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Study Guide: John Donne’s Poetry
Click
here
for a comparison between Neoclassic and "Metaphysical" schools of poetry
Samuel Johnson (an 18th c. critic) said of Donne and his poetic contemporaries:
“About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets. . . . [they] were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavor; but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry they only wrote verses. . . . they cannot be said to have imitated anything; they neither copied nature for life, neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the operations of intellect. . . . Of wit [defined as discordia concors] they have more than enough. The most heterogenous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, he is seldom pleased.”
In essence, Johnson criticizes Donne’s poetry for making what he believes to be inappropriate and unnatural comparisons between serious things (love, religion, the nobility, etc.) and trivial or vulgar things (a flea, sexual union, etc.). He believed that such poets were more interested in showing off their cleverness than in creating a morally uplifting poetic message. For Johnson, “morally uplifting” was defined as reflecting God’s orderly plan for the universe.
Following are some questions to guide your reading of Donne’s poems. Do you agree with Johnson that Donne puts images and metaphors together in ways that are inappropriate to the subject of Neoplatonic love? Be prepared to discuss this in small groups.
“ Air
and Angels” (p. 1243)
· Compare this discussion to the Neoplatonic ladder of love. What is the ironic difference between the “lovely glorious nothing” that the persona sees, and the non-physical One of Neoplatonic idealism?
· Compare the last two lines to the assertion in The Courtier about the nature of women’s souls.
“The
Flea” (p. 1236)
(note: stanza one is based on the classical assumption that conception
resulted from the mingling of the blood of the man and the woman. All bodily
fluids — blood, semen, etc. — were considered to be the same substance in
different forms.)
· This poem presents an argument in three parts. At what point(s) does the persona contradict himself? Does that invalidate his argument? Why or why not?
· What can we imagine the unseen, unheard woman’s words or actions to be at certain points?
· What does this poem suggest about the relationship between things that are physical (fleas, maidenhead, temples) and things that are not (honor, sacredness, love, life)?
“The Sun-Rising” (pp. 1239)
· What is the speaker’s tone? Take into consideration whom he’s addressing and how.
· What physical perspective or point of view are we asked to take at different points in the poem? Does the perspective shift?
· What can make “one little room” an “everywhere”?
· Find an example where, in Johnson’s phrase, images are “violently yoked” together. What new or unspoken idea does this ironic juxtaposition create?
“The Canonization” (pp. 1240-41)
· What is the speaker’s tone? What is his apparent attitude to the poetic commonplaces he refers to in stanza 2? (think of Sidney’s sonnet #1 or #74)
· What shifts in physical reality can love accomplish, according to the persona’s claims?
· What is implied by “canonizing” the lovers? How will reality be changed if the poet succeeds in making his love affair an object of veneration?
· Find an example where, in Johnson’s phrase, images are “violently yoked” together. What new or unspoken idea does this ironic juxtaposition create?
“Holy Sonnet #5” (pp. 1268-9)
· How does the speaker find ways to expand the notion that the human self is “a little world”?
· What are the “little world’s” “two parts,” both individually and allegorically?
· What does this poem say about the paradoxical relationship between fire and water, in the religious sense?
“Holy Sonnet #14” (p. 1271)
· What are the three metaphors (one for each quatrain) that represent the soul’s relationship to God?
· What is the relationship between the intensely physical nature of the three metaphors and the spiritual process being described?
· Is there anything unusual or ironic about the poet’s invitation to God to “ravish” him?
SOME CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES:
Samuel Johnson (18th c.):
“About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets. . . . [they] were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavor; but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry they only wrote verses. . . . they cannot be said to have imitated anything; they neither copied nature for life, neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the operations of intellect. . . . Of wit [defined as discordia concors] they have more than enough. The most heterogenous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, he is seldom pleased.”
T.S. Eliot (“New Criticism”)
“[among metaphysical poets] we find, instead of a mere explication of the content of a comparison, a development by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader. . . . This telescoping of images and multiplied associations is characteristic of the period . . . and is one of the sources of the vitality of their language. . . . their mode of feeling was directly and freshly altered by their reading, and thought. . . . there is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling. . . . The poets of the seventeenth century . . . possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. . . . [after them] a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered. . . . [the metaphysical poets] were, at best, engaged in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling.”
Stanley Fish (“Reader-Response”)
“The surface argument or
plot of a [metaphysical] poem proceeds in the context of the everyday world of
time and space, where objects and persons are discrete and independent; but at
the same time and within the same linguistic space, there is felt the pressure
of a larger context which lays claim to that world and everything in it,
including speaker, reader, and the poem itself. . . . the self-consuming
business of these poems . . . can be viewed as a graduated series of
‘undoings’ and ‘letting go’s’: 1) the undoing of the perceptual framework in
which we live and move and have our (separate) beings . . . . 2) the undoing of
the self as an independent entity . . . . 3) an undoing of the poem as the
product of a mind distinct from the mind of God. . . . And finally, and
inevitably, Herbert’s poems are undone in still another sense when 4) the
insight they yield (‘thy word is all’) renders superfluous the mode of discourse
and knowing of which they themselves are examples.”
