John Donne is best known Met. Poet
 17TH Century poets rejected Elizabethan
lyric poetry and wrote in the manner of
everyday speech.
 “Metaphysical” refers to abstract or
theoretical thinking
 Metaphysical poetry experiments with
language in imaginative ways
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METAPHYSICAL POETRY
PG. 449
Metaphysical conceit—an extended
metaphor that makes a surprising
connection between two quite dissimilar
things. Example pg. 449
 Does not contain the words like or as
 Paradox—a statement that seems
contradictory but nevertheless suggest a
truth. Example pg. 450
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METAPHYSICAL POETRY
The Flea
 Metaphoric conceit: Connecting and
comparing the seduction of a woman to
the biting of a flea
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Do you see the connection?
METAPHYSICAL POETRY
Here we go:
 The flea has bitten and sucked fluid from
both their bodies
 Therefore their bodily fluids have already
mixed together within the belly of the flea
 Donne suggest the sucking flea has joined
the lovers as a minister might join them
in the holy union of marriage
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METAPHYSICAL POETRY
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Simple, conversational diction
Complex sentence patterns
Themes are often philosophical
Conceits that compare dissimilar things
Paradoxes—contradictory statements
Disruptions in poetic meter
Witty and imaginative wordplay (puns)
ELEMENTS OF METAPHYSICAL
POETRY
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Roman Catholic
Married w/out permission—lost his job
Later became Protestant (Anglican Priest)
His life was full of paradox
“married passion to reason”
John Donne
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Painted in his death shroud
John Donne
“Death, be not proud…”
Tone—Defiant, confident, bold
Personification—Death as a person—
begins w/an apostrophe or address to
death
 Those whom Death thinks it kills actually
do not die; Death cannot kill me.
 Paradox explained—Those who die find
eternal life in Heaven; live on in memory;
poets live through their poetry
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HOLY SONNET 10
All mankind is of one author and is one
volume; when one man dies, one chapter
is not torn out of the book, but translated
into a better language; and every chapter
must be so translated.
 God is the one author, he translates some
pieces in the form of age, sickness, war,
and justice.
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Meditation 17
pg 455
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No man is an island, entire of itself; every
man is a piece of the continent, a part of the
main; if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less...any man's death
diminishes me, because I am involved in
mankind...
Thus, with the recurring imagery of the island
and the mainland, John Donne affirms that
no one man can exist on his own, cut off
from all the rest of society; there are no
human islands.
Isolation—controlling image
Meditation 17
pg 455
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Perchance he for whom this bell tolls, may be
so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him;
and perchance I may think myself so much
better than I am, as that they who are about
me...may have caused it to toll for me...and
therefore never send to know for whom the
bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Donne returns again and again to the
imagery of the tolling funeral bell associating
it with the idea of Death and Mortality.
(controlling image)
Meditation 17
pg 455