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Studying Metaphysical Poetry

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-Prof Sharda Chaturvedi

The term ‘metaphysical’ has come to stay as a label for the poetry of Donne and his school. The poetry of Donne which is central to the metaphysical tradition is not a novel and eccentric kind of Poetry without any derivation. It has its roots, in the Elizabethan poetry of wit. The originality of Donne is so striking that it tends to obscure his place in the main current of English poetry. Donne is, according to Eliot, in the direct line of English poetry. Eliot’s interest in Donne was neither academic nor modish. As a poet interested in finding a new medium for the expression of a complex sensibility, Eliot discovered in the metaphysicals - in the kind of experience they were trying to convey and in their craftsmanship - valuable hints for the solution of his own problems.

According to Grierson, the term may with some justifi-cation apply to the poetry of Donne. It lays stress on the right things, for instance, ‘the more intellectual, less verbal, character of their wit compared with the conceits of the Elizabathans; the finer psychology of which their conceits are often the expression; the learned imagery; the argumentative, subtle evolution of their lyrics; above all the peculiar blend of passion and - thought, feeling and ratiocination. In current literary criticism ‘metaphysical’ is a term of approval which underlines those elements. In the poetry of Donne which Eliot and his generation found so fascinating - the lively play of intellect, the alliance of passion and playfulness and dramatic imagination. Donne’s poetic practices started a powerful tradition which affected a large body of poetry in the first half of the 17th century. It is however difficult to set precise limits to the school of Donne. Andrew Marvell may be cited. The definition of Love belengs to the metaphysical tradition.

‘As Lines so Loves oblique may well

Themselves in every Angle greet:

But ours so truly Parallel,

Though infinite can never meet.’2

The conceit here is both cerebral and imaginative. To his Coy Mistress is another poem which relates him to the tradition of Donne.

The Grave’s a fine and private place,

But none I think do there embrace,3


The sudden transmission playfulness to high pitched passion, the interplay of levity and seriousness are characteristic of the poetry of Donne. The poetry of Donne is intensely personal and one can reconstruct from his love songs and holy sonnets an attractive picture of his personality. The ‘personality’ of Donne cannot admittedly be dismissed as something irrelevant to his poetry. The baldest sketch of Donne’s life would appear ‘romantic’, and there is so much of his life in his poetry that a reader who is fascinated or repelled by his personality may be inclined to rate his poetry accordingly. Donne’s poetry records the peculiar emotional tension of the age. The two Anniversaries occasioned by the death of Elizabeth Drury in 1610 are more than occasional poems; they express something characteristic of the Jacobean age - the disenchantment of the late Renaissance and the sense of disintegration which haunted the Jacobean mind. The early Renaissance temper was more exuberant than introspective; it was fed by the hope that the capacities of man and the limits of knowledge are boundless. In the 17th century we notice two distinct attitudes to knowledge. While the practitioners of the ‘new philosophy’ remained confident, the more sensitive minds became sceptical.

While we look up to Heaven, wee confound

Knowledge with knowledge. 0, I am in a mist!4

Donne expresses his scepticism in The Second Anniver-sarie.

What hope have wee to know our selves, when wee

Know not the least things, which for our use be?

Donne and Jonson are the two distinct influences of the age, but they have many important characteristics in common. Both set a new fashion of writing short and concentrated poems. They rejected the elaborate style of Spenser and gave personal accents to poetry a very notable achievement indeed which distinguished them from the anonymity of Elizabethan lyrists. And both use a fresh and colloquial language. But there are important differences. For one thing, Donne’s poetry is more exclusively personal. ‘This solitariness, this private ness, this self-containedness, this together with the often dialectical and dramatic expression of it, is, it seems to me, the most important difference between the serious poetry of Donne and the so-called Metaphysical School and that of Jonson and the Classical or Horatian School.’5

The poetry of Donne is not a digression from the main current; it is rooted in the general sensibility of the age and its influence on the Jacobean poetry is one of emphasis and direction. Mario Praz in his essay on Donne’s relation to the poetry of his time6 traces the tradition of wit to the poetry of Wyatt. The dialectical style of the following lines of Wyatt, for instance, is characteristic of the poetry of wit

My love to scorn, my service to retaine,

Therein me thought you used crueltie,

Since with good wyll I lost my libertie,

Might never wo yet cause me to refraine;

But only this, which is extremitie,

To geue me nought (alas) not to agree.7

Deere, love me not, that you may love me more,8 writes in the manner of Donne. The evolution of the idea is both subtle and passionate; the wit is more than verbal. The quibble in Drayton’s

You not alone, when you are still alone9

develops into a powerful instrument of wit in the poetry of Donne.


If thou love mee, take heed of loving mee10

If yet I have not all thy love,

Deare, I shall never have it all11

Much of Elizabethan dramatic poetry is poetry of wit. The adroit use of antithesis, for instance, is an instrument of wit. In Shakespeare’s

We two, that with so many thousand sighs

Did buy each other, must poorly sell ourselves

With the rude brevity and discharge of one.12

the antithesis - ‘buy’ and ‘sell’, ‘many thousand sighs’ and ‘discharge of one’ - is more than verbal playfulness; it is a powerful aid to intensity. Donne too uses antithesis to heighten the note of passion.

Wee can dye by it, if not live by love,

And if unfit for tombes and hearse

Our legend bee, it will fit for verse

This occurs in one of his serious love poems The Canonization.

Donne gives English poetry a fresh start by rejecting the overworked conventions of Elizabethan poetry. The lines

But the flame

Of thy brave Soule, that shot such heat and light,

As burnt our earth, and made our darkness bright,

Committed holy Rapes upon our Will,

Did through the eye the melting heart distill;

And the deepe knowledge of darke truths so teach,

As sense might judge, what phansie could not reach.

Make an important point which comes very close to what Eliot has discovered in metaphysical poetry, the power of interpreting an experience in terms of sense. Donne’s poetry has

……open’d Us a Mine

Of rich and pregnant phansie, drawne a line

Of masculine expression13

His probing mind discovers new areas of experience and thus enlarges the field of poetry. His ‘masculine expression’ is distinct from the ‘soft melting Phrases’ of the imitators of Spenser. His wit, Carew says, is ‘imperious’ It not merely verbal or ingenious. The phrases ‘Giant phansie’ and ‘imperious wit’ seem to underline the element of intensity in


Donne’s poetry. Donne is not always aiming to ‘recreate thought into feeling’. But the poetry of Donne which Eliot had in mind while writing his celebrated essay employs wit which is simultaneously cerebral and imaginative. Here are a few illustrations :

When my grave is broke up againe

Some second ghost to entertaine,

( For graves have learn’d that woman - head

To be to more than one a Bed)

And he that digs it, spies

A bracelet of bright haire about the bone,14

I could eclipse and cloud than with a wink,

But that I would not lose her sight so long;15

In these examples the peculiar effect, both ingenious and passionate, is achieved by the sudden juxtaposition of dissimilar ideas. It is not a violent yoking together; the sensi-bility working behind has effected a fusion of thought and passion.

The conceit used in Donne’s poetry is not essentially different from the normal poetic figure. Its unexpectedness derives from the imaginative distance between the two terms of the metaphor, their apparent incongruity. This is related to Donne’s particular mode of thinking and feeling, his wit. In a conventional image there is an obvious emotional congruity between the terms of the metaphor. In a typical conceit of Donne, the two terms meet on a limited ground; the minor term is seemingly commonplace with little imaginative value, but its conjunction with other term reveals a vivid and powerful metaphorical relation. To condemn it as fantastic and farfetched is to miss the curve of Donne’s thinking and feeling.

On a round ball

A workman that hath copies by, can lay

An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,

And quickly make that, which was nothing, All,

So doth each teare,

Which thee doth weare,

A globe, yea world by that impression grow,

Till thy tears mixt with mine doe overflow

This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so"16

Quoting these lines Johnson remarks "The tears of lovers are always of great poetical account; but Donne has extended them into worlds."17 There is hardly any emotional congruity between a lover’s tear and a round ball; their unexpected conjunction expresses the curve of Donne’s passionate thinking.


Donne frequently uses another sort of conceit which Williamson calls ‘expanded conceit.’ The image of a pair of compasses in A Valediction: forbidding mourning is a typical example. The elaboration of the metaphor is no doubt ingenious but ingenuity alone can hardly produce this effect.

Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if the ‘other doe.18

Here the idea and the image are inseparable; the elaboration further sharpens and dramatizes the idea. The image, though conceptual, intensifies the effect of tenderness.

The intellectual adroitness of metaphysical conceit is so striking that its sensuous content is hardly noticed; and a reader who expects a sharpely defined visual element is disappointed. In Donne’s poetry even the most ingeniously contrived conceit has a sensuous element. Here is an example -

Let not thy divining heart

Fore think me any ill,

Destiny may take thy part,

And may thy fears fulfill;

But think that wee

Are but turn’d aside to sleep;

They who one another keepe

Alive, ne’r parted bee,19

‘We are but turn’d aside to sleep’ has an evocative sensuous element which turns the conceit into an image and deepens the tenderness of the poem. Here is another example

0 more then Moone,

Draw not up seas to drowne me in thy sphere,

weep me not dead, in thine armes,but forbeare

To teach the sea, what it may do too soone.20

The conceit is both audacious and passionate; the images in spite of their bewildering multiplicity have a rich sensuous element. The notion seems to persist that that Donne’s visual experience was extremely limited and hence his images have little visual quality. In the Storme Donne is describing the sick ship. The mast is saken with an ague, its hold is clogged with a salt dropsy, the tacklings are snapping like ‘too - high - stretched treble strings.’

And from our tottered sailes, rages drop downe so,

As from one hang’d in chaines, a yeare agoe.21

The analogy is no doubt ingenious but the image is intensely visual. More frequently, it is true, Donne describes an object in abstract or intellectual terms but he can, when he chooses, use a concrete visual image to describe and illuminate an object.


Donne is interested in giving a vivid and dramatic expression to the paradox and subtlety of his experience, and the ideas drawn from his extensive reading are made use of to intensify or illuminate ‘the experience of the moment’. Reading, as Eliot has observed, modifies his sensibility and in the process of relating his learning to life he transforms the most abstract thinking into an experience. ‘Naked thinking heart, a striking phrase playfully used by Donne in his poem The Blossome, is an apt description of his mind.

Well then, stay here; but know,

When thou hast stayd and done thy most;

A naked thinking heart, that makes no show,

Is to a woman, but a kinde of Ghost;

Donne’s use of language is a liberating influence on English poetry. He was a great reformer of the English language.22 Donne’s staple vocabulary is direct and natural; it is close to the spoken idiom.

If yet I have not all thy love,

Deare, I shall never have it all

He has no horror of the unpoetic word.

Here who still weeps with spungie eyes,

And her who is dry corke, and never cries

These lines occur in one of his deliberately outrageous poems, The Indifferent. In his serious poetry too, he uses the most plain and homely words. The following line

Or snorted we in the seaven sleepers den?

Occurs in one of his serious and impassioned love poems, The good - morrow. The word ‘itchy’ occurs in one of his Holy Sonnets.

The itchy Lecher, and selfe tickling proud

Have the remembrance of past joyes, for reliefe of coming ills.7

Donne is a master of the memorable line.

So, so, break off this last lamenting kisse

For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love,

A naked thinking heart, that makes no show.

This new style, terse and condensed, appeared in the last decade of the 16th century, in the poetry of Chapman, the plays of Shakespeare and Jonson and the prose of Bacon. And Donne gives it vigour and urgency.

Donne’s subtle use of the speaking voice reminds one of Shakespeare.

For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love,


Or chide my palsie, or my gout,

My five gray haires, or ruin’d fortune flout,

…………………………………………

Contemplate, what you will, approve,

So you will let me love.

Here the rhythm and diction, in spite of the occasional inversion of the normal speech-order, convey the directness of the speaking voice. The colloquial outburst of line 1st the heavy stresses on ‘palsie’ and ‘gout,’ the ironic alliteration of line 3rd and the splutter of short phrases have the tone and movement of the speaking voice. And the voice has many inflexions, from the quiet musing of Loves growth :

Me thinkes I lyed all winter, when I swore

My love was infinite, if spring make’ it more.

To the coarse cynicism of Loves Alchymie :

Hope not for mind in women; at their best

Sweetness and wit, they’ are but Mummy possest.

In Aire and Angels the gallant and conventional exaltation of the opening

Twice or thrice had I loved thee,

Before I knew thy face or name;

So in a voice, so in a shapelesse flame’

Angels affect us oft, and worship’d bee;

Still when, to where thou wert, I came,

Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.

Changes into the insolent matter-of-factness of

So thy love may be my loves spheare;

Just such disparitie

As is twixt Aire and Angells puritie,

Twixt womens love, and mens will ever bee.

Donne and his generation inherited the mediaeval view of man as a being existing at many levels. This was questioned and undermined by the new philosophy of the Renaissance but the old tradition still lives in Donne as an awareness of the multiple nature of man. Donne was of course too close to the Renaissance not to be aware of the process of dissociation that had already started. Although deeply read in scholastic philosophy, Donne was in his temper an antithesis of the scholastic system maker. The aims of the schoolmen were directed towards unification; every branch


of knowledge was related to a central pattern which unified all experience. Donne was more aware of disintegration than of comprehensive harmony. The dialectical slant of his mind was more than a habit inherited from the schoolmen. He saw the growing division of life into separate realms and the dramatic structure of his verse may be interpreted as an attempt to hold together the divided worlds.

The popular twentieth century image of Donne has overstated the element of skepticism in his mind. Indeed, there is no evidence that Donne was seriously troubled by the ‘new philosophy which calls all in doubt.’ In the Third Satire written in his youth there is no hint to philosophic scepticism. The belief that ‘Truth stands on a hill’ is central to his religious poetry. In spite of Copernicus and a wide knowledge of his theories, Donne and his contemporaries accepted the traditional world picture as a vast chain of being with man as the nodal point. Man’s ‘middle state’ is no doubt a source of internal conflict but it serves as a bridge between matter and spirit.

So must pure lovers soules descend

T ‘ affections, and to faculties,

Which sense may reach and apprehend,

Else a great Prince in prison lies.

The old assumption that man is a complex being, rooted in instincts and swayed by passions, is replaced by a simplified picture of man as a rational and predictable being. A recognition to the many - sidedness of human experience is central to metaphysical poetry.

References

1- Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, pp. xv-xvi.

2- The Oxford Books of 17th Century Verse, p. 748.

3- Ibid, p. 745.

4- The White Devil, v, vi, 259-60.

5- Leishman, The Monarch of Wit, p. 26.

6- In A Garland for John Donne.

7- The Works of the English Poets, ed. A. Chalmers, ii. p.376.

8- The Complete Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. A. B. Grosart. i, p. 4l.

9- Poems of Michal Drayton, ed. John Buxton, i, p. 6.

10- The Prohibition

11- Lovers Infiniteness

12- Troilus and Cressida, iv, iv, 39-41.

13- The Oxford Book of 17th Century Verse, p. 399.


14- Ibid; pp. 399-400.

15- The Relique

16- Sunne Rising

17- A Valediction: of weeping

18- Lives, I, p.19

19- Grierson, pp. 50-51

20- Ibid, p.19

21- Ibid, p. 39

22- Ibid, p. 177

23- A Garland for John Donne, p.13

24- The Canonization

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