World University of Bangladesh

Elizabethan and Seventeenth Century Poetry

ENG - 411
Workshop

Submitted by:
Tashfeen Ahmed
Roll # 1425
Batch: 46/A
(Department of English)
 John Donne as a metaphysical poet

John Donne is the classic representative of metaphysical poetry. His instinct

compelled him to bring the whole of experience into his verse and to choose the
most direct and natural form of expression by his learned and fantastic mind. He is
a great genius we can say a power of imagining a new creational work that give us
something new to think and remember. And he is colloquial and rhetorical and
erudite in all his poems. There is a plenty of passion in this kind of poetry. In the
“Anniversary”, Donne gives a lofty expression to the love and mutual trust of
himself and his wife, his restless mind to seek far-fetched ideas, similitude and
images in order to convey to the readers the exact quality of this love and interest.
As a metaphysical poet, John Donne was influenced by Neo-Platonism. One of the
primary Platonic concepts found in metaphysical poetry is the idea that the
perfection of beauty in the beloved acted as a remembrance of perfect beauty in the
eternal realm. His work relies on images and references to the contemporary
scientific or geographical discoveries. These were used to examine religious and
moral questions, often employing an element of casuistry to define their
understanding or personal relationship with God.
Metaphysical poetry is often characterized by the freshness and energy of its
narrative voices. Questions or interrogatives are devices that Donne powerfully
uses to achieve these qualities.
‘The Good Morrow’ demonstrates the richness of questioning in Donne’s work.
Here we open in the middle of the action, or in medias res, given immediate access
to wandering ‘pillow talk’ between partners. The speaker boldly asks:
I wonder by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved. Were we not wean'd till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the ’seven sleepers' den?
The accumulative nature of the questions here enacts the whirring of an
imagination made ‘childishly’ excited by the power of love. Along with the listing,
the enjambment of the first line and caesura in the second work together to
emphasize the persona’s incredulity at his good fortune: these structural strategies
replicate a kind of stuttering in disbelief. Perhaps more than this, these opening
phrases trace a dawning realization about a wasted, worthless past and a
transformed present and future. Rather than signaling uncertainty as we might
expect interrogatives to do, these phrases are more like assertions. They mark an
epiphany, the speaker’s sudden awareness of his and his lover’s changed state.
A striking barrage of interrogatives also features in 'Woman’s Constancy'. Here,
the act of asking serves a very different purpose. In this poem, our narrator is
desperate to know:
Now thou hast loved me one whole day,
Tomorrow when thou leav’st, what wilt thou say?
Wilt thou then antedate some new-made vow?
Or say that now
We are not just those persons which we were?
Or, that oaths made in reverential fear
Of Love, and his wrath, any may forswear?
As in 'Break of Day' where the speaker cheekily demands ‘Why should we rise
because the start of 'Woman’s Constancy' is playful: these questions are teasing
challenges, an arch performance of inferiority designed to draw out assured
affirmations of feeling from the beloved. They give the text a kind of circularity, as
the playfulness of these opening questions matches the text’s conclusion, where the
speaker’s previous worries about his lady’s intentions are coolly seen off with the
pithy line ‘For by tomorrow, I may think so too’.
Alternatively, this rapid firing of questions here can be read as combative, as the
speaker aggressively silences potential interruptions from his companion. This is a
silencing of the female speaker we often encounter in Donne’s work, an aspect of
the texts which contemporary readers often find difficult.
Donne is, according to Eliot, in the direct line of English poetry. Eliot’s interest in
Donne was neither academic nor modish. As a poet interested in finding a new
medium for the expression of a complex sensibility, Eliot discovered in the
metaphysical - in the kind of experience they were trying to convey and in their
craftsmanship - valuable hints for the solution of his own problems.
Donne often used physical love to evoke spiritual love. Indeed, this metaphysical
conceit in much of the love poetry is not explicitly spelled out. To this end,
Donne's poetry often suggests that the love the poet has for a particular beloved is
greatly superior to others’ loves. Loving someone is as much a religious experience
as a physical one, and the best love transcends mere physicality. In this kind of
love, the lovers share something of a higher order than that of more mundane
lovers. In “Love’s Infiniteness,” for example, Donne begins with a traditional-
sounding love poem, but by this third stanza he has transformed the love between
himself and his beloved into an abstract ideal which can be possessed absolutely
and completely. His later poetry (after he joined the ministry) maintains some of
the carnal playfulness from earlier poetry, but transforms it into a celebration of
union between soul and soul or soul and God.
 Comparative study between any two poems of Andrew Marvell

Here the comparative study between the two poems called “To His Coy Mistress”
and “The Garden” by Andrew Marvell has been shown below-
To His Coy Mistress:
Certainly the most widely anthologized and best known of Marvell’s poems is “To
His Coy Mistress.” It is not only a seduction poem, but also a deduction poem, in
which the theme of carpe diem is presented as a syllogism: (1) If there were world
enough and time, the lady’s coyness would not be a crime: (2) There is not world
enough and time: (3) therefore, this coyness may or may not be a crime. Marvell
must have been aware that his poem depended on flawed logic: he may have meant
it to be ironically typical of the desperate reasoning employed by would-be
seducers.
In the first section of the poem, the speaker describes the vast amounts of time
(“An age at least to every part”) and space (from the Ganges to the Humber) he
would devote to his love if he could. This apparently gracious statement of
patience is then juxtaposed with the striking image of “Time’s winged chariot
hurrying near” and the resultant “Deserts of vast eternity.” “Deserts,” meaning
“unpeopled places,” is emphasized by the shift of the stress to the first syllable of
the line. There follows the arresting depiction of the drawbacks of postmortem
chastity, with worms “trying” the lady’s “long-preserved virginity,” as her “quaint
honor” turns to dust.
Imagery of corruption was not unusual in carpe diem poems, and it also occurs in
visual arts of the period: Marvell’s lines are, however, remark-ably explicit and
must have been devised to shock and disgust. The passage represents, as Rosalie
Colie notes in “My Echoing Song” (1970), “sound psychology” in frightening the
lady into the comfort of her lover’s arms, an event that the next two lines suggest
may indeed have occurred at this point, as the speaker rescues himself from the
danger of excessive morbidity with the urbanely ironic comment, “The grave’s a
fine and private place.
But none, I think, do there embrace.” This makes the transition to the last section
of the poem, wherein the speaker, having shown that however limitless time and
space may intrinsically be, they are to mortals very limited, offers his solution. The
answer is to take energetic action.
The formerly coy mistress, now described (either in hope or in fact) as having a
“willing soul” with “instant fires,” is invited to join the speaker in “one ball” of
strength and sweetness, which will tear “thorough the iron gates of life.” This third
section of the poem is an addition not typical of carpe diem poems, which usually
suggest rather than delineate the consummation. The amorous couple, the speaker
indicates, should enthusiastically embrace the inevitable and each other. Like the
elder Fairfax’s in “Upon Appleton House,” they should “make Destiny their
choice” and devour time rather than waiting for time to consume them. In its three
sections, “To His Coy Mistress” presents first a cheerful and generous offering of
limitless time and space, then a chilling reminder that human life is very limited,
and finally a frenzied but extraordinarily powerful invitation to break through and
transcend all limits.

The Garden:
If “To His Coy Mistress” makes the case for action versus hesitation, “The
Garden,” the best-known hortensial work of the “garden poet,” considers the
question of action versus contemplation. Like much of Marvell’s work, it employs
a rich texture of wordplay and classical and Christian allusions. It is a retirement
poem, in which the speaker begins by celebrating his withdrawal from the busy
world of human endeavor. This theme is one rich in tradition, and would have been
attractive during the uncertain and dangerous times in which Marvell lived. In this
poem, however, the speaker retires not merely from the world of men, but, in a
moment of ultimate retirement, from the world of material things. As the poet
contemplates the garden, his mind and his soul momentarily transcend the material
plane.
In the first stanza, the speaker comments on the folly of seeking human glory. Men
“vainly” (“from vanity,” and also “in vain”) “amaze” themselves (surprise
themselves/ trap themselves in a maze) in their efforts to achieve honors
(represented by the palm, oak, and bay leaves used in classical victors’ wreaths).
Even the best such victory represents success in only one area of endeavor, for
which the victor receives the decoration of a wreath woven from a single species.
The next three stanzas describe the physical, sensual values that the garden offers
in contrast to those of the world. As the “society” of the garden is superior to that
of men, so the sensuality of the garden is more intense than that of men: “No white
or red was ever seen/ So amorous as this lovely green” (the colors of fleshly
passion are less “amorous” than the green of the garden), and the beauties of the
trees exceed those of any woman. The gods Apollo and Pan knew this, the speaker
says, since they pursued the nymphs Daphne and Syrinx, not for their womanly
charms, but in order to obtain their more desirable dendritic forms.
In the fifth stanza, the speaker reaches a height of sensual ecstasy as the various
garden fruits literally thrust themselves on him, in what Rosalie Colie rightly calls
a “climactic experience.” It is powerfully sexual, yet the speaker is alone and in the
garden, as Adam once was in Eden. And then the speaker, “stumbling” and the
mind withdraws from the lesser pleasures of the body to seek its own kind of
happiness. Within the mind, an interior paradise, are the images of all things in the
physical world, just as the sea was thought to contain creatures corresponding to all
terrestrial species. Yet the mind, unlike the sea, can create, imaginatively, “Far
other worlds and other seas. Many explications have been offered for this couplet:
the central notion seems to be that through the action of the mind in creating the far
other worlds and seas, the physical world (“all that’s made”) is compacted, or by
contrast appears to be compacted, into a single thought. It is, however, a “green”
thought. The green thought is, perhaps, the Platonic pure idea of garden from
which all gardens derive. It could be suggested that this is the true garden of the
poem.
In stanza 7, the soul leaves the body in a flight indicative of its later, final flight to
heaven. In the next stanza, the garden is compared explicitly to Eden—not merely
Eden before the fall, but Eden before Eve. Three times, in successive couplets, the
speaker states that Paradise enjoyed alone is preferable to Paradise shared. Such
praise of solitude can hardly be exceeded, even in the considerable Christian
literature on the subject, and perhaps Marvell, relying on his readers’ knowledge
that Adam had after all requested Eve’s company, expected his readers to identify
this stanza as a momentary effusion, not shared by the poet himself, on the part of
the poem’s persona. The reader is reminded at least that mortals in the fallen world
can only approximate paradisiacal ecstasy, not achieve it, until they leave this
world for a better one. The speaker, now quite recalled from his ecstasy, observes
“this dial new.” The term may indicate a literal floral sundial, in which small plots
of different plants marked the hours around a circle: it clearly and more
importantly indicates the entire renewed postlapsarian world, under the mercy of
God the “skillful gardener,” who provides the “milder sun” (the Son, Christ, God’s
mercy). The bee, who is industrious rather than contemplative, “computes its time
[thyme] as well as we!” This is a typically Marvellian paradox. The bee’s industry
is reminiscent of the negatively viewed “incessant labors” of the men in the first
stanza: the bee, however, is performing wholesome activity in the garden,
reckoned with flowers. The situation is analogous to that of the speaker in stanza 5
who fell, but did not Fall, remaining in the garden.
The poem’s persona at first rejected the world of action for the garden’s solitude
and the contemplative exercise thereby made possible. Contemplation has led to
physical, then to mental, then to spiritual ecstasy, but the ecstatic moment is
limited because the speaker, dwelling in a world that remains thoroughly fallen, is
not yet “prepared for longer flight.” Refreshed by his experience and noting that
the “dial” is new, the speaker can accept the action of the bee and recognize action,
as well as contemplation, as an appropriate part of human existence.