Exploring Metaphysical Poetry

 1. What do you understand by the term "metaphysical"?

The word "metaphysical" describes something which is beyond the physical world, and often deals with concepts that are abstract, such as existence, reality, and the nature of being. In poetry, Metaphysical Poetry refers to a style of 17th-century literature in which the themes are complex, intellectual, and philosophical. Metaphysical poets, such as John Donne and Andrew Marvell, often employ elaborate metaphors or conceits-extended metaphors-to explore themes like love, religion, and death. Their writing combines passionate depth with intellectual subtlety, often using wit, paradox, and argument to affect a style that seems natural to the subjects under discussion.

2. Which aspects of Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress can be considered "metaphysical" in nature?

In Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress, several elements can be considered metaphysical in nature:

• Philosophical approach to time and life: The poem traces the subject, relating to time and urging the mistress to take advantage of the moment while it is still time enough and to embrace sexual love so that time does not cut short. This is a metaphysical reflection on the fleeting nature of life and human experience.
• Use of intellectual argument: Marvell unfolds an argument, starting with an assumption, if time were endless and then on to a more pressing reality. The reasoning, and metaphysical questioning about time, love, and life, is characteristic of the Metaphysical way of writing.
• Conceit: One of the remarkable conceits of the poem is that it compares the vastness of the speaker's love and time with the "vegetable love" and "rocks" of the world. This is one of the marked features of the Metaphysical style. Thus, the metaphors have been highly exaggerated and intellectual, something we find characteristic of the Metaphysical poets.

3. Critically analyze George Herbert's The Collar

George Herbert in The Collar voices the struggle between internal frustration and spiritual duty. The speaker who is disappointed by his religious calling thinks to throw off the collar (representing his clerical vocation), which symbolizes leaving the clerical vocation to search for freedom. This inner conflict is just like the worldly desires and spiritual obligations battling against each other. Such an abrupt shift in tone-from a moment of divine intervention in the speaker toward a renewed acceptance and peace-is remarkable. And while it is little short of ingenious for a "collar" to serve as both constraint and identity, it creates for Herbert a very powerful metaphor for spiritual wrestling. It is also characteristic of Herbert's style, where despair so often gives way to divine comfort, that the tone should shift with such suddenness. But this tension of discipline and living by a code, and yet wanting it all personally, at last in God's presence reconciled, is the real marrow of this poem.

4. Look up the word "conceit" in the Oxford English dictionary. Do you think John Donne's The Flea and Ecstasy are a conceit?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "conceit" signifies, in its use with regard to poetry, an elaborate metaphor that is extended, comparing two things sometimes seemingly unrelated to illustrate an idea or theme.

• In The Flea, Donne takes the conceit of a flea bite as representing the joining of his speaker and his mistress together. The metaphor runs throughout the poem, but in this final stanza Donne reasons that because the blood of each is mixed with the flea's, they are one in body. This is a classic metaphysical conceit.

• In Ecstasy, he uses the conceit of spiritual and physical union between lovers to explore possibly existing between the soul and body. Separateness within union as applied to the soul and the body, along with another conceit applied through lovers' physical and spiritual union, can be used as a good example