Easter Wings

Readers of Herbert will be aware of the intense feelings he brings to his verse as well as his intellectual ingenuity and dexterity. It is the latter that is considered most characteristic of metaphysical verse. These poets enjoyed clever word play that featured paradoxes and puns, among other literary devices. For example, Donne’s Holy Sonnet, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” in which he implores God to enter his heart, has a number of paradoxes, such as the request, “That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow mee” (Line 3). It also contains the paradox that the poet will never be free until he is “imprison[ed]” by God, and it ends with the notion that he will never be “chaste, except you ravish mee.” This is another paradox, since “chaste” and “ravished” have opposite meanings—one cannot, in normal language, be both chaste and ravished, and yet in the specific context of the poem, such a thing becomes possible: The poet will be chaste (pure) only if he is ravished (taken possession of) by God. Another example is Donne’s sixth Holy Sonnet, which begins, “Death, be not proud” and goes on to affirm the resurrection to eternal life, ending with the paradoxical phrase, “Death, thou shalt die!”

A pun makes use of the fact that the same word might have different meanings, or might sound like another word with a different meaning. In “A Hymne to God the Father,” Donne, not for the first time, puns on his own name. He hopes that at his death, the light of God will still shine on him as it did in life, “And having done that, Thou hast done, / I have no more.” He means that God will have finished his work with him (“Thou hast done”) and has also taken possession of his soul (“Thou hast done”), meaning that God now has Donne.

In “The Sonne,” Herbert offers a simpler pun on the fact that the word “sun” sounds the same as “son.” The pun is carefully elaborated throughout the poem until the culmination in Christ, who is known as the “Sonne” of Man, and is also the “sunne,” the light and “the glorie” by which Christians live.

Metaphysical poetry is also noted for its witty and unusual similes and metaphors known as conceits. A metaphysical conceit is a comparison between two very dissimilar things, made similar mostly through the intellectual ingenuity of the poet. As Helen Gardner notes in her “Introduction” to her edition of The Metaphysical Poets (Penguin 1971), “A conceit is a comparison whose ingenuity is more striking than its justness, or, at least, is more immediately striking,” and a comparison “becomes a conceit when we are made to concede likeness while being strongly conscious of unlikeness” (Gardner 19). For example, in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” Donne shows that his own soul and that of the woman he loves—he likely wrote it with his wife in mind—can never be parted, and he constructs an elaborate conceit that compares the souls of lovers to the two feet of a draughtman’s compass; each moves only in coordination with the other. Herbert uses a series of conceits in his poem “The Church-floore” in which various parts of the building (floor, walls, cement) are compared to various Christian virtues and qualities, such as patience, confidence, love, and “charitee,” the latter two being the cement.

Gardner also notes that metaphysical poems are characterized by closely developed “argument and persuasion,” and they are “famous for their abrupt, personal openings in which a man speaks to his mistress, or addresses his God, or sets a scene, or calls us to mark this or see that” (Gardner 22). Thus, Donne begins “The Canonization” with the line “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,” and “The Flea” begins, “Marke but this flea […].” Herbert, a gentler spirit than Donne, can nonetheless occasionally write a striking first line too, such as “Kill me not ev’ry day” (“Affliction (II)”), a demand that is addressed to God, and “What is this strange and uncouth thing?” (“The Crosse”).