influence
Their ravished spirits did possess.
7. Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583?1648), brother of George Herbert. The 'Ode' is his 'Ode upon a Question moved, whether Love should continue forever?'
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2328 / T. S. ELIOT
There is nothing in these lines (with the possible exception of the stars, a simile not at once grasped, but lovely and justified) which fits Johnson's general observations on the metaphysical poets in his essay on Cowley. A good deal resides in the richness of association which is at the same time borrowed from and given to the word 'becalmed'; but the meaning is clear, the language simple and elegant. It is to be observed that the language of these poets is as a rule simple and pure; in the verse of George Herbert this simplicity is carried as far as it can go?a simplicity emulated without success by numerous modern poets. The structure of the sentences, on the other hand, is sometimes far from simple, but this is not a vice; it is a fidelity to thought and feeling. The effect, at its best, is far less artificial than that of an ode by Gray. And as this fidelity induces variety of thought and feeling, so it induces variety of music. We doubt whether, in the eighteenth century, could be found two poems in nominally the same metre, so dissimilar as Marvell's Coy Mistress and Crashaw's Saint Teresa; the one producing an effect of great speed by the use of short syllables, and the other an ecclesiastical solemnity by the use of long ones:
Love, thou art absolute sole lord Of life and death.
If so shrewd and sensitive (though so limited) a critic as Johnson failed to define metaphysical poetry by its faults, it is worth while to inquire whether we may not have more success by adopting the opposite method: by assuming that the poets of the seventeenth century (up to the Revolution)8 were the direct and normal development of the precedent age; and, without prejudicing their case by the adjective 'metaphysical', consider whether their virtue was not something permanently valuable, which subsequently disappeared, but ought not to have disappeared. Johnson has hit, perhaps by accident, on one of their peculiarities, when he observes that 'their attempts were always analytic'; he would not agree that, after the dissociation, they put the material together again in a new unity.
It is certain that the dramatic verse of the later Elizabethan and early Jacobean poets expresses a degree of development of sensibility which is not found in any of the prose, good as it often is. If we except Marlowe, a man of prodigious intelligence, these dramatists were directly or indirectly (it is at least a tenable theory) affected by Montaigne.9 Even if we except also Jonson and Chapman, these two were probably erudite, and were notably men who incorporated their erudition into their sensibility: their mode of feeling was directly and freshly altered by their reading and thought. In Chapman especially there is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling, which is exactly what we find in Donne:
in this one thing, all the discipline Of manners and of manhood is contained; A man to join himself with th' Universe In his main sway, and make in all things fit One with that All, and go on, round as it; Not plucking from the whole his wretched part, And into straits, or into nought revert,
8. Of 1688; when James II was replaced by Wil- 9. Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), French liam and Mary. essayist.
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THE METAPHYSICAL POETS / 233 1
Wishing the complete Universe might he Subject to such a rag of it as he; But to consider great Necessity.1
We compare this with some modern passage:
No, when the fight begins within himself, A man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head, Satan looks up between his feet?both tug? He's left, himself, i' the middle; the soul wakes And grows. Prolong that battle through his life!2
It is perhaps somewhat less fair, though very tempting (as both poets are concerned with the perpetuation of love by offspring), to compare with the stanzas already quoted from Lord Herbert's Ode the following from Tennyson:
One walked between his wife and child, With measured footfall firm and mild, And now and then he gravely smiled.
The prudent partner of his blood Leaned on him, faithful, gentle, good, Wearing the rose of womanhood.
And in their double love secure, The little maiden walked demure, Pacing with downward eyelids pure.
These three made unity so sweet, My frozen heart began to heat, Remembering its ancient heat,3
The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza,' 1 and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.
We may express the difference by the following theory: The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. They are simple, artificial, difficult, or fantastic, as their predecessors were; no less nor more than Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Guinicelli, or Cino.5 In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden.
1. From The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois (4.1.137-5. These last three poets, all of whom lived in the 46). 13th century, were members of the Tuscan school 2. Robert Browning, 'Bishop Blougram's Apol-of lyric love poets. Guido Guinicelli was hailed by ogy,' lines 693-97. Dante in the Purgatorio as 'father of Italian poets.' 3. 'The Two Voices,' lines 412?23. Cino da Pistoia was a friend of Dante and Petrarch. 4. 17th-century Dutch philosopher.
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