It is unsurprising that the poetry of John Donne and Andrew Marvell is often

compared. It is not simply their classification as ‘metaphysical’ poets, but

similar interests, intent, structures, and techniques which unite their respective
works

How far do you agree?

There are unavoidable cultural tendencies to attempt to categorise works of art,

to apply labels, genres and sub-genres and to invest these groups and genres
with rules and definitions. Thus, contemporary readers of poetry find that
individual poems are often not simply appraised on individual terms, as
complete and singularly whole pieces of work, or that the works of a
particular poet are not only evaluated within the context of their producer’s
artistic catalogue, but that either individual poems, or the combined works of a
particular poet, are also appraised and criticised as ‘examples’ of their imposed
genre, within the confines and the context of this supposed classification.
Hence, particular poets’ works are judged in terms of the ‘contribution’ the
work makes to, as an example, ‘Modernism’ or that a particular poet’s work is
compared and contrasted with, and judged against, those of their
contemporaries on the grounds that their respective creators are, for example,
‘Romantics’ or ‘Modernists’.
As ‘Metaphysical’ poets, then, it is not surprising that Donne and Marvell
are, critically speaking, often compared, contrasted and thought of together. T.S
Eliot, whose advocacy of Donne’s work was largely responsible for a
resurgence in interest, defines metaphysical poetry1 as work which seeks to
elaborate simile to the farthest possible extent, demonstrates rapid association
of thought, contains sudden contrasts of images and by the ‘unification of
sensibility’, that is, the ability to think and feel and the ability to relate and
recreate that which is only ordinarily felt in accessible language. If these
factors are sought, they are undeniably to be found in the work of both poets.
Both Donne and Marvell were members of the clergy and devoted many lines
to both religious and divine poetic meditations and to prose sermons, they both
wrote extensively not only of lovers, but of experiences with lovers which
recreate sense and sensuality, and physical contact, to breathlessly exhilarating
effect and they both write of death to remarkable effect.
That the poetry of these men contains parallels is irrefutable, that they share
poetic aims and intentions and thematic concerns is undeniable, yet, close
reading and detailed analysis betrays that their techniques are very different
and poems which appear to share similarities prove under examination to be
dissimilar indeed, as close reading of Donne’s A Valediction: forbidding
mourning and Marvell’s Definition of Love demonstrates. Both works
demonstrate similarities, they are of a similar length, Donne’s being nine
stanzas in length, Marvell’s eight. Each stanza is octosyllabic, four – lines long
and written in an alternate line end – rhyme pattern. Both poems speak of a
lover with whom the narrator is prevented in some manner from becoming
wholly ‘joined’ with and the way in which each of these poems intellectualises
feeling and sensation and transforms them into conceptions, into abstract ideas,
whilst still investing them with the vividness and personal experience of

1
The Metaphysical Poets, TLS, (1921)
perception marks them as remarkably similar, as reading the first three stanzas
of both poems in parallel shows:

As virtuous men pass mildly away,

And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
The breath goes now, and some say, no:

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.

Moving of th’earth brings harms and fears,

Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater Far, is innocent. ( Donne)

And:

My love is of a birth as rare

As ‘tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by despair
Upon Impossibility

Magnanimous Despair alone

Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne’r have flown
But vainly flapt its Tinsel Wing.

And yet I quickly might arrive

Where my extended Soul is fixt,
But Fate does Iron wedges drive,
And always crouds it self betwixt. (Marvell)

These stanzas make use of similar imagery. The souls which ‘go’ of Donne’s
opening stanza echo Marvell’s ‘fixt’ soul of his third, as does a pervading
sense of resignation to fate. Donne’s imploration to ‘melt’ with his lover into
their shared fate with no resistance, no railing, has similar connotations to
Marvell’s ‘magnanimous Despair’; the reader is aware that these are
desperately sad characters, yet there is no conflict, the surrender is absolute.
The emotions are painful, yet there is nobility and even reward and generosity
in them, thus demonstrating the intellectualisation of emotion into that which is
perceivable, knowable and even manageable. Both poets here also refer to the
impossible. Donne’s ‘tear floods’, ‘sigh tempests’ along with Marvell’s ‘Iron
wedges’ of fate and ‘feeble Hope’ flapping its ‘tinsel wing’ are all impossible
metaphors, and all attempting, in Eliot’s words, the ‘unification of sensibility’
that is, to convey that which can only ever be felt by using images and
words. The third stanza of each of these poems ends on an almost identical
note; In Donne’s, the images of ‘moving’ ‘earth’ and in Marvell’s the ‘Iron
wedges’ introduce resolute physical obstructions. So we see, both men write of
a love. There is impossibility, futility and resignation at work in each.
‘Tempests’ of tears and ‘magnanimous’ despair emphasise the emotion and
portray them as respectively massive and the introductory stanzas conclude
with a sense of enormous obstruction. However, as the poems progress, we see
that there are fundamentally different things happening in each

Dull sublunary lovers’ love

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love, so much refined,

That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter- assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat. (Donne)

And:

For fate with jealous Eye does see

Two perfect Loves; nor lets them close:
Their union would her ruine be,
And her Tyrrannick pow’r depose.

And therefore her decrees of steel

Us as the distant poles have plac’d
(Though Loves whole World on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embrac’d

Unless the giddy Heaven fall,

And Earth some new convulsion tear;
And, us to joyn, the World should all
Be cramp’d into a planisphere. (Marvell)

I these stanzas, Donne, as he does in the first excerpt with his imploration ‘let
us melt/ and make no noise’ and ‘the breath goes now’, and as he does in
many of the Songs and Sonnets analyses the immediate experience of the
narrator’s situation, he does not relate the relationship between the characters
as wholly defined by a particular aspect of their situation, that they are
impeded in their union, but explores this relationship in terms which are much
more subjective to the particular characters in the situation. With Donne, we
are permitted to identify the ‘how’s and the ‘why’s. Not only do we know that
these lovers cannot be together, but that they cannot accept it because to
accept separation is to deny the circumstances and occurrences which nurtured
their love ‘because it doth remove those things which elemented it’. We read
that Donne’s love is ‘refined’, by his repudiation that it is their respective
lover’s bodies which will be missed, the reader gets the sense that this love
transcends physical longing. It is not simply the union of bodies which is
prohibited for Donne, it is the union of minds. He creates a paradox