Questions: Metaphysical Poetry and the Conceit

Question 1

What most clearly separates a metaphysical conceit from an ordinary metaphor?

• A. It always compares a woman to a natural object such as a rose or a star
• B. It joins two very unlike things and develops the comparison through an extended, argument-like chain of likenesses
• C. It appears only in the final couplet of a sonnet
• D. It avoids any reference to science, law or geography

Answer: (B)

The metaphysical conceit is extended and surprising. Donne's compass, for example, is unfolded point by point to prove that the lovers stay joined while apart. Roses and stars are the stock comparisons of the Petrarchan tradition that the metaphysical poets often pushed against.

Question 2

Donne, Herbert and Marvell described themselves as members of a 'metaphysical' school of poetry.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

The label came later. John Dryden remarked that Donne 'affects the metaphysics,' and Samuel Johnson fixed the term in his 'Life of Cowley' (1779-81). The poets themselves did not form a declared movement.

Question 3

In 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,' what object does Donne use to show that two lovers remain joined while one travels?

• A. A flea that has bitten both lovers
• B. A pair of legs of a drawing compass
• C. The rising sun
• D. A pair of wings shaped on the page

Answer: (B)

The compass has a fixed foot and a moving foot joined at the top. The fixed foot leans after the roaming one and makes its circle 'just.' The flea and the sun appear in other Donne poems, and the wing shape belongs to Herbert's 'Easter Wings.'

Question 4

Samuel Johnson complained that in metaphysical poetry 'the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.' Explain how this complaint also describes what later readers such as T. S. Eliot admired.

Model answer: Johnson objected to forced, far-fetched comparisons between unlike things. Eliot, in 'The Metaphysical Poets' (1921), valued exactly that joining of unlike ideas, because it fused thought and feeling in a single act of mind.

The same feature, the yoking of unlike things, reads as a fault for a neoclassical critic who prized decorum and as a strength for a modernist who wanted poetry to think and feel at once. The disagreement is about values, not about the description.