I need help writing a short essay on John Donne's imagery in his songs and sonnets.

One way to write an interesting essay on the imagery used
in John Donne’s poetry might be to choose a random sample of poems and a random sample
of images. For instance, you might choose the first five or so lines of the first five
poems by Donne that appear in a standard anthology of poetry.  The first five poems in
the Donne section of the latest Norton Anthology of English Poetry,
for example, are the
following:

• “The
  Flea”: The first six lines focus on imagery of a flea sucking blood from
  a woman after it has just sucked blood from the male who is courting
  her:

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Me it sucked first, and now sucks
thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be . . .
(3-4)

• The imagery
  here is surprising, unconventional, attention-grabbing, and provocative. One wonders why
  the male is using this particular imagery to attempt to court the woman. He is evidently
  good at improvisation (as the rest of the poem also shows), and he also seems confident
  of his ability to make a convincing argument no matter what “raw material” he is
  given.


• “The Good-Morrow”:
  The first few lines of this poem compare two lovers, before they met and fell truly in
  love, to unweaned children who “sucked on country pleasures” (3)  and also to the seven
  youths in a Christian legend who slept for 187 years. Here the tone associated with the
  imagery is both humorous and humorously crude, especially in the use of the verbs
  “sucked” and “snorted.” The speaker here is using imagery to show his cleverness, his
  wit, and his geniality.


• “Song: Go and catch
  a falling star”: The first five or so lines of this poem are particularly
  rich in various images, showing the speaker’s inventiveness, wide-ranging mind,
  quickness of thought, and love of intriguing
  ideas.


• “The Undertaking”:
  The opening lines of this poem use an allusion to the legendary “Worthies” (three Jews,
  three pagans, and three Christians), suggesting (as in “The Good Morrow”) the speaker’s
  learning, cleverness, and wit.


• “The Sun
  Rising”: In the opening lines of this poem, the speaker uses the
  conventional imagery suggested by the title, but he uses it in a thoroughly
  unconventional, witty, and clever way. This speaker, like some of the others already
  mentioned, is self-confident, assertive, and full of intellectual
  energy.

Donne’s various uses of various kinds
of imagery, then, can tell us a great deal about the speakers of his poems as well as
suggest a great deal about the tones and possible meanings of his works. Perhaps the
strongest impression left by this little survey of Donne’s imagery is of the sheer
variety of the imagery he is capable of using and thus of the
breadth and depth of his own mind.  Rarely is a Donne poem predictable, either in its
imagery or in its development and meanings.