What is metaphysical poetry? Discuss John Donne as metaphysical poet. And illustrate his poems.

My dedication to one of my favorite poet Mr. John Donne 

Assignment

Paper I: The Renaissance Literature

 

Topic: What is metaphysical poetry? Discuss John Donne as metaphysical poet. And illustrate his poems.

Name: Kaushal H. Desai

Department: M.A. English department

Semester: I

Roll No: 17

Submitted To: Dr. Prof. Dilip Barad

(Head of English Dept.

 M.K.B.U. Bhavnagar University)

◘ What is metaphysical poetry? Discuss John Donne as metaphysical poet. And illustrate his poems.

► What is Metaphysical Poetry?

First of all the term “metaphysical poetry” refers to a specific period of time and a specific set of poets. In 17th-century England, there was a group of poets who, while they did form a formal group, have been considered the metaphysical poets. There are, in most lists, nine poets that belong, and they are as follows: John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Edward Herbert, Thomas Carew, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvel, Richard Lovelace and Sir John Suckling.

So, what is metaphysical poetry? Actually the answer lies in the composition of these pieces. The common thread is that they contain metaphors that are highly conceptual in nature. These metaphors are often tenuous, at best, in their comparisons of one thing to another, but they can leave the reader feeling enlightened. This type of metaphor is known as a metaphysical conceit. The way to tell a metaphysical conceit from a regular metaphor is that they often exhibit an analytical tone, contain double meanings, show logical reasoning, and have paradoxes, symbolism, and wit. While one or two of these elements might be missing from any given piece, there should be the majority of them present.

◘ Metaphysical Poets

It was Doctor Samuel Johnson, who for the first time used the term ‘Metaphysical poetry’. Metaphysical poems are lyric poems. For the poetry of John Donne and his followers, since Donne was the pioneer it is known as ‘The school of Donne’ or ‘the school of Metaphysical poetry’

Doctor Samuel Johnson while giving introduction to the life of ‘Abraham Cowley’ used the term Metaphysical poetry for the first time to identify the poetry of John Donne and his followers.

► Characteristics of the ‘Metaphysical Poetry’

• The first characteristic is that all metaphysical were the men of learning and they tried to display their learning and scholarship by becoming scholarly in the writing of their poems. They wanted to distinguish themselves from the former poets of the Elizabethan age and so they used difficult language in their poem. All the metaphysical were scholars and they could prove it. But they could not prove that they loved music.

• According to Samuel Johnson the poetry of Donne and his followers stood tired of their finger but not a trial of ear the meaning is they were scholars. In the writing of poetry but there is no music or rhyme in the metaphysical poetry.

• Far-fetched images and conceits is the most remarkable feature of the metaphysical poetry. Those poets where not happy with the routing images used by the Elizabethan. They wanted to bring new images to distinguish themselves. So they used their images from different field like biology, science, engineering and agriculture. Sometimes they depended upon geometry also to bring their images also to use them for the writing of their poems. George Herbert’s “Pulley” and Marvell’s poem with a title “To his coy mistress” are the best examples.

• One critic Helency white defends the metaphysical poets stating that was the demand of the time for Donne different way had they presented the same manner, just like the Elizabethans’. They would have been rejected. By the readers change was the demand of time and they gave that change in their poems.

• Helen Gardener mentions that Donne and his school changed the whole perspective of writing poetry they wrote poems. In a way in which it was not even imagined by others.

• Several metaphysical poets, especially John Donne, were influenced by Neo-Platonism. One of the primary Platonic concepts found in metaphysical poetry is the idea that the perfection of beauty in the beloved acted as a remembrance of perfect beauty in the eternal realm. Their work relies on images and references to the contemporary scientific or geographical discoveries. These were used to examine religious and moral questions, often employing an element of casuistry to define their understanding or personal relationship with God.

• 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 metaphysical - in the kind of experience they were trying to convey and in their craftsmanship - valuable hints for the solution of his own problems.

In this way what to feel and how the poet give a window through the aspects that’s what to see, but in the different way to present and by this it gives a meaningful concept Herbert and Marvell (Bermudas), and 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.

► John Donne as metaphysical poet

♦ John Donne,

“In ornament way we can say that he is the man who established his poetic style and that’s for he called as ‘metaphysical poet’.”

• The term in the metaphysical or metaphysics in the poetry is the fruit of renaissance tree, becoming over ripe and approaching pure science. The term metaphysical can be interpreted as; beyond=Meta, physical nature=physical. The word metaphysical has been defined by various writers. R.S. Hillyer writes,

“Literally it has to do with the conception of existence

With the living universe and man’s place therein.”

Actually the growth and power, loosely it has taken such meaning as these difficult, obscure, philosophical, ethereal, involved supercilious, ingenious, fantastic and incongruous.

Dryden was the first to use the term in connection with Donne by saying that he ‘affects the metaphysics.’  Dr. Johnson revived this epithet and wrote an essay on the metaphysical poets in his ‘Life of Cowlay’. He pointed out the following peculiarities of the metaphysical poets.

(I)                They were men of learning and made a pedantic display of their strange knowledge.

(II)             They affected a peculiar with which may be deserved a combination of dissimilar images or discovery of occult resemblance in things apparently unlike.

(III)          Their fondness for analysis which broke an image into bits, led them the dissection of emotion rather than a direct impassioned expression of it.

(IV)          Harshness and irregularity of their verse which is poetry only to the eye, not to ear.

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 a great genius we can say a power of imagining a new creational work that give us something new to think and remember. And 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.

◙ How is Donne's life reflected in his poetry?

well by observing its Several major events in Donne's life--his marriage, his conversion to Anglicanism, his wife's early death, illness, and his elevation to the Deanship of St. Paul's--can be seen in his poetry. In a more complicated way, one can draw inferences about which religious doctrines Donne may have been most fascinated by or skeptical about, considering carefully what he writes when treating various doctrines.

By looking through his work we also have to look at the aspects of ‘love’, we all know the mean and also somewhere feel it. Most of the time we imagine by this nature, rose or the spiritual aspects but in metaphysical poetry we see other rout, means something unknown things in this presenting  matter to somewhere other experience let’s question it then discuss it;

◙ How does Donne treat physical and spiritual love in his works?

As a Metaphysical poet, Donne often uses physical love to evoke spiritual love. Indeed, this metaphysical conceit in much of the love poetry is not explicitly spelled out. To this end, Donne's poetry often suggests that the love the poet has for a particular beloved is greatly superior to others’ loves. Loving someone is as much a religious experience as a physical one, and the best love transcends mere physicality. In this kind of love, the lovers share something of a higher order than that of more mundane lovers. In “Love’s Infiniteness,” for example, Donne begins with a traditional-sounding love poem, but by this third stanza he has transformed the love between himself and his beloved into an abstract ideal which can be possessed absolutely and completely. His later poetry (after he joined the ministry) maintains some of the carnal playfulness from earlier poetry, but transforms it into a celebration of union between soul and soul or soul and God.

v  John Donne’s poems

His best known work of metaphysical poetry;

o   The Sun rising

o   The Flea

o   Death, be not proud

o   Sweetest Love

o   The Dream

o   The Ecstasy

He is major the figure here as we renowned and the fact that give us the highlights of metaphysical poetry. He uses many things that we see and for which we can say Unified sensibility, rising power of love, tells feeling by metaphor etc...

• Now, let us analyze his poems step by step,

► First we have to look at John Donne’s Major Themes in his Poems;

§  Paradoxes

§  Belittling cosmic forces

§  Religion

§  Death and the Hereafter

§  Love as both physical and spiritual

§  Interconnectedness of humanity

§  Fidelity

♣ Death be not Proud

Be the great approach “Death Be Not Proud” presents an argument against the power of death. Addressing Death as a person, the speaker warns Death against pride in his power. Such power is merely an illusion, and the end Death thinks it brings to men and women is in fact a rest from world-weariness for its alleged “victims.” The poet criticizes Death as a slave to other forces: fate, chance, kings, and desperate men. Death is not in control, for a variety of other powers exercise their volition in taking lives. Even in the rest it brings, Death is inferior to drugs. Finally, the speaker predicts the end of Death itself, stating “Death, thou shalt die.”

→ Analysis of this poem:

“Sleep is a temporary death and,

 Death is a permanent sleep”

The present Holy sonnet 10 of John Donne deals with the theme of ‘Death’. Death is an inevitable truth of life, one who is born is bound to doe. The poet reduces fear of death in the preset sonnet. The speaker tells Death that it should not feel proud, for though some have called it “mighty and dreadful,” it is not. Those whom Death thinks it kills do not truly die, nor, the speaker says, “can’s thou kill me.”

The first quatrain focuses on the subject and audience of this poem: death. By addressing Death, Donne makes it/him into a character through personification. The poet warns death to avoid pride and reconsider its/his position as a “Mighty and dreadful” force. He concludes the introductory argument of the first quatrain by declaring to death that those it claims to kill “Die not”, and neither can the poet himself be stricken in this way.

The second quatrain, which is closely linked to the first through the abba rhyme scheme, turns the criticism of Death as less than fearful into praise for Death’s good qualities. From Death comes “Much pleasure” since those good souls whom Death releases from earthly suffering experience “Rest of their bones”. Donne then returns to criticizing Death for thinking too highly of itself: Death is no sovereign, but a “slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men”; this last demonstrates that there is no hierarchy in which Death is near the top. Although a desperate man can choose Death as an escape from earthly suffering, even the rest which Death offers can be achieved better by “poppy, or charms”, so even there Death has no superiority.

The final couplet caps the argument against Death. Not only is Death the servant of other powers and essentially impotent to truly kill anyone, but also Death is itself destined to die when, as in the Christian tradition, the dead are resurrected to their eternal reward. Here Donne echoes the sentiment of the Apostle Paul in where Paul writes that “the final enemy to be destroyed is death.” Donne taps into his Christian background to point out that Death has no power and one day will cease to exist.

To be concluding:

We bravely say that death is just a moment of glimpse but after that we again going to a long way with happiness and do not fear about death.

♣ Sweetest Love, I do not goe

John Donne writes that;

“Sweetest Love, I do not go fir weariness of thee,

 Nor in hope the world can show

 A fitter love for me;

But since that I must die at last, ‘tis best

To use myself in jest

Thus by feigned death to die.”

            The magnificent lines touch our heart. Here Love as both physical and spiritual way to drown. The poet tells his beloved that he is not leaving because he is tired of the relationship instead, he must go as a duty. After all, the sun departs each night but returns every morning, and he has a much shorter distance to travel. The third stanza suggests that his duty to leave is unstoppable; man’s power is so feeble that good fortune cannot lengthen his life, while bad fortune will shorten it. Indeed, fighting bad fortune only shares one’s strength with it. As the beloved sighs and cries, the lover complains that if he is really within her, she is the one letting him go because he is part of her tears and breath. He asks her not to fear any evil that may befall him while he is gone, and besides, they keep each other alive in their hearts and therefore are never truly parted.

→ Let us Analyze this poem:

            Here John Donne writes about love, it’s not just love but ‘sweetest love’, is a lyric made up of five stanzas each with the same rhyme scheme ababcddc. Each stanza develops an aspect of the problem of separation from one’s beloved.

In the first stanza the lover wards off any fear of a weakened love on his part. He does not leave “for weariness” of the beloved, nor does he go looking for a “fitter love” for himself. He instead compares his departure to death, saying that since he “Must die at last”, it is better for him to practice dying by “feign’d deaths”, those short times when he is separated from his love. Thus, he turns her fears about losing him into an assurance that she is the very source of his existence; when he is not with her, it is like being dead.

In the second stanza, Donne uses the sun as a metaphor for his fidelity and desire to return. He compares his leaving to the sun’s setting “Yesternight”. It left darkness behind, “yet is here today. If the sun can return each day, despite its lengthy journey around the world, then the beloved can trust that the lover will return since his journey is shorter. Besides, he will make “speedier journeys” since he has more reason to go and return than does the sun.

In the third stanza, the poet examines the view of metaphor aspect compass it’s turns to contemplating larger problems beyond merely being separated from a loved one. He notes how “feeble is man’s power” that one is unable to add more time to his life during periods of “good fortune”. Ironically, the poet notes, we instead add “our strength” to misfortune and “teach it art and length”, thereby giving bad situations power over our lives. We are so powerless that even the power we have turns against us in bad fortune. Perhaps the suggestion here is that the lover has no choice but to go, not having enough strength to overcome fate.

This stanza also serves as a turning point in the song. The two prior stanzas are assurances that the lover will return quickly and faithfully. The final two stanzas focus on the harms his beloved may cause or fear.

Actually when he writes my soul away, he says in the first line of the fourth stanza. The beloved’s expressions of despair cause harm to her lover, he argues, because he is so much a part of her that he is in her breath. He may also mean that her sighs demonstrate her lack of trust in him. The same argument applies to her tears; she depletes his “life’s blood” when she cries. This is why she said to be “unkindly kind” with her tears; this oxymoron emphasizes the lover’s pain in seeing the extent of her need to be with him.

In the final stanza, the lover warning his beloved against future ills she may bring upon him if she continues to fear a future without him. He urges her “divining heart” to avoid predicting him harm; it is possible that “Destiny may take thy part” and fulfill her fears by leading to true dangers.

Summing up:

This poem bears similarities to Donne’s other work about departure from his loved one, “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” The tone of the song considered here is lighter, however, and the imagery not as controlled, poignant, or unexpected as that latter work. Nevertheless, it is worth attempting to read this poem, like so many others of Donne’s, as a spiritual allegory. Perhaps one again can see the lover as God and the beloved as the Church, in which case one might find a resonance with the promised second coming of Jesus in the Christian tradition; in this tradition he will soon return to the world even though he was crucified.     

♣ The Dream

            Two levels, the lover address to his beloved that if his dream is broken, discontinued because of her. He doesn’t mind it, it was a dream based an imagination. It was based on logic. If she becomes the reason for a discontinuation of such a dream, he doesn’t object to it. The lover mentions that his dream still continues even when the dream ended but there is a difference between both other tips of dream. The dream that still continues is the dream of getting her love. He doesn’t want that, that dream should ever end. 

→ Let’s discuss more in detailed way:

“Image of her whom I love, more than she,

Whose fair impression in my faithful heart

Makes me her medal, and makes her love me

As kings do coins, to which their stamps impart.”

            Here poet presents very creative part as we noted but in lover’s dream he dream about the girl who he love so much and by broken dream he again start to dream and he considers his beloved so truthful that she is capable of transformation his dream into reality and fable into history. In this elegy John Donne narrates a dream by the person who he claims to have been dreaming about. Like in the more popular Donne poem “The Flea,” the narrator attempts to cajole the woman into coming to bed with him by talking about the poetic conceit and how it relates to them. Unlike in “The Flea,” however, Donne uses some very complex imagery to describe the dream and the waking and to form his arguments for her staying.   

            Lover should dream anything about love. So he suggests that instead of seeing dream they should act in reality. The lover in the absence of the dream of love would like to get affection from his beloved in reality.

            Donne also clarifies that it was not her noise because of which his dream of was discontinue. It was because of her eyes just like lightening that his dream was discontinued since she can judge what is going on in his heart and mind, he campers her with an angel but then he says she is herself and not an angel. Because she knows it well what he dreams his loves considers her an angel than more than an angel and finally he says that she is herself.

At last:

By commenting on love she believes that, that love is weak in which there are elements fear, sin and shame pure love has to be free from such elements.   

♣ The Flea

            The flea by John Donne, the master of metaphysical poetry. The poet uses biological image of the flea in order to deal with the theme of ‘Love’. The speaker uses the occasion of a flea hopping from himself to a young lady as an excuse to argue that the two of them should make love. Since in the flea their blood is mixed together, he says that they have already been made as one in the body of the flea. Here the rhyme is AABBCCDDD so nicely designs. Besides, the flea pricked her and got what it wanted without having to persuade her.

→ Analysis of this poem:

 “Mark but this flea, and mark in this,

How little that which thou deniest me is;

It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;

Thou know’st that this cannot be said

A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead.”

The poem is addressed by the lover to his beloved. The lover tells his beloved that both have become one. She, ‘Do not think about it’ by this remark she refusing his argue of ‘one soul’.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since

Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?

            By this saying he convey to his love for him that they should be one because the flea sucked my blood and then your blood so it’s became one and for that you can’t deny it. It’s innocent plays a trick by God, that God also want to we became one.

            Moving on to the acceptation The speaker tells his beloved to look at the flea before them and to note “how little” is that thing that she denies him. For the flea, he says, has sucked first his blood, then her blood, so that now, inside the flea, they are mingled; and that mingling cannot be called “sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead.” The flea has joined them together in a way that, “alas, is more than we would do.” As his beloved moves to kill the flea, the speaker stays her hand, asking her to spare the three lives in the flea: his life, her life, and the flea’s own life. “Cruel and sudden”, the speaker calls his lover, who has now killed the flea, “purpling” her fingernail with the “blood of innocence.”

Winding up:

The speaker asks his lover what the flea’s sin was, other than having sucked from each of them a drop of blood. He says that his lover replies that neither of them is less noble for having killed the flea. It is true, he says, and it is this very fact that proves that her fears are false: If she were to sleep with him, she would lose no more honour than she lost when she killed the flea. And the poem innocently flourishing the charm the lover’s beloved.

♣ The Ecstasy

Here Grierson explains “Ecstasy in Neo-platonic philosophy was the state of mind in which the soul, escaping from the body attuned to the vision of God, the one, the absolute:” The term ecstasy denotes the transition to a higher level where absolute truths are apprehensible to us beyond sense, reasoning and intellect. Just as another metaphysical poet, Richard Crashaw, describes spiritual or religious ecstasy in his “Hymn to St Teresa”. J Weemes asserts that ecstasy occurs when “the servants of God were taken up in spirit, separate as it were from the body, that they might see some heavenly mystery revealed unto them.”

In the prescribed poem, the souls of the two lovers free themselves from the definite in

confines of the physical construct of the body and become one physically and spiritually in an ecstatic union of souls.

→ Let’s discuss this poem in detail:

“Where, like a pillow on a bed

                                                    A pregnant bank swell'd up to rest

The violet's reclining head,

                                                    Sat we two, one another's best.”

Here poet describes various symbol of love like;

o   Soul Mates

o   Two Become One

o   Importance of a Physical Union

Manly we can say it’s about philosophising the emotion of love. Ecstasy is a mental state of happiness and fulfilment. The lover experiences such a state of ecstasy in the company of his beloved. It is a poem about expressing his mental state in the company of his beloved. The lover mention that both he and his beloved sat for the whole day together and without an exchange of words, they kept quiet and their souls continued talking to each other the dialogue could take place even in the absence of words. One thread or string was formed through their eyes. And that string created the music of love.

It is such a state in which they drawback and limitations are forgotten by them. They have entered into a different type of state in which there is nothing except oneness. The present poem makes use of of metaphysical images in it. Images like; ‘pregment bank’, ‘pillow on a bed’, ‘armies’, ‘cemented’, ‘mixture of things’, ‘trance pant’, ‘atomies’, ‘prince in prison’, etcetera and a justify the present poem as true metaphysical poem.    

To be concluding:

            We can say that in love there is, “silence better than words” the pure love that no one can destroy and the immortally going way to their love at first sight it’s always be there like forever. 

tio

• At present, including all the details, facts and examples the idea is clear of metaphysical poetry. “Donne is almost undisputed, the quintessential metaphysical poet. If none other is read, Donne is generally recommended for a reader to get a good idea of what metaphysical poetry is all about.”

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