Metaphysical poetry: Reflective blog

        Payal chudasama

    ●  student  of English language and  literature. 

        METAPHYSICAL POETRY:REFLECTIVE BLOG

                

 Hello  reader,   

      

      I am here  giving  the three questions  . This question  related  to the  metaphysical poetry.  This task given by Dr.Dilip Barad sir.  Let's  see  the question. 

Question:1 

    Characteristics of metaphysical poetry  with explanations of a few metaphysical poetry written by  John  Donne.  As well as any other metaphysical poetry. 

Answer:

☆ Introduction:

     This term was first used  byDr Johnson,who applied in  to cowley and  Donne. It denotes the work of a group of poets whi cane directly or indirectly  under Donne 'influence.Usually lyrical in nature, their work shows a surprising  blend of passion  and thought; their  poems are full of learned imagery and striking conceits, and ,at their  best , reveal great psychological insight and subtlety of thought development. In this category  are included Crashaw, George Herbert, Vaughan,and Marvell. Their work will be considered in detail later in the chapter. ( This paragraph is  of book" History of  English literature ")

      

 ☆ Definition of Metaphysical Poetry : 

You've probably heard of haikus, lyrical poems and limericks. All of those types of poetry have specific qualities that allow us to group them together. Metaphysical poetry is a little bit different. The poems classified in this group do share common characteristics: they are all highly intellectualized, use rather strange imagery, use frequent paradox and contain extremely complicated thought.

However, metaphysical poetry is not regarded as a genre of poetry. In fact, the main poets of this group didn't read each other's work and didn't know that they were even part of a classification.

Literary critic and poet Samuel Johnson first coined the term 'metaphysical poetry' in his book Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1179-1781). In the book, Johnson wrote about a group of 17th-century British poets that included John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell and Henry Vaughan. He noted how the poets shared many common characteristics, especially ones of wit and elaborate style. (WWW.study. Com.)

 ☆What Does Metaphysical Mean?

The word 'meta' means 'after,' so the literal translation of 'metaphysical' is 'after the physical.' Basically, metaphysics deals with questions that can't be explained by science. It questions the nature of reality in a philosophical way.

Here are some common metaphysical questions:

• Does God exist?
• Is there a difference between the way things appear to us and the way they really are? Essentially, what is the difference between reality and perception?
• Is everything that happens already predetermined? If so, then is free choice non-existent?
• Is consciousness limited to the brain?

Metaphysics can cover a broad range of topics from religious to consciousness; however, all the questions about metaphysics ponder the nature of reality. And of course, there is no one correct answer to any of these questions. Metaphysics is about exploration and philosophy, not about science and math.

 ☆Characteristics   of  metaphysical  poetry:

The group of metaphysical poets that we mentioned earlier is obviously not the only poets or philosophers or writers that deal with metaphysical questions. There are other more specific characteristics that prompted Johnson to place the 17th-century poets together.

Perhaps the most common characteristic is that metaphysical poetry contained large doses of wit. In fact, although the poets were examining serious questions about the existence of God or whether a human could possibly perceive the world, the poets were sure to ponder those questions with humor.

Metaphysical poetry also sought to shock the reader and wake him or her up from his or her normal existence in order to question the unquestionable. The poetry often mixed ordinary speech with paradoxes and puns. The results were strange, comparing unlikely things, such as lovers to a compass or the soul to a drop of dew. These weird comparisons were called conceits.

Metaphysical poetry also explored a few common themes. They all had a religious sentiment. In addition, many of the poems explored the theme of carpe diem (seize the day) and investigated the humanity of life.

One great way to analyze metaphysical poetry is to consider how the poems are about both thought and feeling. Think about it. How could you possibly write a poem about the existence of God if you didn't have some emotional reaction to such an enormous, life-altering question?  (WWW.study.com)

 Dr. Samuel Johnson highlights certain characteristics of the metaphysical poetry.

1. The first characteristic is that all metaphysicals were the men of learning and scholarship by becoming scholarly in the writing of their poems. They wanted to distinguish themselves from the Elizabethan age and so they used difficult language in their poems.
2. 
   
3. 《1》According to Semual Johnson the poetry of Donne and his followers stood a trial of their finger but not a trial of their ears. The meaning is, they were scholars in the writing of poetry but yhere is no music or rhythm in the metaphysical poetry. All the metaphysicals were scholars and they could prove it but they could not prove that they loved music.
4. 
   
5. 《2》Far fetched images and conceits is the most remarkable feature of the metaphysical poetry. Those poets were not happy with the routine images used by the Elizabethans. They wanted to bring new images to distinguish themselves, and so they need their images from different field like biology, science, agriculture and engineering. Sometimes they depended upon geometry also to bring their images. And to use them for the writing of their poems. George Hurbert’s “Pulley” and Marvel’s poem with the best “ to His coy Mistress” are the best examples.
6. One critic Helen.C.White depends the metaphysical poets stating that:

“ It was the demand of time for Donne and his School to write poetry in a different way. Had they presented the theme of love and Christianity in the same manner, just like the Elizabethans, they would have been rejected by the readers. Change was the demand of time and they gave that change in their poetry.”

5. One more critic Helen Gardener mentions that :
6. 
   

“ Donne and his School changed the whole perspective of writing poetry. They wrote poems in a way in which it was not even imagined by others”

What is ‘metaphysical poetry’, and who were the metaphysical poets? The term – which was popularised by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century, is often used to describe the work of poets including John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell, although Johnson originally applied it to the poetry of Abraham Cowley. Below are some of the best and most illustrative examples of ‘metaphysical poetry’, which highlight the conceits, extended metaphors, wordplay, and paradoxes which many poets associated with the label ‘metaphysical’ embraced and utilised in their work.( Resource)

John Donne :

□  John Donne ' poetry:

 ◇" The Flea" :

 Like many of the best metaphysical poems, ‘The Flea’ uses an interesting and unusual conceit to make an argument – in this case, about the nature of physical love. Like Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (see below), ‘The Flea’ is essentially a seduction lyric. Since this flea has sucked blood from both me and you, the poet says to his would-be mistress, our blood has already been mingled in the flea’s body; so why shouldn’t we mingle our bodies (and their fluids) in sexual intercourse? Of course, this rather crude paraphrase is a world away from the elegance and metaphorical originality of Donne’s poem with its extended metaphor…

◇ ‘The Sun Rising’: 

 This is one of Donne’s most celebrated poems, and it’s gloriously frank – it begins with Donne chastising the sun for peeping through the curtains, rousing him and his lover as they lie in bed together of a morning. Its ‘metaphysical’ quality is evident in Donne’s planetary imagery later in the poem: especially when he taunts the sun for being unlucky in love because use  its natural partner the world  is already  spoken for because Donne and his beloved are the world.

Question : 2


Write the critical  analysis of  Metaphysical  poem of poets other than John  Donne .
  
#Answer:

  ☆ Introduction:

When we begin exploring John Donne’s verse, the description of him as a ‘metaphysical’ poet is inescapable and so it’s worth considering in detail.

Importantly, Donne and the other 16th- and 17th-century poets gathered under the ‘metaphysical’ banner – Carew, Vaughan and Marvell to name some of the most renowned – didn’t form a cohesive movement in their own time. However, their stylistic similarities – in particular a kind of showy originality and linguistic immediacy – have meant that they have been clustered together for centuries. Some critics such as the 18th-century essayist Samuel Johnson have criticised metaphysical poets for what they saw as their self-conscious cleverness. Others such as the poet T S Eliot have celebrated their inventiveness.

Although it’s important not to lose sight of the differences between these writers, Donne does make use of many typical ‘metaphysical’ features used by others in the group – arresting turns of phrase, conciseness, conceits and an emphasis on the argumentative, for example. We might then, reasonably enough, say that the metaphysical label ‘fits’ his work and leave it there. What warrants further exploration is establishing how – exactly, specifically – Donne makes brilliant and unique use of these techniques. 

Arresting language: Questions and imperatives

Questions

Metaphysical poetry is often characterised by the freshness and energy of its narrative voices. Questions – or interrogatives – are devices that Donne powerfully uses to achieve these qualities.

‘The Good Morrow’ demonstrates the richness of questioning in Donne’s work. Here we open in the middle of the action, or in medias res, given immediate access to wandering ‘pillow talk’ between partners. The speaker boldly asks:

I wonder by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved. Were we not wean'd till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the ’seven sleepers' den?

The accumulative nature of the questions here enacts the whirring of an imagination made ‘childishly’ excited by the power of love. Along with the listing, the enjambment of the first line and caesura in the second work together to emphasise the persona’s incredulity at his good fortune: these structural strategies replicate a kind of stuttering in disbelief. Perhaps more than this, these opening phrases trace a dawning realisation about a wasted, worthless past and a transformed present and future. Rather than signalling uncertainty as we might expect interrogatives to do, these phrases are more like assertions. They mark an epiphany, the speaker’s sudden awareness of his and his lover’s changed state.


Other   examples  of metaphysical poetry:

George Herbert, ‘The Collar’. George Herbert (1593-1633) went to the grave without seeing any of his poetry into print; it was only because his friend, Nicholas Ferrar, thought they were worth salvaging that they were published at all. In this poem, Herbert’s speaker seeks to reject belief in God, to cast off his ‘collar’ and be free. (The collar refers specifically to the ‘dog collar’ that denotes a Christian priest, with its connotations of ownership and restricted freedom, though it also suggests being bound or restricted more generally. Herbert, we should add, was a priest himself.) This central collar-metaphor signals this as one of Herbert’s greatest achievements in metaphysical poetry.

George Herbert, ‘The Pulley’. Another of Herbert’s poems whose paradoxes and wordplay show him to be one of the greatest metaphysical poets. ‘The Pulley’ is a Creation poem which imagines God making man and bestowing all available attributes upon him – except for rest. Work is important so that man should worship the God who made Nature, rather than Nature itself. We suppose one way of looking it is to say that God is advocating hard work as its own reward, and justifying having just one day of the week as a ‘day of rest’ on which to worship Him. Man should be ‘rich and weary’ – rich not only in a financial but in a moral and spiritual sense, too, we assume.

Henry Vaughan, ‘The Retreat’. The Welsh-born Vaughan (1621-95) is less famous than some of the other names on this list, but his work has similarly been labelled ‘metaphysical’. This poem is about the loss of heavenly innocence experienced during childhood, and a desire to regain this lost state of ‘angel infancy’, playing upon the double meaning of ‘retreat’ as both refuge and withdrawal.

Andrew Marvell, ‘The Definition of Love’. If we were going to try to pin down the term ‘metaphysical poetry’ to a clear example, we could do worse than this poem, from Andrew Marvell (1621-78). In ‘The Definition of Love’, Marvell announces that his love was born of despair – despair of knowing that the one he loved would never be his, because he and his beloved run on parallel lines which means they can never intersect and come together. In other words, those who are best-suited to each other (if we interpret the ‘parallel’ image thus) are often kept apart (this poem has been interpreted as a coded reference to homosexuality: two men who love each other are ‘parallel’ in being the same gender, but seventeenth-century society decreed that they could never be together). A clever poem, but also a powerful one about frustrated love. 

Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’. Marvell, addressing his sweetheart, says that the woman’s reluctance to have sex with him would be fine, if life wasn’t so short. But such a plan is a fantasy, because in reality, our time on Earth is short. Marvell says that, in light of what he’s just said, the only sensible thing to do is to enjoy themselves and go to bed together – while they still can. The poem is famous for its enigmatic reference to the poet’s ‘vegetable love’ – which has, perhaps inevitably, been interpreted as a sexual innuendo, and gives us a nice example of the metaphysical poets’ love of unusual metaphors.(www.intersteingliteratur.com)

 ◇ Another   example of metaphysical  poetry in Gujarati  literature:

અમે  રે  સૂકું  રૂ  નું  પૂમડું,
              તમે  અત્તર  રંગીલા  રસદાર;
તરબોળી  દ્યો  ને  તારેતારને,
              વીંધો  અમને  વ્હાલા,  આરંપાર :
              આવો,  રે  આવો  હો  જીવણ,  આમના.

અમે  રે  સૂના  ઘરનું  જાળિયું,
              તમે  તાતા  તેજના  અવતાર;
ભેદીને  ભીડેલા  ભોગળ –  આગળા,
              ભરો  લખ  લખ  અદીઠા  અંબાર :
              આવો,  રે  આવો  હો  જીવણ,  આમના.

અમે  રે  ઊધઇ –  ખાધું  ઇંધણું,

              તમે  ધગધગ  ધૂણીના  અંગાર;

પડેપડ  પ્રજાળો  વ્હાલા,  વેગથી,

              આપો  અમને  અગનના  શણગાર :

              આવો,  રે  આવો  હો  જીવણ,  આમના.

Question:3  

If you can  write  creative poems, try to rewrite or create new metaphysical poem in either  English or Gujarati or hindi or sanskrit language.

# Answer: 

Title:  "તું  આવી  જા"

              આંખોમાં  હવે   દુનિયા  સમાઈ ગઈ,

                      બસ તું આવી જા.

              આ રણવગડામા હવે  પાંપણો  સુકાઈ  ગઈ ,

                               બસ તું આવી જા. 

            તારી રૂહને   શોધતા-શોધતા રસ્તો  ભૂૂૂલાાઈ ગયો,
                          બસ તું આવી જા. 

            રડી-રડીને    પથ્થરો પણ   પીગળી ગયા,
                      બસ તું આવી જા. 


        ધગધગતા આ તાપમાં હદય પણ  બળી ગયુ,
             બસ તું આવી જા. 


        રોજ -રોજ  કબરે- કબરે  ભટકીને  દેહ  થાકી ગયો,
               બસ તું આવી જા. 


          



           .

 I  have  try to wrote the metaphysical  poetry.   This  poem  written by me.This poem  written in  Gujarati language. 

                    

Thank you.