Name: Jankiba Rana
M.A. Semester 3
Roll No. 11
Batch 2014.15
Paper:1 RENAISSANCE LITURATURE
TOPIC: Metaphysical Poetry
Metaphysical Poetry, a term coined by Samuel Johnson has its roots in 17th century England. This type of poetry is witty, ingenious and highly philosophical. It included: Love, Life and Existence. It used literary elements of Similes, metaphors, imagery, paradoxes, conceit and far-fetched views of reality.
John Donne is regarded as the “Leading Poet” of this highly intellectual form of poetry. Donne was influenced by belief that the precision of beauty in the adored behaved as a commemoration of ideal beauty in the everlasting kingdom. He also used unconventional and colloquial rhythm and tone, which was highly contrary to the Elizabethan poetry style.
Grierson Remarks:
“Donne’s poetry is metaphysical, not only in the sense of being erudite and witty, but in the proper sense of being reflective and philosophical.”
Donne was the founding father and dominant practitioner of the metaphysical school of poetry.
The Word “Metaphysical”
• It is made of two words:
Meta – Beyond
And
Physical – Our Surroundings means such artificial world.
Source of Metaphysical Inspiration
• Metaphysical Poetry resolves itself into the two broad divisions of amorous and religious verse.
• Donne successfully tried his hand at both love and divine poetry.
• He has written many songs, sonnets and divine poems in “The Anniversary”.
Characteristics of Metaphysical Poetry
Highly Intellectual
Written chiefly in 17th century England
Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Marveli, Vaughan
Bold and ingenious conceit
Complexity and Subtlety of thought
Frequent use of paradox, irony, obliquity
Often deliberate harshness or rigidity of expression
Primarily concerned with analyzing feeling
Blend of emotion and intellectual ingenuity
Dramatic directness of language
Rhythm derived from that of living speech.
Let’sDis some of the Metaphysical poetry by Donne
The poetry is charge with the rich possibility of bringing the imagery of the world into their poems in Donne’s case.
For e.g.:
Tears, maps, a flea and it making extended, complex, conceits out of them as a way of demonstrating and discovering the entanglements of inner and outer life, of the psychical emotional and physical landscapes.
The Metaphysical Poetry:
John Donne:
Death be not proud,
Sweetest Love,
The Dream,
The Flea,
The Ecstasy,
These are the metaphysical poetry by John Donne; let’s discuss them in detail…
“The Flea”
Donne’s The Flea,
Compares the lover’s Union with a flea, cleverly developing his argument throughout the poem.
This poem is the cleverest of a long line of sixteenth-century love poems using the flea as an erotic image a genre derived from an older poem of Ovid. Donne’s poise of hinting at the erotic without ever explicitly referring to sex, while at the same time leaving no doubt as to exactly what he means is as much a source of the poem’s humor as the silly image of the flea is the idea that being bitten by a flea would represent.“Sin or Shame or loss of maidenhead”. The concept of platonic and country love also feature strongly in metaphysical poetry.
The Sweetest Love
According to P.K.Thakar, We can understand the poem in three level:
• Phonological Level,
• Semantic Level,
• Grammar Level.
• Phonological Level:
In this poem the words like ‘deaths’ and ‘die’, he and ‘hath no’ and nor ‘So’, ‘But’ and ‘Believe’, ‘Speedier’ and since, add, another, and hour, alliterate each other. So, the device of alliteration is used here.
• Semantic Level:
The poem is about the departure of the loves. So, this is love poem, the title itself suggest it. It is a lyric.
“Sweetest love,
I do not go,
For weariness of three.”
Here, the poet say’s that he is not going, because he is tired of his beloved. In the second stanza he uses the Metaphor of ‘Sun’. He says that even sun comes daily and goes out every day.
He says that, He will also Come line it.
In the first line of third stanza, here he becomes philosophical. He says that man’s power is feeble.
In the fourth stanza, the lover aryls that he is so much a part of her, he is in her breath.
In the last stanza:
“Destiny May,
Take thy part and May,
Thy fear fulfill.”
At least he advices his beloved to imagine. She should think that both of them are on bed turnery aside of each other.
• Grammar Level:
This is a lyric of five stanzas. Here the apostrophe to the lover. The archaic words are also used here like ‘thee’, ‘thou’, ‘thy’, etc.
“The Dream”
‘The Dream’ is a metaphysical poem. The poem is addressed by a lover to his beloved. It uses the feminine pronoun. His dream not based on imagination but based on reason and logic.
“Dearest, for nothing worthless than you
Would I have woke up from this dream;
For reality was stronger than fantasy.”
His dream discontinues not because of her voice but her eye just like lightening. He compared to her with an angel.
Donne uses conceit in this line word like “Lightening”.
“As lightening, or the light of a candle,
Your eyes, and not your voice woke me;”
There is irony in the lines,
“Yet I thought theel-
For thou lovest truth-
An angel, at first sight”
He compare his love with torch and gave element of fear Sin and Shame for pure love.
“Love becomes weak with fear and if this fear is a mixture of shame, then have honor like torches, which must be ready for men to light and put out, so you deal with me;”
He is expressing his love in a metaphysical stage. Donne uses far-fetched images like,
‘Lightening’, ‘Torch’, ‘Mixture’, ‘Prophane’, etc…
“Death Be Not Proud”
This Holly Sonnet presents an argument against the power of death. The poet addresses death as a person. He gives physical characteristics to inanimate idea or concept.
In the First Quatrain:
In very first line, the speaker is personifying death telling him that he shouldn’t be proud although some people call him mighty and dreadful, but it is not so and this is the reason for not being proud.
In the Second Quatrain:
The speaker is giving us a proof that death is just like sleep and rest. He is comparing death to sleep and rest. He is asking what we get from sleep and rest but pleasure and if sleep and rest are a copy from the original, so form death we are to get more pleasure.
In the Third Quatrain:
The speaker is giving us another proof that death is not mighty, He is considering death as a slave to faith because the slaves can’t control themselves but they obey orders especially when, people want to commit suicide, he goes with them and also he is a slave to chance and kings.
The Couplet:
The speaker is telling death that he is not afraid of him because after this sleep, he will wake up and live eternally and death, in the other life, will have no place for him and he shall be finished.
“The Ecstasy”
In the very first stanza,
Donne is describing the scenery of a river or lakeside bank. He describes himself and another as pillows on a bed lie there.
The 2nd Stanza,
Described how their hands were held together and “Cemented” with perspiration. He then described beams coming out of their eyes and twisting like thread which holds their eyes together as with a single, double thread.
The 3rd Stanza,
Donne states that the lovers’ hands were all they had to make themselves into one further; he says that the reflections in their eyes were their only way to propagate.
In the Next Stanza, Used Metaphor to describe their souls.
Stanza five has the souls negotiating as their bodies lie live memorial statues. They remained that way the whole day and said nothing to each other.
The next stanza postulates whether any man can be so refined in love that he can understand the language of the soul, and furthermore, if that “good” love of the mind stood at a convenient distance.
Stanza seven relates that the two souls now speak as one, they may take a connection and leave that place better off than when they arrived.
The Eight stanza states that their state of ecstasy “” or simplifies thing and they can see that it was not sex that motivated them.
The Ninth stanza furthers the idea that two lovers are one soul which is mixed each a part of the other.
The next uses a metaphor of a transplanted violet to show how two souls can be interlaminated and how this “new” soul can repair the defects of each of the individual souls.
The eleventh stanza again furthers the idea of two souls as one. In it says that the lovers know what they are made of, and that no change can invade them.
The next stanza asks why the bodies are left out, and it says that although the soul is the intelligence, the bodies are the sphere which controls them, like the celestial spheres.
Stanza 13th thanks the bodies for their service of bringing the soul to be and for yielding their senses. The bodies are not impurities that weaken, but rather alloys that strengthen us.
The next stanza talks that, Heaven’s influence does not work on man like other things. It imprints the air so that people’s souls may flow out from the body.
Stanza 15th tells us, how our blood works to make “Spirits” that can help the body and soul together make us man.
Stanza 16th – Postulates that lover’s souls must give into affections and wits that our bodies provide. If not, we are to a great prince in prison.
The next stanza says that we turn to our bodies so that weak man may look at them, but that love is true mysteries are grown in the souls “book”.
The last stanza, sums up the scene by speculating how they would be regarded by another lover in their “dialogue” of the combined souls.
Conclusion
While summing up, we come to know that all the poems are having different kind of a theme, and they has metaphorical elements in it, The metaphysical poetry created a new trend of writing poetry but even this trend did not continued for a long time.
