This may be a bit cute, but it gets at something important about the metaphysical style, namely its vertiginous suspension of a difference between things that are real, and really happening, and things that are not. Literally and figuratively, the poem is a panty dropper. In this-Love’s hallowed temple-this soft bed! Now off with those shoes and then safely tread Your gown’s going off such beauteous state revealsĪs when from flow’ry meads th’hill’s shadow steals. That still can be and still can stand so nigh! Tells me from you that now ’tis your bed-time! Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime It’s not a bad account of Donne, who did after all write “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” a blisteringly hot hymn to the precoital striptease: Its intellectual excesses leave poetry paradoxically naked, with only flesh to recommend it. Out comes stuff: blood, bugs, sperm, glass, gold, tears, rust, smoke, bubbles, stars, houses and ships on fire.ĭonne’s poetry is called “metaphysical.” One of the first people to use the term for literature was William Drummond, who in 1630 scolded writers who tried to abstract poetry into “ Metaphysical Ideas, and Scholastical Quiddities, denuding her of her own Habits, and those Ornaments with which she has amused the world some Thousand Years.” Metaphysical poetry, Drummond suggests, is not only difficult but lewd. Radically disorienting yet utterly persuasive, his language-torqued by what might politely be called an eccentric relationship to meter-splits convention open and, with it, the punctilious shell of fashion and gesture we mistake for the actual human body. Nonetheless the work is stunningly bizarre, worthy as few things are of the name sui generis. That’s not to say they don’t lean on commonplaces (they do) or that Donne was isolated from the political situation of his age (he was anything but).
His Dark Lady and Fair Youth-the addressees of the sonnets-exist undeniably in the same world as Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Edmund Spenser’s courtly and pastoral personae, shaped by the same history and giving voice to comparable ideas about love and sex, art and nature, and the battle between our angelic and animal qualities.ĭonne’s poems, by contrast, are from outer space.
Like other English writers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Shakespeare works fluidly with formal and emotional vocabularies inherited from the Italian poet Petrarch and his followers. This is strangely difficult to remember, for they had contrary relationships to poetic traditions and trends. John Donne was a contemporary of Shakespeare.
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