Metaphysical Poetry

Texts:

• Grierson's take on Metaphysicals

• John Donne

• George Herbert

• Henry Vaughan

• Andrew Marvell

• Ben Jonson

Listen to John Donne's “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”

Quotations:

• Dull, sublunary lovers' love... (from “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”)

• Our two souls therefore, which are one, [...] / Like gold to aery thinnes beat. (from “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”)

• As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be, / To taste whole joys. (from “To His Mistress Going to Bed”)

• Busy old fool, unruly sun... (from “The Sun Rising”)

• Death, be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; (from “Sonnet 6”)

• Batter my heart, three-personed God; (from “Sonnet 10”)

• Gather ye rosebuds while ye may... (from Robert Herrick's “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time”)

• I saw eternity the other night / Like a great ring of pure and endless light... (from Henry Vaughan's “The World”)

• Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime. (from “To His Coy Mistress”)

• But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near; (from “To His Coy Mistress”)

• 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; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. […] the essential quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind.
  T.S. Eliot “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921)

• The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.
  Samuel Johnson “The Life of Cowley” (1779)

Contexts:

• Metaphysical poets at Luminarium

• Early 17^th century poetry at Luminarium

• Grierson's intro to Metaphysicals

• Early 17^th century at Norton Topics Online

• Historical background -- age of Donne (at Bibliomania)
• Historical background -- from Donne to Dryden (at Bibliomania)
  

• John Donne study guide at Bibliomania
  
• On Donne's metaphors in "Valediction...Mourning"

• "Valediction" study guide by Cummings
• "Death be not proud" study guide by Cummings
  
• "To His Coy Mistress" study guide by Cummings
• Marvell study guide @ Bibliomania
  
• "To Celia" study guide by Cummings
  

• 17^th century major events

• Arnie Sanders' take on John Donne and George Herbert

• Google directory on 17^th century British literature

Terms:

Metaphysical ; Cavalier; Sons of Ben; conceit; emblematic conceit; microcosm-macrocosm analogy; paradox; coincidentia oppositorum; oxymoron; juxtaposition; discordia concors; concordia discors; hyperbole; shaped / pattern verse; aubade; pun; wit; masque; mannerism; baroque; counterreformation.