8. Aristotle's 'De Anima' ('On the Soul') 1.4: teenth Century: Donne to Butler (1921), selected 'The mind is doubtless something more divine and and edited, with an essay, by Herbert J. C. Grierunimpressionable.' son. Eliot's essay was originally a review of this 1. Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seven-book in the London Times Literary Supplement.
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quality which returns through the Elizabethan period to the early Italians. It is difficult to find any precise use of metaphor, simile, or other conceit, which is common to all the poets and at the same time important enough as an element of style to isolate these poets as a group. Donne, and often Cowley, employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically 'metaphysical'; the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a figure of speech to the furthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it. Thus Cowley develops the commonplace comparison of the world to a chess-board through long stanzas (To Destiny), and Donne, with more grace, in A Valediction,2 the comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses. But elsewhere we find, instead of the mere explication of the content of a comparison, a development by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader.
On a round ball
A xvorkeman that hath copies by, can lay
An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,
And quickly make that, which was nothing, All,
So doth each teare,
Which thee doth weare,
A globe, yea world by that impression grow,
Till thy tears mixt with mine doe overflow
This world, b)> waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.1
Here we find at least two connexions which are not implicit in the first figure, but are forced upon it by the poet: from the geographer's globe to the tear, and the tear to the deluge. On the other hand, some of Donne's most successful and characteristic effects are secured by brief words and sudden contrasts:
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone/
where the most powerful effect is produced by the sudden contrast of associations of 'bright hair' and of 'bone'. This telescoping of images and multiplied associations is characteristic of the phrase of some of the dramatists of the period which Donne knew: not to mention Shakespeare, it is frequent in Middleton, Webster, and Tourneur, and is one of the sources of the vitality of their language.
Johnson, who employed the term 'metaphysical poets', apparently having Donne, Cleveland, and Cowley chiefly in mind, remarks of them that 'the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together'.5 The force of this impeachment lies in the failure of the conjunction, the fact that often the ideas are yoked but not united; and if we are to judge of styles of poetry by their abuse, enough examples may be found in Cleveland to justify Johnson's condemnation. But a degree of heterogeneity of material compelled into unity by the operation of the poet's mind is omnipresent in poetry. We need not select for illustration such a line as:
Notre ame est un trois-mats cherchant son Icarie;6
2. I.e., 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.' 6. From Charles Baudelaire's 'Le Voyage': 'Our 3. Donne's 'A Valediction: Of Weeping,' lines sou] is a three-masted ship searching for her 10-18. Icarie'; Icarie is an imaginary Utopia in Voyage en 4. 'The Relic,' line 6. Icarie (1840), a novel by the French socialist 5. See Samuel Johnson's Cowley. Etienne Cabet.
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we may find it in some of the best lines of Johnson himself (The Vanity of Human Wishes):
His fate was destined to a barren strand, A petty fortress, and a dubious hand; He left a name at which the world grew -pale, To -point a moral, or adorn a tale.
where the effect is due to a contrast of ideas, different in degree but the same in principle, as that which Johnson mildly reprehended. And in one of the finest poems of the age (a poem which could not have been written in any other age), the Exequy of Bishop King, the extended comparison is used with perfect success: the idea and the simile become one, in the passage in which the Bishop illustrates his impatience to see his dead wife, under the figure of a journey:
Stay for me there; I will notfaile To meet thee in that hollow Vale. And think not much of my delay; I am already on the way, And follow thee with all the speed Desire can make, or sorrows breed. Each minute is a short degree, And ev'ry hour a step towards thee, At night when I betake to rest, Next morn I rise nearer my West Of life, almost by eight houres sail, Than when sleep breath'd his drowsy gale. . . . But hearkl My Pulse, like a soft Drum Beats my approach, tells Thee I come; And slow howere my marches be, I shall at last sit down by Thee.
(In the last few lines there is that effect of terror which is several times attained by one of Bishop King's admirers, Edgar Poe.) Again, we may justly take these quatrains from Lord Herbert's Ode,7 stanzas which would, we think, be immediately pronounced to be of the metaphysical school:
So when from hence we shall be gone, And be no more, nor you, nor I, As one another's mystery,
Each shall be both, yet both but one.
This said, in her up-lifted face, Her eyes, which did that beauty crown, Were like two stars, that having fain down,
Look up again to find their place:
While such a moveless silent peace Did seize on their becalmed sense, One woidd have thought some
