Donne, Marvell and Time
Francis McCabe
Both Donne and Marvell, despite the term only being coined after their deaths, were classed as ‘Metaphysical Poets’, a style of poetry defined by critic Samuel Johnson as involving the ‘most heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together’ . 1 He did not mean the nomination of the term ‘metaphysical’ in any form of praise or recognition of sophistication, instead, the ‘race of writers’ 2 (namely Donne, Cowley and Cleveland) and their poetry were where ‘nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons and allusions’ . 3 Eliot, in his essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ 4 published in 1925, instead favoured that the poets ‘possessed a mechanism of stability which could devour any kind of experience’. Examining Donne’s ‘The Flea’ , 5 and Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ 6 enables us to recognize not only the beauty in experience and feeling behind the metaphorical comparisons, but also the wider themes of masculinity, religion, death, and time that permeate the poetry of Marvell and Donne and their 17 th -century contemporaries. Both ‘The Flea’ and ‘Coy Mistress’ seemingly convey the themes of ‘ carpe d iem’ poems, in their persuasion of the narrative voice’s would -be lover not to waste time and, instead, to engage in sex with the speaker. Both poems echo the musical seduction of a frustrated man towards his prospective lover. Eliot argued that the ‘simple and pure’ nature of the language in metaphysical poetry ‘induces a variety of music’, enhancing these poems' seductive nature. Donne commands the attention of the reader and lover by his first imperative, ‘Mark but this flea’ , while Marvell lulls his lover with exuberant and exotic imaginations of the ‘Indian Ganges’, and romantic staples of eternal adoration: ‘ten years before the flo od’ and ‘an hundred years . . . to praise thine eyes’. Whil e both poets’ aim is to seduce, Marvell does it more convincingly, with lavish, exaggerated romanticisms of how long he would spend in admiration for each of the lover’s features (‘an age at least to every part,/and the last age should show your heart’) , where Donne falls short of romantic language, in his use of short syllables and the image of a flea, one completely dissociated from love and courtship. This comparison is in fact what marks Donne’ s poem as ‘metaphysical’, the device that Eliot denominates as ‘the elaboration of a figure of speech to the farthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it’. Donne’s likening of a flea to a marriage temple where his and his potential lover’s ‘bloods mingled be’ (a common 17th - century belief that the blood is ‘mingled’ in intercourse and conception) is creatively ingenious, adorning the poem with an edge of mischievous wit and conceit that marks it as characteristically metaphysical. This is where the two poems most dramatically differ; where Marvell employs multiple different metaphysical comparisons (Time and chariot, coyness and crime, vegetable and love), Donne uses only the flea, and repeatedly so, hence
1 See Eliot, The Metaphysical Poets ; Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies, Metaphysical Poets. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 See essay Eliot, T.S The Metaphysical Poets .
5 For all poems of John Donne in this essay, see Donne (2007). 6 For all poems of Andrew Marvell in this essay, see Marvell (1985).
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