Metaphysical Poetry and the Conceit

Core Idea

"Metaphysical poets" is the name later critics gave to a group of seventeenth-century English poets, chiefly John Donne, George Herbert and Andrew Marvell. Their signature device is the metaphysical conceit: an extended comparison between two very unlike things, worked out step by step like an argument. The poems mix wit with deep feeling, use spoken, dramatic openings, and treat love and faith with the tools of logic, science and law.

How It's Best Learned

Read Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" and trace the compass comparison stanza by stanza, listing each point of likeness the speaker claims. Then compare it with a conventional Petrarchan comparison, such as eyes like stars, and ask what the stranger comparison lets the poet argue. Finish with Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" to see the same wit used for persuasion.

Common Misconceptions

• The poets formed a school and called themselves "metaphysical." (They did not. Samuel Johnson fixed the label in his "Life of Cowley" in the *Lives of the Poets*, 1779-81, and he meant it partly as criticism.)
• A conceit is any metaphor. (A conceit is an extended and surprising comparison that the poem develops and defends, often across several stanzas.)
• Metaphysical poems are cold intellectual puzzles. (The wit usually serves strong feeling: grief at parting, sexual desire, or religious struggle, as in Donne's "Batter my heart, three-person'd God.")

Explainer

In the early seventeenth century, English love poetry had a well-worn set of comparisons. A lady's eyes were stars, her cheeks were roses, and her lover froze and burned at the same time. These figures came from the Petrarchan tradition and had been used so often that they had little force left. John Donne (1572-1631) wrote as if he were tired of them.

Donne's poems often begin like an interrupted conversation: "For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love," or "Busy old fool, unruly sun." Then they argue. The argument is carried by a conceit, a comparison between two things that at first seem to have nothing in common. In "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," a speaker about to travel abroad tells his lover not to weep. Their souls, he says, are like the two legs of a drawing compass. She is the fixed foot, he is the moving one. As he travels, she "leans and hearkens after it," and her firmness makes his circle end where it began. The poem tests the likeness detail by detail until it proves its point.

That habit of mind gave the group its name. John Dryden remarked that Donne "affects the metaphysics," and Samuel Johnson, in his "Life of Cowley" (1779-81), called these writers "metaphysical poets." Johnson admired their learning but disliked their method: "the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together." He wanted decorum, and the conceit broke it.

The same wit appears in religious poetry. George Herbert (1593-1633) printed "Easter Wings" so that its lines form the shape of wings on the page. Donne's Holy Sonnets turn the conceit on God: "Batter my heart, three-person'd God" imagines the soul as a "usurp'd town" held by an enemy, which God must retake by force. Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) used the method for persuasion in "To His Coy Mistress," which moves from "Had we but world enough and time" to a logical conclusion about seizing the present.

In 1921, T. S. Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets" reversed Johnson's verdict. Eliot praised these poets for fusing thought and feeling. When you read a metaphysical poem, find the conceit, list its points of likeness, and ask what the poem proves with it.