Donne's songs and sonnets, commonly known as the love lyrics is the focus of this article. The love lyrics are commonly thought to be short non-narrative poems that, in contexts representing experiences of love and sex, articulate the subjective thoughts and emotions of a single speaker. This definition, emerged relatively recently in the history of thinking about literary kinds. It is not clear that Donne himself thought of these poems as a group. The editors of the Variorum have compiled evidence that these poems entered manuscript circulation one by one at different times, perhaps over a period of more than two decades. Donne's earliest readers necessarily encountered them piecemeal; and these poems would seem to have as good a claim as any of his verses to qualify as the random ‘pieces’ that, ‘had been loosely…scattered in his youth’ and that their author later ‘wisht…had been abortive…’.