Metaphysical Poetry
During the reign of Charles I (1625-1649), son and successor to James I (1603-1625), there was a Civil War between the supporters of the King Charles and his court (known as “Cavaliers”) and the supporters of Parliament (known as “Roundheads,” possibly because they wore their hair short). In general, Roundheads were hostile to anything associated with the court -- including its refined literary forms. The conflict was part political (if Parliament gained more power, the monarch and court had less), part religious (the Roundheads tended to be extremely Puritan(ical), and were shocked at the laxity and frivolity of the court), and part cultural: poetry had traditionally been an aristocratic pursuit and thus was not to be trusted. Poems were mostly written within court circles, for court audiences; poetry tended to be circulated in manuscript form rather than published; skill in writing verses was to a certain extent a sign of good breeding, like dressing well or using the right fork at dinner.
The Puritans revived the anti-poetry attitudes that Sir Philip Sidney reacts to in his “Defense of Poesie,” in which “poetry” is understood in the general sense as “literature,” including prose; and had two purposes, to “instruct” and to “delight.” Not surprisingly, during the years of the Puritan Protectorate, following the Puritan revolt and the execution of Charles I (lost his head; very messy business revolution), very little poetry appeared. In the years leading up to the Revolution, however, there was a great deal of poetic activity, primarily centered on the court or aristocratic circles.
The two main “groups” of poets were the “metaphysical” poets, of whom the greatest was John Donne (pause for moment of reverential silence), and the so-called “Sons of Ben,” poets who admired and emulated England's first (unofficial) Poet Laureate, Ben Jonson. The latter group to a certain extent overlapped with the “cavalier” poets, so called because most of them were aristocrats who gallantly supported the lost cause of Charles Stuart (loyalty to the monarch was a part of their aristocratic code). Their subject matter tends to emphasize gallant virtues and aristocratic values; the style and tone are witty and light, and not infrequently there is a thematic connection with the poems of erotic s education.
The term "Metaphysical Poet" was first coined by the critic Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) and he used it as a disparaging term. Earlier, John Dryden had also been critical of the group of poets he grouped together as too proud of their wit. Johnson and Dryden valued the clarity, restraint and shapeliness of the poets of Augustan Rome (which is why some 18th century poets are called "Augustan," and therefore were antagonistic towards poets of the mid-17th century.
The Metaphysicals were out of critical favor for the 18th and 19th centuries (obviously, the Romantic poets found little in this heavily intellectualized poetry). At the end of the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th century, interest in this group picked up, and especially important was T.S. Eliot's famous essay "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921). Interest peaked this century with the New Critics school around mid-century, and now is tempering off a bit, though Donne, the original "Big Name" is being superceded now by interest in George Herbert, who's religious seeking and questioning seems to be hitting a critical nerve.
Dryden was the first to use the term when he criticised Donne in 1693: 'He affects the Metaphysics... in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts.' It is true that Donne appeals to the intellect not the heart of the reader. Johnson commented in The Lives of the Poets (with reference to Cowley), that 'about the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets', highlighting the self-conscious intellectualism of their work: 'the metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show learning was their whole endeavor'.
Dryden disapproved of Donne's writing style, especially his use of conceits (witty comparisons) and his extravagant abstractions. A 'metaphysical conceit' is an extended metaphor; making ingenious comparisons between two apparently incongruous things or concepts. Samuel Johnson described the far-fetched nature of their poetic comparisons as 'a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike' eg. Donne's extended comparison of love with astrology or Marvell's comparison of the soul with a drop of dew. They are comparing things which are not at all alike but within the world of the poem they make sense. Conceits have a crucial role in furthering the argument or persuading the reader.
Helen Gardner explains: ‘Argument and persuasion, and the use of the conceit as their instrument, are the elements or body of a metaphysical poem. Its quintessence or soul is the vivid imagining of a moment of experience or of a situation out of which the need to argue, or persuade, or define arises. Metaphysical poetry is famous for its abrupt, personal openings in which a man speaks to his mistress, or addresses his God, or sets a scene, or calls us to mark this or see that.’
Metaphysical poetry is self-consciously difficult, demanding intellectual effort on the part of the reader. It unashamedly alienates the intellectually lazy, assuming a level of understanding on the part of its readership which it flatters as elite able to understand its wit. Jasper Mayne summed this up in his elegy on Donne: ‘We are thought wits, when ‘tis understood’. Major Characteristics of Metaphysical Poetry can be summed as below:
- Intellectuality: Metaphysical poetry treats human experiences and emotions in terms of analytical, intellectual rather than emotional terms, frequently becoming one long reasoned argument. For instance, if the poet is discussing his love for a lady or his love for God, instead of saying “I love thee,” offering direct emotional expression to his feelings, he will analyze his love, argue his way through a logical presentation (in essence, try to discover a more intellectual way of making an emotional presentation).
- Poetry of Unified Sensibility: We think and feel simultaneously, so the world of poetic experience should involve BOTH. As we read a poem, watch a sunset, or fall in love, we think/analyze and feel/emotionalize. Thus we would expect the poet to more rapidly form the rational to emotional, spiritual to physical, mystical to logical—and blend these together into a new though unusual whole.
- Leading Figurative Device: Conceits are ingeniously elaborated metaphors, demonstrating curious equations (occult resemblances) between two things, most frequently comparing spiritual truth to physical objects. A conceit fuses disparate items and goes beyond the “normal” bounds of metaphor; the meaningful likeness is discoverable (cf. Johnson,discordia concors: union of two very dissimilar items, “yoked by violence together”).
My soul is God's conduit pipes, or His musical pipes
“Drill through my metal heart an hole, wherein
With graces cotters to thyself it pin.”
The conceit tends to form the body, the core of the poet's statement rather than being used merely for ornamentation, and
It is a ready vehicle for unified sensibility (it joins the physical/ spiritual, sensuous / intellectual — cf. Donne's compasses in his “Valediction”).
- Elements of WIT—paradox, pun, antithesis, and startling contrast: Other stylistic possibilities in metaphysical poetry (esp. as derived from Donne): colloquial and homely language, conversational idiom; strong line (rugged, unmetrical, monosyllabic, strong stresses); dramatic mode (use of apostrophe; poems become monologues or dialogues, prayers).
e. Love: Love is common theme of the most of the metaphysical poets. In Marvell we find the pretence of passion (in To His Coy Mistress) used as a peg on which to hang serious reflections on the brevity of happiness. The Definition of Love is an ironic game - more a love of definition let loose; the poem is cool, lucid and dispassionate, if gently self-mocking. So you can move on to Donne, in whom passionate sexual love is examined with vigour and intensity. There are far too many suitable poems to consider all in detail, but The Good-Morrow, The Sunne Rising and The Anniversarie belong together, while A Nocturnall, upon S. Lucie's Day gives the other side of the coin. There is positive celebration of life in The Good Morrow and the others, while in the Nocturnall we have the examination of complex negativity.
In A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning the argument is not logically persuasive, but the cleverness and subtlety of Donne's method are diverting - an intelligent woman might be comforted. She cannot change the fact of the lover's going, but the poem is evidence of the integrity of the love he has professed hitherto.
Both Herbert and Vaughan address man's love of God, while Herbert, and Marvell (Bermudas), consider God's love of man. Herbert considers man's duty to God in The Collar and The Pearl as does Marvell in The Coronet.
Eternity and man's life in the context of this, is the explicit subject of all of Vaughan's poems in the selection, but is considered by Herbert in The Flower and, in a wholly secular manner, by Marvell in To His Coy Mistress.
In terms of the whole poetry of these four, this small selection accurately reflects the arguably narrow preoccupation of Herbert and Vaughan with religious questions, and the great variety of Marvell.
The selection only of love poems is partly misleading in Donne's case. He wrote a great deal of devotional verse, much of it very good, but his most striking achievements are in the Songs and Sonets. Herbert, of course, is not narrow - he is concerned with man's whole life in relation to God. Vaughan is more problematic - his preoccupation with his own salvation and his conviction that most of mankind is damned are less attractive qualities. He is fanatical where Herbert is tolerant
f. Imagery: We can also consider the imagery used by the poets. Let us not become bogged down in discussion of single images, such as the notorious “twin compasses” in A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.
Consider, rather, the whole range of sources of imagery each uses. Broadly speaking, Donne is eclectic (wide-ranging) and apparently obscure. He did not write for publication, but showed poems to friends whom he supposed to be well-read enough to understand these references. Donne's imagery draws on the new (in the late 16thcentury) learning of the English renaissance and on topical discoveries and exploration. We find references to alchemy, sea-voyages, mythology and religion (among many other things). Certain images or ideas recur so often as to seem typical: kingship and rule; subjectivism ("one little room an everywhere" "nothing else is"); alchemy - especially the mystical beliefs associated with elixir and quintessence – and cosmology, both ancient and modern (references both to spheres and to the world of "sea-discoverers").
Herbert's imagery, by way of contrast, draws on the everyday and familiar; reason is like "a good huswife", spirit is measured in "drammes" and God's grace is a "silk twist", suffering is a harvest of thorns or blood-letting, Paradise is a garden where winter never comes, severity is a rod and love is God's bow or the host at a banquet. It will be seen, however, that many of these images are found in Christ's teaching, while others (or the same ones) may have acquired religious connotations. The reference to "thorn" and "bloud" in The Collar ironically seem to ignore the conventional religious symbolism of these terms.
Vaughan uses imagery almost exclusively from the natural world which is apprehended with a delight notably absent from his perception of most other people. The clue to this lies in The Retreate where Vaughan notes that "shadows of eternity" were seen by him in natural phenomena such as clouds or flowers. These images are readily understood and beautiful as with the flown bird and the star liberated from the Tomb. With Marvell, imagery is more problematic. Unlike Donne who scatters metaphors freely, Marvell is more selective and sparing. Very often the image is more memorable and striking than the idea it expresses, as with the "deserts of vast eternity", while frequently one finds an idea which cannot be understood except as the image in which Marvell expresses it, as with the "green thought in a green shade". In any case, with all of these poets, the use of metaphor serves, and is subordinate to, the total argument.
In The Coronet, Marvell considers whether the poetic skill which has formerly (and culpably) served to praise his "shepherdess" can "redress that Wrong", by weaving a "Chaplet" for Christ. But, the poet concludes, this is self-deception and vanity, and he ends with a prayer that God will act to remove the "Serpent" (the pursuit, in writing, of the poet's own "Fame" or (self) "Interest" - even if this requires the destruction of Marvell's own ingenious verse - "my curious frame"). In the skilful development of the central metaphor of the garland or "coronet" (appropriate both to the pastoral context and with biblical connotations, especially in associating the temptation to evil with the Serpent lurking in the greenery, Marvell exhibits the complexity, the riddling quality which this poem calls into question, perhaps best shown in the tortuous syntax of the first sentence with its succession of subordinate clauses separating the introductory "When" from the subject and main verb "I seek".
g. Stanzas and poetic form: Donne establishes a pattern which the others emulate in his use of the stanza. He appears to love variety as a natural embellishment and (to borrow Milton's phrase)“true ornament of verse”. We can see this by comparing poems. The three stanza structure which carries the argument in The Good Morrow is used again in other poems. But the fluency of the stanza in The Good-Morrow leading to the brief penultimate line and final Alexandrine with its stately, measured quality, gives way in The Sunne Rising to a far more lively and varied stanza. The almost breathless colloquial lines are, however, qualified in each stanza by a wholly regular and fluent rhyming couplet which enables Donne to conclude with a rhetorical flourish (note, however, that the final pentameter line is divided - rather on the model of the Alexandrine - after the second iambic foot). InThe Anniversarie the whole stanza is more measured and stately and the Alexandrine is restored as the final line. In A Nocturnall Upon S.Lucies Day Donne uses, again, predominantly the pentameter line, yet the whole effect is more laboured than the fluentGood-Morrow. This is achieved by repeated interruptions marked by the punctuation.
Herbert matches Donne for variety in the stanza, but is more aware of the appearance of the poem on the page, as well as the effect on the ear. Poems such as The Altar and Easter Wings are written almost wholly for the sake of appearance. In this selection we should note, especially, The Collar and Discipline. In Discipline the cramped, lean lines reflect the severity which the poet begs God to refrain from using. In The Collar, there is an apparent randomness, a lack of order on the page, which mirrors the disordered outburst the poet here records. the jerky quality which derives from rhetorical questions - frequent use of full-stop, colon and question-mark even in mid-line - gives way only in the final four lines to a fluent conclusion which comes with the poet's account of his submission to the divine pull on the collar.
In many of Marvell's poems we find the same eight-syllable iambic line, yet its effect can vary remarkably. In To His Coy Mistress the vigorousness of the argument appears in the breathless lines - few are end-stopped, and the lines have the rough power of speech.
In The Definition of Love the same line is used, but arranged in four line stanzas. These carry the argument in the same way in which Donne uses this stanza in A Valediction Forbidding Mourning. Unlike Donne, who is prepared to allow some use of enjambments (between first and second stanzas and frequently within all the stanzas) Marvell's stanza here has a near metronomic quality - a punctuation mark at the end of the second line exaggerates the rhyming syllable, which is emphatically matched at the end of the stanza. There is a similar regularity in Bermudas but here, by arranging the lines as rhyming pairs, Marvell conveys something of the sense of the motion of the English boat through the water (as the poem's last line makes clear). This same line is used again, but arranged into eight line stanzas to develop the argument in The Garden, which is less slick but more profound and thoughtful than that in The Definition of Love.
Vaughan feels free to use variety in his stanza. Less spectacularly, perhaps, than Donne, he nonetheless suits form to content. So The Retreate is a fast-moving sustained meditation not divided into stanzas. The more contrived and ordered argument of The World or Man require much longer stanzas, but regular in form, while "They Are All Gone into the World of Light", with its shorter stanza, becomes, in effect, a long series of distinct observations on the poem's single subject.
John Donne as a Metaphysical Poet
John Donne is the classic representative of metaphysical poetry. His instinct compelled him to bring the whole of experience into his verse and to choose the most direct and natural form of expression by his learned and fantastic mind. He is colloquial and rhetorical and erudite in all his poems. There is a plenty of passion in this kind of poetry. In the “Anniversary”, Donne gives a lofty expression to the love and mutual trust of himself and his wife, his restless mind to seek far-fetched ideas, similitude and images in order to convey to the readers the exact quality of this love and interest.
Metaphysical poetry is inspired by “philosophical conception of universe and the role assigned to the human spirit in the great drama of existence.” John Donne and his followers are not metaphysical poets in the full sense of the term. They are metaphysical in a restricted sense. Donne is also award of clash between the old and new, the world of faith and the world of reason, the clash between the old geographers and Copernicus and his followers.
The metaphysical poetry resolves self into two broad divisions of amorous and religious verse. John Donne has written many songs and sonnets on the subject of love. He does not follow the Petrarchan tradition of love poetry as we find in Spenser and Shakespeare. Donne was the first who revolted against this tradition of poetry. He does not flatter his beloved or glorify her. On the contrary, in many of his songs, he shows a cynical contempt for women. His song, “Goe And Catch A Falling Starre” is an example for this connection.
John Donne is also capable of deep feelings. The poems he wrote to celebrate his wedded love are full of such feelings. He says to his wife in the “Anniversary” that all honors and glories all the princes and their favorites might perish but “only our love hath no decay.”
In his early life, John Donne had lived an irregular life but in his middle age he took religion whole-heartedly and entered the church. His divine poems as his religious verse are a brooding thought on the subject of death and a strong faith in resurrection. Donne seems our representative before God.
Unified sensibility is an important element of metaphysical poetry. It was T.S Eliot who made this phrase popular. According to him separation of thoughts from feelings is called dissociation of sensibility. The other is called unified sensibility which is the combination of thinking and feeling. John Donne and the metaphysical had a unified sensibility. Their poetry expressed through feelings and thinking at the same time. Here is a direct apprehension of thought or creation of thought into feeling.
Another characteristic feature of the metaphysical verse is indulgence in “dissimilar images of discovery occult resemblance in things apparently unlike.” The metaphysical poetry is full of far-fetched images or often called conceits and allusions and references borrowed from branches of learning. For example, Donne represents himself in “Twickhnam Garden” as an unhappy lover. He wants to be converted himself in a fountain so that he may weep all the time. But his tears would be true tears of love.
Metaphysical conceits convey a unified experience. John Donne has made a characteristic use of ideas and experience and the most startling connections are discovered between them. According to Greisens, the hallmark of all metaphysical poetry is passionate feeling and paradoxical concentration is an important quality of metaphysical poetry in general and Donne’s poetry in particular. In all his poems, the reader is held to one idea or line of argument.
Intellect and wit blending with emotion and feelings marks metaphysical poetry especially that of Donne. Indeed John Donne represents very well the school of poetry somewhat vaguely called “Metaphysical.” He brought the whole of his experience into his poetry. The term metaphysical was applied to the poetry of John Donne and his followers by Dryden. In their poetry, there is a habit of always seeking to express something after something behind, the simple and obvious first sense and suggestion of a subject. According to Johnson that these poets only wanted to display their learning and to say something which had not been before.
On John Donne- T. S. Eliot
Source: "John Donne," in The Nation and the Athenaeum, Vol. XXXIII, No. 10, June 9, 1923, pp. 331-32.
One of the characteristics of Donne which wins him, I fancy, his interest for the present age, is his fidelity to emotion as he finds it; his recognition of the complexity of feeling and its rapid alterations and antitheses. A change of feeling, with Donne, is rather the regrouping of the same elements under a mood which was previously subordinate: it is not the substitution of one mood for a wholly different one.
Impossible to isolate his ecstasy, his sensuality, and his cynicism.
With sincerity in the practical sense, poetry has little to do; the poet is responsible to a much more difficult consciousness and honesty. And it is because he has this honesty, because he is so often expressing his genuine whole of tangled feelings, that Donne is, like the early Italians, like Heine, like Baudelaire, a poet of the world's literature.
There are two ways in which we may find a poet to be modern: he may have made a statement which is true everywhere and for all time (so far as "everywhere" and "for all time" have meaning), or there may be an accidental relationship between his mind and our own. The latter is fashion; we are all susceptible to fashion in literature as in everything else, and we all require some indulgence for it. The age of Donne, and the age of Marvell, are sympathetic to us, and it demands a considerable effort of dissociation to decide to what degree we are deflected toward him by local or temporary bias.
The age objects to the heroic and sublime, and it objects to the simplification and separation of the mental faculties. The objections are largely well grounded, and react against the nineteenth century; they are partly--how far I do not inquire--a product of the popularization of the study of mental phenomena. Ethics having been eclipsed by psychology, we accept the belief that any state of mind is extremely complex, and chiefly composed of odds and ends in constant flux manipulated by desire and fear. When, therefore, we find a poet who neither suppresses nor falsifies, and who expresses complicated states of mind, we give him welcome. And when we find his poetry containing everywhere potential or actual wit, our thirst has been relieved.
Neither the fantastic (Clevelandism is becoming popular) nor the cynical nor the sensual occupies an excessive importance with Donne; the elements in his mind had an order and congruity. The range of his feeling was great, but no more remarkable than its unity. He was altogether present in every thought and in every feeling. It is the same kind of unity as pervades the work of Chapman, for whom thought is an intense feeling which is one with every other feeling. Compared with these men, almost every nineteenth-century English poet is in some way limited or deformed.
Our appreciation of Donne must be an appreciation of what we lack, as well as of what we have in common with him. What is true of his mind is true, in different terms, of his language and versification. A style, a rhythm, to be significant, must embody a significant mind, must be produced by the necessity of a new form for a new content.... The dogmatic slumbers of the last hundred years are broken, and the chaos must be faced: we cannot return to sleep and call it order, and we cannot have any order but our own, but from Donne and his contemporaries we can draw instruction and encouragement.
George Herbert as Metaphysical Poet
George Herbert's poetry shows that to a large extent he followed the lead offered by Donne, but he also made contributions which were quite distinct. Herbert's distinguishing characteristic is his simplicity of diction and metaphor. He retains the colloquial manner, and, to an extent, the logical persuasive presentation of ideas, but he draws his metaphors from everyday domestic experience, employing a range of simple commonplace imagery in contrast to the sophisticated imagery of Donne. 'Conceits' are not an important part of Herbert's poetry, and his appeal is not so intellectual as Donne's. A technique Herbert introduced was the ending of a poem with two quiet lines which resolve the argument in the poem without answering the specific points raised by it, and this represents quite a dramatic break from Donne. Donne expresses his doubts in intellectual terms, and answers them in the same way. Herbert occasionally explores his doubts in intellectual terms, but answers them with emotion. In this way Herbert conveys the insight that one cannot argue or reason with God; one either feels God's presence, or loses the feeling. In these respects Herbert can be considered to have broken new ground, into which Henry Vaughan followed later.
Unlike Donne, Herbert wrote no love poetry, having decided, when he began writing poetry at Cambridge, to devote his poetic works to God. He seems to have had less difficulty in adjusting from court life to a religious life than did Donne, and his faith seems to have been more secure than that of Donne. Izaak Walton reports that Herbert was considered as almost a saint by those that knew him. Herbert's poetry is certainly about struggles of a religious kind, but the struggles are neither so desperate nor so personal as Donne's. Herbert's poetry is of a more instructive kind; instructing by example rather than precept. He writes for others, recording his struggles in order that others may follow his example. The thought in Herbert's poems can be seen as a continuation of the thought in his sermons, and it is this purpose behind his poetry which largely determines his style. In the opening stanza of 'The Church Porch' he writes,
A verse may finde him, who a sermon flies,
And turn delight into a sacrifice.
Herbert writes:
What? Shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the rode,
Loose as the winde, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit? (p.135)
Herbert puts less emphasis on conceits, exotic imagery, and ingenious thought, and looks to another source for stylistic inspiration - the Bible, or, more specifically, the language of Christ and the Parables. Where Donne goes out of his way to find an exotic or striking image - a globe, beaten gold, a pair of compasses for example, Herbert looks for the homeliest commonplace image he can find. In 'The Collar' for example we have a thorn, wine, fruit, and cable. We can see the reason for this preference in Herbert's own observations on Christ's use of common imagery: by familiar things he might make his doctrine slip the more easily into the hearts even of the meanest . . . that labouring people might have everywhere monuments of his doctrine . . . that he might set a copy for the parsons. Herbert did not want his vocabulary or imagery to be a barrier to any reader's understanding.
The essential simplicity of Herbert's approach is reflected in the titles he chooses, often single words such as 'Man', 'Life', 'Love', and 'Death'. These words often do not reoccur in the poems, and nor, if the poems were read without the title, would the reader be able to supply them. The unifying ideas in Herbert's poems are often simple too, such as the idea of a pulley, or a collar.
At times perhaps he comes close to over-simplifying his subjects; to liken man's need for God to a pulley, for example, or the discipline of faith to a collar, might seem rather crude. But this initial simplicity is deceptive, for the poems generally embody a system of complex thought, revealed by the structure and the use of metaphor. The structure of 'The Collar', for example, reflects the struggle between freedom and discipline in its alternation of long and short lines.
My lines and life are free; free as the rode,
Loose as the winde, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit?
Complexity is also present in that the frame of mind he is expressing contains the seeds of its own downfall, for that which is free, loose, and large, can also be directionless and undisciplined. The diction of a later line reveals Herbert's self-condemnation: But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wilde. A person who is raving, fierce, and wild, is not capable of making a balanced judgement. In ways such as these the central simple idea is filled out in the structure and diction of the poem.
Another technique used by Herbert is clearly seen in the poem 'Redemption', and it is in poems such as this that he comes close to his model: the parable. On the surface 'Redemption' tells a simple story of a tenant being granted a favour by his landlord, but a little reflection shows that the story is a symbolic representation of the relationship between mankind, God, and Christ.
The meaning of the story told in the poem builds in a cumulative way when we piece details together and interpret them - the title being the clue to the interpretation. We learn, for example, that the landlord has 'gone/ about some land, which he had dearly bought'. Later we learn that the landlord is among 'theeves and murderers'. Finally the poet meets the landlord,
. . . there I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, & died.
These final lines show that the price paid for the land which was 'dearly bought' was Christ's death on the cross. Complexities such as these place Herbert among the Metaphysical poets, in spite of his essential simplicity and avoidance of 'conceits'.
In many poems, such as 'Affliction', 'Man', and 'The Flower' Herbert follows Donne's example in addressing God directly, and these seem to be the most personal of his poems. We see him exploring his personal relationship with God, wanting to understand God better and to make himself more worthy.
In 'Affliction' he charts, in a considered and meditative manner, the fluctuations and failings of his faith. In the first three stanzas he records some of his early feelings about God which were not true faith at all, but exercises in indulgence, or self-gratification. At first he thought his service 'brave', suggesting that he was more concerned with his own glory than with the glory of God. In the second stanza he reveals a mercenary attitude, in which he looks forward to a relationship with God which will bring him personal reward.
. . . both heav'n and earth
Pay'd me my wages in a world of mirth.
In the third stanza he records how he tried to argue himself into faith, with love, and true religious experience, being conspicuous by their absence.
Thus argu'd into hopes, my thoughts reserved
No place for grief or fear.
These experiences are presented in the past tense, and in the last line we see that he now realises that his relationship with God must be founded on love.
Ah my deare God! though I am clean forgot,
Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.
In 'The Flower' we see Herbert trying to understand, and reconcile himself to, the cycle of spring and winter, life and death, to which all things on earth are subject. He relates the cycle to his own experiences of periods of happiness and fruitfulness and periods of decline, which he attributes to the will of God.
The theme of 'The Flower' resonates with the theme of 'The Pulley' in which he sees God as deliberately causing a state of restlessness in the soul of mankind in order that he should not become complacent and forget that finding God requires a continuous struggle. The final stanza of 'The Flower' also relates back to 'Affliction', for we can see the errors of false faith stemming from human pride. The need for love in his relationship with God found at the end of 'Affliction' is complimented by the need for humility found at the end of 'The Flower'.
Thou hast a garden for us, where to bide.
Who would be more,
Swelling through store,
Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.
Where Donne's sense of 'repining restlessnesse' was never stilled, even by revelation of the love of God, for Herbert the notions of 'quiet' and 'rest' are essential to his poems. Donne asks questions and rarely resolves them, while in Herbert the resolution is satisfactory and deeply felt.
We see in Herbert a poet who although essentially derivative of Donne, used the medium of Metaphysical poetry for a sincere exploration of his own faith, and in doing so broadened the scope of the genre to allow the poet a more personal approach than that apparent in Donne, an approach which was in turn taken up by Henry Vaughan.
Andrew Marvel as a Metaphysical Poet
“Had we but world enough,
and time, This coyness, lady,
were no crime.”
- To His Coy Mistress
As all the Metaphysical Poets are known for their ability to startle the reader and coax new perspective through paradoxical images, subtle argument, inventive syntax, and imagery from art, philosophy, and religion using an extended metaphor known as a conceit, Andrew Marvell, along with these, developed a poetic style in which philosophical and spiritual subjects were approached with reason and often concluded in paradox. This group of writers established meditation—based on the union of thought and feeling sought after in Jesuit Ignatian meditation—as a poetic mode.
On Andrew Marvell-By T S Eliot
(First published in the Times Literary Supplement, 31 March 1921.)
The tercentenary of the former member for Hull deserves not only the celebration proposed by that favoured borough, but a little serious reflection upon his writing. That is an act of piety, which is very different from the resurrection of a deceased reputation. Marvell has stood high for some years; his best poems are not very many, and not only must be well known, from the Golden Treasury and the Oxford Book of English Verse, but must also have been enjoyed by numerous readers. His grave needs neither rose nor rue nor laurel; there is no imaginary justice to be done; we may think about him, if there be need for thinking, for our own benefit, not his. To bring the poet back to life - the great, the perennial, task of criticism - is in this case to squeeze the drops of the essence of two or three poems; even confining ourselves to these, we may find some precious liquor unknown to the present age. Not to determine rank, but to isolate this quality, is the critical labour. The fact that of all Marvell's verse, which is itself not a great quantity, the really valuable part consists of a very few poems indicates that the unknown quality of which we speak is probably a literary rather than a personal quality; or, more truly, that it is a quality of a civilization, of a traditional habit of life. A poet like Donne, or like Baudelaire or Laforgue, may almost be considered the inventor of an attitude, a system of feeling or of morals. Donne is difficult to analyse: what appears at one time a curious personal point of view may at another time appear rather the precise concentration of a kind of feeling diffused in the air about him. Donne and his shroud, the shroud and his motive for wearing it, are inseparable, but they are not the same thing. The seventeenth century sometimes seems for more than a moment to gather up and to digest into its art all the experience of the human mind which (from the same point of view) the later centuries seem to have been partly engaged in repudiating. But Donne would have been an individual at any time and place; Marvell's best verse is the product of European, that is to say Latin, culture. Out of that high style developed from Marlowe through Jonson (for Shakespeare does not lend himself to these genealogies) the seventeenth century separated two qualities: wit and magniloquence. Neither is as simple or as apprehensible as its name seems to imply, and the two are not in practice antithetical; both are conscious and cultivated, and the mind which cultivates one may cultivate the other. The actual poetry, of Marvell, of Cowley, of Milton, and of others, is a blend in varying proportions. And we must be on guard not to employ the terms with too wide a comprehension; for like the other fluid terms with which literary criticism deals, the meaning alters with the age, and for precision we must rely to some degree upon the literacy and good taste of the reader. The wit of the Caroline poets is not the wit of Shakespeare, and it is not the wit of Dryden, the great master of contempt, or of Pope, the great master of hatred, or of Swift, the great master of disgust. What is meant is some quality which is common to the songs in "Comus" and Cowley's "Anacreontics" and Marvell's "Horatian Ode." It is more than a technical accomplish meet, or the vocabulary and syntax of an epoch; it is, what we have designated tentatively as wit, a tough reasonableness beneath the slight Iyric grace. You cannot find it in Shelley or Keats or Wordsworth; you cannot find more than an echo of it in Landor; still less in Tennyson or Browning; and among contemporaries Mr. Yeats is an Irishman and Mr. Hardy is a modern Englishman - that is to say, Mr. Hardy is without it and Mr. Yeats is outside of the tradition altogether. On the other hand, as it certainly exists in Lafontaine, there is a large part of it in Gautier. And of the magniloquence, the deliberate exploitation of the possibilities of magnificence in language which Milton used and abused, there is also use and even abuse in the poetry of Baudelaire.Wit is not a quality that we are accustomed to associate with 'Puritan' literature, with Milton or with Marvell. But if so, we are at fault partly in our conception of wit and partly in our generalizations about the Puritans. And if the wit of Dryden or of Pope is not the only kind of wit in the language the rest is not merely a little merriment or a little levity or a little impropriety or a little epigram. And, on the other hand, the sense in which a man like Marvell is a 'Puritan' is restricted. The persons who opposed Charles I and the persons who supported the Commonwealth were not all of the flock of Zeal-of-the-land Busy or the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association. Many of them were gentlemen of the time who merely believed, with considerable show of reason, that government by a Parliament of gentlemen was better than government by a Stuart; though they were, to that extent, Liberal Practitioners, they could hardly foresee the tea-meeting and the Dissidence of Dissent. Being men of education and culture, even of travel, some of them were exposed to that spirit of the age which was coming to be the French spirit of the age. This spirit, curiously enough, was quite opposed to the tendencies latent or the forces active in Puritanism; the contest does great damage to the poetry of Milton; Marvell, an active servant of the public, but a lukewarm partisan, and a poet on a smaller scale, is far less injured by it. His line on the statue of Charles II, 'It is such a King as no chisel can mend', may be set off against his criticism of the Great Rebellion: 'Men . . ought and might have trusted the King'. Marvell, therefore, more a man of the century than a Puritan, speaks more clearly and unequivocally with the voice of his literary age than does Milton.This voice speaks out uncommonly strong in the "Coy Mistress." The theme is one of the great traditional commonplaces of European literature. It is the theme of 'O mistress mine,' of 'Gather ye rosebuds,' of 'Co, lovely rose'; it is in the savage austerity of Lucretius and the intense levity of Catullus. Where the wit of Marvell renews the theme is in the variety and order of the images. In the first of the three paragraphs Marvell plays with a fancy which begins by pleasing and leads to astonishment.
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime,
. . . I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews;
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow....
We notice the high speed, the succession of concentrated images, each magnifying the original fancy. When this process has been carried to the end and summed up, the poem turns suddenly with that surprise which has been one of the most important means of poetic effect since Homer:
But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near,
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
A whole civilization resides in these lines:
Pallida Mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas,
Regumque turris....
And not only Horace but Catullus himself:
Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.
The verse of Marvell has not the grand reverberation of Catullus's Latin; but the image of Marvell is certainly more comprehensive and penetrates greater depths than Horace's.A modern poet, had he reached the height, would very likely have closed on this moral reflection. But the three strophes of Marvell's poem have something like a syllogistic relation to each other. After a close approach to the mood of Donne,
. . . then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity . . .
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace,
the conclusion,
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife,
Thorough the iron gates of life.
It will hardly be denied that this poem contains wit; but it may not be evident that this wit forms the crescendo and diminuendo of a scale of great imaginative power. The wit is not only combined with, but fused into, the imagination. We can easily recognize a witty fancy in the successive images ('my vegetable love', 'till the conversion of the Jews'), but this fancy is not indulged, as it sometimes is by Cowley or Cleveland, for its own sake. It is structural decoration of a serious idea. In this it is superior to the fancy of "L'Allegro," "11 Penseroso," or the lighter and less successful poems of Keats. In fact, this alliance of levity and seriousness (by which the seriousness is intensified) is a characteristic of the sort of wit we are trying to identify. It is found in
Le squelette etait invisible
Au temps heureux de l'art paien!
of Gautier, and in the dandysme of Baudelaire and Laforgue. It is in the poem of Catullus which has been quoted, and in the variation by Ben Jonson:
Cannot we delude the eyes
Of a few poor household spies ?
'Tis no sin love's fruits to steal;
But the sweet thefts to reveal,
To be taken, to be seen,
These have crimes accounted been.
It is in Propertius and Ovid. It is a quality of a sophisticated literature; a quality which expands in English literature just at the moment before the English mind altered; it is not a quality which we should expect Puritanism to encourage. When we come to Gray and Collins, the sophistication remains only in the language, and has disappeared from the feeling. Gray and Collins were masters, but they had lost that hold on human values, that firm grasp of human experience, which is a formidable achievement of the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets. This wisdom, cynical perhaps but untired (in Shakespeare, a terrifying clairvoyance), leads toward, and is only completed by, the religious comprehension; it leads to the point of the "Ainsi tout leur a craque dans la main" of Bouvard and Pecuchet.The difference between imagination and fancy, in view of this poetry of wit, is a very narrow one. Obviously, an image which is immediately and unintentionally ridiculous is merely a fancy. In the poem "Upon Appleton House," Marvell falls in with one of these undesirable images, describing the attitude of the house toward its master:
Yet thus the leaden house does sweat,
And scarce endures the master great;
But, where he comes, the swelling hall
Stirs, and the square grows spherical;
which, whatever its intention, is more absurd than it was intended to be. Marvell also falls into the even commoner error of images which are over-developed or distracting; which support nothing but their own misshapen bodies:
And now the salmon-fishers moist
Their leathern boats begin to hoist;
And, like Antipodes in shoes,
Have shod their heads in their canoes.
Of this sort of image a choice collection may be found in Johnson's Life of Cowley. But the images in the "Coy Mistress" are not only witty, but satisfy the elucidation of Imagination given by Coleridge:
This power . . . reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects, a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement....
Coleridge's statement applies also to the following verses, which are selected because of their similarity, and because they illustrate the marked caesura which Marvell often introduces in a sort line:
The tawny mowers enter next
Who seem like Israelites to be
Walking on foot through a green sea....,
And now the meadows fresher dyed,
Whose grass, with moister colour dashed,
Seems as green silks but newly washed....
He hangs in shades the orange bright,
Like golden lamps in a green night. .
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade....
Had it lived long, it would have been
Lilies without, roses within.
The whole poem, from which the last of these quotations is drawn ("The Nymph and the Fawn"), is built upon a very slight foundation, and we can imagine what some of our modern practitioners of slight themes would have made of it. But we need not descend to an invidious contemporaneity to point the difference. Here are six lines from "The Nymph and the Fawn":
I have a garden of my own,
But so with roses overgrown
And lilies, that you would it guess
To be a little wilderness;
And all the spring-time of the year
It only loved to be there.
And here are five lines from "The Nymph's Song to Hylas" in the Life and Death of Jason, by William Morris:
I know a little garden close
Set thick with lily and red rose.
Where I would wander if I might
From dewy dawn to dewy night,
And have one with me wandering.
So far the resemblance is more striking than the difference, although we might just notice the vagueness of allusion in the last line to some indefinite person, form, or phantom, compared with the more explicit reference of emotion to object which we should expect from Marvell. But in the latter part of the poem Morris divaricates widely:
Yet tottering as I am, and weak,
Still have I left a little breath
To seek within the jaws of death
An entrance to that happy place;
To seek the unforgotten face
Once seen, once kissed, once reft from me
Anigh the murmuring of the sea.
Here the resemblance, if there is any, is to the latter part of "The Coy Mistress." As for the difference, it could not be more pronounced. The effect of Morris's charming poem depends upon the mistiness of the feeling and the vagueness of its object; the effect of Marvell's upon its bright, hard precision. And this precision is not due to the fact that Marvell is concerned with cruder or simpler or more carnal emotions. The emotion of Morris is not more refined or more spiritual; it is merely more vague: if anyone doubts whether the more refined or spiritual emotion can be precise, he should study the treatment of the varieties of discarnate emotion in the "Paradiso." A curious result of the comparison of Morris's poem with Marvell's is that the former, though it appears to be more serious, is found to be the slighter; and Marvell's "Nymph and the Fawn," appearing more slight, is the more serious.
So weeps the wounded balsam; so
The holy frankincense doth flow;
The brotherless Heliades
Melt in such amber tears as these.
These verses have the suggestiveness of true poetry; and the verses of Morris, which are nothing if not an attempt to suggest, really suggest nothing; and we are inclined to infer that the suggestiveness is the aura around a bright clear centre, that you cannot have the aura alone. The day-dreamy feeling of Morris is essentially a slight thing; Marvell takes a slight affair, the feeling of a girl for her pet, and gives it a connection with that inexhaustible and terrible nebula of emotion which surrounds all our exact and practical passions and mingles with them. Again, Marvell does this in a poem which, because of its formal pastoral machinery, may appear a trifling object:
CLORINDA. Near this, a fountain's liquid bell
Tinkles within the concave shell.
DAMON. Might a soul bathe there and be clean,
Or slake its drought ?
where we find that a metaphor has suddenly rapt us to the image of spiritual purgation. There is here the element of surprise, as when Villon says:
Necessite faict gens mesprendre
Et faim saillir le loup des boys,
the surprise which Poe considered of the highest importance, and also the restraint and quietness of tone which makes the surprise possible. And in the verses of Marvell which have been quoted there is the making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar, which Coleridge attributed to good poetry.The effort to construct a dream world, which alters English poetry so greatly in the nineteenth century, a dream world utterly different from the visionary realities of the Vita Nuova or of the poetry of Dante's contemporaries, is a problem of which various explanations may no doubt be found; in any case, the result makes a poet of the nineteenth century, of the same size as Marvell, a more trivial and less serious figure. Marvell is no greater personality than William Morris, but he had something much more solid behind him: he had the vast and penetrating influence of Ben Jonson. Jonson never wrote anything purer than Marvell's "Horatian Ode"; this ode has that same quality of wit which was diffused over the whole Elizabethan product and concentrated in the work of Jonson. And, as was said before, this wit which pervades the poetry of Marvell is more Latin, more refined, than anything that succeeded it. The great danger, as well as the greatest interest and excitement, of English prose and verse, compared with French, is that it permits and justifies an exaggeration of particular qualities to the exclusion of others Dryden was great in wit' as Milton in magniloquence; but the former, by isolating this quality and making it by itself into great poetry, and the latter, by coming to dispense with it altogether, may perhaps have injured the language. In Dryden wit becomes almost fun, and thereby loses some contact with reality; becomes pure fun, which French wit almost never is.
The midwife placed her hand on his thick skull,
With this prophetic blessing: Be thou dull....
A numerous host of dreaming saints succeed,
Of the true old enthusiastic breed.
This is audacious and splendid; it belongs to satire beside which Marvell's Satires are random babbling, but it is perhaps as exaggerated as:
Oft he seems to hide his face,
But unexpectedly returns,
And to his faithful champion hath in place
Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza mourns,
And all that hand them to resist
His uncontrollable intent.
How oddly the sharp Dantesque phrase 'whence Gaza mourns' springs out from the brilliant contortions of Milton's sentence!
Who from his private gardens, where
He lived reserved and austere,
(As if his highest plot
To plant the bergamot)
Could by industrious valour climb
To ruin the great work of Time,
And cast the kingdoms old
Into another mold;
The Pict no shelter now shall find
Within his parti-coloured mind,
But, from this valour sad,
Shrink underneath the plaid:
There is here an equipoise, a balance and proportion of tones, which, while it cannot raise Marvell to the level of Dryden or Milton, extorts an approval which these poets do not receive from us, and bestows a pleasure at least different in kind from any they can often give. It is what makes Marvell a classic; or classic in a sense in which Gray and Collins are not; for the latter, with all their accredited purity, are comparatively poor in shades of feeling to contrast and unite.We are baffled in the attempt to translate the quality indicated by the dim and antiquated term wit into the equally unsatisfactory nomenclature of our own time. Even Cowley is only able to define it by negatives:
Comely in thousand shapes appears;
Yonder we saw it plain; and here 'tis now,
Like spirits in a place, we know not how.
It has passed out of our critical coinage altogether, and no new term has been struck to replace it; the quality seldom exists, and is never recognized.
In a true piece of Wit all things must be
Yet all things there agree;
As in the Ark, join'd without force or strife,
All creatures dwelt, all creatures that had life
Or as the primitive forms of all
(If we compare great things with small)
Which, without discord or confusion, lie
In that strange mirror of the Deity.
So far Cowley has spoken well. But if we are to attempt even no more than Cowley, we, placed in a retrospective attitude, must risk much more than anxious generalizations. With our eye still on Marvell, we can say that wit is not erudition; it is sometimes stifled by erudition, as in much of Milton. It is not cynicism, though it has a kind of toughness which may be confused with cynicism by the tender-minded. It is confused with erudition because it belongs to an educated mind, rich in generations of experience; and it is confused with cynicism because it implies a constant inspection and criticism of experience. It involves, probably, a recognition, implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible, which we find as clearly in the greatest as in poets like Marvell. Such a general statement may seem to take us a long way from "The Nymph and the Fawn," or even from the "Horatian Ode"; but it is perhaps justified by the desire to account for that precise taste of Marvell's which finds for him the proper degree of seriousness for every subject which he treats. His errors of taste, when he trespasses, are not sins against this virtue; they are conceits, distended metaphors and similes, but they never consist in taking a subject too seriously or too lightly. This virtue of wit is not a peculiar quality of minor poets, or of the minor poets of one age or of one school; it is an intellectual quality which perhaps only becomes noticeable by itself, in the work of lesser poets. Furthermore, it is absent from the work of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, on whose poetry nineteenth-century criticism has unconsciously been based. To the best of their poetry wit is irrelevant:
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye,
That finds no object worth its constancy ?
We should find it difficult to draw any useful comparison between these lines of Shelley and anything by Marvell. But later poets, who would have been the better for Marvell's quality, were without it; even Browning seems oddly immature, in some way, beside Marvell. And nowadays we find occasionally good irony, or satire, which lack wit's internal equilibrium, because their voices are essentially protests against some outside sentimentality or stupidity; or we find serious poets who seem afraid of acquiring wit, lest they lose intensity. The quality which Marvell had, this modest and certainly impersonal virtue - whether we call it wit or reason, or even urbanity - we have patently failed to define. By whatever name we call it, and however we define that name, it is something precious and needed and apparently extinct; it is what should preserve the reputation of Marvell. C'etait une belle ame, comme on ne fait plus a Londres.
THE METAPHYSICAL POETS
T. S. ELIOT
(This review of Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler, selected and edited, with an essay, by Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford: Clarendon Press), was first published in the Times Literary Supplement, 20 October 1921. NB: I have not reproduced in this html version the accents in Eliot's French quotations.)
By collecting these poems from the work of a generation more often named than read, and more often read than profitably studied, Professor Grierson has rendered a service of some importance. Certainly the reader will meet with many poems already preserved in other anthologies, at the same time that he discovers poems such as those of Aurelian Townshend or Lord Herbert of Cherbury here included. But the function of such an anthology as this is neither that of Professor Saintsbury's admirable edition of Caroline poets nor that of the Oxford Book of English Verse. Mr. Grierson's book is in itself a piece of criticism, and a provocation of criticism; and we think that he was right in including so many poems of Donne, elsewhere (though not in many editions) accessible, as documents in the case of 'metaphysical poetry'. The phrase has long done duty as a term of abuse, or as the label of a quaint and pleasant taste. The question is to what extent the so-called metaphysicals formed a school (in our own time we should say a 'movement'), and how far this so-called school or movement is a digression from the main current.
Not only is it extremely difficult to define metaphysical poetry, but difficult to decide what poets practice it and in which of their verses. The poetry of Donne (to whom Marvell and Bishop King are sometimes nearer than any of the other authors) is late Elizabethan, its feeling often very close to that of Chapman. The 'courtly' poetry is derivative from Jonson, who borrowed liberally from the Latin; it expires in the next century with the sentiment and witticism of Prior. There is finally the devotional verse of Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw (echoed long after by Christina Rossetti and Francis Thompson); Crashaw, sometimes more profound and less sectarian than the others, has a quality which returns through the Elizabethan period to the early Italians. It is difficult to find any precise use of metaphor, simile, or other conceit, which is common to all the poets and at the same time important enough as an element of style to isolate these poets as a group. Donne, and often Cowley, employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically 'metaphysical'; the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a figure of speech to the furthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it. Thus Cowley develops the commonplace comparison of the world to a chess-board through long stanzas (To Destiny), and Donne, with more grace, in A Valediction, the comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses. But elsewhere we find, instead of the mere explication of the content of a comparison, a development by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader.
On a round ball
A workeman that hath copies by, can lay
An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia
And quickly make that, which was nothing, All,
So cloth each teare,
Which thee cloth 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.
Here we find at least two connections which are not implicit in the first figure, but are forced upon it by the poet: from the geographer's globe to the tear, and the tear to the deluge. On the other hand, some of Donne's most successful and characteristic effects are secured by brief words and sudden contrasts:
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,
where the most powerful effect is produced by the sudden contrast of associations of 'bright hair' and of 'bore'. This telescoping of images and multiplied associations is characteristic of the phrase of some of the dramatists of the period which Donne knew: not to mention Shakespeare, it is frequent in Middleton, Webster, and Tourneur, and is one of the sources of the vitality of their language.
Johnson, who employed the term 'metaphysical poets', apparently having Donne, Cleveland, and Cowley chiefly in mind, remarks of them that 'the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together'. The force of this impeachment lies in the failure of the conjunction, the fact that often the ideas are yoked but not united; and if we are to judge of styles of poetry by their abuse, enough examples may be found in Cleveland to justify Johnson's condemnation. But a degree of heterogeneity of material compelled into unity by the operation of the poet's mind is omnipresent in poetry. We need not select for illustration such a line as:
Notre ame est un trois-mats cherchant son Icarie;
We may find it in some of the best lines of Johnson himself (The Vanity of Human Wishes):
His fate was destined to a barren strand,
A petty fortress, and a dubious hand;
He left a name at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral, or adorn a tale.
where the effect is due to a contrast of ideas, different in degree but the same in principle, as that which Johnson mildly reprehended. And in one of the finest poems of the age (a poem which could not have been written in any other age), the Exequy of Bishop King, the extended comparison is used with perfect success: the idea and the simile become one, in the passage in which the Bishop illustrates his impatience to see his dead wife, under the figure of a journey:
Stay for me there; I will not faile
To meet thee in that hollow Vale.
And think not much of my delay;
I am already on the way,
And follow thee with all the speed
Desire can make, or sorrows breed.
Each minute is a short degree,
And ev'ry houre a step towards thee.
At night when I retake to rest,
Next morn I rise nearer my West
Of life, almost by eight houres sail,
Than when sleep breath'd his drowsy gale....
But heark! My Pulse, like a soft Drum
Beats my approach, tells Thee I come;
And slow howere my marches be,
I shall at last sit down by Thee.
(In the last few lines there is that effect of terror which is several times attained by one of Bishop King's admirers, Edgar Poe.) Again, we may justly take these quatrains from Lord Herbert's Ode, stanzas which would, we think, be immediately pronounced to be of the metaphysical school:
So when from hence we shall he gone,
And he no more, nor you, nor I,
As one another's mystery,
Each shall he both, yet both but one.
This said, in her up-lifted face,
Her eyes, which did that beauty crown,
Were like two starrs, that having faln down,
Look up again to find their place:
While such a moveless silent peace
Did seize on their becalmed sense,
One would have thought some influence
Their ravished spirits did possess.
There is nothing in these lines (with the possible exception of the stars, a simile not at once grasped, but lovely and justified) which fits Johnson's general observations on the metaphysical poets in his essay on Cowley. A good deal resides in the richness of association which is at the same time borrowed from and given to the word 'becalmed'; but the meaning is clear, the language simple and elegant. It is to be observed that the language of these poets is as a rule simple and pure; in the verse of George Herbert this simplicity is carried as far as it can go - a simplicity emulated without success by numerous modern poets. The structure of the sentences, on the other hand, is sometimes far from simple, but this is not a vice; it is a fidelity to thought and feeling. The effect, at its best, is far less artificial than that of an ode by Gray. And as this fidelity induces variety of thought and feeling, so it induces variety of music. We doubt whether, in the eighteenth century, could be found two poems in nominally the same metre, so dissimilar as Marvell's Coy Mistress and Crashaw's Saint Teresa; the one producing an effect of great speed by the use of short syllables, and the other an ecclesiastical solemnity by the use of long ones:
Love thou art absolute sole lord
Of life and death.
If so shrewd and sensitive (though so limited) a critic as Johnson failed to define metaphysical poetry by its faults, it is worth while to inquire whether we may not have more success by adopting the opposite method: by assuming that the poets of the seventeenth century (up to the Revolution) were the direct and normal development of the precedent age; and, without prejudicing their case by the adjective 'metaphysical', consider whether their virtue was not something permanently valuable, which subsequently disappeared, but ought not to have disappeared. Johnson has hit, perhaps by accident, on one of their peculiarities, when he observed that 'their attempts were always analytic'; he would not agree that, after the dissociation, they put the material together again in a new unity.
It is certain that the dramatic verse of the later Elizabethan and early Jacobean poets expresses a degree of development of sensibility which is not found in any of the prose, good as it often is. If we except Marlowe, a man of prodigious intelligence, these dramatists were directly or indirectly (it is at least a tenable theory) affected by Montaigne Even if we except also Jonson and Chapman, these two were notably erudite, and were notably men who incorporated their erudition into their sensibility: their mode of feeling was directly and freshly altered by their reading and thought. In Chapman especially there is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling, which is exactly what we find in Donne:
…. in this one thing, all the discipline
Of manners and of manhood is contained
A man to join himself with th' Universe
In his main sway, and make in all things fit
One with that All, and go on, round as it
Not plucking from the whole his wretched part
And into straits, or into nought revert,
Wishing the complete Universe might be
Subject to such a rag of it as he;
But to consider great Necessity.
We compare this with some modern passage:
No, when the fight begins within himself
A man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head,
Satan looks up between his feet - both tug -
He's left, himself i' the middle; the soul wakes
And grows. Prolong that battle through his life!
It is perhaps somewhat less fair, though very tempting as both poets are concerned with the perpetuation of love by offspring, to compare with the stanzas already quoted from Lord Herbert's Ode the following from Tennyson:
One walked between his wife and child,
With measured footfall firm and mild,
And now and then he gravely smiled.
The prudent partner of his blood
Leaned on him, faithful, gentle, good
Wearing the rose of womanhood.
And in their double love secure,
The little maiden walked demure,
Pacing with downward eyelids pure.
These three made unity so sweet,
My frozen heart began to beat,
Remembering its ancient heat.
The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. 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. The 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; m the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.
We may express the difference by the following theory: The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. They are simple, artificial, difficult, or fantastic, as their predecessors were; no less nor more than Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Guinicelli, or Cino. In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden. Each of these men performed certain poetic functions so magnificently well that the magnitude of the effect concealed the absence of others. The language went on and in some respects improved; the best verse of Collins, Gray, Johnson, and even Goldsmith satisfies some of our fastidious demands better than that of Donne or Marvell or King. But while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude. The feeling, the sensibility, expressed in the Country Churchyard (to say nothing of Tennyson and Browning) is cruder than that in theCoy Mistress.
The second effect of the influence of Milton and Dryden followed from the first, and was therefore slow in manifestation. The sentimental age began early in the eighteenth century, and continued. The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected. In one or two passages of Shelley's Triumph of Life, in the second Hyperion there are traces of a struggle toward unification of sensibility. But Keats and Shelley died, and Tennyson and Browning ruminated.
After this brief exposition of a theory - too brief, perhaps, to carry conviction - we may ask, what would have been the fate of the 'metaphysical' had the current of poetry descended in a direct line from them, as it descended in a direct line to them ? They would not, certainly, be classified as metaphysical. The possible interests of a poet are unlimited; the more intelligent he is the better; the more intelligent he is the more likely that he will have interests: our only condition is that he turn them into poetry, and not merely meditate on them poetically. A philosophical theory which has entered into poetry is established, for its truth or falsity in one sense ceases to matter, and its truth in another sense is proved. The poets in question have, like other poets, various faults. But they were, at best, engaged in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling. And this means both that they are more mature, and that they wear better, than later poets of certainly not less literary ability.
It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. (A brilliant and extreme statement of this view, with which it is not requisite to associate oneself, is that of M. Jean Epstein, La Poesie d'aujourd-hui.) Hence we get something which looks very much like the conceit - we get, in fact, a method curiously similar to that of the 'metaphysical poets', similar also in its use of obscure words and of simple phrasing.
O geraniums diaphanes, guerroyeurs sortileges,
Sacrileges monomanes!
Emballages, devergondages, douches! O pressoirs
Des vendanges des grands soirs!
Layettes aux abois,
Thyrses au fond des bois!
Transfusions, represailles,
Relevailles, compresses et l'eternal potion,
Angelus! n'en pouvoir plus
De de'bacles nuptiales! de debacles nuptiales!
The same poet could write also simply:
Wile est bien loin, elle pleure,
Le grand vent se lamente aussi . . .
Jules Laforgue, and Tristan Corbiere in many of his poems, are nearer to the 'school of Donne' than any modern English poet. But poets more classical than they have the same essential quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind.
Pour l'enfant, amoureux de cartes et d'estampes,
L'univers est egal a son vaste appetit.
Ah, que le monde est grand a la clarte des lampes!
Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit!
In French literature the great master of the seventeenth century Racine - and the great master of the nineteenth - Baudelaire - are in some ways more like each other than they are like anyone else. The greatest two masters of diction are also the greatest two psychologists, the most curious explorers of the soul. It is interesting to speculate whether it is not a misfortune that two of the greatest masters of diction in our language, Milton and Dryden, triumph with a dazzling disregard of the soul. If we continued to produce Miltons and Drydens it might not so much matter, but as things are it is a pity that English poetry has remained so incomplete. Those who object to the 'artificiality' of Milton or Dryden sometimes tell us to 'look into our hearts and write'. But that is not looking deep enough; Racine or Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.
May we not conclude, then, that Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herbert and Lord Herbert, Marvell, King, Cowley at his best, are in the direct current of English poetry, and that their faults should be reprimanded by this standard rather than coddled by antiquarian affection ? They have been enough praised in terms which are implicit limitations because they are 'metaphysical' or 'witty', 'quAaint' or 'obscure', though at their best they have not these attributes more than other serious poets. On the other hand we must not reject the criticism of Johnson (a dangerous personA to disagree with) without having mastered it, without having assimilated the Johnsonian canons of taste. In reading the celebrated passage in his essay on Cowley we must remember that by wit he clearly means something more serious than we usually mean today; in his criticism of their versification we must remember in what a narrow discipline he was trained, but also how well trained; we must remember that Johnson tortures chiefly the chief offenders, Cowley and Cleveland. It would be a fruitful work, and one requiring a substantial book, to break up the classification of Johnson (for there has been none since) and exhibit these poets in all their difference of kind and of degree, from the massive music of Donne to the faint, pleasing tinkle of Aurelian Townshend - whose Dialogue between a Pilgrim and Time is one of the few regrettable omissions from the excellent anthology of Professor Grierson.
Remarks about Metaphysical Poetry
i. We are thought wits, when 'tis understood. - Jasper Mayne (part-time metaphysical poet)
ii. He [Donne] affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love. - John Dryden (1693)
iii. About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets. - Samuel Johnson (C18)
iv. With Donne, whose Muse on dromedary trots,
Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots;
Rhyme's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clue,
Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw.- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (C19)
v. A thought to Donne was an experience: it modified his sensibility... the ordinary man... 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. - T.S. Eliot (1921).
vi. "Brain-sick fancies, twaddle upon twaddle..." giving us a sense of difficulty overcome when at last we arrive at "a passionate outcry" - J.E.V. Crofts (1930s)
vii. Argument and persuasion, and the use of the conceit as their instrument, are the elements or body of a metaphysical poem. Its quintessence or soul is the vivid imagining of a moment of experience or a situation out of which the need to argue, or persuade, or define arises. - Helen Gardner (1957).
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