Tag: Metaphysical Poetry

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Good Friday

Easter and Passover are of the times of year when historical and scientific explanations seek to find ways to support, or contradict, magic and faith. Numerous documentaries are aired on Western television during the holidays, with the purpose to see the Judeo-Christian narrative within the context of historical evidence and scientific proof. Validity and belief lock horns. Religious texts are set against historical documents and tried through scientific process. When could the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn really have created the illusion of a great star? What was the role of Egypt, for the people of Judea, and for the family of the carpenter Joseph? What did Caesar Augustus really decree? What was the plan of Herod? – What happened that Easter around AD 33 in Jerusalem?

The twilight zone between the two parties of the debate is the vast semantic field of the metaphor. Ancient prophesies can turn into substantial future events, or they can be seen realised in symbolic form. The “great light” (Isaiah 9:2) can be searched as a great “star in the east” (Matthew 2:2), or as illumination on a broader scale. Where the blood of a slaughtered lamb as a sign on the door-post saves from illness and the death of the oldest child (Exodus 12:6–11), the blood of the metaphorical sacrificial lamb keeps returning as a life-giving force in Christian narrative thousands of years later.

The poet John Donne (1572–1631), together with the other Metaphysical poets, developed the art of the poetic conceit into the most prominent composition of prophecy, metaphor and image. On Good Friday 1613 (then, too, on the 2nd of April, like this year), Donne returns to one of his most favoured puns, expanding and exploding it into a most profound Christian metaphor – and into a rather intriguing philosophical image. While riding Westward, Donne writes, were he to turn around and face East, he “should see a Sunne, by rising set, / And by that setting endlesse day beget;” (ll. 11–12). The sun rises from the east, yet this is also where, in the narrative of the Christian Donne, the Son on God is raised on the cross to his death; by dying, then, he is creating everlasting day — life — to mankind. While the full interpretation of redemption and mercy is restricted to a Christian reading, the ”Cosmographers” (whom Donne tempts in another poem, ”Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse”, l. 7) must find the image rather ingenious, too.

* The quotations, as well as the image of the poem, are from the 1921 edition of Herbert J.C. Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of The Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press), the centenary of which is celebrated this year as one of the key inspirations for the revival of Donne and the other Metaphysical poets for the modern reader.

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Poems and Science

While we often want to experience and discuss poetry and scientific phenomena in completely separate contexts, and indeed as far from each other as possible, there was a time when the twain did meet — and in doing so created the most moving and engaging verse imaginable.

This is the form of English verse that (in the words of Samuel Johnson almost two centuries later) was to be called Metaphysical poetry. The term refers to verse originating in the 1590s and, most specifically, with the poet John Donne (1572-1631). Other poets included in this group of writers are, most significantly, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, and Andrew Marvell.* Some scholars also include, for example, Thomas Carew, Abraham Cowley, and Richard Lovelace, as well as some earlier, pre-Metaphysical poets like Ben Jonson, Walter Raleigh — and even William Shakespeare.**

The common denominator for Metaphysical poetry is its strong focus on complex imagery and use of diligent linguistic precision. (In the terms of rhetoric, this is referred to as Metaphysical conceit.) The poets were learned men of intelligence, and of wit (another central term for this poetry), and they were eager to demonstrate their refinement through linguistic artfulness. The poems are primarily concerned with passion, or with God — or with combining temporal and celestial love; later, closer to the mid-17th-century and the revolution, political topics were introduced into the discourse. Strong lines resolutely carry the significance of meaning.

The imagery used in this poetry is always purposely rather far from the topic discussed, and the metaphors are elaborated upon extensively to create complex and multilayered constructions of meaning. The narrative is not complete without covering the entire semantic field of the image, on all levels of meaning. (For example, in one of his poems Donne presents a flea as the metaphor for an encounter where, on one level of reading, the love can be seen as romantic, pure affection, whereas, on another level, the content is highly erotic.)

Very often the Metaphysical conceit introduces imagery from the realm of exploration or scientific discovery. This was a world very new for the writers of the time, and the new worlds and universes presented endless possibilities for fantastic encounters — with oneself, with a lover, and with God. Donne frequently elaborates on the image of the sun rising and setting, and he uses it as a poignant homophonic metaphor for the son of God rising on the cross to die and setting in the grave to save mankind. Other metaphors include maps to new worlds, cosmological spheres — and, most famously perhaps, the drawing compass.

Here the Metaphysical poetry of the 1590s and the early 17th century meets the Science Fiction of today. In both genres the writers seem to employ the metaphors of the most developed thinking of their day, to reach to the limits of that understanding — and to venture beyond the known world. Writers in both eras and genres use the most elaborate research of their time as a springboard for their creative minds, and build new universes with which to illustrate the intricate workings of mans body, his mind, and his soul.

The ’Lothian Portrait’ of John Donne, c. 1595. National Portrait Gallery, London.

* See e.g. Joan Bennett, Five Metaphysical Poets (1964)
** See e.g. Helen Gardner, The Metaphysical Poets (1957)