Metaphysical Poetry

1.

Historical and Cultural Background

1603
1604-8
1605
1608-13
1611
1613
1616
1620
1621
1625
1633
1637
1642
1642-49
1649
1650
1651
1653
1658
1660
1662

2.

Death of Elizabeth; accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England,

union of the crowns of England and Scotland
Shakespeares plays including Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and
Cleopatra, Coriolanus
Gunpowder plot
Bacon, Advancement of Learning
Shakespeares last plays including Tempest, Winters Tale, Henry VIII
Authorized version of the Bible
Globe Theatre burned
Death of Shakespeare
Ben Jonson, Works
Pilgrim fathers sail for America
Donne appointed Dean of St Pauls
Death of James I; accession of Charles I
Donne, Poems (posthumously), Herbert, The Temple
Milton, Lycidas
Theatres closed by order of parliament
The English Civil War
Trial and Execution of Charles I
Marvell, An Horatian Ode
Hobbes, Leviathan
Cromwell becomes Lord Protector
Death of Cromwell
Restoration of Charles II; reopening of theatres
Restoration of Church of England and final revision of Book of Common
Prayer

The Literary Scene

Elizabethan conventions, genres and topics survive into Jacobean times but there appears a
new style and frame of thinking in poetry. The New Science of the age, following
Copernicus (1473-1543), Galileos (1564-1642), Brunos (1548-1600) and Sir Francis
Bacons ideas challenges age old assumptions and promotes, in poetry, genres marked with
distance, scepticism and self-doubt, like satire, meditative verse, or epigram. The new poetry
exhibits an almost modern interest in psychology and a zest to show the world as it is, not as
much as it should be. A small but influential group of poets, later to be called by Dr Johnson
Metaphysicals choose to break free from Tudor conventions and engraft poetry anew by
extreme exploitation of the capacities of language through conceits, elaborate puns, farfetched similes and, very importantly, by borrowing words and images from non-poetical
fields like medicine, cartography, botany, gardening, law, astronomy, astrology, alchemy or
physics. Another standard procedure of this kind of poetry is to forcibly bring together the
sublime and the ephemeral, the sacred and the profane, invariably resulting in the
profanisation of the former. (C.f. Donne talking about a flea as marriage temple in The Flea.)

The poems are mostly short, colloquial, witty and often rather aggressive towards the
addressee (at times even towards the reader c.f. Marvells To His Coy Mistress.) They often
and mockingly reason where there is no place for logic i.e. in matters of love and physical
desire (see the primitive rhetoric in The Flea or in To His Coy Mistress) and have a similar
tendency to be sensual about thoughts. As Dr Samuel Johnson spotted so well
(Metaphysicals) wrote rather as beholders than partakers of human nature; as beings looking
upon good and evil, impassive and at leisure; as Epicurean deities making remarks on the
actions of men, and the vicissitudes of life, without interest and without emotion. Their
courtship was void of fondness, and their lamentation of sorrow. Their wish was only to say
what they hoped had never been said before.
Their contemporaries held Donne, Herbert, Marvell and the other university wits in high
acclaim and their fame was in the ascendent during the Restoration as well. Then, for almost
two centuries, they lay forgotten until the 1921 publication, by Grierson, of the volume
Metaphysical Poems. T.S. Eliot (great poet and critic of the time) celebrated them, especially
Donne, in an essay, Metaphysical Poets, in these words:
A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poets mind is
perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the
ordinary mans experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. Tha latter falls in love, or reads
Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of
the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always
forming new wholesIn the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from
which we have never recovered.
Feminist critics from the 1970s on have led many a jolly attack against the unquestionably
male-centred world of these poets. Now in feminist circles it is agreed that despite
appearances much of secular Metaphysical poetry was written by disappointed men to console
equally disappointed men. Female addressees are either imaginary or long departed, courtship
a fantasy, returned love rare
John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell
As to their lives and work study either A. Sanders The Short Oxford History of English
Literature or Margaret Drabble (ed.) The Oxford Companion to English Literature, both of
which are available in our library. Here follows a reading of Donnes The Ecstasy:
-

the poem is a mini erotic narrative, which, despite the use of we can be seen as a
seduction piece
the reader is made into some kind of voyeur If any, so by love refind,/ That he souls
language understood,/And by good love were grown all mind,/Within convenient
distance stood
shorthand, sexualized beginning landscape
important and insidious use of we: forced intimacy
Donne deliberately abandons Petrarchan language and replaces it by contemporary
scientific idiom
lurking fertility image int he background, showing the way to the couple
the scene is almost comic: the lovers are paralysed by desire
speaks about armies: the suggestion of contest, not only of togetherness
ecstasy = your soul is out of your body, very often used in spiritual experience (c.f.
Christ on the cross) or in the visual arts of the age (see the many representations of St
Theresa of Avila in baroque paintings, or Berninis famous statue)

3.

till line 48 the souls are regarded as having physiology: technical things happen
between them
also the imagery of alchemy (c.f. Loves Alchemy by Donne), he speaks about the
experience of these souls in terms of a chemical experiment: he argues (following
Plato) that only by being mingled does one gain lucidity, control, knowledge of
oneself
the whole poem balances (as do so many of Donnes early poems) on a fine line: are
we to take it seriously or is it a comedy?
c.f. Book IV. of Castigliones The Courtier on why lovers want to kiss each other: so
that through their mouths their souls can meet
sexuality is a way of expressing yourself, says Donne, and if you flee from your
sexuality you keep a prince in prison
the subtle knot that makes us man: realization that man is a complex thing, aknot of
sensuality and intellect (a deeply Platonical argument yet again)
finally, Donne hands his poem over to the reader: it is up to you how you see us if
we appear like animals to you, you are to be blamed for lack of imagination and
refinement, if you see us elevated as written in the text, you are also elevated and
sophisticated. Or very stupid indeed, for to have taken this little rhetorical exercise too
seriously
indeed, sometimes the best way with Donne is not to take him quite seriously
extremely complicated argumentation all through the poem, presented often by using
other peoples languages like alchemists, astrologers
Donne is often identified by readers with power, masculinity, Englishness, as wrestling
with the language, as an aggressive innovator, a poetical father-figure almost. Often
provoking patricide, by the way
already by some contemporaries (Carew, e.g.) it was realized that Donne made poetry
difficult, perhaps thus provoking readers to give up reading automatisms of the
threadbare Petrarchan convention
Wyatt and Shakespeare are also difficult to read but Donne also appears complicated:
he wanted difficulty seen at once
Donne often bullies the reader, buttonholes him all the time, establishes a complicated,
ambiguous ralationship with him
some readers hate him for his sophistication, coolness, for the almost acrobatic
deployment of ambiguous meaning in his poetry
women-readers are often put off by his textual harassment, a term coined by
changing sexual harassment and meaning instances of the text insulting its reader.
Donne is one of those poets who, if you do not like at first sight, are unlikely to
become your favourites: divides opinion to the extremes

Things to do alone

Read William Empsons Donne and the New Philosophy in: Essays on
RenaissanceLiterature Vol. I. ed. by John Haffenden, Cambridge University Press,
1993.

Study representations of St Theresa of Avila. What seems to be common in them?

Read Marvells To His Coy Mistress. What, in your opinion, might offend the female
reader in that poem?

The early 17th century abounds in conceits. Find a good dictionary definition of the
term and look for examples, literary and visual.

Read Herberts Easter Wings. Find the joke in it.