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, John Milton 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, ‘rather at once out time devour’. Eternity and man’s life in the context of this, is the explicit subject of 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 ‘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 ‘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 time 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 see’s 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 the mind of 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 were 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, is more stately, is 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 poems content and physiological 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, ‘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 an intimate address ‘Mark but this flea’ to a real woman is intended in say ‘The Flea’. But 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 opening, 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, them 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 speakers 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, ‘yet this enjoys before it woo’, ‘marriage temple is’ among other things what is trust of Donne’s imagery is true of the other disconcerting element in his poetry, its harsh and rugged verse. It is an outcome of the same double motive, the desire to startle and the desire to approximate poetic to direct, unconventional, colloquial speech.
Donne’s verse has a powerful and haunting harmony of its own. For Donne is not simple, no poet could be, willing to force his accent, to strain and crack a set pattern, he is striving to find a rhythm that will express the passionate fullness of his mind, the fluxes and refluxes of his moods; and the felicities of verse are as frequent and startling as those phrasing discords of individual lines or phrases are resolved in the complex and rhetorically effective harmony of a whole group of lines.
‘The Flea’ is a playful and humorous form of metaphysical poems. 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 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. So 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 appear into 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’, while 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 rare few images of ‘vegetable love should grow’ is a very erotic phrase, showing the slow development of love and also relating to the male genitals. It is a sexual implication, maybe 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 as passion, a burning passion, which links with the burning of ashes, like 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 with 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. In 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 ‘deserve 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 and the eternity what he had earlier facilitated the requisite offering to his mistress now becomes a vast desert. It is ironic that to understand ‘deserts of vast eternity’ we can upon that very conception of the monotonous which we have failed to apply where it would be most apt. it would seem that a lover, any lover, would tire of spending ‘two hundred’ years ‘to adore each breast’. The same would be expected of a woman subjected to such unending praise. Yet we do not stop to reflect on this alternative view while reading the first stanza. Rather, we are not permitted to reflect on this aspect since the poem keeps ushering us along presenting one image after another in a mind numbing succession.
This might explain part of the effectiveness of ‘To His Coy Mistress’ as a persuasive tract. If Marvell is so adept at guiding us through his train of thought, it is only to be expected that we are convinced of his argument. This is not because we feel his thoughts are in reality ours, but because we are grateful to Marvell for having shared them. In travelling along with Marvell on his rhetorical journey, we develop an affinity for him and his concerns.
Another similarity between the poets is that the poems that they 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 very 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 metaphysiclas were re- discovered and re-instated by TS Eliot who realised that the combined intense emotions with elaborate imagery was very powerful. The poetry has become increasingly admired ever since.