Metaphysical Poetry: The Good Morrow – John Donne, Go and Catch a Falling Star – John Donne, and Avarice – George Herbert

·         Use of Metaphysical conceits (arguments – two lovers are like the two hands of a compass)

·         Us e of Metaphysical wit

·         Arguments

·         Use of philosophical ideas of the classical age – Plato, Aristotle

·         Poems are based on personal experiences

·         Conventional themes handled unconventionally

·         Abrupt dramatic openings

The Good Morrow – John Donne

1.      John Donne as a mature man has discovered true love and beauty for the first time

2.      The 1^st stanza refers to Plato’s concept of the Ideal Forms

3.      All their previous experiences of beauty, pleasure, and love were immature, unsophisticated ones compared to what they have discovered just then in each other 

4.      He feels that the two of them have just awaken from a long sleep like the young men in the story of the seven sleepers

5.      In the second stanza, he greets their awakened souls “good morrow” – good morning

6.      The two lovers form a self contained world: “make one little room, an everywhere”

7.      Therefore they have no desire to chart maps and discover other worlds

8.      In the 3^rd stanza Donne brings in Plato’s Symposium

9.      In Symposium first humans were described as spheres which are half male and half female

10.  The sphere was self contained and happy

11.  So he and mistress are two “hemispheres/ Without sharp north, without declining west”

12.  Sharp north – coldness, declining west – darkness; therefore, the sphere of the lovers has everlasting light and a warm climate

13.  Their love is equal, so one’s love is not destroyed by the other’s

14.  Hence, both themselves and their love are immortal

15.  Donne celebrates passionate love as the supreme experience of the world

Themes

·         Immortality of passionate love

Technique

·         Metaphysical conceit – the two lovers are two hemispheres that forms a perfect sphere

·         1^st person point of view

·         Dramatic opening: I wonder by my troth, what thou and I/ Did, till we loved? Were we not wean’d till then? 

·         Use of logical arguments: I wonder by my troth, what thou and I/ Did, till we loved? Were we not wean’d till then?  … ‘Twas so; but this all pleasures fancies bee

Go and Catch a Falling Star – John Donne

1.      The Song is composed by a man who has lost faith in women

2.      He is absolutely sure that a woman cannot be both beautiful and faithful/true

3.      In the 1^st stanza he issues a set of challenges

a.       Catch a falling stars

b.      Obtain a child by mandrake root

c.       Find where the past time is kept

d.      Find who had given Devil a cleft foot

e.       Teach the poet to hear mermaid songs, etc.

4.      In the 2^nd stanza the poet tells the reader to go on a pilgrimage to see “strange sights”

5.      Even if the reader travel 10,000 days and nights or until “age show white haires on” him, he would not find “a woman true, and faire”

6.      In the 3^rd stanza the poet says that even if the reader did find such a woman in the house next door, by the time the message reaches Donne she would be unfaithful several times

Themes

·         Beautiful women are faithless/ fickle

Techniques

·         A dramatic opening – Goe and catche a falling starre

·         Conversational tone

·          A set of supernatural images – falling starre, a mandrake roote, Mermaids, etc.

·         The 1^st stanza contains a set of imperatives – sets impossible tasks 

·         The 2^nd and the 3^rd stanzas are ‘if-condition’ – highlights the impossibility of finding a beautiful woman who is beautiful

Avarice – George Herbert

1.      George Herbert as a Protestant priest is interested in Christian teaching

2.      Avarice is one of the seven deadly sins

3.      The sonnet “Avarice” tells the story of man’s subjugation by money

4.      In the 1^st quatrain money is called the “bane of bliss, and source of woe”

5.      Money may look “fresh and fine” but it has a “parentage” that is “base and low” – the mine

6.      Though it had done nothing for human soul, now money has control over it

7.      It is the man who had minted money and given it value through “stamp and seal”

8.      But now money had become man, and man had become dross to money

9.      By trying to make more money – avarice - men fall “in the ditch”

Theme

·         Avarice or greed

·         Spiritual degradation of man - men fall “in the ditch”

Techniques

·         A Shakespearean sonnet

·         Money is personified

·         Metaphors

o   Kingdom – man’s soul

o   Ditch – spiritual degeneration

o   Stamp and seal – authority

·         Antithesis – bane of bliss

·         Paradox

o   Thou art the man, and man but dross to thee

o   And he digs out thee out, falls in the ditch