What are the main characteristics of the metaphysical poets?
Name: Katie- Rose Matthews
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What are the main characteristics of the metaphysical poets?
(With reference to 'The Flea', 'The Apparition' and 'To His Coy Mistress')
A characteristic is a distinguishing quality, attribute or trait applied to something to make it similar to something else. The two metaphysical poets that we will consider are John Donne and Andrew Marvell. Although these two poets were both writtig in the 17th Century both had completely different upbringings and experiences throughout their lives.
Andrew Marvell was born in Yorkshire, on March 31st 1621 to the Rev. Andrew Marvell, and his wife Anne. When Marvell was three years of age, the family moved to Hull, where Rev. Marvell became lecturer in Holy Trinity Church. He was educated at the Hull Grammar School, and in 1633 he matriculated as a Sizar of Trinity College, Cambridge. Two poems by Marvell, one in Greek, one in Latin, were printed in the "Musa Cantabrigiensis" in 1637. In 1638 Marvell was admitted a Scholar of Trinity College, and took his B.A. degree in the same year. A few days after receiving his scholarship, Marvell's mother died. He remained a few more years in residence, leaving Cambridge only after his father's death, by drowning.
In 1650, Marvell became the tutor of twelve-year-old Mary Fairfax (later Duchess of Buckingham), daughter of Sir Thomas Fairfax, retired Lord General of the parliamentary forces. At the Yorkshire seat of the Fairfax family, Nun Appleton House, Marvell seems to have written, over a period of about three years, most of his non-satiric English poems. Marvell, who had been a supporter of the king, Charles I, under the commonwealth, became a supporter of Cromwell. In the summer of 1657, Marvell tutored Cromwell's nephew and ward, William Dutton, living at Eton.
Starting in 1659, Marvell was elected M.P. for his hometown of Hull, and he continued to represent it until his death, Marvell was engaged in political activities, taking part in embassies to Holland and Russia and writing political pamphlets and satires. Marvell died on the 16th August 1678 of tertian argue, and the negligence of the attending physician. He was buried in the church of St. Giles-in-the-fields.
John Donne was born in Bread Street, London in 1572 to a prosperous Roman Catholic family, a precarious thing at a time when anti catholic sentiment was rife in England. His mother, Elizabeth Heywood, was the daughter of John Haywood the writer, who had married Sir Thomas More's niece. So he was already born into a background of literacy. Donne was one of six children but by the time he was 21 years old only one of them, his sister Anne, was still alive. His mother married twice after his father's sudden death in 1567. His education began with private tuition at home and later at Oxford and almost certainly Cambridge as well.
After travelling, upon his return to England in 1598, Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, lord keeper of the Great Seal, afterward Lord Ellesmere. Donne was beginning a promising career. He sat in Queen Elizabeth's last parliament, for Brackley. But in 1601, he secretly married Lady Egerton's niece, seventeen-year-old Anne More, daughter of Sir George More, Lieutenant of the Tower, and thereby ruined his own worldly hopes. Egerton dismissed Donne from his post and for the next dozen years the poet had to struggle to support his growing family. During the next few years Donne made a meagre living as a lawyer, which would have broadened his logical mind and developing arguments.
As Donne approached forty, he published two anti- Catholic polemics; they were the final indication of Donne's abandonment of the Catholic faith.
As London was Donne's home his outlook was naturally urban and sophisticated which certainly influenced his writing.
Donne reluctantly entered the ministry and was appointed the Royal Chaplain later in the year of 1615. John Donne's style, full of elaborate metaphors and religious symbolism, his flair for drama, his wide learning and his quick wit soon established him as one of the greatest preachers of the era. Fully 160 of his sermons survive.
Anne Donne died on 15th August, aged thirty- three after giving birth to their twelfth child, a stillborn. Seven of their children survived their mother's death. Donne was completely grief stricken. He soon became obsessed with the idea of death; Donne preached what was called his own funeral sermon, 'Death's Duel' just a few weeks before he died in London on March 31st 1631.
The term 'metaphysical' when applied to poetry has a long and interesting history. It is used to group together certain 17th century poets, usually John Donne, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Thomas ...
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Anne Donne died on 15th August, aged thirty- three after giving birth to their twelfth child, a stillborn. Seven of their children survived their mother's death. Donne was completely grief stricken. He soon became obsessed with the idea of death; Donne preached what was called his own funeral sermon, 'Death's Duel' just a few weeks before he died in London on March 31st 1631.
The term 'metaphysical' when applied to poetry has a long and interesting history. It is used to group together certain 17th century poets, usually John Donne, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne, and Thomas Carew, Abraham Cowley and Richard Crashaw. Although in no sense a school or movement proper, they share common characteristics of wit, inventiveness and a love of elaborate stylistic manoeuvres. Metaphysical poetry is concerned with the whole experience of man, but the intelligence, learning and seriousness of the poets means that the poetry is about the profound areas of experience especially- about love, romantic and sensual; about man's relationship with God- the eternal perspective, and, to a less extent, about pleasure, learning and art.
Metaphysical poems are lyric poems. They are brief but intense meditations, characterized by striking use of wit, irony and wordplay. Beneath the formal structure is the underlying structure of the poems' argument. Poems are not written by influences or movements or sources, but come from the living hearts of men. Fortunately in the case of Donne, one of the most individual poets, it is possible to some extent to reproduce the circumstances, their inner experiences from which his intensely personal poetry flowed.
One of the main characteristics of the metaphysical poets is that they write about their own feelings, mainly love, sorrow, revenge, seduction and many others. In the three poems that we are looking at we only see seduction, revenge and love. In love we find Marvell shows pretence of passion in 'To His Coy Mistress, used as a peg on which to hang serious reflections on the shortness of happiness, as he says let us 'rather at once out time devour'. Eternity and man's life in the context of this, is the explicit subject in a wholly secular manner, by Marvell in 'To his Coy Mistress'
In Donne's case, 'The Flea' is a poem of seduction 'how little that thou deny'st me.' This poem uses the image of the flea that has just bitten the speaker and his beloved to stretch an amusing conflict over whether the two will engage in premarital sex.
Looking at the poet's technique should, perhaps, begin with a consideration of argument. In a way all of the poems have an argument, but it is interesting or striking in some more than others. In Marvell's, 'To His Coy Mistress' he is urging his mistress to surrender to him before she loses her beauty and time destroys them both. The light argument is that of seduction, him trying to persuade the mistress to sleep with him, other wise when she dies 'then worms shall try that long preserved virginity'. This is clearly a morbid picture: a conscious attempt to convey the physical implications of death and burial. But it does more than this, indirectly; a contrasting and yet matching experience in life is adduced through the image.
The more serious argument summed up in 'time's winged chariot hurrying near' may first seem as though he does not have the time to seduce and break down the woman's wall of unwillingness but is showing that time forces you forward, forces you to move onwards.
The poem 'The Flea' is the cleverest of a long line of sixteenth-century love poems using the flea as an erotic image. The argument in this poem is that the speaker wants to make love but the beloved does not, and so the speaker highly clever but grasping at straws, uses the flea, in whose body his blood mingles with his beloved's, to show how innocent such mingling can be, his reason being that if mingling in the flea is so harmless, sexual mingling would be equally harmless for they are the same thing really.
Donne's 'The Apparition' is mainly a discussion; it is a poem about the speaker's thoughts. The speaker has been scorned by love and somebody rejected by love seeks revenge, as in this case. The stanzas take you through the thought pattern of the speaker and the way that he sees his ghost appearing at the foot of the bed of his ex-mistress and her new love. He feels he has been 'kill'd' by the rejection of his mistress who seeks a new love. As we enter his thoughts we find out about his pleasures in seeking revenge by terrifying the woman, 'bath'd in a cold quicksilver sweat' he wants to make her sorry for the pain she has caused and that is the only way he can see how 'thou shouldst painfully repent.'
In each of the poems we find another common feature: you get a sense of a speaking voice. Whether it is part of a discussion, a trail of thoughts or a persuasive argument. Donne also establishes a pattern, which the others emulate in his use of the stanza. Donne loves variety as a natural embellishment and it is a 'true ornament of verse'. We can see this by comparing the poems. The three-stanza argument in 'The Flea' is used again in other poems of Donne. But the fluency of the stanza in 'The Flea' leading to the triplet at the end, where he begins to agree with his mistress, it is more stately, with a measured quality, but this gives way in 'The Apparition' to a far more lively and varied stanza. The line length is giving the idea of someone thinking; giving the poem immediacy and that his thoughts are spontaneous. The use of the pronouns 'thou' 'thee' gives the poem a sense of a speaker and the two stanzas tell the story: the first is the concept, the idea of a ghost coming back to haunt her, the second is what the effect would be on her. The rhyming scheme in 'The Apparition' is very complicated. It is suited to the poem's content and psychological complexity complex of the poem; the strong emotions of love and hate. The scheme holds the poem together. In many of Marvell's poems we find the same eight- syllable iambic line, yet its effect can vary remarkably. In 'To His Coy Mistress' the vigorousness of the argument appears in the breathless lines- few are end-stopped, and the lines have a rough power of speech, as in 'Rather at once our time devour'.
All the poets, though they occasionally display learning, write with fairly colloquial voices. The best known examples are in Donne's pretended outbursts: 'Alas, is more than...' 'What I will say...' However the simple intimate address to the reader 'Thou call'st for more' is no less characteristic of speech.
As in other respects, Marvell exhibits more variety here. We find the second person in 'To His Coy Mistress'. When Donne does this, we can believe, even though his own thoughts are what we learn, that this is an intimate address 'Mark but this flea'. But in Marvell the 'Coy Mistress' is evidently absent- a mere excuse for Marvell to examine his real subjects- time and the briefness of human happiness.
Another, sometimes un-noticed trait of the metaphysical poets is that they all seem to have shocking openings, maybe o capture the readers' attention or just to bring you straight to the point of the poem. We notice the progression of Marvell's argument in 'To His Coy Mistress' from the first word or two of each stanza, 'Had we...' meaning if it were the case that... then... 'But at my back...'meaning it is not the case and 'Now therefore...' meaning in the view of this ...
In Donne's 'The Flea' in-between each stanza we have to imagine that an event has taken place. Normally this is the woman's part of the poem to reply to the speaker's thoughts and views. So the openings to each stanza are quite dramatic and shocking, theses being 'Mark but this flea' it gets the reader straight to the point of the poem. In the second stanza the opening is 'Oh stay' so we have to imagine that the mistress is going to leave the room to get away from him. In the third stanza, the opening is very powerful and effective 'Cruel and sudden' he makes the mistress almost sound evil, yet again during the gap between the stanzas an event has taken place, the mistress has killed the flea. Donne's other poem 'The Apparition', however does not seem to hold this characteristic of the shocking opening, but I feel this could be to do with the fact that the poem is not an argument or a discussion but a poem about the speaker's thoughts.
The use of wit is yet another feature of the metaphysical poets, the use of wit- elaborate figurative treatments of a particular subject- and employing epigram, paradox, contraries, or personified abstractions. Donne's imagery is eclectic, wide-ranging, and apparently obscure. He did not write for publication, but showed poems to friends whom he supposed to be well read enough to understand these references. Donne's imagery draws on the new, in the late 16th century, learning the English Renaissance and on topical discoveries and exploration. We find references to alchemy, sea voyages, mythology and religion.
'The Flea' is a playful and humorous form of metaphysical poem. Donne takes the image of a flea and compares it to the love between the speaker and his mistress. The speaker describes a flea that has sucked his blood and the blood of his mistress. There is no sin in this but it 'swells with one blood made of two' as though it were pregnant. The poet points out that 'this, alas, is more than we would do'. It is clear that the speaker is trying to convince the woman that having sexual intercourse with him is as harmless or even less harmless than a flea that sucks their blood.
Clearly the speaker fails to appeal to the woman's religious morals and she kills the flea despite his witty persuasion. The image of the 'living walls of jet' is a powerful pun, the metaphor first seems to relate to feeling closed in, with it all dark and gloomy, but then it could relate to the colour of the fleas' body, as jet is a black piece of jewellery. Donne uses religious imagery in his persuasion; the flea is described as having 'three lives in one' like the holy trinity- God, Son, Holy Spirit. In the flea's case, it is the flea's life and the lives of the two lovers, which are as one. Donne continues to create a holy image of the flea as he explains that the flea is their 'marriage temple' and they are 'cloistered in. The woman wants to kill the flea, but the speaker argues that it would be sinful to kill this flea because this would mean killing him, the flea and herself at the same time, 'three sins in killing three'. The whole poem, 'The Flea' is a metaphysical conceit: it sets up an analogy between one body's spiritual qualities or actions, them having sexual intercourse, and an object from the living world, the flea. In this case the conceit was used to persuade but they are often also used in the Renaissance period to prove or define a point.
In 'The Apparition' imagery is scattered all over, after all it is the speaker's imaginative ideas running wild. Some of the most powerful though I feel are not necessarily the more complex one, 'when by thy scorn, O murd'ress, I am dead' which means that the rejection of the mistress has emotionally scarred him so much he feels he cannot go on, that he is dead. The saying 'There is no one more bitter than one scorned by love' seems to come to mind. The metaphor 'cold quicksilver sweat' is very clever and effective, quicksilver is mercury and it goes into little blobs of balls like the sweat on the woman's face. The silvery colour of the mercury is the reflection of the candlelight shimmering on them.
With Marvell, imagery is more problematic. Unlike Donne who scatters metaphors freely, Marvell is more selective and sparing. Very often the image is more memorable and striking than the idea it expresses, as with the 'deserts of vast eternity'. Frequently one finds an idea that cannot be understood except as the image in which Marvell expresses it. In any case, with all of these poets, the use of metaphor serves, and is secondary to the total argument. However saying that, in 'To His Coy Mistress' the image of 'vegetable love should grow' is a very erotic phrase, showing the slow development of love and also relating to the male genitals. It has a sexual implication, to try to arouse the mistress. In the second stanza the imagery becomes very bleak and depressing with references to death, 'Vault' 'echoing' 'worms' 'ashes' 'grave's'. The image 'into ashes all my lust:' is a strong and inter linking metaphor; lust is thought of as passion, a burning passion, which links with the burning of ashes, like the fire of death. 'Like amorous birds of prey' has a sexual subtext, it is describing the lovers as birds of prey and that they should be like the birds- they should 'devour' time. Time is the victim, time should not consume them, they should consume time.
The metaphysical poets seem to have similar attitudes towards the fact that time is creeping up on them and their views of death. Marvell's conception of time is ever changing in 'To His Coy Mistress' but this is only to be expected in a poem that seeks to convince by constructing an ideal and proceeding to demonstrate its utopian nature. It is the world of 'would' and 'should' that we are immersed in before the pivotal 'But' in the second stanza, Marvell presents an idyllic view of lovers engaged in a slow waltz that stretches on for centuries. In this snail paced ritual Marvell feels he can do justice to his mistress, who 'deserves this state'. Things become a little more complex in the next line, 'nor would I love at lower rate'. This is where we begin to question what has up till now progressed so smoothly, as all good fantasies must if they are to be successful.
For the beings that Marvell speaks of, ages pass by as minutes; indeed we acknowledge that they must, or else why would one devote ' An hundred years' to 'Praise thine eyes'. It is necessary, if one is to be convinced by this argument, to occupy two positions simultaneously. The first is the acceptance of Marvell's illusion, of a state where one can spend years on a single activity and yet it is essential to evaluate this period of time in human terms. If we waver too much in either direction, Marvell's persuasion would fail.
We find Marvell now occupying the role of a practical person. He has become one who is aware of his mortality and of the advance of time. Time now becomes an enemy to be feared, an enemy who is closing down on him.
Another similarity between the poets is that the poems are frequently inspired by actual events. The poem thus often reflects the poet's developing thought process rather than a finished one. As Donne does, Marvell writes very much about his own ideas, but with less consistency. There is variety and superficial contradiction in the 'Songs and Sonnets' but Donne's preoccupation with love is not in doubt. Marvell in 'To His Coy Mistress' writes with lucidity and wit 'but none, I think, do they embrace' yet there is often an element of detachment- perhaps best shown in the dispassionate clarity and wordplay of his other poems.
Although these Metaphysical poets display very similar characteristics and attitudes towards certain ideas are alike, their poetry in itself is unique. These poets deal with philosophical abstract ideas beyond the realm of physical reality. The first person that used the term 'Metaphysical' was the writer and poet Samuel Johnson in the 18th Century. He felt their imagery and language was 'unpoetic' and they used inappropriate images e.g. Donne's comparison of lovers to a compass. In the 20th century the metaphysicals were re- discovered and re-instated by T.S. Eliot who realised that the combined intense emotions with elaborate imagery was very powerful. The poetry has been increasingly admired ever since.
Katie Matthews - 1 - Metaphysical Poetry