How is Donne's poetry different from Elizabethan poetry?

John Donne (1572-1631) reacted against the monotonous
convention of the Elizabethan love poetry and established what has become known as the
Metaphysical style of poetry .While the Elizabethan love poets were busy in dressing
their mistresses with rare beauties of a goddess, and faltering them with magnificent
praises , Donne in that case enjoys the lady love ,experiences her love and tells his
readers about the nature of that experience .

The
Elizabethan in their images of love poetry use Petrarchan conceit .It exploits a
particular set of images for comparisons with the despairing lover and his unpitying but
idolized mistress But the Metaphysical poets in their love -poetry use image known as
metaphysical conceit .It “is a comparison whose ingenuity is more striking than its
justness" and that "a comparison becomes a conceit when we discover occult things in the
things unlike”

One specimen from Donne's poetry ,
Good Morrow is relevant here .

.Donne in this poem employs
the techniques which are,- the abrupt opening of the poem with a surprising dramatic
line(I wander by my troth,what thou and I/Did,till we loved?); the use of colloquial
diction (snorted ,But suck’d); the ideas in the poem being presented as a logical and
persuasive argument (before experience ,after experience, the nature of the experience
,resultant of the experience ), the mode of wooing is such that “He perplexes the mind
of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy , when he should entertain them
with the softness of love” .For ,Donne here neither woos his mistress nor invites her to
respond to love-making .His thrashing logic, abrupt comparison ,and far-fetched images
prove a riddle to the mistress .His intention is to philosophize the miracle of the
experience.

The Elizabethan poets , as Wyatt , Surrey,
Sidney , Spenser etc  , were either love-lorn-swine , or flatterers of their mistress
.They sing the woe of their disappointed love .Again they were conventional and their
approach was courtly .Their poems had little poetic truth . Their poems grew monotonous
, as they lacked the direct experience of life .