The Metaphysical Poets

Summary

The Metaphysical Poets is Helen Gardner's anthology of English poets of the seventeenth century who wrote in the style that Samuel Johnson, borrowing a phrase from Dryden, called 'metaphysical'. Johnson complained that in their verse the most heterogeneous ideas were yoked by violence together; T. S. Eliot, in his 1921 review of Herbert Grierson's earlier anthology, praised them for a unified sensibility in which thought and feeling were fused. Gardner's selection, arranged roughly chronologically by poet, begins with John Donne, the movement's founder. His Songs and Sonnets transform love poetry with dramatic openings, colloquial speech and startling conceits drawn from science, theology, geography and medicine: the lovers as a compass in 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning', the flea that has mingled their blood, the sun scolded as a busy old fool, the lovers canonized as saints of love. His Holy Sonnets turn the same intensity on God and death, from 'Death, be not proud' to 'Batter my heart, three-personed God', and his hymns written in sickness imagine his physicians as cosmographers reading his body like a map. George Herbert's poems, published posthumously in The Temple (1633), express the struggles and consolations of a country priest's faith in exquisitely crafted forms, including shaped poems like 'Easter Wings', the rebellious 'The Collar', the anguished 'Affliction' poems and the serene 'Love (III)'. Richard Crashaw, a Catholic convert, writes ecstatic Baroque devotional verse on saints such as Teresa of Avila. Henry Vaughan, a Welsh physician, writes mystical poems of childhood innocence, eternity seen as a great ring of pure light, and friends gone into the world of light. Andrew Marvell's poems range from the witty seduction of 'To His Coy Mistress', with its winged chariot of time, to the meditative 'The Garden', the political 'Horatian Ode' on Cromwell, and the 'Dialogue between the Soul and Body'. Thomas Traherne's rediscovered poems celebrate the child's vision of the world as paradise. The anthology also includes Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Henry King's exequy on his dead wife, Thomas Carew, Abraham Cowley, Edward Benlowes and others. The collection displays a poetry of argument, paradox and passion, written in an age of religious conflict, civil war and new science, in which love, God and death are explored through intellectual daring.

Plot or Argument

• John Donne: love poems

  Songs and Sonnets and Elegies: dramatic, witty love poems built on conceits from science, law and theology.

• John Donne: divine poems

  Holy Sonnets and hymns facing sin, death, sickness and God's grace.

• George Herbert

  Devotional lyrics from The Temple: struggle, affliction, rebellion and reconciliation in intricate forms.

• Crashaw and Vaughan

  Baroque ecstasy and Welsh mysticism; visions of eternity, childhood and the dead.

• Andrew Marvell

  Wit, politics and meditation: the coy mistress, the garden, the dialogue of soul and body.

• Contemporaries and Traherne

  Henry King's 'Exequy', Carew, Cowley, Lord Herbert, and Traherne's visions of infant felicity.

Characters

• John Donne, poet

  Founding metaphysical poet, love poet turned Dean of St Paul's.

• George Herbert, poet

  Country parson whose devotional lyrics are among the finest in English.

• Henry Vaughan, poet

  Welsh physician and mystical religious poet.

• Andrew Marvell, poet

  Witty lyricist and parliamentarian.

• Richard Crashaw, poet

  Catholic convert writing ecstatic devotional verse.

• Henry King, poet

  Bishop who wrote the 'Exequy' for his young wife.

Lessons

• Thinking through feeling

  Metaphysical poems argue: they build cases, draw analogies and pursue logic to surprising ends. They show that intellect and passion can intensify each other.

  • How does the compass conceit work in 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning'?
  • Is Johnson's criticism of 'heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence' fair?

• Confronting death

  Donne defies death, Herbert accepts it, Vaughan longs for it, and Marvell uses it to urge love. The poems offer a range of seventeenth-century attitudes to mortality.

  • Is 'Death, be not proud' confident or anxious?
  • How does Marvell's 'winged chariot' differ from Donne's view of death?
  • Which poem best consoles the grieving?

• Faith as struggle

  Herbert's 'The Collar' and 'Affliction' poems record rebellion and despair within faith, resolved in moments of grace. Devotion here is a relationship, not a formula.

  • How does 'The Collar' turn at its ending?
  • Why does the soul 'draw back' in 'Love (III)'?

Context

The poets wrote between the late reign of Elizabeth I and the Restoration, through religious controversy between Protestants and Catholics, the Civil War and Commonwealth, and the rise of the new science of Galileo, Harvey and the Royal Society.

Composition

Most of the poems circulated in manuscript; Donne's were printed posthumously in 1633, as was Herbert's The Temple. Gardner's anthology was first published in 1957 (revised 1966), with modernized spelling and her introduction.

Reception

Neglected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the metaphysicals were revived by Grierson's 1921 anthology and Eliot's essay, and became central to twentieth-century taste and to New Criticism.

Comparisons

• macbeth

  Contemporaries of the early Donne; Shakespeare's late tragic verse shares the metaphysicals' compressed, paradoxical intensity.

• troilus-and-criseyde

  Chaucer's courtly love and Donne's anti-courtly love poetry mark two poles of the English love lyric.

• whitman-complete-poems

  Whitman's expansive celebration of the body and soul answers Marvell's 'Dialogue between the Soul and Body' in a different key.

• confessions

  Herbert's and Donne's direct addresses to God echo Augustine's prayerful, self-searching voice.

• dorothy-parker-complete-poems

  Parker's witty, death-haunted lyrics are a modern heir to the metaphysical blend of cleverness and despair.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• Donne's openings. 'The Flea', 'The Sun Rising' and 'The Canonization' all begin in the middle of an argument, as if the speaker were interrupting someone. Listen for the other person the speaker is answering.
• The compass in the last three stanzas of 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning', where the two lovers become the fixed foot and the moving foot of a draftsman's compass, so that the one who travels returns to where he began.
• The last lines of Herbert's 'The Collar'. After thirty lines of rebellion in irregular meter, a single voice calls and a single answer comes, and the poem's disordered form seems to settle.
• Herbert's 'Easter Wings', whose stanzas are printed in the shape of wings and whose lines shrink and grow as the speaker describes falling and rising with Christ.
• The three-part structure of Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress': if we had time, but we do not, therefore let us act now. Read it as a syllogism and ask whether the conclusion follows.

Key terms and names

Conceit

An extended, surprising comparison that joins things apparently unlike, as when Donne makes a flea a marriage bed and temple, or a compass an image of faithful love. The conceit is the signature device of the poets in this anthology.

Metaphysical

The label Samuel Johnson used in his Life of Cowley, following Dryden, for these poets' learned and argumentative style. Johnson meant it as criticism of their far-fetched comparisons; Eliot and Gardner adopted it in praise.

Dissociation of sensibility

T. S. Eliot's phrase, from his 1921 essay on these poets, for the separation of thought from feeling that he believed set in after the seventeenth century. He held that Donne could feel a thought as immediately as the scent of a rose.

Holy Sonnets

Donne's nineteen religious sonnets, including 'Death, be not proud' and 'Batter my heart, three-personed God'. They address God and death with the same dramatic urgency his love poems bring to a mistress.

The Temple

The collection of Herbert's English poems published in 1633, the year of his death. Its poems are arranged like a passage into and through a church building, from 'The Church-porch' toward 'Love (III)' near the end.

Pattern poem

A poem whose printed shape pictures its subject, as in Herbert's 'Easter Wings' and 'The Altar'. The shape is part of the argument rather than decoration.

Exequy

A funeral rite or a poem of mourning. Henry King's 'Exequy' addresses his dead young wife and imagines himself traveling steadily toward the grave where he will rejoin her.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension In 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning', what does the speaker ask his beloved not to do at his departure, and what images, from dying men to beaten gold to the compass, does he use to explain why?
2. Comprehension What does the speaker of 'The Collar' threaten to do, and what interrupts him at the end of the poem?
3. Comprehension In 'Death, be not proud', what reasons does Donne give that death is not mighty and dreadful?
4. Interpretation Johnson complained that these poets joined unlike ideas by violence. Choose one conceit, the flea, the compass, or the physicians as cosmographers in Donne's 'Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness', and argue whether it illuminates or merely astonishes.
5. Interpretation In 'Love (III)', Love keeps answering every excuse of a soul that feels guilty of dust and sin. Why does Herbert stage grace as a conversation at a table rather than as a declaration?
6. Interpretation Donne writes about seducing a woman and about being seized by God in much the same dramatic, argumentative voice. Does that shared voice make his religious poems more honest or less reverent?
7. Interpretation Marvell's speaker and Vaughan's speaker both meditate on time and death. Compare the time's winged chariot hurrying near in 'To His Coy Mistress' with the dead gone into the world of light in Vaughan, and describe what each poet wants the reader to do in response.
8. Big Question These poets believed that wit and argument could carry the deepest love and the most serious faith. Can reasoning and feeling be truly united in a poem or a life, or must one always govern the other?

Faith Connections

• 1 Corinthians 15:26, 54-57 (Scripture)

  Paul names death the last enemy to be destroyed and asks where its sting is. Donne's 'Death, be not proud' builds its whole argument on this chapter, ending with the claim that death itself shall die.

• Luke 12:37 (Scripture)

  Jesus says that the master will gird himself, make his faithful servants sit down to eat, and come and serve them. Herbert's 'Love (III)' dramatizes this reversal, as Love insists on serving the reluctant guest at table.

• Hosea 2 (Scripture)

  God speaks of his unfaithful people as a wife he will allure and betroth to himself again. Donne's 'Batter my heart' draws on this tradition of the soul as a bride betrothed to God's enemy, asking God to break that bond by force.

• Augustine, Confessions VIII.12 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine, weeping in the garden at Milan in the midst of his struggle, hears a child's voice and is turned to Scripture and conversion. The end of Herbert's 'The Collar', where a single word from outside ends a long inner revolt, follows the same pattern of a struggle resolved by a call rather than by the speaker's own argument.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: The poems collected here argue, in practice, that the intellect is not the enemy of passion: love, grief and devotion are most truly expressed when the mind works hardest on them, finding hidden likenesses between the lovers and a compass, the soul and a besieged town, the sick body and a map; since the subjects of love, God and death are themselves full of paradox, a poetry of paradox and argument is fitted to them; therefore wit, far from cheapening serious feeling, is one of its proper instruments.

Rhetorical device: apostrophe. Donne's Holy Sonnet opening Death, be not proud speaks directly to death as if it were a boastful person who can be argued with and refuted, and the poem treats the address as a debate that death loses. The same device shapes 'The Sun Rising', where Donne scolds the sun for waking the lovers.

Debate: Resolved: Samuel Johnson was right that the metaphysical poets valued cleverness more than truth of feeling.

Memory Work

They are all gone into the world of light

Writing Prompts

Essay: Choose one love poem and one religious poem by Donne and analyze how each uses a conceit to make an argument. Argue whether Donne's divine poems continue the methods of his love poems or transform them.

Comparison with Poems: Hopkins admired Herbert and, like the seventeenth-century devotional poets, wrote of struggle with God in compressed, surprising language. Compare one of Herbert's poems of affliction or rebellion, such as 'The Collar', with one of Hopkins's sonnets of desolation, and argue how each poem moves from complaint toward trust and whether that movement is earned.

Medical Lens

The metaphysical poets wrote in the age of William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood (1628), public anatomies and humoral medicine, and their conceits are often medical. Donne's 'Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness' imagines his physicians as cosmographers and his body as their map, and his 'A Fever' and 'A Nocturnal upon St Lucy's Day' turn illness and depressive emptiness into metaphysical argument; the latter is often read as a poem of profound grief or melancholy. Herbert's 'Affliction (I)' recounts years of sickness and frustration. Henry Vaughan practised as a physician and translated Hermetic medical texts. Marvell's 'A Dialogue between the Soul and Body' is a witty debate on mind–body relations in which each complains of being imprisoned and tormented by the other. Henry King's 'Exequy' is one of the great English elegies for a dead wife. Donne's 'The Flea' uses mingled blood in the language of contemporary physiology.

• John Donne, 'Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness'

  Donne, on what he believes is his deathbed, imagines his physicians as cosmographers reading his body as a flat map.

  Physicians DoctorsDeath Dying
• John Donne, 'A Fever'

  The poet addresses his feverish mistress, arguing that the world will perish if she dies.

  Fever Infection
• John Donne, 'A Nocturnal upon St Lucy's Day'

  A meditation on the longest night in which the speaker describes himself as the quintessence of nothingness after a loved one's death.

  GriefMelancholia Depression
• George Herbert, 'Affliction (I)'

  Herbert recounts how sickness and setbacks wasted his youth, and his complaint against God.

  PainMelancholia Depression
• Andrew Marvell, 'A Dialogue between the Soul and Body'

  Soul and Body each complain of imprisonment by the other, with images of bones, nerves and diseases.

  Mind BodyAnatomy Dissection
• Henry King, 'An Exequy to his Matchless Never to be Forgotten Friend'

  King's elegy for his young wife, longing to join her in the grave.

  GriefDeath Dying

Creative Prompts

• Poetry

  Write a metaphysical conceit poem comparing a modern medical technology (an MRI, a prescription, an EEG) to love.

• Essay

  How does Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood shape the imagery of seventeenth-century poetry?

• Dialogue

  Write a modern 'Dialogue between the Mind and the Brain' in the manner of Marvell.

Further Reading

• Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, John Donne

  Donne's prose meditations written during a near-fatal illness in 1623.

• Selected Essays, T. S. Eliot

  Contains 'The Metaphysical Poets' (1921).

• John Donne: Body and Soul, Ramie Targoff

• Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, Katherine Rundell