Hello, I am Himanshi Parmar. As a Part of Blog task, here i write a blog about Metaphysical poetry and some of the notable poems of that time. But before that i want to write about my own experience of learning this unit, 'metaphysical poetry' is in online mode.
R. K. Mandaliya sir was taught this unit to us. He start the unit with basic informations about metaphysical poetry, so that all students can easily understand the base of that poetry. And i think because of that easy starting, i got intrest in the lectures. Also Sir's teaching style is quite interesting, as he gave us so many examples from various Fields like cinema, sculpture etc. This thing kept my intrest throughout the lectures.
Also i enjoyed all the poems. As sir sing it and explain, it is much easier to understand the concept. I never feel comfortable with online studies because it's less interactive. But this lectures of 'metaphysical poetry', i found much interesting and easy. Mandaliya sir was also dictated some questions. As he dictate the questions, repeat all the sentence twice a time, spell all hard spelling. That all thing are being very useful to us. And make the concept of 'metaphysical poetry' clear in our mind. Now let me start my blog about characteristics and poems of 'metaphysical poetry'.
Metaphysical poetry is a group of poems that share common characteristics and they all are highly intellectualized, uses strange imaginary and contain complex thoughts. The group of metaphysical poets emerged in the second half of the sixth century. Metaphysical poems also have the elements of metaphors, metaphysical conceits, paradoxes, and analogies. Metaphors and metaphysical conceits, a type of extended metaphor, are used to show a connection between two things that are not similar and to prove the speaker's point in his poem.
A metaphysical conceit is an extended metaphor that makes an outstretched comparison between a person's spiritual faculties and a physical object in the world. For example Metaphysical poets such as John Donne and Andrew Marvell, among others, made use of metaphysical conceits to explore the relationships between lovers by such poems like The Flea, To his coy mistress, and other.
Literary critic and poet Samuel Johnson first coined the term 'metaphysical poetry' in his book Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1179-1781). In the book, Johnson wrote about a group of 17th-century British poets that included John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell and Henry Vaughan.
Now let me discuss about some of the important definitions and the meaning of metaphysical poetry.
1] definition and meaning of Metaphysical poetry :-
Metaphysical is a philosophical concept used in literature to describe the things that are beyond the description of physical existence. ... '
The meanings are clear that it deals with the things that are beyond this the existence of the physical world.Also The term metaphysics comes from Aristotle, it means a science which investigates being as being reality rather than poetic convention, exploring life through the senses. A 'metaphysical conceit' is an extended metaphor; making ingenious comparisons between two apparently incongruous things or concepts.
If we understand the word 'metaphysical', then it is like - 'meta' means 'beyond' and 'physics' means 'physical nature'.Metaphysical poetry means poetry that goes beyond the physical world of the senses and explores the spiritual world. Metaphysical poetry began early in the Jacobean age in the last stage of the age of Shakespeare.
Metaphysical poetry began early in the Jacobean age in the last stage of the age of Shakespeare.
John Donne was the leader and founder of the metaphysical school of poetry. Dryden used this word at first and said that Donne “affects the metaphysics”. Among other metaphysical poets are Abraham Cowley, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Robert Herrick etc.
So this how we can identify metaphysical poetry, different from other era's poetry. Now let me switched to characteristics of metaphysical poetry.
2] characteristics of the metaphysical poetry :-
(1) Dramatic manner and direct tone of speech :-
This is one of the major characteristic of the metaphysical poetry. We found this Dramatic spice and direct tone and subject which is taken from the field which is not related anyhow with literature, Is in many poems, like in the starting of the poem, "The Canonization" - there is given dramatic starting.
For God's sake hold your,
Tongue, and let me love.
(2) Fondness for conceits :-
Fondness for conceits is a major character of metaphysical poetry. Donne often uses fantastic comparisons. The most striking and famous one used by Donne is the comparison of a man who travels and his beloved who stays at home to a pair of compasses in the poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”
“If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two,
Thy soul fixt foot makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’other do”.
We find another conceit in the very beginning couple of lines of “The Extasie”
“Where like a pillow on a bed,
A pregnant bank swel’d up.”
(3) Metaphysical Poetry is a blend of passion and thought :-
T. S. Elliot thinks that “passionate thinking” is the chief mark of metaphysical poetry. There is an intellectual analysis of emotion in Donne’s Poetry. Though every lyric arises out of some emotional situation, the emotion is not merely expressed, rather it is analyzed. Donne’s poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” proves that lovers need not mourn at parting. For instance,
“So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love”.
(4) Wit :-
Perhaps the most common characteristic is that metaphysical poetry contained large doses of wit. In fact, although the poets were examining serious questions about the existence of God or whether a human could possibly perceive the world, the poets were sure to ponder those questions with humor.
(5) Unclarity :-
Metaphysical poetry is considered highly ambiguous and obscure due to high intellect and knowledge of metaphysical poets. The poetry is greatly challenging to understand at the first reading. It needs full concentration and full attention to getting to the roots of the matter. Metaphysical poetry is considered to be brief and concise. Every line conveys a lot of meanings in a few words. Every word is adjusted in every line like a brick in a wall and conveys the message of the author. Hence there is no wastage of words.
(6) Express love and faith in Christianity :-
metaphysical poetry express love and faith in Christianity. It talks about deep things. It is also talks about soul, love, religion, reality etc. You can never be sure about what is coming your way while reading a metaphysical poem. There can be unusual philosophies and comparisons that will make you think and ponder. Also they brought the subject of their poetry from various fields like Geography, Biology, Engineering, Architecture, Geometry, Political Science etc. This thing gave unique identity to their poetry ans make them different from Elizabethan poets.
To read more characteristics click here.
Now let me discuss about some important poems of Metaphysical age.
(1) The Flea :-
The Flea is one of the most popular metaphysical poem published in 1633. The poem written by a well known poet John Donne (1572-1631).Donne wrote this poem in the 1590s when he was a young law student at Lincoln's Inn, before he became a respected religious figure as Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral. The poem uses the conceit of a flea, which has sucked blood from the male speaker and his female lover, to serve as an extended metaphor for the relationship between them. The speaker tries to convince a lady to sleep with him, arguing that if their blood mingling in the flea is innocent, then sexual mingling would also be innocent.
Summary of the poem :-
In the poem a lover tries to convince his beloved for physical interaction. And for that he told his beloved to look at the Flea. And then he explains that the flea first sucked his blood, then her blood, so that now inside the flea, they are mingled and so that, this mingling can not be called, "sin, or shame, or loss of Maidenhead". As her beloved denied and considering that thing. He tries to convince his beloved that the flea joined them together.
"Alas, is more than we would do".
When his beloved tries to kill the flea, he stopped her and tell that she is doing sin by killing three lives. The life of him, life of herself and flea's life, also he used to give example that when the flea sucked both of them. They get married and now flea is like their marriage temple. Then the speaker calls his lover as "cruel and sudden", who has now killed the flea. "Purpling" her fingernail with the "blood of innocence". At last he made last attempt to convince his beloved and told her that, if she were sleep with him, she would lose no more honor than she lost when she killed the flea. And the poem ends. Poet beautifully portrait the poem. With the unique example of flea.
(2) Death be not proud (Sonnet x) :-
Sonnet X, also known by its opening words as "Death Be Not Proud", is a fourteen-line poem, or sonnet, by English poet John Donne.Written between February and August 1609, it was first published posthumously in 1633."Death Be Not Proud" presents an argument against the power of death. Addressing Death as a person, the speaker warns Death against pride in his power. The poem starts with,
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
Donne says that Death should not feel proud of itself. Death is neither frightening nor powerful although some people have called it so. It has no power over the soul which is immortal. The poet explains his idea through the examples of rest and sleep. He says that rest and sleep are only the pictures of death. We derive pleasure from rest and sleep. So death itself should provide much more pleasure, which is the real thing. Secondly our best men get death very soon. Their bones get rest and their soul gets freedom. Hence death is not frightening thing.
Now the poet blasts the popular belief that death is all powerful. Death, in fact is a captive, a slave to the power of fate, chance, cruel kings and bad men. It lives in the bad company of poison, war and sickness. Opium and other narcotics are as effective as death in inducing us to sleep. They, actually, make us sleep better. Death cannot operate at its own level. So death should not feel proud of its powers.
In the end, the poet once again says that death is a kind of sleep, after which the soul will wake up to live forever and becomes immortal. Then death has no power over us. In other words the soul conquers death; it is the death which itself dies. Thus Donne degrades death and declares happily the impotence of death. It is, in no way, powerful and dreadful. So we should not fear death as it has no power over our souls. (Click here to read further).
(3) The sun Rising :-
"The Sun Rising" is a thirty-line poem with three stanzas published in 1633 by poet John Donne. The meter is irregular, ranging from two to six stresses per line in no fixed pattern. The longest lines are at the end of the three stanzas and the rhyme never varies each stanza runs ABBACDCDEE.
The poet asks the sun as to why the sun is shining and disturbing him and his lover at the bed. He says that the sunbeams are nothing in compared to their power of love. In the poem, the poet considers the bedroom to be the entire world. The sun should go away and do other things rather than disrupt or bother them, like wake up ants or schoolboys who are late to school. In the first two paragraphs, the poet complains the sun for its misconduct but in the third paragraph the tone is a demanding one.” to read line to line summary (click here).
(4) The Ecstasy :-
The poem, ‘The Ecstasy’, is a clear and coherent expression of Donne’s philosophy of love. Donne agrees with Plato that true love is spiritual. It is a union of souls. But unlike Plato, Donne does not ignore the claims of the body. It is the body that brings the lovers together. Love begins in sensuous apprehension and spiritual love follows upon the sensuous. So the claims of the body must not be ignored. The union of bodies is as essential as the union of souls. Thus, Donne goes against the teachings of both Plato and the Christian Divines in his stresses on sensuous and physical basis even of spiritual love.
Summary :-
The speaker and his beloved sit together on the bank of a river. It is spring, and the violets are blooming. The two hold hands and gaze into each other's eyes, but this is the extent of their physical intimacy. They have not yet made love. Although their bodies stay as still as statues, their souls have left their bodies and are occupying the space between them. There, the souls seem like two armies engaged in negotiations. This state of affairs continues all day as the two sit and remain silent.
The speaker then imagines what a bystander might think of them. He says if this imaginary bystander understands the language of the soul, he would be able to hear their souls speak as one soul. He would be made "purer" by witnessing their love. Their souls, mixed and intertwined by love, have transformed two into one a new soul made of the two.
The speaker wonders why, since their souls are so unified, they continue to forego sex. Their bodies are the vehicles that brought them together and where their souls first lived before they combined into one soul. He notes that their souls must eventually go back into their bodies, and the combination of soul and body is part of being human. The poem is well written by the poet. Portrait physical attraction along with spirituality.
(5) The Collar :-
Here i mention one video of this poem recitation.
The Collar" is a poem by Welsh poet George Herbert published in 1633, and is a part of a collection of poems within Herbert's book The Temple.As with virtually all of Herbert's poems, "The Collar" is a meditation on his relationship with God. And as a metaphysical poet, Herbert uses an elaborate metaphor , or conceit, to illustrate the nature of that relationship.
The title word of the poem "Collar" refers to the white band worn by the clergy, and it is the role of a priest that the poem alludes to. The word ‘collar’ in the title, therefore, symbolizes the priest's role as servant. Ironically written, ‘The Collar’ is, in fact, about the struggle Critical Appreciation of George Herbert’s The Collar to maintain faith in God, although the thirty-two of its thirty-six lines describe what the poem itself calls the ravings of a person who is rebellious against the restrictive pressures that surround him as a priest.
Summary :-
In the first sixteen lines of the poem, the speaker (or “the heart”) states that he is fed up with the current state of affairs and plans to seek out his freedom. He laments that he is “in suit,” in a lowly position, and that he has not reaped greater rewards. As these lines progress, we learn that the speaker has undergone a period of pining and sadness, leading to his present anger.
In lines 17-26, another inner voice interjects, “not so, my heart,” reminding the first speaker that there is an end to sadness in sight. If only the speaker will “leave [his] cold dispute” and stop his rebellion, he will be able to open his eyes and see the truth.
In lines 27-32, the will reappears, commanding the other speaker “away!” and restating his commitment to going abroad. In the final four lines of the poem, the irregular free verse gives way to an ABAB rhyme scheme. The second inner voice reveals that, even in the midst of raving, he heard someone calling “Child” and replied “My Lord.” This indicates a return to God after a period of rebellion.
(6) To his Coy mistress :-
“To His Coy Mistress” is his most celebrated poem, which showcases some of the most conformed traits of metaphysical poetry.
Summary :-
The poem is spoken by a male lover to his female beloved as an attempt to convince her to sleep with him. The speaker argues that the Lady’s shyness and hesitancy would be acceptable if the two had “world enough, and time.” But because they are finite human beings, he thinks they should take advantage of their sensual embodiment while it lasts.
He tells the lady that her beauty, as well as her “long-preserved virginity,” will only become food for worms unless she gives herself to him while she lives. Rather than preserve any lofty ideals of chastity and virtue, the speaker affirms, the lovers ought to “roll all our strength, and all / Our sweetness, up into one ball.” He is alluding to their physical bodies coming together in the act of lovemaking.
Here is the video of poem recitation of, "To his coy mistress".
Thus to conclude we can able to say that, metaphysical poetry is a group of poet who uses wired imaginary and complexity in language. Language of this kind of poetry is hard to understand and quite complex.
Words :- 3005
Paragraphs :- 22
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