Their style was characterized by wit and metaphysical conceits—far-fetched or unusual similes or metaphors, such as in Andrew Marvell’s comparison of the soul with a drop of dew; in an expanded epigram format, with the use of simple verse forms, octosyllabic couplets, quatrains or stanzas in which length of line and rhyme scheme enforce the sense.[4] The specific definition of wit which Johnson applied to the school was: "... a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike."[5] Their poetry diverged from the style of their times, containing neither images of nature nor allusions to classical mythology, as were common.[6] Several metaphysical poets, especially John Donne, were 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. Their 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.
Some characteristics of metaphysical poetry include:
· a tendency to psychological analysis of emotion of love and religion
· a penchant for imagery that is novel, "unpoetical" and sometimes shocking, drawn from the commonplace (actual life) or the remote (erudite sources), including the extended metaphor of the "metaphysical conceit"
· simple diction (compared to Elizabethan poetry) which echoes the cadences of everyday speech
· form: frequently an argument (with the poet's lover; with God; with oneself)
· meter: often rugged, not "sweet" or smooth like Elizabethan verse. This ruggedness goes naturally with the Metaphysical poets' attitude and purpose: a belief in the perplexity of life, a spirit of revolt, and the putting of an argument in speech rather than song.
1572 – 31 March 1631
Although religious and metaphysical categories are central to his thinking, Donne’s love poems are not truly metaphysical. They use logic to justify claims such as: ‘She is all states, and all princes, I,/Nothing else is!’ (‘The Sun Rising’) - not a philosophical proposition but a dramatic gesture. Donne is not a sceptic nor a romantic egotist of the emotions. It is rather that he forced the language of 1590s drama into lyric. His love poems are Jacobean in style: although a master of verse, he avoided Elizabethan melody, natural imagery and classicized beauty. Idea dominates word; and the words have what he called ‘masculine persuasive force’.
Summary
Lying in bed with his lover, the speaker chides the rising sun, calling it a “busy old fool,” and asking why it must bother them through windows and curtains. Love is not subject to season or to time, he says, and he admonishes the sun—the “Saucy pedantic wretch”—to go and bother late schoolboys and sour apprentices, to tell the court-huntsmen that the King will ride, and to call the country ants to their harvesting.
Why should the sun think that his beams are strong? The speaker says that he could eclipse them simply by closing his eyes, except that he does not want to lose sight of his beloved for even an instant. He asks the sun—if the sun’s eyes have not been blinded by his lover’s eyes—to tell him by late tomorrow whether the treasures of India are in the same place they occupied yesterday or if they are now in bed with the speaker. He says that if the sun asks about the kings he shined on yesterday, he will learn that they all lie in bed with the speaker.
The speaker explains this claim by saying that his beloved is like every country in the world, and he is like every king; nothing else is real. Princes simply play at having countries; compared to what he has, all honor is mimicry and all wealth is alchemy. The sun, the speaker says, is half as happy as he and his lover are, for the fact that the world is contracted into their bed makes the sun’s job much easier—in its old age, it desires ease, and now all it has to do is shine on their bed and it shines on the whole world. “This bed thy centre is,” the speaker tells the sun, “these walls, thy sphere.”
Form
The three regular stanzas of “The Sun Rising” are each ten lines long and follow a line-stress pattern of 4255445555—lines one, five, and six are metered in iambic tetrameter, line two is in dimeter, and lines three, four, and seven through ten are in pentameter. The rhyme scheme in each stanza is ABBACDCDEE.
Commentary
One of Donne’s most charming and successful metaphysical love poems, “The Sun Rising” is built around a few hyperbolic assertions—first, that the sun is conscious and has the watchful personality of an old busybody; second, that love, as the speaker puts it, “no season knows, nor clime, / Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time”; third, that the speaker’s love affair is so important to the universe that kings and princes simply copy it, that the world is literally contained within their bedroom. Of course, each of these assertions simply describes figuratively a state of feeling—to the wakeful lover, the rising sun does seem like an intruder, irrelevant to the operations of love; to the man in love, the bedroom can seem to enclose all the matters in the world. The inspiration of this poem is to pretend that each of these subjective states of feeling is an objective truth.
Accordingly, Donne endows his speaker with language implying that what goes on in his head is primary over the world outside it; for instance, in the second stanza, the speaker tells the sun that it is not so powerful, since the speaker can cause an eclipse simply by closing his eyes. This kind of heedless, joyful arrogance is perfectly tuned to the consciousness of a new lover, and the speaker appropriately claims to have all the world’s riches in his bed (India, he says, is not where the sun left it; it is in bed with him). The speaker captures the essence of his feeling in the final stanza, when, after taking pity on the sun and deciding to ease the burdens of his old age, he declares “Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere.”
A catholic clergyman
His poetry:
-the idea of conceit (paradoxical, shocking) (“The Flea”- pchła)
-wit- dowcip, the ability to create poetry
-mixing the holy and the profane
Introductions in medias res- in the middle of story, you don’t know what’s going on at the beginning
Special features of “The Sun Rising”:
-rhymes abab
-another indents (akapity) every two lines
-questions, quotations, punctuation marks after almost every line
-specific words- thou, ‘st, thus, shalt, thy
Lover and mistress lying in a bed
Morning, sun is rising
Sun is disrespected (old fool etc.), they what it to hide away
There’s no need to measure time, only love is important
The person speaking says that he could do anything but simply doesn’t want to
His mistress’s eyes are brighter than the Sun, she is precious like gold from exploited colonies in Indias
He call themselves kings, they are all the nations in the word, others just try to imitate them
Their bedroom is like the whole world but made smaller
Erotic love is more important than other things
The old model of universe- the Sun is going around the world
3 April 1593 – 1 March 1633
An example of Herbert’s religious poetry is “The Altar.” A "pattern poem” in which the words of the poem itself form a shape suggesting an altar, and this altar becomes his conceit for how one should offer himself as a sacrifice to the Lord. He also makes allusions to scripture, such as Psalm 51:17, where it states that the Lord requires the sacrifice of a broken heart and a contrite spirit.
Summary and Analysis
“The Altar,” by George Herbert (1593-1633), literally holds an important place in the poet’s body of work. After Herbert’s death, his surviving English poems were published in a collection called The Temple. The collection is divided into three parts: a long poem titled “The Church Porch”; a very lengthy middle section titled “The Church,” which consists of shorter lyrics, including some of Herbert’s most famous poems; and a final long poem titled “The Church Militant.” “The Altar” is the first poem to appear in the “The Church.”
“The Altar” is often called a “hieroglyphic” poem because it is written in the shape of what it describes. (“Easter Wings” is another such work.) Herbert himself did not use the term, an invention of later critics. However, the term is helpful, since it implies that for Herbert everything—including the shapes of poems—can be imbued with religious meaning. Herbert is above all a Christian poet, and this poem reflects his intention to communicate Christian truths through his poetry.
The poem is full of allusions to the Bible, as Helen Wilcox shows in her splendid annotated edition of Herbert’s poetry. She notes:
Two
biblical passages lie behind [the opening two] lines (and the rest of
the poem): Deuteronomy xxvii 2-6, where the Jews are
instructed to "build an altar unto the Lord thy God, an altar of
stones" on "the day when ye shall pass into Jordan,"
and Psalms li 17: "The sacrifice of God is a troubled
spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God, shalt thou not despise."
These are just two of the many ways in which the poem echoes the Bible, as do almost all of Herbert’s poems. Only someone who knows the Bible well will appreciate the full richness of meaning implied in his works.
Nevertheless, the poem also can be read and appreciated even without extensive knowledge of scripture. Notice, for instance, that the speaker places the word “Lord” directly in the center of line 1, with the altar on one side of the word and the speaker (“thy servant”) on the other. The altar is “broken,” not only because God commanded that altars be pieced together from found stones, rather than carved from a solid block of stone or made from finished stones, but also because the altar, which is made by a human, is therefore necessarily imperfect. The altar is “broken,” just as all sinful human beings are inevitably broken: The nature of the altar reflects the nature of the human who builds it. The “ALTAR” the poet constructs is not made of literal stones but of the human “heart”: the poem...
He was an orthodox.
Special features:
-rhymes aabb
-shaped verses
-capital letters
-specific words: thy, thee
graphic poetry, shaped verses- that’s how his poetry is named
only religious poetry, concerning God and human
God is hidden by material world, you can’t speak to him
Altar is a main theme, it was built by God
The heart of the person speaking is like an altar
Capital letters: sacrifice heart to become an altar
Herbert’s poems are homely in imagery and simple in language, and often about the church; his volume is called The
Temple. These prayer-poems differ from similar poems by Donne, Marvell, Crashaw, Vaughan or Traherne, being personally
addressed to God in an intimate tone. Christ was for Herbert a human person to whom one speaks, and who may reply. This
medieval intimacy became rare after Herbert; for Milton, God ‘hath no need/Of man’s works or his own gifts’ (‘On his
Blindness’). This remoteness was increased for rational Anglicans by the Puritan enthusiasm of the 1640s. Herbert’s simple
faith was not simple-minded; Renaissance Christianity did not lack mind or drama. Herbert, formerly Public Orator of
Cambridge University, spoke fluent Latin. His is the studied simplicity of the parables.
To the virgins, to make much of time- Robert Herrick
He was a cavalier, an Anglican priest
24 August 1591 – buried 15 October 1674[
Special features:
-every stanza (zwrotka) starts normally, then there’s an indent with another line, than normally once again and an indent at the end
- punctuation marks after almost every line
-rhymes abab
To young girls about enjoying the youth, loosing virginity
carpe diem
he gives 3 arguments:
-time is running and death is coming
-virgins are in the prime of life, they’re going to be old soon
-when you’re old it’s much worse
conclusion- lose it now or you’ll wait forever
He is well known for his style and, in his earlier works, for frequent references to lovemaking and the female body. Herrick never married, and none of his love-poems seem to connect directly with any one woman. He loved the richness of sensuality and the variety of life.This poem is an example of the carpe diem genre; the popularity of Herrick's poems of this kind helped revive the genre.
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" is a lyric poem that promotes carpe diem, the idea of living life to the fullest—now. The Roman poet Horace (65-8 BC) popularized the term carpe diem in the eleventh poem of his first book of Odes, published in 23 BC. Horace wrote: “Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.” This sentence may be translated as Loosely translated, this sentence says, "Seize the day rather than placing your trust in the future." After Horace died, carpe diem gained widespread currency as a term for categorizing any literary work whose primary purpose was to persuade readers to make the most of the here and now. Thus, Herrick's “To the Virgins” is a lyric poem that falls into the carpe diem genre. It does not urge rash action, but it does urge readers to answer the door when opportunity knocks.
Act now to make the most of your life. In other words, says the poem, aggressively pursue a goal rather than sitting idly by waiting for good things to happen. Be proactive. Take a risk. You can't dream your way to your goal. You young ladies should pursue opportunities for marriage before time turns you into old maids.
Cavalier was the name used by Parliamentarians for a supporter of King Charles I and his son Charles II during the English Civil War, the Interregnum, and the Restoration (1642 – c. 1679). Cavaliers were also known as Royalists. Prince Rupert, commander of much of Charles I's cavalry, is often considered an archetypical Cavalier.