for interrupting lovers. It’s bedroom rhetoric masquerading as philosophy. The subtext is power: if the lovers can declare themselves outside time, they don’t just dodge responsibility; they crown their private world as the real center of the universe. Donne sells intimacy as cosmology, and the confidence is the seduction.