In his Elegies he tells stories of his conquests dramatically, in full detail, satirically, sensually. In Jealousy we are given an exact picture of the deformed husband who,
"Swol'n and pampered with great fare,
Sits down and snorts, cag'd in his basket chair"
—so that the poet and his mistress perforce have to "play in another house," away from those "towering eyes, that flamed with oily sweat of jealousy."
In The Perfume we see the girl's "immortal mother, which doth lie still buried in her bed, yet will not die," who, fearing lest her daughter be swollen, embraces her and names strange meats to try her longings: we see
"The grim-eight-foot-high-iron-bound-serving-man
That oft names God in oaths, and only then."
But the scent that the lover uses gives him away and so he is by her "hydroptic father catechized."
There is a good deal of frank naturalism in the elegy entitled To his Mistress Going to Bed, but it is healthily coarse, though scarcely quotable even in these times, which is a pity.
"There is no penance due to innocence."
But playing as he does on all the notes of all the different sorts of love, Donne gives the impression of one who attained in the end an abiding love for one person, Anne More, his wife.
In The Ecstasy we see him crying out against passionate friendship: