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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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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.

• John Donne, 'A Fever'

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

• 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.

• George Herbert, 'Affliction (I)'

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

• 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.

• 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.