Concisely,
the term "metaphysical poetry” connotes the characteristics of complexity,
intellectual tone, abundance of subtle wit, fusion of intellect and emotion,
colloquial argumentative tone, conceits, scholarly allusions, dramatic tone,
and philosophic or reflective elements. John Donne was the most outstanding of
the English Metaphysical Poets. His poetry is noted for its ingenious fusion of
wit and seriousness and represents a shift from classical models toward a more
personal style. Donne's poetry embraces a wide range of secular and religious
subjects.
Donne faced a moral
vacuum and experienced the unstable nature of the universe. So he tried to find
out a resolution, first in the Neo-Platonic theory and then finally in the
traditional Christian religion. The Sun Rising may be said to be
an intellectual exercise in reversing the contemporary Copernican heliocentric
system, in which the sun was given a dominant centrality. Donne makes the
lovers undercut that centrality by playing the part of the decentred earth and
asserting their former supremacy in the geometric Ptolemic context.
The
very beginning of The Sun Rising
exemplifies all the above-mentioned characteristics of metaphysical poetry. The
abrupt and colloquial beginning startles, if not shocks, the reader along with
the speaker's irreverence; and the use of extravagant conceits are without
precedent:
"Busy
old fool, unruly sun
Why dost thou thus
Through the window and through curtains call on us?”
Why dost thou thus
Through the window and through curtains call on us?”
In
this poem, the conceits are a little strange, but no more. As a lover, he puts
himself above ordinary people: schoolboys, apprentices, court-huntsmen, country
ants, who all must work to the sun's (time's) bidding.
At once
this kind of address of the sun reverses the tradition of hundreds of
Petrarchan and Elizabethan love-poems, in which the sun is a touchstone of
ecstatic tribute—“the golden eye of heaven”, “Hyperion” etc. In this respect,
the poem can be marked as an inverted aubade, in which the sun is pursued
through three stanzas of sustained exhilaration.
However,
any potentiality comic effect is undercut by a note of seriousness, applied in
a dramatic manner. Donne’s imagery, though bizarre and exaggerated as a
‘pseudo-argument’ asserts what every Platonist and Christian really believes.
At certain moments, any man might be wrapt beyond mortality, in the eternal
intimation of spiritual love. This belief leads Donne to gather his confidence
and defy time:
“Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are rags of time.”
From
the philosophical point of view, this statement goes triumphantly over the
assumed contempt for the sun, attesting that the world fittingly symbolised in
the “school-boys” and “sowre prentices”, the “country ants” and the
“Court-huntsmen” is indeed tinged with illusions. In calling the material world
unreal, the poet is saying with Plato, that even the world’s princes and
potentates are mere shadows, an imitation in time of the timeless ideals.
Such
complex of ideas remains in the second stanza too. The sun and the lovers have
actually changed roles, with the mistress for an instant becoming the sun, and
her “eye-beams” blinding the usurped lord of light. Love is not a mere
reflection of the lover’s needs, subjective and transient; it is homage to
beauty revealed and revered:
“She is all States, and all Princes, I,
Nothing
else is:
…compar’d to this
All honour’s mimic…”
Donne
is here praising mutual love as an experience of supreme value that opposes the
transitory material world and finally transcends it. But remarkably,
transcendence of the physical world and mortality is accomplished not by denial
of the body but by its fulfillment. Whereas Neo-Platonist like Baldasar
Castiglione suggests in his The Book
of the Courtier, that the lover can ascend to spiritual love only by
leaving behind the impure body, Donne insists that transcendental spiritual
love is also sexual indeed, that lovers transcend the physicality of existence
by embracing the body.
On
reaching this conclusion of supreme value, the lovers can invite the sun to
carry on his business for they are beyond the reach of the co-ordinates of time
in their world “contracted thus”:
“Shine here to us, and thou art every where
This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere”.
~~~~~*~~~~~
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