Metaphysical Poetry

 

Introduction

“Metaphysical Poets” is a term coined by poet & critic Samuel Johnson, who describes a loose group of English lyric poets of the 17th century, whose work was characterised by ample use of conceits, guess & speculation about topics such as love, religion etc.

These poets were not formally affiliated; most of them did not know each other or read each other’s work. Metaphysical poetry is extremely intelligent & witty. It is deeply religious but is also ironical.

It is a little bit different from other types of poetry. Poems classified in this category do share the same characteristics. They are all of highly intellectualised, use strange imagery & contain complicated thoughts.

Meaning & Origin

The word “meta” means “after”. Thus metaphysics deals with the questions that can’t be explained by science. It questions the nature of reality in a philosophical way. Metaphysics can cover a broad range of topics from religious to consciousness. Metaphysics is about exploration & philosophy, not about science & mathematics.

Characteristics

Themes:

Metaphysical poetry is spiritual & has often religious themes. Moreover, it focuses on love, as the union of soul.

Literary Devices: 

Metaphysical poetry uses metaphors, puns, paradoxes & meter to create drama & tension. 

In addition, Metaphysical poetry uses scientific, medical & legal words & phrases to create arguments about the philosophical aspect of life.

Poets:

 Metaphysical poets were men of high intellect. They were all graduated from Oxford University, Cambridge University or they studied at one of the Inns of Court in the city of London. With the help of their vast knowledge, they presented new ideas & stories to their readers.

Unclarity:

 Metaphysical poetry is considered highly ambiguous & obscure due to high intellect & knowledge of metaphysical poets. The poetry is greatly challenging to understand at the first reading. It needs full concentration & full attention to getting to the roots of the matter.

Short Poems:

 Metaphysical poetry is considered to be brief & concise. Every line conveys a lot of meanings in a few words. Every word is adjusted in every line like a brick in a wall & conveys the message of the author. Hence there is no wastage of words.

Sayings in the Poetry:

 Metaphysical poetry is a vast collection of maxims & sayings. Thus epigrammatic quality is part & parcel of the metaphysical poetry. John Donne is a pioneer in this regard.

Metaphysical Conceits:

 A significant feature of metaphysical poetry is the use of metaphysical conceits. It is the unique quality of metaphysical poetry. A conceit is a comparison of two dissimilar things, which may have very little in common. E.g. Abraham Cowley in his poem “The Mistress” compares his love for ladies to his habit of travelling in various countries of the world.

Originality: 

Originality is the hallmark of metaphysical poets. All the metaphysical poets were unique & original in their ideas & thoughts. They didn’t follow the path of their contemporary poets. They stood against their contemporaries & followed their own way of writing poetry.

Wit:

 Metaphysical wit is also a noteworthy feature of metaphysical poetry. Metaphysical wit is the expression of one’s idea & thoughts, using aptly & technically, the words & various figures of speech in such a manner as to provide pleasure to the readers. John Donne is called the “Monarch of Wit” in the history of metaphysical poetry.

Platonic Love: Platonic love is another feature of metaphysical poetry. Platonic love means, spiritual love, which is free from elements of physical love.

Conclusion

Metaphysical poetry is not intended to be read in a passive way. Its use of paradox, imagery, conceit & wit is meant to awaken the reader. Metaphysical poetry asks the philosophical questions about religion, faith, spirituality & being.

Metaphysical poetry

 

Death (John Donne)

Flea(John Donne)

The Sun Rising (John Donne)

Ecstasy (John Donne )

The Collar (George Herbert)

To His Coy Mistress(Andrew Marvell)

Summary of Poem Death 

The speaker directly addresses and personifies Death, telling it not to be arrogant just because some people find death scary and intimidating. In fact, death is neither of these things because people don’t really die when death—whom the speaker pities—comes to them; nor will the speaker truly die when death arrives for him.

Comparing death to rest and sleep—which are like images of death—the speaker anticipates death to be even more pleasurable than these activities. Furthermore, it’s often the best people who go with death—which represents nothing more than the resting of the body and the arrival of the soul in the afterlife.

Death is fully controlled by fate and luck, and often administered by rulers or people acting desperately. The speaker points out that death is also associated with poison, war, and illness. Drugs and magic spells are more effective than death when it comes to rest. With all this in mind, what possible reason could death have for being so puffed up with pride?

Death is nothing but a mere sleep in between people’s earthly lives and the eternal afterlife, in which death can visit them no more. It is instead death—or a certain idea of death as something to be scared of—that is going to die.

Summary of Poem Flea

Look at this flea and you'll see how small the thing that you deny me really is. It bit me first and now it bites you. In the flea, our two bloods are mingled together. You know that this isn’t sinful or shameful; it’s not a loss of virginity. And yet the flea gets to enjoy your blood without courting you first, and it grows fat digesting our combined blood. And that is more than we are allowed to do.

Wait, don’t kill the flea and kill us with it! In the flea’s body, we are almost, no, more than, married. The flea is you and me. It is our marriage bed, our wedding chapel. Though our parents’ disapprove, we are safe within these dark, living walls. Though you may want to kill me, do not add suicide and sacrilege to your list of sins: three sins will come from killing the flea.

Cruel and unpredictable woman, have you stained your nails purple with the flea’s innocent blood? The flea is guilty of nothing but sucking a drop of blood from you. Yet you exalt in your victory over the flea and say that neither you nor I are weaker for killing it. That’s true enough and you should learn from that how false your fears are. You will lose as much honor when you give your virginity to me as this flea’s death took from you.

Summary of Poem The Sun Rising 

sun, you old, disruptive busybody, why are you shining past the windows and closed curtains to pay an uninvited visit to me and my girlfriend? Do lovers really have to structure their schedules around your movements across the sky? You rude, inflexible, and insensitive jerk, go scold boys who are late to school and apprentices who are sulky about their early morning. Go tell the king's hunting party that the king is about to ride out on a hunt, and urge lowly farm workers to start their harvesting duties. Love, in all its forms, is above the influence of seasons and weather. It is also above the influence of hours, days, and months, which, unlike love, wear out like old rags as time passes.

Why should you think your beams are so worshipped and strong? I could block them out by closing my eyes, except that I wouldn't want to stop looking at my lover that long. Assuming that her eyes aren't so bright that they've blinded yours, go check, and tomorrow evening tell me whether both the East Indies and West Indies are where you left them, or whether they are right here next to me. Ask to see the kings you saw yesterday, and you will hear that they are all lying here in this bed.

My lover is every country, and I am every prince. Nothing else exists. Princes only pretend to be us; compared to our love, all honor is a cheap copy, and all wealth is a futile attempt to attain riches. You, sun, should be half as glad as we are that the whole world fits here in the bedroom. Your old age demands that you take it easy. Because your job is to keep the world warm, you can do your job by keeping us warm. By shining here on us, you can shine everywhere; this bed is your center, and the bedroom walls are the outside boundaries of the solar system.

Summary of Poem The Collar 

The poem begins with the speaker stating that he will stand for his present life no longer. It is time for him to make a change and he intends to resurrect the parts of himself the lost in his youth. He will seek out real pleasures and no longer worry about what is right and wrong. 

As the poem continues, the extent of his confinement is revealed. He has crafted a prison for himself out of his own belief. The ropes will no longer keep him and he will utilize his fears to his own benefit. He will be a stronger man.

The final lines bring the speaker back to his religious reality. The voice of God penetrates through his “raving ” and calms his ardor. He will not do as he said he would; he has been taken back into the fold of the church.

Summary of Poem To His Coy Mistress

 If we had all the time in the world, your prudishness wouldn't be a problem. We would sit together and decide how to spend the day. You would walk by the river Ganges in India and find rubies; I would walk by the river Humber in England and write my poems. I would love you from the very start of time, even before the Biblical Flood; you could refuse to consummate our relationship all the way until the apocalypse. My slow-growing love would gradually become bigger than the largest empires. I would spend a hundred years praising your eyes and gazing at your forehead and two hundred years on each of your breasts. I would dedicate thirty thousand years to the rest of your body and give an era of human history to each part of you. In the final age, your heart would reveal itself. Lady, you deserve this kind of dedication—and I don't want to accept any lesser kind of love. But I am always aware of time, the way it flies by. For us, the future will be a vast, unending desert for all of time. Your beauty will be lost. In the grave, my songs in praise of you will no longer be heard. And worms will take the virginity you so carefully protected during life. Your honor will turn to dust and my desire will turn to ashes. The grave may be a quiet, private place—but no one has sex there. Therefore, while your beauty sits right at the surface of your skin, and every pore of your body exudes erotic passion, let's have sex while we can. Let's devour time like lovesick birds of prey instead of lying about letting time eat away at us. Let's put together our strength and our sweetness and use it as a weapon against the iron gates of life. We may not be able to defeat time in this way, but at least we can make it work hard to take us.

Post - Truth

                             Post Truth 

Post-truth is a philosophical and political concept for "the disappearance of shared objective standards for truth" and the "circuitous slippage between facts or alternative facts, knowledge, opinion, belief, and truth".

 Post-truth according to my understanding 

    One person does and other runs behind (him/her) without knowing (believes in that particular thing)whether it is right or wrong. 

Funny side of the post-truth ear

 The presidential election which gave birth (Almost felt like) to this terminology, the result was a scandal-dominated election process that was mainly fought on social media and spreading their propaganda. It was a game of perception than facts.

Perception Vs Reality

For example: When we hear something positive about a good friend or a person, we have a tendency of believing it without doing a fact check. Same goes the other way around: if we don‘t like someone and hear something bad about them, we might also believe it without fact checking. It would be exhausting to fact check everything we hear. Trust is an important thing to us. We want to believe and not doubt everything we hear. We don‘t want to question everybody we talk to.

As always in life, it should be about the balance of trusting and verifying. It seems like over the last few years we became a little lazy on checking facts and a little heavy on emotions.

If we look at the Media industry, health industry and their advertisements, we might ask ourselves how much facts versus how much emotion are being presented to us. There are a lot of promises around many products that might not be worth the money.

The pharmaceutical industry understands that we choose with our feelings and that we don‘t have time to read scientific surveys. See the 5000% price increase and to make it sound moral and just. If a pain-killer promises us that the pain will end and we can enjoy our days with our family, that sounds great. But what about the side-effects of taking pain-killers? We don‘t want to hear it.

In current stressful life and instant gratification age, If someone would offer you some pills to take to cure your pain or depression within a week, most would probably believe in it. This is the age of Millennial.

As human beings, we try to find the easiest and most convenient way through most situations. We want to avoid unpleasant feelings and achieve happiness. We only read the news that supports our belief systems or we maybe even completely ignore the news, as we feel that we can‘t do anything about it and don‘t want to get upset by politics.

Unfortunately, this strategy leads to elections like we just saw or the social change what we are witnessing. If we tune into the news every four years, it‘s hard to tell what‘s true and what‘s not. We don‘t know who to trust.

As painful or wonderful as this Trump victory or Brexit might be for some of us only time will tell,  but let‘s use this occasion as an opportunity to understand and redefine the way we do things, or the way we form out opinions or the way we passed judgement on everything in the society. Let‘s start talking about how we would like it to be done.

Maybe someday someone read or listen to our ideas and who knows? we all can become part of the solution and not of the problem. Maybe we need to take the time and look at “the facts” to protect us from “fake news”.

Back in Europe, the Oxford English Dictionary awarded “post-truth” word of the year for 2016. Their too-narrow definition refers to political speech that owes no allegiance to facts, but that instead targets the anger and prejudices of certain groups. “Post-truth” politicians do not just lie, they have an Orwellian contempt for facts, even countable facts such as whether crime rates are low, or global temperatures are high. Once upon a time, we could rely on experts, technocrats, scientists, judges, and policy wonks to keep their lies in check, and to be the evidential, rational, and legal ballast in the ideological and political tempests. Now they are derided and dismissed, labeled “so-called judges”, “so-called experts”.

Post-truth politicians do not just attack experts, they go after the media. In dozens of countries, not just the US, they use their media access and power to spread lies in ways not seen since McCarthy’s “reds under the bed.” When that fails, they assassinate (in Russia), close them down (in Turkey), restrict media access (in the US), or brand them the enemy – “the real opposition party” according to Trump advisor Steve Bannon. This makes the media’s job impossible. They aspire to Olympian neutrality, but if they simply parrot what people say without fact-checking, they do a disservice to us all. However, when the media do fact-check they appear to be taking sides – this is inevitably the case when one side of the debate is looser with facts than the other. Nor are the media blameless victims in the truth wars – they need viewers so (in caricature) prefer drama to substance, urgent news to important news, and edutainment (charismatic quacks, gurus-du-jour, celebrity anti-scientists, and diet-fad peddlers) to education.

Despite this, we cannot either blame post-truth politicians or the media. Politicians lying might not matter at all – if we didn’t elect them, but we do! Who wins elections matters, but in the long-run, it is more important that our culture values truth and our institutions that produce it. Just as each of us has a role to play in saving the environment, e.g. recycling and moderating energy use, each of us has a role to play in creating our culture, daily, through what behaviors we say yes to.

The newest weapon in the truth wars is the internet. We once hoped that the internet would deliver greater access to knowledge, and make us wiser, connected, globally aware, and more reasonable. It has not. On social media, trolling, rants, fabrications, and hate-speech propagate more quickly than reasoned arguments and civil discussion. More than half of Americans, and nearly half of Europeans now get their news first online. Diversification of “news” producers mean fringe beliefs can aggregate, form communities, and attract sympathetic followers. Paradoxically, the science of how networks work creates “the majority illusion”, where the reach of fringe views is disproportionately amplified and so attracts more interest than orthodox ones. Algorithms (essentially) tell you what you want to hear – if you believe Pope Francis endorsed candidate Trump, more “news” like that will fill your inbox. “Likes” and “shares” tend to be emotional-impulsive, rather than reasoned-evaluative judgments: the limbic system, rather than the cerebral cortex does the liking. Popularity “trumps” accuracy. Social media trains us in appalling conversational habits: for example, name-calling, not listening, stereotyping, and not sharing assumptions or reasoning. Again, this is a cultural issue. We all, mostly, “know” what healthy debate looks like, but we get better at what we practice – i.e. practice being a Neanderthal and you get better at that rather than the good conversations skills you (in theory) “know.”

What is Fake-News?

Fake news can be divided into three kinds. The first kind is news that is deliberately “made-up” and that the “perp” knows is manufactured. The second kind is news that is unarguably false, yet in the minds of the writer/ publisher is true. The third kind is satirical, from publications such as The Onion, who do not pretend what they say is the truth, yet has the appearance of a news article.

The most important problem of our time may then be the post-truth problem because solving our other problems democratically depends upon solving that first.” (Paul Gibbons