Metaphysical Poetry

Metaphysical Poetry


1. Historical and Cultural Background


1603 Death of Elizabeth; accession of James VI of Scotland as James
I of England, union of the crowns of England and Scotland
1604-8 Shakespeare's plays including Othello, King Lear, Macbeth,
Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus
1605 Gunpowder plot
Bacon, Advancement of Learning
1608-13 Shakespeare's last plays including Tempest, Winter's Tale,
Henry VIII
1611 'Authorized' version of the Bible
1613 Globe Theatre burned
1616 Death of Shakespeare
Ben Jonson, Works
1620 Pilgrim fathers sail for America
1621 Donne appointed Dean of St Paul's
1625 Death of James I; accession of Charles I
1633 Donne, Poems (posthumously), Herbert, The Temple
1637 Milton, Lycidas
1642 Theatres closed by order of parliament
1642-49 The English Civil War
1649 Trial and Execution of Charles I
1650 Marvell, 'An Horatian Ode'
1651 Hobbes, Leviathan
1653 Cromwell becomes Lord Protector
1658 Death of Cromwell
1660 Restoration of Charles II; reopening of theatres
1662 Restoration of Church of England and final revision of Book of
Common Prayer


2. 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), Galileo's (1564-
1642), Bruno's (1548-1600) and Sir Francis Bacon's 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, far-fetched 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. Marvell's 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
poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly
amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's 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 wholes…In 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 Donne's 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
refin'd,/ That he soul's 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 Bernini's famous statue)
- till line 48 the souls are regarded as having physiology: technical
things happen between them
- also the imagery of alchemy (c.f. Love's 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 Donne's early poems) on a
fine line: are we to take it seriously or is it a comedy?
- c.f. Book IV. of Castiglione's 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, a'knot' 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 people's 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








3. Things to do alone




- Read William Empson's 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 Marvell's 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 Herbert's Easter Wings. Find the joke in it.