essay on the metaphysical poetry

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from Lives of the Poets

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Known as the most significant literary figure of the mid to late 1700s, poet, novelist, translator, lexicographer, editor, biographer, and critic Samuel Johnson is best known for his literary criticism and his work on the two-volume A Dictionary of the English Language, in Which the Words are Deduced from Their Originals, and Illustrated in Their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers; to Which are Prefixed a History of the Language and an English Grammar (1755).

Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets , which is commonly known as the Lives of the Poets , appeared in 1781 as the preface to a selection of work by the approximately fifty poets featured. None of the all-male poets featured were still alive at the book’s publication; all wrote between the 1660s and the 1770s. While Johnson selected a few of the poets in the collection (Isaac Watts, Sir Richard Blackmore, John Pomfret, Thomas Yalden, and James Thomson), most were chosen by the booksellers who suggested and organized the collection.

Johnson’s note on each poet is typically composed of three components: a biography gleaned primarily from secondary sources, a brief characterization of the poet, followed by Johnson’s substantive critical perspective on the poet’s work as a whole. The lives range in length from a few pages to a full volume. The collection had initially been planned as a slim volume, but upon completion the collection spanned 66 volumes: ten volumes of Johnson’s notes, and another 56 of the poets’ work. While Johnson wrote additional literary criticism, this is considered the central collection of his critical work. Johnson died in 1784, three years after the collection’s completion.

“LIFE OF MILTON” (1779; EXCERPT)

He was at this time [1624, aged fifteen] eminently skilled in the Latin tongue; and he himself by annexing the dates to his first compositions, a boast of which the learned Politian [Angelo Poliziano (1454–94), poet and scholar—ed.] had given him an example, seems to commend the earliness of his own proficiency to the notice of posterity; but the products of his vernal fertility have been surpassed by many, and particularly by his contemporary Cowley. Of the powers of the mind it is difficult to form an estimate; many have excelled Milton in their first essays who never rose to works like Paradise Lost . . . .

His next production was “Lycidas,” an elegy written in 1637 on the death of Mr. King, the son of Sir John King, secretary for Ireland in the time of Elizabeth, James, and Charles. King was much a favorite at Cambridge, and many of the wits joined to do honor to his memory. Milton’s acquaintance with the Italian writers may be discovered by a mixture of longer and shorter verses, according to the rules of Tuscan poetry, and his malignity to the Church by some lines which are interpreted as threatening its extermination. . . .

For the subject of his epic poem, after much deliberation, “long choosing, and beginning late,” he fixed upon Paradise Lost ; a design so comprehensive that it could be justified only by success. He had once designed to celebrate King Arthur, as he hints in his verses to Mansus; but “Arthur was reserved,” says Fenton, “to another destiny.”

. . . Of the English poets he set most value upon Spenser, Shakespeare, and Cowley. Spenser was apparently his favorite; Shakespeare he may easily be supposed to like, with every other skilful reader, but I should not have expected that Cowley, whose ideas of excellence were different from his own, would have had much of his approbation. His character of Dryden, who sometimes visited him, was that he was a good rhymist, but no poet.

In the examination of Milton’s poetical works I shall pay so much regard to time as to begin with his juvenile productions. For his earlier pieces he seems to have had a degree of fondness not very laudable: what he has once written he resolves to preserve, and gives to the public an unfinished poem, which he broke off because he was “nothing satisfied with what he had done,” supposing his readers less nice than himself. These preludes to his future labours are in Italian, Latin, and English. Of the Italian I cannot pretend to speak as a critic, but I have heard them commended by a man well qualified to decide their merit. The Latin pieces are lusciously elegant; but the delight which they afford is rather by the exquisite imitation of the ancient writers, by the purity of the diction, and the harmony of the numbers, than by any power of invention or vigour of sentiment. They are not all of equal value; the elegies excel the odes, and some of the exercises on Gunpowder Treason [the foiled Gunpowder Plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament on November 5, 1605—ed.] might have been spared.

The English poems, though they make no promises of Paradise Lost , have this evidence of genius, that they have a cast original and unborrowed. But their peculiarity is not excellence: if they differ from verses of others, they differ for the worse; for they are too often distinguished by repulsive harshness; the combinations of words are new, but they are not pleasing; the rhymes and epithets seem to be laboriously sought and violently applied.

One of the poems on which much praise has been bestowed is “Lycidas”, of which the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing. What beauty there is we must therefore seek in the sentiments and images. It is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion; for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. Passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of “rough satyrs and fauns with cloven heel.” Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.

In this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting: whatever images it can supply are long ago exhausted; and its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind. When Cowley tells of Hervey that they studied together, it is easy to suppose how much he must miss the companion of his labours and the partner of his discoveries; but what image of tenderness can be excited by these lines!

We drove a field, and both together heard What time the grey fly winds her sultry horn, Battening our flocks with the fresh dews of night.

We know that they never drove a field, and that they had no flocks to batten; and though it be allowed that the representation may be allegorical, the true meaning is so uncertain and remote that it is never sought because it cannot be known when it is found.

Among the flocks and copses and flowers appear the heathen deities, Jove and Phoebus, Neptune and Æolus, with a long train of mythological imagery, such as a College easily supplies. Nothing can less display knowledge or less exercise invention than to tell how a shepherd has lost his companion and must now feed his flocks alone, without any judge of his skill in piping; and how one god asks another god what is become of Lycidas, and how neither god can tell. He who thus grieves will excite no sympathy; he who thus praises will confer no honor.

This poem has yet a grosser fault. With these trifling fictions are mingled the most awful and sacred truths, such as ought never to be polluted with such irreverent combinations. The shepherd likewise is now a feeder of sheep, and afterwards an ecclesiastical pastor, a superintendent of a Christian flock. Such equivocations are always unskillful; but here they are indecent, and at least approach to impiety, of which, however, I believe the writer not to have been conscious.

Such is the power of reputation justly acquired that its blaze drives away the eye from nice examination. Surely no man could have fancied that he read “Lycidas” with pleasure had he not known its author.

Of the two pieces, “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” I believe opinion is uniform, every man that reads them, reads them with pleasure. The author’s design is not, what Theobald has remarked, merely to show how objects derived their colors from the mind, by representing the operation of the same things upon the gay and the melancholy temper, or upon the same man as he is differently disposed; but rather how, among the successive variety of appearances, every disposition of mind takes hold on those by which it may be gratified.

The cheerful man hears the lark in the morning; the pensive man hears the nightingale in the evening. The cheerful man sees the cock strut, and hears the horn and hounds echo in the wood; then walks “not unseen” to observe the glory of the rising sun or listen to the singing milk-maid, and view the labours of the plowman and the mower; then casts his eyes about him over scenes of smiling plenty, and looks up to the distant tower, the residence of some fair inhabitant: thus he pursues rural gaiety through a day of labor or of play, and delights himself at night with the fanciful narratives of superstitious ignorance.

The pensive man at one time walks “unseen” to muse at midnight, and at another hears the sullen curfew. If the weather drives him home he sits in a room lighted only by “glowing embers”; or by a lonely lamp outwatches the North Star to discover the habitation of separate souls, and varies the shades of meditation by contemplating the magnificent or pathetic scenes of tragic and epic poetry. When the morning comes, a morning gloomy with rain and wind, he walks into the dark trackless woods, falls asleep by some murmuring water, and with melancholy enthusiasm expects some dream of prognostication or some music played by aerial performers.

Both Mirth and Melancholy are solitary, silent inhabitants of the breast that neither receive nor transmit communication; no mention is therefore made of a philosophical friend or a pleasant companion. The seriousness does not arise from any participation of calamity, nor the gaiety from the pleasures of the bottle.

The man of cheerfulness having exhausted the country tries what “towered cities” will afford, and mingles with scenes of splendor, gay assemblies, and nuptial festivities; but he mingles a mere spectator as, when the learned comedies of Jonson or the wild dramas of Shakespeare are exhibited, he attends the theatre.

The pensive man never loses himself in crowds, but walks the cloister or frequents the cathedral. Milton probably had not yet forsaken the Church.

Both his characters delight in music; but he seems to think that cheerful notes would have obtained from Pluto a complete dismission [liberation] of Eurydice, of whom solemn sounds only procured a conditional release.

For the old age of Cheerfulness he makes no provision; but Melancholy he conducts with great dignity to the close of life. His Cheerfulness is without levity, and his Pensiveness without asperity.

Through these two poems the images are properly selected and nicely distinguished, but the colors of the diction seem not sufficiently discriminated I know not whether the characters are kept sufficiently apart. No mirth can, indeed, be found in his melancholy; but I am afraid that I always meet some melancholy in his mirth. They are two noble efforts of imagination.

The greatest of his juvenile performances is the Masque of Comus , in which may very plainly be discovered the dawn or twilight of Paradise Lost . Milton appears to have formed very early that system of diction and mode of verse which his maturer judgment approved, and from which he never endeavored nor desired to deviate.

Nor does Comus afford only a specimen of his language: it exhibits likewise his power of description and his vigour of sentiment, employed in the praise and defense of virtue. A work more truly poetical is rarely found; allusions, images, and descriptive epithets embellish almost every period with lavish decoration. As a series of lines, therefore, it may be considered as worthy of all the admiration with which the votaries have received it.

As a drama it is deficient. The action is not probable. A Masque, in those parts where supernatural intervention is admitted, must indeed be given up to all the freaks of imagination; but so far as the action is merely human it ought to be reasonable, which can hardly be said of the conduct of the two brothers, who, when their sister sinks with fatigue in a pathless wilderness, wander both away in search of berries too far to find their way back, and leave a helpless Lady to all the sadness and danger of solitude. This however is a defect overbalanced by its convenience.

What deserves more reprehension is that the prologue spoken in the wild wood by the attendant Spirit is addressed to the audience; a mode of communication so contrary to the nature of Dramatic representation that no precedents can support it.

The discourse of the Spirit is too long, an objection that may be made to almost all the following speeches; they have not the sprightliness of a dialogue animated by reciprocal contention, but seem rather declamations deliberately composed and formally repeated on a moral question. The auditor therefore listens as to a lecture, without passion, without anxiety.

The song of Comus has airiness and jollity; but, what may recommend Milton’s morals as well as his poetry, the invitations to pleasure are so general that they excite no distinct images of corrupt enjoyment, and take no dangerous hold on the fancy.

The following soliloquies of Comus and the Lady are elegant, but tedious. The song must owe much to the voice, if it ever can delight. At last the Brothers enter, with too much tranquillity; and when they have feared lest their sister should be in danger, and hoped that she is not in danger, the Elder makes a speech in praise of chastity, and the Younger finds how fine it is to be a philosopher.

Then descends the Spirit in form of a shepherd; and the Brother, instead of being in haste to ask his help, praises his singing, and enquires his business in that place. It is remarkable that at this interview the Brother is taken with a short fit of rhyming. The Spirit relates that the Lady is in the power of Comus, the Brother moralizes again, and the Spirit makes a long narration, of no use because it is false, and therefore unsuitable to a good Being.

In all these parts the language is poetical and the sentiments are generous, but there is something wanting to allure attention.

The dispute between the Lady and Comus is the most animated and affecting scene of the drama, and wants nothing but a brisker reciprocation of objections and replies, to invite attention and detain it.

The songs are vigorous and full of imagery; but they are harsh in their diction, and not very musical in their numbers.

Throughout the whole the figures are too bold and the language too luxuriant for dialogue: it is a drama in the epic style, inelegantly splendid, and tediously instructive.

The Sonnets were written in different parts of Milton’s life upon different occasions. They deserve not any particular criticism; for of the best it can only be said that they are not bad, and perhaps only the eighth [“When the Assault Was Intended to the City”] and the twenty-first [“Cyriack, whose grandsire on the royal bench”] are truly entitled to this slender commendation. The fabric of a sonnet, however adapted to the Italian language, has never succeeded in ours, which, having greater variety of termination, requires the rhymes to be often changed. . . .

Of Paradise Regained the general judgment seems now to be right, that it is in many parts elegant, and everywhere instructive. It was not to be supposed that the writer of Paradise Lost could ever write without great effusions of fancy and exalted precepts of wisdom. The basis of Paradise Regained is narrow; dialogue without action can never please like an union of the narrative and Dramatic powers. Had this poem been written, not by Milton but by some imitator, it would have claimed and received universal praise.

If Paradise Regained has been too much depreciated, Samson Agonistes has in requital been too much admired. It could only be by long prejudice and the bigotry of learning that Milton could prefer the ancient tragedies with their encumbrance of a chorus to the exhibitions of the French and English stages and it is only by a blind confidence in the reputation of Milton that a drama can be praised in which the intermediate parts have neither cause nor consequence, neither hasten nor retard the catastrophe.

In this tragedy are however many particular beauties, many just sentiments and striking lines; but it wants that power of attracting attention which a well-connected plan produces.

Milton would not have excelled in Dramatic writing; he knew human nature only in the gross, and had never studied the shades of character, nor the combinations of concurring or the perplexity of contending passions. He had read much and knew what books could teach; but had mingled little in the world, and was deficient in the knowledge which experience must confer.

Through all his greater works there prevails an uniform peculiarity of Diction, a mode and cast of expression which bears little resemblance to that of any former writer, and which is so far removed from common use that an unlearned reader when he first opens his book finds himself surprised by a new language.

This novelty has been, by those who can find nothing wrong in Milton, imputed to his laborious endeavors after words suitable to the grandeur of his ideas. “Our language,” says Addison, “sunk under him.” But the truth is, that both in prose and verse, he had formed his style by a perverse and pedantic principle. He was desirous to use English words with a foreign idiom. This in all his prose is discovered and condemned, for there judgment operates freely, neither softened by the beauty nor awed by the dignity of his thoughts; but such is the power of his poetry that his call is obeyed without resistance, the reader feels himself in captivity to a higher and a nobler mind, and criticism sinks in admiration.

Milton’s style was not modified by his subject: what is shown with greater extent in Paradise Lost may be found in Comus . One source of his peculiarity was his familiarity with the Tuscan poets: the disposition of his words is, I think, frequently Italian; perhaps sometimes combined with other tongues. Of him, at last, may be said what Jonson says of Spenser, that “he wrote no language,” but has formed what Butler calls “a Babylonish Dialect,” in itself harsh and barbarous, but made by exalted genius and extensive learning the vehicle of so much instruction and so much pleasure that, like other lovers, we find grace in its deformity.

Whatever be the faults of his diction he cannot want the praise of copiousness and variety; he was master of his language in its full extent, and has selected the melodious words with such diligence that from his book alone the Art of English Poetry might be learned.

After his diction something must be said of his versification. “The measure,” he says, “is the English heroic verse without rhyme.” Of this mode he had many examples among the Italians, and some in his own country. The Earl of Surrey is said to have translated one of Virgil’s books without rhyme, and besides our tragedies a few short poems had appeared in blank verse; particularly one tending to reconcile the nation to Raleigh’s wild attempt upon Guiana, and probably written by Raleigh himself. These petty performances cannot be supposed to have much influenced Milton, who more probably took his hint from Trisino’s Italia Liberata ; and, finding blank verse easier than rhyme, was desirous of persuading himself that it is better.

“Rhyme,” he says, and says truly, “is no necessary adjunct of true poetry.” But perhaps of poetry as a mental operation metre or music is no necessary adjunct; it is however by the music of metre that poetry has been discriminated in all languages, and in languages melodiously constructed with a due proportion of long and short syllables metre is sufficient. But one language cannot communicate its rules to another; where metre is scanty and imperfect some help is necessary. The music of the English heroic line strikes the ear so faintly that it is easily lost, unless all the syllables of every line co-operate together; this co-operation can be only obtained by the preservation of every verse unmingled with another as a distinct system of sounds, and this distinctness is obtained and preserved by the artifice of rhyme. The variety of pauses, so much boasted by the lovers of blank verse, changes the measures of an English poet to the periods of a declaimer; and there are only a few skilful and happy readers of Milton who enable their audience to perceive where the lines end or begin. “Blank verse,” said an ingenious critic, “seems to be verse only to the eye.”

Poetry may subsist without rhyme, but English poetry will not often please, nor can rhyme ever be safely spared but where the subject is able to support itself. Blank verse makes some approach to that which is called the “lapidary style”; has neither the easiness of prose nor the melody of numbers, and therefore tires by long continuance. Of the Italian writers without rhyme, whom Milton alleges as precedents, not one is popular; what reason could urge in its defense has been confuted by the ear.

But whatever be the advantage of rhyme I cannot prevail on myself to wish that Milton had been a rhymer, for I cannot wish his work to be other than it is; yet like other heroes he is to be admired rather than imitated. He that thinks himself capable of astonishing may write blank verse, but those that hope only to please must condescend to rhyme.

The highest praise of genius is original invention. Milton cannot be said to have contrived the structure of an epic poem, and therefore owes reverence to that vigour and amplitude of mind to which all generations must be indebted for the art of poetical narration, for the texture of the fable, the variation of incidents, the interposition of dialogue, and all the stratagems that surprise and enchain attention. But of all the borrowers from Homer, Milton is perhaps the least indebted. He was naturally a thinker for himself, confident of his own abilities and disdainful of help or hindrance; he did not refuse admission to the thoughts or images of his predecessors, but he did not seek them. From his contemporaries he neither courted nor received support; there is in his writings nothing by which the pride of other authors might be gratified or favor gained, no exchange of praise nor solicitation of support. His great works were performed under discountenance and in blindness, but difficulties vanished at his touch; he was born for whatever is arduous; and his work is not the greatest of heroic poems, only because it is not the first.

“PREFACE TO ABRAHAM COWLEY” (1779; EXCERPT)

In the window of his mother’s apartment lay Spenser’s Fairy Queen ; in which he very early took delight to read, till, by feeling the charms of verse, he became, as he relates, irrecoverably a Poet. Such are the accidents, which, sometimes remembered, and perhaps sometimes forgotten, produce that particular designation of mind, and propensity for some certain science or employment, which is commonly called Genius. The true Genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction. The great painter of the present age had the first fondness for his art excited by the perusal of Richardson’s treatise. . . .

Among the English poets, Cowley, Milton, and Pope might be said “to lisp in numbers;” and have given such early proofs, not only of powers of language, but of comprehension of things, as to more tardy minds seems scarcely credible. But of the learned puerilities of Cowley there is no doubt, since a volume of his poems was not only written but printed in his thirteenth year; containing, with other poetical compositions. “The Tragical History of Pyramus and Thisbe,” written when he was ten years old; and “Constantia and Philetus,” written two years after. . . .

This obligation to amorous ditties owes, I believe, its original to the fame of Petrarch, who, in an age rude and uncultivated, by his tuneful homage to his Laura, refined the manners of the lettered world, and filled Europe with love and poetry. But the basis of all excellence is truth: he that professes love ought to feel its power. Petrarch was a real lover, and Laura doubtless deserved his tenderness. Of Cowley, we are told by Barnes, who had means enough of information, that, whatever he may talk of his own inflammability, and the variety of characters by which his heart was divided, he in reality was in love but once, and then never had resolution to tell his passion.

Cowley, like other poets who have written with narrow views, and, instead of tracing intellectual pleasure to its natural sources in the mind of man, paid their court to temporary prejudices, has been at one time too much praised, and too much neglected at another.

Wit, like all other things subject by their nature to the choice of man, has its changes and fashions, and at different times takes different forms. About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets; of whom, in a criticism on the works of Cowley, the last of the race, it is not improper to give some account.

The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavor; but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect, that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables.

If the father of criticism has rightly denominated poetry, an imitative art, these writers will, without great wrong, lose their right to the name of poets for they cannot be said to have imitated any thing; they neither copied nature nor life; neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the operations of intellect.

Those, however, who deny them to be poets, allow them to be wits. Dryden confesses of himself and his contemporaries, that they fall below Donne in wit, but maintains that they surpass him in poetry.

If Wit be well described by Pope, as being “that which has been often thought, but was never before so well expressed,” they certainly never attained, nor ever sought it; for they endeavored to be singular in their thoughts, and were careless of their diction. But Pope’s account of wit is undoubtedly erroneous: he depresses it below its natural dignity, and reduces it from strength of thought to happiness of language.

If by a more noble and more adequate conception that be considered as Wit, which is at once natural and new, that which, though not obvious, is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just; if it be that, which he that never found it, wonders how he missed; to wit of this kind the metaphysical poets have seldom risen. Their thoughts are often new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found.

But Wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors ; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit thus defined, they have more than enough. The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased. . . .

This kind of writing, which was, I believe, borrowed from Marino and his followers, had been recommended by the example of Donne, a man of very extensive and various knowledge; and by Jonson, whose manner resembled that of Donne more in the ruggedness of his lines than in the cast of his sentiments.

When their reputation was high, they had undoubtedly more imitators, than time has left behind. Their immediate successors, of whom any remembrance can be said to remain, were Suckling, Waller, Denham, Cowley, Cleveland, and Milton. Denham and Waller sought another way to fame, by improving the harmony of our numbers. Milton tried the metaphysic stile only in his lines upon Hobson the Carrier. Cowley adopted it, and excelled his predecessors, having as much sentiment, and more music. Suckling neither improved versification, nor abounded in conceits. The fashionable style remained chiefly with Cowley; Suckling could not reach it, and Milton disdained it. . . .

Cowley was, I believe, the first poet that mingled Alexandrines at pleasure with the common heroic ten syllables, and from him Dryden borrowed the practice, whether ornamental or licentious. He considered the verse of twelve syllables as elevated and majestic, and has therefore deviated into that measure when he supposes the voice heard of the Supreme Being.

“LIFE OF DRYDEN” (1779; EXCERPT)

Of his school performances has appeared only a poem on the death of Lord Hastings, composed with great ambition of such conceits as, notwithstanding the reformation begun by Waller and Denham, the example of Cowley still kept in reputation. Lord Hastings died of the small-pox, and his poet has made of the pustules first rosebuds, and then gems; at last exalts them into stars, and says,

No comet need foretell his change drew on, Whose corps might seem a constellation.

At the university he does not appear to have been eager of poetical distinction, or to have lavished his early wit either on fictitious subjects or public occasions. He probably considered that he who purposed to be an author, ought first to be a student. He obtained, whatever was the reason, no fellowship in the College. Why he was excluded cannot now be known, and it is vain to guess; had he thought himself injured, he knew how to complain. In the “Life of Plutarch” he mentions his education in the College with gratitude; but in a prologue at Oxford, he has these lines:

Oxford to him a dearer name shall be Than his own mother-university; Thebes did his rude unknowing youth engage; He chooses Athens in his riper age.

It was not till the death of Cromwell, in 1658, that he became a public candidate for fame, by publishing “Heroic Stanzas on the Late Lord Protector,” which, compared with the verses of Sprat and Waller on the same occasion, were sufficient to raise great expectations of the rising poet.

When the king was restored Dryden, like the other panegyrists of usurpation, changed his opinion, or his profession, and published “Astrea Redux, A Poem on the Happy Restoration and Return of His Most Sacred Majesty King Charles the Second.”

The reproach of inconstancy was, on this occasion, shared with such numbers that it produced neither hatred nor disgrace; if he changed, he changed with the nation. It was, however, not totally forgotten when his reputation raised him enemies. . . .

In 1667 he published “Annus Mirabilis, The Year of Wonders,” which seems to be one of his most elaborate works.

It is addressed to Sir Robert Howard by a letter, which is not properly a dedication; and, writing to a poet, he has interspersed many critical observations, of which some are common, and some perhaps ventured without much consideration. He began, even now, to exercise the domination of conscious genius, by recommending his own performance: “I am satisfied that as the Prince and General [Rupert and Monk] are incomparably the best subjects I ever had, so what I have written on them is much better than what I have performed on any other. As I have endeavored to adorn my poem with noble thoughts, so much more to express those thoughts with elocution.”

It is written in quatrains, or heroic stanzas of four lines; a measure which he had learned from the Gondibert of Davenant, and which he then thought the most majestic that the English language affords. Of this stanza he mentions the encumbrances, increased as they were by the exactness which the age required. It was, throughout his life, very much his custom to recommend his works by representation of the difficulties that he had encountered, without appearing to have sufficiently considered, that where there is no difficulty there is no praise. . . .

Dryden may be properly considered as the father of English criticism, as the writer who first taught us to determine upon principles the merit of composition. Of our former poets the greatest dramatist wrote without rules, conducted through life and nature by a genius that rarely misled, and rarely deserted him. Of the rest, those who knew the laws of propriety had neglected to teach them.

Two Arts of English Poetry were written in the days of Elizabeth by Webb and Puttenham, from which something might be learned, and a few hints had been given by Jonson and Cowley; but Dryden’s Essay on Dramatick Poetry was the first regular and valuable treatise on the art of writing.

He who, having formed his opinions in the present age of English literature, turns back to peruse this dialogue, will not perhaps find much increase of knowledge or much novelty of instruction; but he is to remember that critical principles were then in the hands of a few, who had gathered them partly from the Ancients, and partly from the Italians and French. The structure of Dramatick poems was not then generally understood. Audiences applauded by instinct, and poets perhaps often pleased by chance.

A writer who obtains his full purpose loses himself in his own luster. Of an opinion which is no longer doubted, the evidence ceases to be examined. Of an art universally practiced, the first teacher is forgotten. Learning once made popular is no longer learning; it has the appearance of something which we have bestowed upon ourselves, as the dew appears to rise from the field which it refreshes.

To judge rightly of an author we must transport ourselves to his time, and examine what were the wants of his contemporaries, and what were his means of supplying them. That which is easy at one time was difficult at another. Dryden at least imported his science, and gave his country what it wanted before; or rather, he imported only the materials, and manufactured them by his own skill.

It may be doubted whether Waller and Denham could have over-borne the prejudices which had long prevailed, and which even then were sheltered by the protection of Cowley. The new versification, as it was called, may be considered as owing its establishment to Dryden; from whose time it is apparent that English poetry has had no tendency to relapse to its former savageness.

The affluence and comprehension of our language is very illustriously displayed in our poetical translations of Ancient Writers; a work which the French seem to relinquish in despair, and which we were long unable to perform with dexterity. Ben Jonson thought it necessary to copy Horace almost word by word, Feltham, his contemporary and adversary, considers it as indispensably requisite in a translation to give line for line. It is said that Sandys, whom Dryden calls the best versifier of the last age, has struggled hard to comprise every book of his English Metamorphoses in the same number of verses with the original. Holyday had nothing in view but to show that he understood his author, with so little regard to the grandeur of his diction, or the volubility of his numbers, that his meters can hardly be called verses; they cannot be read without reluctance, nor will the labor always be rewarded by understanding them. Cowley saw that such copiers were a servile race; he asserted his liberty, and spread his wings so boldly that he left his authors. It was reserved for Dryden to fix the limits of poetical liberty, and give us just rules and examples of translation.

When languages are formed upon different principles, it is impossible that the same modes of expression should always be elegant in both. While they run on together the closest translation may be considered as the best; but when they divaricate, each must take its natural course. Where correspondence cannot be obtained, it is necessary to be content with something equivalent. Translation therefore, says Dryden, is not so loose as paraphrase, nor so close as metaphrase.

All polished languages have different styles; the concise, the diffuse, the lofty, and the humble. In the proper choice of style consists the resemblance which Dryden principally exacts from the translator. He is to exhibit his author’s thoughts in such a dress of diction as the author would have given them, had his language been English: rugged magnificence is not to be softened: hyperbolical ostentation is not to be repressed, nor sententious affectation to have its points blunted. A translator is to be like his author; it is not his business to excel him.

The reasonableness of these rules seems sufficient for their vindication; and the effects produced by observing them were so happy, that I know not whether they were ever opposed but by Sir Edward Sherburne, a man whose learning was greater than his powers of poetry; and who, being better qualified to give the meaning than the spirit of Seneca, has introduced his version of three tragedies by a defense of close translation. The authority of Horace, which the new translators cited in defense of their practice, he has, by a judicious explanation, taken fairly from them; but reason wants not Horace to support it.

It seldom happens that all the necessary causes concur to any great effect: will is wanting to power, or power to will, or both are impeded by external obstructions. The exigences in which Dryden was condemned to pass his life, are reasonably supposed to have blasted his genius, to have driven out his works in a state of immaturity, and to have intercepted the full-blown elegance which longer growth would have supplied. . . .

His prediction of the improvements which shall be made in the new city is elegant and poetical, and, with an event which Poets cannot always boast, has been happily verified. The poem concludes with a simile that might have better been omitted.

Dryden, when he wrote this poem, seems not yet fully to have formed his versification, or settled his system of propriety. In rhyme he continued to improve his diction and his numbers. According to the opinion of Harte, who had studied his works with great attention, he settled his principles of versification in 1676, when he produced the play of Aureng Zebe ; and, according to his own account of the short time in which he wrote Tyrannick Love and The State of Innocence , he soon obtained the full effect of diligence, and added facility to exactness. . . .

Rhyme has been so long banished from the theatre that we know not its effect upon the passions of an audience; but it has this convenience, that sentences stand more independent on each other, and striking passages are therefore easily selected and retained. Thus the description of Night in The Indian Emperor and the rise and fall of empire in The Conquest of Granada are more frequently repeated than any lines in All for Love or Don Sebastian . . . .

“Absalom and Achitophel” is a work so well known that particular criticism is superfluous. If it be considered as a poem political and controversial it will be found to comprise all the excellences of which the subject is susceptible: acrimony of censure, elegance of praise, artful delineation of characters, variety and vigour of sentiment, happy turns of language, and pleasing harmony of numbers; and all these raised to such a height as can scarcely be found in any other English composition.

It is not however without faults; some lines are inelegant or improper, and too many are irreligiously licentious. The original structure of the poem was defective: allegories drawn to great length will always break; Charles could not run continually parallel with David.

The subject had likewise another inconvenience: it admitted little imagery or description, and a long poem of mere sentiments easily becomes tedious; though all the parts are forcible and every line kindles new rapture, the reader, if not relieved by the interposition of something that sooths the fancy, grows weary of admiration, and defers the rest.

As an approach to historical truth was necessary the action and catastrophe were not in the poet’s power; there is therefore an unpleasing disproportion between the beginning and the end. We are alarmed by a faction formed out of many sects various in their principles, but agreeing in their purpose of mischief, formidable for their numbers, and strong by their supports, while the king’s friends are few and weak. The chiefs on either part are set forth to view; but when expectation is at the height the king makes a speech, and

Henceforth a series of new times began.

Who can forbear to think of an enchanted castle, with a wide moat and lofty battlements, walls of marble and gates of brass, which vanishes at once into air when the destined knight blows his horn before it? . . .

The alexandrine was, I believe, first used by Spenser, for the sake of closing his stanza with a fuller sound. We had a longer measure of fourteen syllables, into which the Aeneid was translated by Phaer, and other works of the ancients by other writers; of which Chapman’s Iliad was, I believe, the last.

The two first lines of Phaer’s third Aeneid will exemplify this measure:

When Asia’s state was overthrown, and Priam’s kingdom stout, All guiltless, by the power of gods above was rooted out.

As these lines had their break or caesura always at the eighth syllable it was thought in time commodious to divide them; and quatrains of lines alternately consisting of eight and six syllables make the most soft and pleasing of our lyric measures, as

Relentless Time, destroying power, Which stone and brass obey, Who giv’st to every flying hour To work some new decay.

In the alexandrine, when its power was once felt, some poems, as Drayton’s Polyolbion , were wholly written; and sometimes the measures of twelve and fourteen syllables were interchanged with one another. Cowley was the first that inserted the alexandrine at pleasure among the heroic lines of ten syllables, and from him Dryden professes to have adopted it.

The triplet and alexandrine are not universally approved. Swift always censured them, and wrote some lines to ridicule them. In examining their propriety it is to be considered that the essence of verse is regularity, and its ornament is variety. To write verse is to dispose syllables and sounds harmonically by some known and settled rule—a rule however lax enough to substitute similitude for identity, to admit change without breach of order, and to relieve the ear without disappointing it. Thus a Latin hexameter is formed from dactyls and spondees differently combined; the English heroic admits of acute or grave syllables variously disposed. The Latin never deviates into seven feet, or exceeds the number of seventeen syllables; but the English alexandrine breaks the lawful bounds, and surprises the reader with two syllables more than he expected.

The effect of the triplet is the same: the ear has been accustomed to expect a new rhyme in every couplet; but is on a sudden surprised with three rhymes together, to which the reader could not accommodate his voice did he not obtain notice of the change from the braces of the margins. Surely there is something unskillful in the necessity of such mechanical direction.

Considering the metrical art simply as a science, and consequently excluding all casualty, we must allow that triplets and alexandrines inserted by caprice are interruptions of that constancy to which science aspires. And though the variety which they produce may very justly be desired, yet to make our poetry exact there ought to be some stated mode of admitting them.

But till some such regulation can be formed, I wish them still to be retained in their present state. They are sometimes grateful to the reader, and sometimes convenient to the poet. Fenton was of opinion that Dryden was too liberal and Pope too sparing in their use.

The rhymes of Dryden are commonly just, and he valued himself for his readiness in finding them; but he is sometimes open to objection.

It is the common practice of our poets to end the second line with a weak or grave syllable:

Together o’er the Alps methinks we fly, Fill’d with ideas of fair Italy.

Dryden sometimes puts the weak rhyme in the first:

Laugh all the powers that favor tyranny, And all the standing army of the sky.

Sometimes he concludes a period or paragraph with the first line of a couplet, which, though the French seem to do it without irregularity, always displeases in English poetry.

The alexandrine, though much his favorite, is not always very diligently fabricated by him. It invariably requires a break at the sixth syllable; a rule which the modern French poets never violate, but which Dryden sometimes neglected:

And with paternal thunder vindicates his throne. . . .

“LIFE OF THOMAS GRAY” (1779; EXCERPT)

In this year (1742) Gray seems to have applied himself seriously to poetry; for in this year were produced the “Ode to Spring,” his “Prospect of Eton,” and his “Ode to Adversity.” He began likewise a Latin poem, De Principiis Cogitandi .

In . . . retirement he wrote (1747) an ode on “The Death of Mr. Walpole’s Cat”; and the year afterwards attempted a poem of more importance, on “Government and Education,” of which the fragments which remain have many excellent lines.

His next production (1750) was his far-famed “Elegy in the Church-yard,” which, finding its way into a Magazine, first, I believe, made him known to the public. . . .

In 1757 be published “The Progress of Poetry” and “The Bard,” two compositions at which the readers of poetry were at first content to gaze in mute amazement. Some that tried them confessed their inability to understand them, though Warburton said that they were understood as well as the works of Milton and Shakespeare, which it is the fashion to admire. Garrick wrote a few lines in their praise. Some hardy champions undertook to rescue them from neglect, and in a short time many were content to be showed beauties which they could not see.

Gray’s reputation was now so high, that after the death of Cibber, he had the honor of refusing the laurel [the Poet Laureateship—ed.], which was then bestowed on Mr. Whitehead. . . .

As a writer he had this peculiarity, that he did not write his pieces first rudely, and then correct them, but labored every line as it arose in the train of composition; and he had a notion not very peculiar, that he could not write but at certain times, or at happy moments; a fantastic foppery; to which my kindness for a man of learning and of virtue wishes him to have been superior.

Gray’s Poetry is now to be considered; and I hope not to be looked on as an enemy to his name, if I confess that I contemplate it with less pleasure than his life.

His “Ode on Spring” has something poetical, both in the language and the thought; but the language is too luxuriant, and the thoughts have nothing new. There has of late arisen a practice of giving to adjectives, derived from substantives, the termination of participles; such as the cultured plain, the daisied bank; but I was sorry to see, in the lines of a scholar like Gray, the honied Spring. The morality is natural, but too stale; the conclusion is pretty.

The poem “On the Cat” was doubtless by its author considered as a trifle, but it is not a happy trifle. In the first stanza “the azure flowers that blow,” show resolutely a rhyme is sometimes made when it cannot easily be found. Selima, the Cat, is called a nymph, with some violence both to language and sense, but there is good use made of it when it is done; for of the two lines,

What female heart can gold despise? What cat’s averse to fish?

the first relates merely to the nymph, and the second only to the cat. The sixth stanza contains a melancholy truth, that “a favourite has no friend,” but the last ends in a pointed sentence of no relation to the purpose; if what glistered had been gold, the cat would not have gone into the water; and, if she had, would not less have been drowned.

The “Prospect of Eton College” suggests nothing to Gray, which every beholder does not equally think and feel. His supplication to father Thames, to tell him who drives the hoop or tosses the ball, is useless and puerile. Father Thames has no better means of knowing than himself. His epithet “buxom health” is not elegant; he seems not to understand the word. Gray thought his language more poetical as it was more remote from common use: finding in Dryden “honey redolent of Spring,” an expression that reaches the utmost limits of our language, Gray drove it a little more beyond apprehension, by making “gales” to be “redolent of joy and youth.”

. . . My process has now brought me to the wonderful “wonder of wonders, the two sister odes; by which, though either vulgar ignorance or common sense at first universally rejected them, many have been since persuaded to think themselves delighted. I am one of those that are willing to be pleased, and therefore would gladly find the meaning of the first stanza of “The Progress of Poetry.”

Gray seems in his rapture to confound the images of spreading sound and running water. A “stream of music” may be allowed; but where does music, however “smooth and strong,” after having visited the “verdant vales, rowl down the steep amain,” so as that “rocks and nodding groves rebellow to the roar?” If this be said of music, it is nonsense; if it be said of water, it is nothing to the purpose.

The second stanza, exhibiting Mars’s car and Jove’s eagle, is unworthy of further notice. Criticism disdains to chase a school-boy to his common-places.

To the third it may likewise be objected, that it is drawn from mythology, though such as may be more easily assimilated to real life. Idalia’s “velvet green” has something of cant. An epithet or metaphor drawn from Nature ennobles Art; an epithet or metaphor drawn from Art degrades Nature. Gray is too fond of words arbitrarily compounded. “Many-twinkling” was formerly censured as not analogical; we may say “many-spotted” but scarcely “many-spotting.” This stanza, however, has something pleasing.

Of the second ternary of stanzas, the first endeavors to tell something, and would have told it, had it not been crossed by Hyperion: the second describes well enough the universal prevalence of Poetry; but I am afraid that the conclusion will not rise from the premises. The caverns of the North and the plains of Chili are not the residences of “Glory and generous Shame.” But that Poetry and Virtue go always together is an opinion so pleasing, that I can forgive him who resolves to think it true.

The third stanza sounds big with “Delphi,” and “Egean,” and “Illisus,” and “Meander,” and “hallowed fountains” and solemn sound; but in all Gray’s odes there is a kind of cumbrous splendour which we wish away. His position is at last false: in the hue of Dante and Petrarch, from whom we derive our first school of poetry; Italy was overrun by “tyrant power” and “coward vice;” nor was our slate much better when we first borrowed the Italian arts.

Of the third ternary, the first gives a mythological birth of Shakespeare. What is said of that mighty genius is true; but it is not said happily: the real effects of this poetical power are put out of sight by the pomp of machinery. Where truth is sufficient to fill the mind, fiction is worse than useless; the counterfeit debases the genuine.

His account of Milton’s blindness, if we suppose it caused by study in the formation of his poem, a supposition surely allowable, is poetically true, and happily imagined. But the car of Dryden, with his two coursers, has nothing in it peculiar; it is a car in which any other rider may be placed.

“The Bard” appears, at the first view, to be, as Algarotti and others have remarked, an imitation of the prophecy of Nereus. Algarotti thinks it superior to its original; and, if preference depends only on the imagery and animation of the two poems, his judgment is right. There is in “The Bard” more force, more thought, and more variety. But to copy is less than to invent, and the copy has been unhappily produced at a wrong time. The fiction of Horace was to the Romans credible; but its revival disgusts us with apparent and unconquerable falsehood. Incredulus odi [not believing it, I hate it—ed.].

To select a singular event, and swell it to a giant’s bulk by fabulous appendages of specters and predictions, has little difficulty, for he that forsakes the probable may always find the marvelous. And it has little use; we are affected only as we believe; we are improved only as we find something to be imitated or declined. I do not see that “The Bard” promotes any truth, moral or political.

His stanzas are too long, especially his epodes; the ode is finished before the ear has learned its measures, and consequently before it can receive pleasure from their consonance and recurrence.

Of the first stanza the abrupt beginning has been celebrated; but technical beauties can give praise only to the inventor. It is in the power of any man to rush abruptly upon his subject, that has read the ballad of Johnny Armstrong,

Is there ever a man in all Scotland—

The initial resemblances, or alliterations, “ruin, ruthless, helm or hauberk,” are below the grandeur of a poem that endeavors at sublimity.

In the second stanza the bard is well described; but in the third we have the puerilities of obsolete mythology. When we are told that “Cadwallo hush’d the stormy main,” and that “Modred made huge Plinlimmon bow his cloud-top’d head,” attention recoils from the repetition of a tale that, even when it was first heard, was heard with scorn.

The weaving of the winding sheet he borrowed, as he owns, from the northern bards; but their texture, however, was very properly the work of female powers, as the art of spinning the thread of life in another mythology. Theft is always dangerous; Gray has made weavers of slaughtered bards, by a fiction outrageous and incongruous. They are then called upon to “weave the warp, and weave the woof” perhaps with no great propriety; for it is by crossing the woof with the warp that men weave the web or piece; and the first line was dearly bought by the admission of its wretched correspondent, “Give ample room and verge enough.” He has, however, no other line as bad.

The third stanza of the second ternary is commended, I think, beyond its merit. The personification is indistinct. Thirst and Hunger are not alike; and their features, to make the imagery perfect, should have been discriminated. We are told, in the same stanza, how “towers are fed.” But I will no longer look for particular faults; yet let it be observed, that the ode might have been concluded with an action of better example; but suicide is always to be had, without expense of thought.

These odes are marked by glittering accumulations of ungraceful ornaments; they strike, rather than please; the images are magnified by affectation the language is labored into harshness. The mind of the writer seems to work with unnatural violence. “Double, double, toil and trouble.” He has a kind of strutting dignity and is tall by walking on tiptoe. His art and his struggle are too visible, and there is too little appearance of ease and nature.

To say that he has no beauties, would be unjust: a man like him, of great learning and great industry, could not but produce something valuable. When he pleases least, it can only be said that a good design was ill directed. . . .

In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honors. The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo. The four stanzas beginning “Yet even these bones,” are to me original: I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here, persuades himself that he has always felt them. Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him.

Samuel Johnson, the premier English literary figure of the mid and late 18th century, was a writer of exceptional range: a poet, a lexicographer, a translator, a journalist and essayist, a travel writer, a biographer, an editor, and a critic. His literary fame has traditionally—and properly—rested more on his prose than...

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Shakespeare’s Metaphysical Poem: Allegory, Metaphysics, and Aesthetics in ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’

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Ted Tregear, Shakespeare’s Metaphysical Poem: Allegory, Metaphysics, and Aesthetics in ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’, The Review of English Studies , Volume 74, Issue 316, October 2023, Pages 635–651, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgad055

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Long treated as a poetic curio or a biographical riddle, Shakespeare’s poetic contribution to the 1601 Loves Martyr —usually known as ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’—has recently been reclaimed as an experiment in metaphysical poetry. This essay sets out to ask what that means: for the poem, for metaphysical poetry, and for metaphysics itself. It argues that Shakespeare draws on the language of metaphysics, and its canonical problems, to test the relationship between poetic and philosophical thinking. It follows the poem as it charts the efforts, and failures, of both allegory and metaphysics to apprehend the thought-defying love between phoenix and turtle. It shows how that love engages the dilemma of the particular and the universal, a dilemma native to metaphysics since Aristotle, but felt most acutely in the realm of aesthetic experience. And it suggests that, in sounding out the limits of metaphysical reason, Shakespeare’s poem allows for poetry to think in a way that metaphysics cannot. ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ ends in mourning: for the death of phoenix and turtle, and for the demise of the metaphysical transcendentals they seemed in hindsight to uphold. That mourning might nonetheless offer poetry its vocation, as the space where reason might remember and reflect on the object of its loss.

When, in 1601, John Marston read through Shakespeare’s latest poem, the word that came to his mind was metaphysical . ‘O Twas a mouing Epicedium ’, he enthused, in the contribution to the 1601 Loves Martyr placed immediately after Shakespeare’s own. 1 His praise is shared between that epicedium and its subjects, the phoenix and turtle-dove that he, like Shakespeare, sets out to memorialize. Marston soon warms to his theme: Lo now; th’xtracture of deuinest Essence , The Soule of heauens labour’d Quintessence , ( Peans to Phoebus ) from deare Louer’s death, Takes sweete creation and all blessing breath.    ( LM , 2A1 r )

Whatever issues from these lovers’ death is more refined than essence, more ensouled than quintessence, against whose creation the heavens’ own alchemy looks laboured. That labour, the sheer effort of working out what has just happened, becomes the subject of Marston’s poem, and draws him towards the rich but recondite domain of metaphysics: Raise my inuention on swift Phantasie, That whilst of this same Metaphisicall God, Man, nor Woman, but elix’d of all My labouring thoughts, with strained ardor sing, My Muse may mount with an vncommon wing.    (2A1 r )

Squeezed out in italics like the poem’s other terms of art, ‘ Metaphisicall ’ hangs at the end of the line, as though sucking the air out of Marston’s lungs. As the poet recovers, he finds it hard to work out what, exactly, might be metaphysical here: ‘God’, ‘Man’, and ‘Woman’ are all possibilities, but with nor , all are revoked as inadequate to the task. The result is a word left somewhere between an adjective and a noun, so transcending all substantives that it becomes almost substantial in itself. Marston follows Shakespeare to the heights of metaphysics; but what is metaphysical about Shakespeare’s poem, it seems, is all but unspeakable.

Marston enjoyed ramping up his diction like this. By 1601, it had become a hallmark of his style, which grazes along the knife-edge of grandiloquence and pretension: polysyllabic, neologistic, and conspicuously philosophical. ‘No speech is Hyperbolicall, | To this perfection blessed’, he claims, and he puts that claim to the test. Compared to that perfection, ‘that boundlesse Ens ’, ‘all Beings’ are ‘deck’d and stained’; ‘ Ideas that are idly fained | Onely here subsist inuested’ ( LM , 2A1 v ). Lines like these made Marston a pioneer in what Patrick Cheney has recently christened the ‘metaphysical sublime’, a poetry that propels itself into raptures beyond thinking’s customary bounds. 2 Indeed, his contribution to Loves Martyr is the first time a seventeenth-century poem identifies itself, albeit by association, as metaphysical. The word’s application to a certain style of poetry—smart, witty, metaphorically and conceptually audacious—predates its usage by Samuel Johnson, and earlier by John Dryden, both of them usually credited with bequeathing the idea of ‘metaphysical poetry’ to literary criticism. As early as the 1640s, William Drummond was already defending poetry against those who ‘endevured to abstracte her to Metaphysicall Ideas, and Scholasticall Quiddityes’. 3 Drummond was most likely thinking of John Donne, whose Poems had recently appeared in print; but he may equally have been thinking of Loves Martyr , which appears on his reading list from 1606. 4 If Marston can be read as a metaphysical poet avant la lettre , so too can the poet he celebrates in such glowing terms. Shakespeare’s poem in Loves Martyr is untitled; it merely begins, with disorienting simplicity, ‘Let the bird of lowdest lay’. Since the nineteenth century, it has been known as ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’—a title which, however convenient, risks begging the question, in distinguishing from the outset two lovers whose divisions are rendered so massively vexing. Mired for much of its existence in historical and biographical speculation regarding its cast of characters, the poem has more recently been reclaimed as a vital document in literary history. ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’, James Bednarz argues, is ‘the first great published “metaphysical” poem in English’. 5

Following Marston’s cue, this essay sets out to read Shakespeare’s poem as an experiment in metaphysical poetry, and to understand what that might mean: for the poem, for metaphysical poetry, and for metaphysics itself. These terms are on the move in literary scholarship. Long regarded with some suspicion, and retained, if at all, with caution, the idea of metaphysical poetry has been taken up by recent scholars as an invitation to reconsider the affinity between poetry and metaphysics in seventeenth-century writing. Work by Gordon Teskey, Wendy Beth Hyman, James Kuzner, and others, has shown how lyrics like Shakespeare’s might be metaphysical, not by rehearsing metaphysical arguments, or reciting their terms of art, but by pursuing a kind of thinking in excess of philosophy. 6 ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ itself should dispel any lingering assumptions that a poem’s philosophical content must be extracted and formalized before it can count as truly philosophical. Such a position would accept that whatever knowledge poetry offered must be revoiced in the language of reason; whereas, as we will see, it is Reason that must borrow poetry’s voice for its ‘ Threne ’. Meanwhile, elsewhere in early modern scholarship, metaphysics has been reconceived as a much broader enterprise than previously thought, encompassing a greater variety of writers, forms, and styles. 7 Yet the problem of its definition—of what counts as metaphysics—has only grown starker as a result. In a sense, the history of metaphysics is the history of its attempts to define itself. 8 As the pursuit of the most extreme or original principles of knowledge, it is continually running up against the challenge that these are things it cannot, or should not, know. From the outset, its claims to primacy are hedged by doubts, not only over whether it has the right to make those claims—the first of the puzzles ( aporiai ) Aristotle poses in his Metaphysics , whether there can be a single science of first causes—but over what is lost from view when it does. 9 In reading ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ as a metaphysical poem, then, this essay does not look to establish a substantive metaphysics beneath it, nor to splice metaphysics and poetry together without distinction or division. Instead, it looks to this poem to uncover the catachrestic energy latent within the category of ‘metaphysical poetry’—a category that might best be thought of as an instance of its own best-known operation, by which, in Samuel Johnson’s words, ‘[t]he most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’. 10 Recognizing the tension coiled within this critical term, the resistance revealed and released by such synthetic force, might thus shed new light on poetry, and on metaphysics too.

In Shakespeare’s case, this turns on the question of what, if anything, can be known about the strange union between a phoenix and a turtle-dove. Like Marston, Shakespeare is grappling with what to call the compound at his poem’s heart, and what it might mean for its beholders and survivors. To do this, the poem tests out various strategies of poetic apprehension, trying first allegory, then metaphysics, before admitting defeat. From that defeat emerges a fresh sense of the matter on which this poem sets to work, and the matter of the poem itself; and with that, the poem reaches the juncture between metaphysics and poetry, where the failure of even the subtlest concepts gives onto the puzzlement of aesthetic experience. The following three parts of this essay thus follow the three moments in Shakespeare’s poem, passing through allegory to metaphysics into aesthetics. As the contours of an early modern aesthetics become sharper, thanks to Rachel Eisendrath and others, so it becomes more plausible to read Shakespeare’s poem as an enquiry into the problem on which metaphysics and aesthetics converge: the dialectic of the universal and particular. 11 Of all the puzzles treated in the Metaphysics , Aristotle judged, this was ‘the hardest of all, and most necessary to theorize’ ( Met , 999a24–5). The waning force of Aristotle’s hylomorphic explanation throughout the seventeenth century, under the pressure of corpuscularian thought, brought the problem’s difficulties into sharper focus. 12 Yet although it falls within the sphere of metaphysics, the disturbances it causes are most keenly felt in aesthetic experience. For the philosophy of aesthetics from Kant onwards, finding something beautiful means encountering a particular that will not be subsumed under a universal concept, but will not renounce its right to some sort of universality. As an obstacle to the reconciliation of particulars and universals, beauty is a scandal for reason, not only because it resists the knowing of the universal, but because it refuses to accept the contrary status of sheer material irrationality. Instead, it holds onto the prospect that the particular, sensuous and fragile, might hold a claim to truth—and that, by stopping its ears to that claim, reason makes itself irrational. This does not mean advocating particular against universal, object against concept. It means, instead, attempting to retrieve a new and better universal, one that is able to reflect on reason’s unacknowledged investments.

Something like this drama unfolds over the course of ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’. Grappling with the love and death of the phoenix and turtle drives the poem to try out new-found capacities of scholastic thinking, only to end up exposing the need that thinking serves. At its centre is a critique of reason as Reason, suddenly rendered visible as an all-too-particular personification, and forced to voice its own shortcomings. Reason is thus returned to the world it seemingly rises above, as a material force in the regime of property and property’s rationalization. Yet if the union of the phoenix and turtle provokes this critique, it does not succeed it with a regime of its own. The truth of love is visible on departure; far from championing its cause, the poem marks its passing. ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ ends in an elegy for the lovers who only in hindsight outstrip rationalization—an elegy that is, moreover, itself an attempt to rationalize. After all, the fact that its closing ‘ Threnos ’ is spoken by Reason itself, ‘As Chorus to their Tragique Scene’ (l.52), reveals the extent, both to which reason has been unsettled, and to which poetry remains invested in reason. 13 In this sense, Shakespeare’s poem cannot escape the critique of metaphysics it ventures. Both metaphysics and poetry are ways of thinking whose vaunted powers are stalked by suspicions of redundancy. Both prove incapable of doing justice to the lovers they remember. And both are reduced, at last, to mourning: metaphysics, by the confounding of its desire for knowledge; poetry, by the recognition that it cannot deduce some posterity from these vanished lovers, let alone be that posterity itself. In that conjunction, however, both metaphysics and poetry afford a better sense of what they have lost. The shortcomings of the poem’s metaphysical concepts are determinate: they are what allow the departed particulars to be represented without being traduced. Poetry, likewise, makes those particulars mournable. In a poem that leads from the failure of the concept to the tomb of its objects, Shakespeare presses the metaphysical dialectic of particular and universal towards its terminus in the aesthetic. By its ending, metaphysics has passed into the material, while that material is redeemed only in memory, through the impassioned but impotent sighing of a prayer. ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ closes in the affinity between art and mourning, where the condition for poetry’s autonomy is also its loss, and where its right to exist is a right to memorialize that loss, mournfully.

‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ begins with a fiat which may not make anything happen. The opening stanza issues a summons that falls somewhere between demand, concession, and invitation: Let the bird of lowdest lay, On the sole Arabian tree, Herauld sad and trumpet be: To whose sound chaste wings obay.    (ll.1–4)

By the sound of it, these lines should be louder than they are. The bird is identified only by the loudness of its lay, so forceful that it becomes not just the herald but the trumpet too. It joins a raucous choir of birds announced over subsequent stanzas, from the ‘shriking harbinger’ of the owl (l.5) to the ‘death-deuining Swan’ and his ‘defunctiue Musicke’ (ll.14–15). Yet Barbara Everett is surely right that the tenor of these opening lines ‘unmakes imperatives, the mood of power’. 14 Their speaker is not the bird itself, after all, but some other voice, the one that brings this poem into being. However loud the bird may be, if and when it sounds, its voice is invoked with an uncanny sense of calm. It is only muffled further by the poem’s form. The four-line structure of its first 13 stanzas often tends to fall into a three-line unit from which the fourth line stands enigmatically apart. That can give those final lines an epigrammatic feel: ‘Keepe the obsequie so strict’ (l.12), ‘But in them it were a wonder’ (l.32), ‘Either was the others mine’ (l.36), ‘Simple were so well compounded’ (l.44). Here, the three-line arc of the stanza’s first phrase, and the expectant colon at its end, seemingly anticipate some of some rationale for this summons. Instead, the fourth line preserves the pointed abstraction of the scene: through the metonymy that dissolves a flock of birds in a flurry of wings, before attaching the peculiar epithet of ‘chaste’; but above all, through the verb. ‘Obay’ (l.4) could be indicative or imperative: these wings might naturally obey the herald’s sound, or they might need some additional encouragement to do so. It may alternatively remain as a kind of conditional: let this bird be the herald, and only then will these wings obey. If it is hard to conceive how chaste wings might obey that sound, it is harder still to conceive how they might obey to it. The little glitch in the stanza’s grammar slackens a transitive obedience into an indistinct and intransitive response, further unmaking its imperative, and in doing so, placing an awkward weight on an especially vulnerable moment in the poem’s metre. The four-beat, seven-syllable pattern opens a pause between the last stress of one line and the first of the next. As a result, each line seems marked by an implicit diminuendo, each time growing quieter and slower before restarting in the following line. Rather than smoothing over that technical vulnerability, Shakespeare seems intent on exacerbating it, by routinely beginning his lines with the most unprepossessing of words. ‘To whose sound’ (l.4); ‘To this troupe’ (l.8); ‘From this Session’ (l.9): these monosyllables carry a prosodic charge they cannot bear, and are somehow thickened as a result. Even before its philosophical meditations on distance and space, then, the poem troubles the question of where it takes place. The prepositions, under the weight of the metre, seem to enfold within them some opaque relations of thought.

Meanwhile, the ebbing urgency of this stanza’s verbs brings a new grammatical shape into view. So wide is the space between ‘Let’ and ‘be’, the two terms of this fiat , that another construction emerges: not the giving of orders, but the positing of a hypothesis: let x be y . The stanza has the ring of a geometrical theorem, defining and constructing terms of interpretation that have not yet been set. 15 This is what makes it hard to know what, if anything, is taking place. Over its opening movement, ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ introduces a catafalque of birds, and matches them with a corresponding set of ritual functions. But the form of that ritual wavers. The ‘Session’ (l.9) announced at the beginning of one stanza morphs, by its end, into an ‘obsequie’ (l.12), until the ‘ Requiem ’ (l.16) reframes it finally as a funeral. Yet unless the invitations of Let are accepted, none of these birds arrives, and none of their functions are performed. If one reading sees a procession of birds acting out a funeral, another would emphasize the birds on the one hand, and the funeral on the other, with only the direction of the poem’s mysterious voice to read them together. That direction is more suggestive than instructive: not x is y , but let x be y . By the time that same grammar returns in the fourth stanza, what is standing for what is harder to say: Let the Priest in Surples white, That defunctiue Musicke can, Be the death-deuining Swan, Lest the Requiem lacke his right.    (ll.13–16)

Instead of appointing the swan as priest, the poem posits priest as swan; instead of casting birds in a familiar ritual, a familiar ritual is wrenched out of shape, with only the whiteness of the surplice to establish a correspondence between bird and priest so heterogeneous it is positively surreal. Even the ‘ Requiem ’ momentarily comes alive, not as a ceremony with its rite, but a claimant with his right . Elsewhere in the poem, reversing predications has a similar shock-effect, most startlingly in the Threnos , in a line where the deadness of the birds is promoted, abstracted, and vivified: ‘Death is now the Phoenix nest’ (l.56). For all the interpreting the poem’s nouns have provoked, its verbs are just as strange: whether in the archaism of ‘can’, the aetiolated imperatives like ‘obay’, or simply the kind of hypothetical positing involved in letting one thing be another.

This is the speculative grammar in which the poem’s opening section unfolds. Rather than soldering two terms into identity, it sets them in motion, each defining and destabilizing the other. Shakespeare imports this mode of double speaking from allegory. In his landmark argument for reading ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ as metaphysical poetry, James Bednarz situates it at the transition between two phases of literary production: on the one side, a tradition of allegory, stretching back through Edmund Spenser to medieval writing; on the other, the cool, tricky lyrics of John Donne. ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’, Bednarz writes, is ‘an explicitly self-conscious literary work that reconfigures as metaphysical verse the kind of Spenserian allegory Chester employs’. 16 Yet sliding from allegorical to metaphysical poetry along the literary-historical timeline risks foreclosing allegory’s claim to be the most metaphysical poetry of all. If ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ is Shakespeare’s metaphysical poem, it is one he constructed out of allegory’s resources; and appreciating its metaphysics means appreciating the Spenserian elements of his practice. As Bednarz notes, that in turn means attending to the poem that takes up most of Loves Martyr , by which Shakespeare’s experiment with allegory was mediated: ‘Rosalins Complaint’, by the Welsh poet Robert Chester. ‘Rosalins Complaint’ describes itself on the title-page as ‘ Allegorically shadowing the truth of Loue , in the constant Fate of the Phoenix and Turtle ’ ( LM , A2 r ). Spenser’s example looms large throughout: in its inset history of King Arthur, which picks up where Spenser left off in Book II of The Faerie Queene ; but also in the way that episode of British history is enclosed in allegorical shadows. The love and death of the phoenix and turtle-dove is the overarching narrative of Chester’s poem; but around it play a delirious medley of episodes, from an aerial tour of the wonders of the world, to catalogues of flora and fauna, to alphabetical and acrostic celebrations of phoenix and turtle. That eclecticism is perhaps part of allegory’s strategy, a way of signalling the subordination of poetic narrative to some external locus of meaning. 17 In Chester’s hands, though, allegorical polysemy may be just too multiple to form a unified hermeneutic vision. Characters are sporadically identified with abstractions, but seem unable to sustain them. One moment the turtle-dove is constancy, the next, liberal honour. The phoenix may not even be a phoenix at all: ‘O stay me not, I am no Phoenix I’, it insists, ‘And if Ibe that bird, I am defaced’ (C4 v ). Both change meaning as regularly as they change gender. Yet the poem remains insistent that its materials are there to be interpreted.

This paradox is restated insistently in a self-standing poem, ‘To those of light beleefe’, where Chester instructs his poem’s readers: You gentle fauourers of excelling Muses , And gracers of all Learning and Desart, You whose Conceit the deepest worke peruses, Whose Iudgements still are gouerned by Art: Reade gently what you reade, this next conceit Fram’d of pure loue, abandoning deceit. And you whose dull Imagination, And blind conceited Error hath not knowne, Of Herbes and Trees true nomination, But thinke them fabulous that shall be showne: Learne more, search much, and surely you shall find, Plaine honest Truth and Knowledge comes behind.    ( LM , C4 r )

Playing on that keyword of allegory, ‘conceit’—perhaps borrowed from Spenser’s letter to Ralegh—Chester praises readers who identify his poem as a ‘conceit | Fram’d of pure loue’, and muster the corresponding ‘Conceit’ while perusing it. By contrast, he censures those whose ‘blind conceited Error’ blocks them from the ‘Plaine honest Truth and Knowledge’ behind the poem’s surface. As the reception of Loves Martyr , and its fervid biographical overinterpretation, have proved, distinguishing between one kind of ‘conceit’ and another is far from self-evident. Rather than signalling Chester’s incompetence, however, this might reveal something about writing allegory after Spenser. Allegory seems to invest a poem with the hope of perfect comprehensibility, through which it might be conceived as true or good and not just as beautiful. Yet the darkness of its conceit suggests this comprehensibility is, if not absent, then certainly hidden. In the absence of some conceptual schema by which the poem’s details could be ordered, but without permission to enjoy those details free from the concept’s demands, allegory is legible only through the piecemeal work of speculation. Only by searching much and learning more can the poem’s readers hope to light on its allegorical moments: the mediations of universal and particular, local and provisional, rather than either’s predominance. 18

If Shakespeare took anything from Chester, it was allegory’s capacity to provoke this kind of thinking. The result, in ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’, is a puzzle: a scene that unfolds according to some cryptic set of norms; a voice that relates those norms, without explaining or performing them; a cast of characters whose significance is uncertain; and a letting-be which holds those characters in a sort of double vision. ‘As a communal ritual of consolation full of shared meanings’, writes Anita Gilman Sherman, ‘the poem seems to instantiate the reverse of a private language and to undo its possibility. Yet, it verges on the unintelligible by offering us the conundrum of a private language on a social scale’. 19 In simultaneously urging collective sense-making and singular incomprehensibility like this, this poem situates itself at the juncture between the universal and particular. That is the site of allegory, and its traffic between its materials and their meaning. But it is also the site of judgement, which from Aristotle onwards had been tasked with relating sensible particulars to intelligible universals. 20 It is this tradition Kant continues, in his third Critique , in defining judgement as ‘the ability to think the particular as contained under the universal’: the rule, the principle, the law. 21 Whether moving from universal to particular, or vice versa, judgement involves a process Kant calls Beurteilung , or ‘estimating’. That process is most energetic in the experience of beauty, where judgement tries and fails to file the stuff of appearance under conceptual headings: lingering over the sensuous particular at hand, without giving up the search for some concept, some universal by which it might be known. In a sense, then, allegory might be seen as an allegory for aesthetic judgement itself. The feverish interpretation required of its readers is a model for the cognitive whirring Kant describes: learning more, searching more, scanning the world in hope of finding recognition. The artwork encourages us to look for its presiding norms, the standards by which we might call it beautiful and know what we mean; yet it escapes subsumption under the universals of understanding (the true) or reason (the good). Although the interpretations it elicits take the form of statements about the work itself, they prove unable to substantiate their claim to cognition, but equally unable to exchange that claim for the comfort of indifferent liking.

The tension between universal and particular ran through aesthetics long before Kant. For Aquinas, Maura Nolan has shown, beauty held a universal scope as a metaphysical transcendental while retaining an irreducibly particular moment in its relation to subjective cognition. 22 That medieval legacy only clarifies the closeness of aesthetics to metaphysics. The dilemma of particular and universal, we have seen, is one they share. Not just a problem, perhaps the problem, on which metaphysics works since Aristotle, it is a problem for metaphysics itself, because it throws into doubt the spectrum of thinking that is its condition of possibility. Aristotle establishes that spectrum at the opening of the Metaphysics , which begins in the love of knowledge: ‘all people by nature desire to know’ ( Met , 980a1). That desire moves upwards from experience ( empeira ) to art ( technē ) to knowledge ( epistēmē ), and from particulars to universals, until, with the first philosophy known afterwards as metaphysics, thinking reaches the first causes of everything that exists. Metaphysical enquiry thus involves an ascent from the particulars, even if Aristotle resists the hypostasis of otherworldly principles he attributes to Plato. It is premised on human cognition as allowing that ascent by progressing through a series of homogeneous moments, from experience to knowledge, whose continuity and hierarchy can make things cohere. Crucially, there is an affinity here with allegory. The fourfold allegorical method developed by Origen and later Christian thinkers, Angus Fletcher has argued, corresponds to an Aristotelian search for the four causes; with this method, readers of allegory follow the path of metaphysics, asking after the essence and meaning of what they read, and stopping only at the universal in which the conceit is illuminated. 23 For Fletcher, as for many theorists of allegory, this spiriting of particulars into universals taints metaphysics and allegory alike with an ideological guilt. Yet what Shakespeare presents in ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ is an alternative possibility latent in allegorical technique. As the following part will argue, the poem shows the recursions of thought from universality as it is driven back to its bodies. But these recursions release an energy that rises above particulars even as it immerses itself in them, to find what, speaking of allegory, Namratha Rao has called ‘a moving concept, one that is both critical and speculative’. 24 The charting of that dialectic, in both its moments, is what makes Shakespeare’s poem metaphysical. Metaphysics’ desire to know may be nothing but wishful thinking, or, worse, the impulse towards domination. But it also makes metaphysics a thinking which can divulge its own innermost wishes.

‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ stages a ‘Session’ that might pass judgement on the phoenix and turtle, and a ‘ Requiem ’ that might set them to rest. But even assuming the ritual can begin—as it seems, in the poem’s second movement, to do—it cannot reconcile the particular and universal dimensions of its central figures. Here the Antheme doth commence, Love and Constancie is dead, Phoenix and the Turtle fled, In a mutuall flame from hence.    (ll.21–4)

As this new voice enters, it sounds as though the allegory’s conceit is spoken out loud. ‘Love’ and ‘Constancie’ reveal themselves as the proper essences of phoenix and turtle; with their demise, the concepts they signified and instantiated are dead. Nonetheless, mapping one pair onto another already oversimplifies the internal fusion of love and constancy, for which only a singular verb, ‘is’, is required. Meanwhile, the distinction of the stanza’s internal rhyme is as important as its identification: if love and constancy are ‘dead’, here, in this anthem, the phoenix and turtle may have ‘fled’, still living somewhere ‘hence’. This is the story of the philosophical concepts that characterize the second part of Shakespeare’s poem. Those concepts are brought in to determine what this love between phoenix and turtle might mean; but no sooner do they enter than they are denatured by that love’s resistance to determination. Introduced as the poem’s metaphysical causes, they end up as its materials. So, by the following stanza, ‘Love and Constancie’ has been further reduced, such that now, love alone is the presiding conceit: So they loued as loue in twaine, Had the essence but in one, Two distincts, Diuision none, Number there in loue was slaine. Hearts remote, yet not asunder; Distance and no space was seene, Twixt this Turtle and his Queene; But in them it were a wonder.      (ll.25–32)

These stanzas touch on the oldest question of metaphysics—that is, in Aristotle’s description, the question of being qua being; and their answer is somewhat akin to his. What makes something the thing it is, for Aristotle, is its essence : neither the form-matter compound of the concrete object, nor the universal form over and above matter, but the universal actualized and bodied forth by the particular. Correspondingly, in Shakespeare’s poem, the two lovers are materially independent but ontologically identical. They may still be ‘in twaine’, but their true being, the essence, is ‘in one’; and that essence is one only by splitting itself into two. That metaphysical partition is shored up as the stanzas continue. The phoenix and turtle, we learn, simultaneously fulfil and fail the scholastic criteria of what it is to be one thing, as in se indivisum , undivided in themselves, and simultaneously ab aliis divisum , distinct from each other. Their hearts are remote, but not asunder, because their ontological sameness coincides with their accidental differences of distance.

The technical subtlety of these arguments has sometimes reminded readers of attempts to explain how the Trinity’s three persons might share one indivisible substance. J. V. Cunningham even landed on the idea of the Trinity as the ‘clue’ to reading Shakespeare’s poem, the system of norms through which ‘all the difficulties of the expository part of the poem are resolved’. 25 As a result, these lines are often taken as the key to the poem’s metaphysics, or theology, or political theology. Yet they feel just as invested in rearticulating the problem itself, through ever finer degrees of extremity, as in propounding a solution. This would bring them closer to the early modern culture of paradox, in which the Trinity itself could feature alongside other ‘involved aenigmas and riddles’ to unsettle received opinion. 26 The paradox of the final line above, however, lies in the refusal of paradox’s customary wonder: while in other cases, ‘it were a wonder’, here, the poem claims, it is not. Shakespeare’s stanzas hold the project of metaphysical system together with its dialectical recoil, equally refusing the confidence of doctrine and the paradox’s contrarian flair. This strange combination expresses itself in the poem’s mode of arguing: precise, exacting, but eerily unmoved. These stanzas draw on scholastic concepts and methods, even gently parodying the scholastic tic of distinction by distinguishing distinction itself from division. All the same, they feel simultaneously fragmentary and tranquil. They are more like notes towards a poem; not pushing home an argument, or settling on its terms, but trying again and again to describe the instance of love. For all its philosophical nouns, the verbs in the poem’s second part are in short supply. Strung together with the slightest of connectives, often just a comma, the logical connections remain frustratingly vague. And the arresting force of the line-break stops thought before it can get going. The effect is a sort of philosophical parallax, whose readers must first reconstruct, then reconcile, multiple framings of the phoenix and turtle, on the basis of frustratingly abstruse suggestions. But it also serves to animate the concepts themselves. Without the grammatical nexus that would put them to use, words like ‘Diuision’, ‘Number’, and ‘Distance’—sporadically capitalized as they are—transform from concepts into characters: substances in their own right, players in this philosophical drama.

So it is that metaphysics opens onto allegory once again; and its concepts, technically acute but logically underdetermined, acquire a contradictory prominence. On the one hand, they are hypostatized as universals over and against their particular uses. In absorbing the energies of philosophical argumentation into themselves, they establish themselves as a metaphysical jargon. On the other hand, being relieved of their stricter philosophical functioning also lets them take on an unexpected life of their own. Number cannot count, but can be ‘slaine’ (l.28); and it can only be slain because it can no longer count. Distance, meanwhile—the spatial relation between visible entities—becomes a visible entity itself. Congelations of thinking, these concepts seem both to arrogate thought to themselves, as though it radiated out of them, and simultaneously to make thinking material. Shakespeare develops both tendencies at one stroke as his poem moves from increasingly animate conceptualization towards full-fledged personification: Propertie was thus appalled, That the selfe was not the same: Single Natures double name, Neither two nor one was called.    (ll.37–40)

For Aristotle, property ( idion ) is ‘that which does not show the essence of a thing, but belongs to it alone, and is predicated convertibly of it’. 27 As an attribute which denotes the essential character of something, it is a way of defining and thus knowing things. With the love of phoenix and turtle, though, that movement towards knowledge has stalled. No longer does it seem possible to determine the relations between subject and predicate in philosophical propositions; the self-same thing, once it emanates from itself, is no longer the same. The resulting tremor at once makes ‘Propertie’ and makes it appalled; and in being appalled into being, it contravenes its own law. On an Aristotelian account, properties depend on substances; here, property becomes itself a substance. Yet the substance conferred by personification is instantly revoked. ‘Propertie’—one of what would be dubbed the quinque voces of predicable—becomes a speaking persona only to be rendered speechless, appalled by what it sees, and dumbfounded at what to call it: single or double, two, one, or neither. 28

When the next abstraction appears on the scene, it is already afflicted by the curse of property: Reason in it selfe confounded, Saw Diuision grow together, To themselues yet either neither, Simple were so well compounded. That it cried, how true a twaine, Seemeth this concordant one, Loue hath Reason, Reason none, If what parts, can so remaine.      (ll.41–8)

At the sight of division growing together, reason seems to divide in on itself, emerging as Reason ‘in it selfe confounded’. The shock is enough to turn one stanza into two, as, in a formal surprise, the poem runs over the break between them. This is almost the only time when its otherwise self-certain form seems disconcerted. Its unruffled manner of proceeding is no longer adequate to the wonder it describes, it seems, and a new voice emerges, an altogether new sound: the startling cry of an abstraction not given to crying. And in that moment, Shakespeare’s experiments with personification reveal a fresh metaphysical significance. For many theorists of allegory, personifications are the worst sort of metaphysics, reducing bodies into concepts without remainder. 29 Here, Reason is the remainder. Its cry is the admission of its failure; unable to stick to the theoretical position of seeing, it is forced to speak for itself. Rather than subsuming the object into the concept, then, this personification drives the concept to reveal itself as object. It is as though we suddenly glimpse the transcendental conditions of the social formation that make the phoenix and turtle in some sense unthinkable. Their love sends a shudder through reason that betrays the subjective investments it had intended to sublate. Reason recognizes the passion in what it witnesses, and simultaneously acknowledges the passion within itself as well: a dialectic of love and reason which undoes their division without drawing them into a lasting concord. And with the challenge of those improper parts ringing in its ears, Reason makes a parting gesture of its own. Its new-found voice is put to work in making ‘this Threne , | To the Phoenix and the Doue ’ (ll.49–50)—moving the poem, in effect, from metaphysics to poetry.

What, then, is the poem saying about the metaphysics it deploys? For Cunningham, its scholastic inflections reach out to Trinitarian theology as its determining intellectual and linguistic context—the metaphysical framework which can ‘sanction’ its thinking. 30 Yet the unsparing clarity of his reading leaves it unclear why, if the Trinity’s logic is so appropriate for the phoenix and turtle, Property and Reason should be so put out. For those who read the poem in light of reason’s collapse, by contrast, these ventures into scholasticism are exclusively critical. In a recent monograph on Loves Martyr , Don Rodrigues thus reads Shakespeare’s poem as a wholesale rejection of metaphysical reason from the standpoint of embodied experience. Speaking for the body captured by ‘externally imposed notions of the rational’, Rodrigues gives voice to the poem itself, which ‘seems to say, Keep your Reason off my body, because it cannot begin to understand me’. 31 My reading of the poem has sympathy with both sides of this argument, but departs from both. Installing metaphysics as the presiding force of ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ would deny the poem’s capacity to think for itself, as though it remained dependent on the heteronomous authority of the understanding for its truth-claims. But establishing an antagonistic dualism between metaphysics and poetry, reason and the body, opens itself to the same charges. In this case, the body becomes some transcendent other—seemingly free from thought’s entanglements, but surreptitiously repeating its distortion, by abandoning its native corporeality and handing itself over for theoretical manipulation. The body is not strong enough to resist the concept’s voracious expansion, for the simple reason that ‘body’ is itself a concept. 32 For this reason, too, the dialectic of universal and particular cannot be resolved by asserting the latter against the former. The particular is a double name, no sooner uttered than it is brought within the ambit of cognition. There is a somatic resistance to the universal in Shakespeare’s poem; but finding it requires subjecting the universal to intense scrutiny on its own terms. For if the particular—the body, the material, the non-conceptual—is tacitly mediated by the concept, then the opposite is also true. Within concepts themselves there is a disavowed residue of the non-conceptual; and it is at the furthest extreme of the concept that this residue manifests itself, in the shudder with which it touches on the limits of its comprehensive powers.

‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ is thus a critique of metaphysical reason, subjective and objective genitive. That critique remains immanent: Reason, after all, is ‘in it selfe confounded’ (l.41). The pathos of its cry testifies to its internal contradictions, to the alienated humanity buried within its workings, and chastens its own tendency to universalize itself over and above particulars as their truth and their fate. Its recoil thus makes space for a new dispensation of reason, in which love, no less than reason itself, might have a role to play. For this reason, metaphysics is at once the target of the poem’s critique and its method. As the science that takes concepts for its objects, it may declare itself emphatically remote from material concerns, yet it is never quite sundered from them, thanks to the material sedimented within the concept itself. By working concepts to the point of collapse, metaphysics promises to reveal more about the object—an object truly outside the closed circuit of thought—than any particular object invoked from well within that circuit. And it gives substance to that collapse by grasping it with all the sophistication necessary to establish it, not as a subjective failing of any thinker, but as an objective default of thinking itself. This is the reason for the extraordinary stringency of Shakespeare’s voice throughout the poem, its resolute retreat from intimacy, against which Reason’s cry is all the more startling. By keeping its distance from the objective world, metaphysics feels for the space from which the object has been lost: the object has departed, the space remains. All its attempts to rationalize the phoenix and turtle from the outside have succeeded only in exposing the compromising remnant of materiality that reason would repress. In the act, reason comes face-to-face with itself as Reason, confronted with its own semblance, and compelled to assume a new role in the domain of artistic seeming: as ‘ Chorus to their Tragique Scene’ (l.52). The only way left for metaphysics is to follow through on that materialist turn, not by returning to the body, but by mourning its loss. And with that, the poem moves into its Threnos , and metaphysics passes over into aesthetics.

The ‘Threnos’ presents its own metaphysical conundrum. Given its own new title, at the beginning of a new page, it is uncertain whether it is part of the same poem or a new poem altogether. The double name seems peculiarly fitting for the single natures of ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’. For all the poem’s metaphysical investigations into ones and twos, the ‘Threnos’ also clarifies its interest in the threeness they might produce: from the Trinitarian complexion of its metaphysics, to the rhymed tercets into which it moves, to the possibility of some third term left over from the phoenix and turtle’s mutual flame. Yet this turn of the dialectic is, above all, a song of mourning: Beautie, Truth, and Raritie, Grace in all simplicitie, Here enclosde, in cinders lie. Death is now the Phoenix nest, And the Turtles loyall brest, To eternitie doth rest.        (ll.53–8)

After the hymn-like invocation of metaphysical transcendentals, the grubbiness to which they have been reduced comes as a cruel joke. For all its simplicity, Grace lies in cinders; Truth lies; and Beauty cannot communicate itself beyond the urn’s enclosure. The poem ends on a crisis of reproduction, where the prospect of continuing is itself rendered doubtful. This, of course, is the question posed by the emblem at the heart of Loves Martyr , the phoenix whose meaning is at once the continuity between old and new and the precariousness of that transition. Only in the broadest terms can that crisis be mapped onto a corresponding historical moment. The impending eclipse of Elizabeth the ‘mortall Moone’, the extinction of the Tudor line, even the confusion over the social and religious rituals best suited for smoothing over such a transition: all these might inflect the poem, but none of them are determining. 33 Indeed, the poem’s sense of crisis is defined by its loss of moorings from any historical or philosophical system of reference—a loss one might outrageously refer to as the feeling of modernity. Without such moorings, poetry is stranded between the particular and the universal; no longer reconciling them, as Aristotle had suggested, but marking the failure of their reconciliation. 34 The fable of the phoenix and turtle tests the conditions of poetry’s remaining; and the failure of its allegory becomes an allegory of its own failure.

In Chester’s ‘Rosalins Complaint’, the survival of the phoenix is never quite guaranteed. The thought that some ‘more perfect creature’ might emerge from its partnership with the turtle, entertained by the pelican who witnesses their death, remains an unanswered question. Marston uses his contribution in Loves Martyr to give an emphatically affirmative answer, and to refute Shakespeare’s more melancholy interpretation. Indeed, even before the regeneration of an offspring he calls ‘ Metaphisicall ’, he has already tried to place Shakespeare at the scene of the crime by praising his ‘mouing Epicedium ’—the name for a poem recited in the presence of the body. 35 Shakespeare presents, not the body, but its absence; and he answers the question of Chester’s pelican in the negative: Leauing no posteritie, Twas not their infirmitie, It was married Chastitie.    (ll.59–61)

The union of phoenix and turtle is so chaste that it admits no third, no tertium quid , by which single nature and double name might be harmonized. The stanza presents itself as an apology and an explanation, but the inversions of its syntax reveal an unmistakeable grief. It thus marks a turn towards a peculiarly mournful sense of the aesthetic. Shakespeare had discovered this compact of beauty and grief in the first batch of his Sonnets , and their recognition, even in the exhortation to reproduce, of a beauty distinguished in being unreproducible. Beauty is beautiful, increasingly, because it cannot be passed down: its evanescence only renders it more beguiling. 36 So too, in the opening stanzas of this Threnos , Beauty, like its fellow transcendentals, is visible only in retrospect, unthinkable except through the cinders it has become. Although it reaches out to a perhaps unconsummated rite, ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ pays its respects in the perfect tense, with a ‘defunctiue Musicke’ it attributes to the death-divining swan (l.14).

This, at least, is the reading favoured by those critics James Bednarz calls the ‘pessimists’. The alternative viewpoint fixes on the ‘bird of lowdest lay’, whose perch on the ‘sole Arabian tree’ may identify it as the resurrected phoenix itself (ll.1–2). Either the phoenix dies before the poem begins, it seems, or it begins the entire poem. There is nothing to tell between the two; but whatever hints the poem may drop at its start cannot revoke the mood of sadness enfolding its end. There are nonetheless some survivors in this tragic scene: the birds who make up the allegorical procession, the abstractions who people its central passage, and Reason, who—as much as Shakespeare—is the author of this ‘ Threne ’ (l.49). For all that phoenix and turtle leave no posterity, Reason asserts itself as a third term in their union. Even after acknowledging its own internal contradictions, and turning to poetry for their resolution, it reaffirms its hold over respectable cognition as the privileged voice of testimony. Reason implicitly presents itself as the only one who can speak of these dead birds, as the only identifiable voice in their funeral. As the irresolution of the poem’s ‘Session’ shows (l.9), the death of the phoenix and turtle does not found some new law to replace confounded reason—whether based on the particular, or the body, or the material beyond reason’s reach. Instead, it bequeaths a new sense of lawlessness, the lack of a norm by which these beings could be subsumed into a cycle of transmission. Poetry cannot be the counterweight to metaphysics, because it too is a conceptual art: Reason reminds us of that fact, in speaking on both sides of the page, recouping in the ‘ Threnos ’ what it relinquished earlier in the poem. Poetry’s sole advantage is as the place where thought can recall its own incapacities. Perhaps this is why it is so difficult to tell what happens at the end of the ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’, whether death or resurrection. Poetry cannot avouch a survival reason has cast into doubt. It cannot revive or replace the metaphysical principles whose death it relates, or preserve what has been lost. All it can do is show through its grief the loss it has incurred, before reason’s divisions grow together again and the wound is healed.

Shakespeare’s poem is thus an elegy that hints at poetry’s conceptual affinity with the elegiac. In the act, it raises the possibility that it itself might be the tertium quid that outlasts the phoenix and turtle. Funeral elegy always skirts the risk of becoming the main event like this: of taking itself as its principal object, and hence of losing the lost one twice over. That risk is thrilling, insofar as it captures the ambivalence of these poetic speakers, their desire to reassert their survival against the threat of falling, like the dead, into silence. The exuberance of Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ or Donne’s Anniversaries only manifest in exaggerated form the genre’s flair for self-absorption. 37 The tendency of elegies to return their reflections on themselves, to become poems about poems and not about loss, is one to which elegiac poets are (so to speak) alive. For Lynn Enterline, the emergence of poetry out of loss in ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ comes as such an antidote, if not for the mourners, then at least for the readers. ‘Shakespeare’, she argues, ‘turns a poem of death into one that makes large claims for his own verbal power’. 38 But one could read the transformation the other way round, too, as returning those displays of verbal power to the scene of death. If the poem becomes a well-wrought urn, the question is: for whom does it mourn? The experience of poetry as poetry, with its own nascent autonomy as a discourse, is bound up with the memory of what it has had to forgo: the capacity for speaking truth. This is the phenomenon J. M. Bernstein calls ‘aesthetic alienation’, where the very experience of the aesthetic as aesthetic—of beauty as beauty, and not truth—is its emancipation and its defeat. 39 Poetry’s autonomy is won only through the introjection of loss; and art is art because it broods on that loss, refusing to forget it, and refashioning it as its own innermost theme. That complex of freedom and defeat lingers around the final stanzas of ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’, which are remarkable for mystifying the objects of its elegy: not just in refusing to declare who this is all for, but for actively deflating the dignity of these ‘dead Birds’, their death relayed in flat, curt terms (l.67). The thought that a new world could be built on their terms is risible. Yet in making them mournable, the poem confronts the world they leave behind with the claim they continue to uphold, superseded but unforgotten.

The predilection of metaphysical poems for valedictions and departures is from this perspective more than coincidence. It suggests their sensitivity to the contest between universal and particular, and the reason the latter might unpredictably accrue—if what parts can so remain. Beauty is, for Shakespeare, a thing of the past. But (in the other half of Hegel’s dictum) it remains a thing of the past. That remaining is the condition of the artwork’s memorial function, the claims we could not know, the rites we could not celebrate: the loss of a world that is gone for good and yet unmourned. And the poem is that mourning: Truth may seeme, but cannot be, Beautie bragge, but tis not she, Truth and Beautie buried be.      (ll.62–4)

The poem does not profess to preserve what it remembers; in the words of earlier lines, it cannot reconstitute here what has escaped from hence (ll.21–4). Yet it preserves the negative space of the object in the shudder of pleasure and loss it provokes, not in reality, but in seeming. This leaves it at odds with history, even literary history. The break marked by ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ is not between two styles of poetry, allegorical and metaphysical, but between empirical reality and the unacknowledged right of the aesthetic. For, as Christopher Pye observes, the aesthetic is in Kant’s rendering ‘a category definitionally out of sync with itself and with its articulation as a cognizable category’. 40 It claims a universality that is not the universality of cognition, and invites a collective assent it cannot empirically verify. Aesthetics thus becomes, in Bernstein’s words, a kind of memorial. 41 For this reason, inserting ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ into literary history fails to respect the protest it lodges against historical time in the name of the dead—a protest made in the name of history itself. The poem is historical in remembering what has dropped out of cognition: the body in pain, the object of loss. That might lead us towards a different understanding of literary history. Rather than being accorded its own independence, or tagged to some basic but extraneous historical process, literary history can be understood as a continual restaging of that loss, the testing of possible responses to a disturbance whose tragic scene Shakespeare restages here.

That staging is performed for an unexpected audience, those who ‘are either true or faire’ (l.66). That it is still possible to be true or faire, in a poem which announces the mortification of Truth and Beauty, should come as a surprise. What, then, do the true and fair inherit from the ruination of Beauty, Truth, and Rarity? Not the concepts themselves, nor the objects that challenged them, but the memory of the disturbance between the two. ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ is metaphysical above all in attesting to the antagonism between universal and particular without presuming it can be reconciled in either’s favour. The poem ends with such a testimony: To this vrne let those repaire, That are either true or faire, For these dead Birds, sigh a prayer.    (ll.65–7)

From the loudest lay to the sighing of a prayer—so close to singing, but so much quieter—the poem has dissipated into less and less forceful expressions. Its final stanza consecrates a site of mourning that threatens to engulf the poem itself, freezing it into the silence of the urn, or letting it waft into sighs. If this lends it an air of pessimism, it would nonetheless be wrong to read it as resignation. The tomb of the phoenix and turtle invites and demands its readers’ attention, and offers itself up as a new place of gathering. If it cannot reinstate a metaphysics that has collapsed, it can at least remember the flash of recognition between metaphysics and poetry, where reason’s cry was given form as a Threnos . Its mourning may not become a law, but it shows how the seeming of the artwork intimates a lawfulness beyond law’s reach. The critique of reason it has elucidated hints, in this final invitation, at a corresponding ethical imperative: to love the transience of things. That entails a commitment to transient things—things that would otherwise find themselves buried under the universal or consigned to mere particularity. But it also entails a commitment to things as transient, as mutable, whatever permanence the concept and its essence would bestow. At this present moment, the personification of Property continues to flourish in the noxious hypostasis of the corporation, and the irrationality of reason in its disregard for material life flaunts itself without fear of check. 42 For all this, Shakespeare’s metaphysical poem upholds the claims of the departed, claims that might someday be honoured: in solidarity with the lost, through the project of collective repair.

John Marston, ‘A Narration and Description of a Most Exact Wondrous Creature, Arising out of the Phoenix and Turtle Doues Ashes’, in Loves Martyr, or, Rosalins Complaint (London, 1601), 2A1 r ; further references to this volume marked in parentheses.

Patrick Cheney, ‘Marstonian Authorship: The Poems, Plays, and Masque’, RES , 73 (2022), 648–69; Cheney, ‘ Artes poeticae : Spenser, Donne, and the Metaphysical Sublime’, in Yulia Ryzhik (ed.), Spenser and Donne: Thinking Poets (Manchester, 2019), 85–107.

William Drummond, ‘A Letter on the True Nature of Poetry, Addressed to Dr Arthur Johnston’, in Robert H. MacDonald (ed.), William Drummond of Hawthornden: Poems and Prose (Edinburgh, 1976), 191. For a fuller pre-history (omitting Drummond), see Arthur H. Nethercot, ‘The Term “Metaphysical Poets” before Johnson’, MLN , 37 (1922), 11–17.

Robert H. MacDonald, The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden (Edinburgh, 1971), 228.

James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Truth of Love: The Mystery of ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ (Basingstoke, 2012), 196.

See, among others, Gordon Teskey, ‘The Metaphysics of the Metaphysicals’, in Michael Schoenfeldt (ed.), John Donne in Context (Cambridge, 2019), 236–46; Wendy Beth Hyman, Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry (Oxford, 2019); James Kuzner, The Form of Love: Poetry’s Quarrel with Philosophy (New York, NY, 2021); and Ted Tregear, ‘Hope Against Hope: Abraham Cowley and the Metaphysics of Poetry’, forthcoming in ELH . Timothy Harrison and Elizabeth Harvey propose ‘physical’ as a better adjective for Donne’s poetry, for its knowing investigations into the relationship between physical and metaphysical: Harrison and Harvey, John Donne’s Physics (Chicago, IL, 2024). I am grateful to Dr Harrison for sharing this forthcoming work with me.

See especially Emily Thomas (ed.), Early Modern Women on Metaphysics (Cambridge, 2018).

See A. W. Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (Cambridge, 2012). For problems of definition, see also Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems , ed. Rolf Tiedemann, tr. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, 2000), 1–9.

‘The first puzzle concerns the thing we mentioned first, whether it belongs to one science or to more than one to theorize all the kinds of causes’: Aristotle, Metaphysics , ed. Werner Jaeger (Oxford, 1957), 996a18–20, translations my own.

Samuel Johnson, ‘Cowley’, in Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The Lives of the Poets , 4 vols (Oxford, 2006), 1. 200.

See Rachel Eisendrath, Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis (Chicago, IL, 2018); Emily Vasiliauskas, The Skull in the Mirror: Aesthetics in the Age of Shakespeare (in progress); Hugh Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (Cambridge, 2009); and Paul A. Kottman (ed.), The Insistence of Art: Aesthetic Philosophy after Early Modernity (New York, NY, 2017).

For seventeenth-century responses, see Martha Bolton, ‘Universals, Essences, and Abstract Entities’, in Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (eds), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, Volume One (Cambridge, 2000), 178–211; and, more broadly, Robert Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes 1274–1671 (Oxford, 2011).

References to Shakespeare’s poem taken from The New Oxford Shakespeare: Critical Reference Edition , ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett et al. (Oxford, 2017); line-numbers given in parentheses.

Barbara Everett, ‘Set upon a golden bough to sing: Shakespeare’s debt to Sidney in “The Phoenix and Turtle”’, Times Literary Supplement , 5107 (2001), 13–15 (p. 15).

For ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ as part of a mathematical ferment in Shakespeare’s thinking, see Edward Wilson-Lee, ‘Shakespeare by Numbers: Mathematical Crisis in Troilus and Cressida ’, Shakespeare Quarterly , 64 (2013), 449–72, esp. 467–70.

Bednarz, Truth of Love , 187.

See Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY, 1996), 5: ‘An allegory is an incoherent narrative…that makes us interpret throughout’.

This depiction of allegory is indebted to Namratha Rao, ‘Ground-plots of Invention: Poetics of the Material and Difficult Thinking in The Faerie Queene ’, ELR , 53 (2023), 218–49; and Rao, ‘The Virtues of Mediation: Milton’s Ludlow Maske ’, forthcoming in RES . I am grateful to Dr Rao for sharing and discussing her work with me.

Anita Gilman Sherman, ‘Fantasies of Private Language in “The Phoenix and Turtle” and “The Ecstasy”’, in Judith H. Anderson and Jennifer C. Vaughan (eds), Shakespeare and Donne: Generic Hybrids and the Cultural Imaginary (New York, NY, 2013), 169–84 (p. 177).

See Kevin Curran, ‘Introduction’, in Kevin Curran (ed.) Shakespeare and Judgment (Edinburgh, 2017), 1–18.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment , tr. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN, 1987), 18.

Maura Nolan, ‘Aesthetics’, in Marion Turner (ed.), A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Chichester, 2013), 223–38.

Angus J. S. Fletcher, ‘Allegory without Ideas’, boundary 2 , 33 (2006), 77–98.

Rao, ‘Ground-plots of Invention’, 221.

J. V. Cunningham, ‘“Essence” and the Phoenix and Turtle ’, ELH , 19 (1952), 265–76 (p. 273).

Thomas Browne, ‘Religio Medici’, in Kevin Killeen (ed.), Selected Writings (Oxford, 2014), 12; see also Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, NJ, 1966); and Peter G. Platt, Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox (Farnham, 2009). I am grateful to one of RES ’s readers for suggesting this direction.

Aristotle, ‘Topics’, in Hugh Tredennick and E. S. Forster (eds), Posterior Analytics; Topica (Cambridge, MA, 1960), A2 (102a19–20); further references from this edition given in my translations. See also Jonathan Barnes, ‘Property in Aristotle’s Topics’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie , 52 (1970), 136–55.

Beyond its philosophical significance, property was of course undergoing a more tangible crisis, marked by developments in property law, the creeping priority of movable over immovable forms of property, and the abstraction of wealth from its material bearers, all part of the development of capital. That crisis is intertwined with the crisis of transmission described below, not least inasmuch as the distinction between movables and immovables depends on how they can be alienated (inherited, given, sold, etc.). See Martha C. Howell, ‘The Language of Property in Early Modern Europe’, in Henry S. Turner (ed.), The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (London, 2002), 17–25.

See Teskey, Allegory and Violence , 1–31; and Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (London, 2019). For Shakespeare’s use of personification, see Helen Cooper, ‘The Afterlife of Personification’, in Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland (eds), Medieval Shakespeares: Pasts and Presents (Cambridge, 2013), 98–116.

Cunningham, ‘“Essence”’, 273.

Don Rodrigues, Shakespeare’s Queer Analytics: Distant Reading and Collaborative Intimacy in ‘Love’s Martyr’ (London, 2022), 105, 123.

This also distinguishes my reading from other accounts—especially Michael Witmore’s, Shakespearean Metaphysics (London, 2008)—which take the bodies onstage as the terms by which Shakespeare articulates a metaphysics of immanence.

See Sonnet 107, l.5: ‘The mortall Moone hath her eclipse indur’de’; for the line’s allusion to Elizabeth I’s death, see Shakespeare, The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint , ed. John Kerrigan (London, 1999), 313–19 n. Marie Axton read Loves Martyr as an allegory for the succession, but, as we have seen, the mechanics of allegory are themselves troubled in this poem: Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London, 1977), 116–30.

Aristotle, Poetics , 145b1–10: De Arte Poetica Liber , ed. Rudolf Kassel (Oxford, 1965).

The distinction between epicedium (spoken in the presence of the body), epitaphium recens (for a recently buried body), and epitaphium anniversarium (yearly commemoration of the dead) was made by Julius Caesar Scaliger in his Poetices (1561). See Andrea Brady, English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century: Laws in Mourning (Basingstoke, 2006), 21.

‘…aber diese Kurzlebigkeit fügt zu ihren Reizen einen neuen hinzu’: Sigmund Freud, ‘On Transience’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , tr. James Strachey (London, 1957), 14.306.

For early modern elegy, see Brady, English Funerary Elegy ; and G. W. Pigman, III, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge, 1985), esp. 52–67.

Lynn Enterline, ‘“The Phoenix and Turtle”, Renaissance Elegies, and the Language of Grief’, in Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield, and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr (eds), Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion (New York, NY, 2007), 147–59 (p. 157).

J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (Cambridge, 1992); see also Gregg M. Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (Stanford, CA, 2001). For the resonance of Bernstein’s account with early modern poetics, see Mark Robson, ‘Defending Poetry, or, is There an Early Modern Aesthetic?’, in John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas (eds), The New Aestheticism (Manchester, 2003), 119–30.

Christopher Pye, The Storm at Sea: Political Aesthetics in the Time of Shakespeare (New York, NY, 2015), 14.

Bernstein, Fate of Art , 17–65.

See Henry S. Turner, ‘Corporate Persons, Between Law and Literature’, in Lorna Hutson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2017), 467–84.

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Metaphysical Horizon in Wanda Dynowska's Indian Poems

6 Pages Posted: 29 Jul 2024

Marta Tiutiunnyk

University of Bielsko-Biala

Date Written: April 30, 2024

The article concerns the works of literature published by the Polish poet Wanda Dynowska (1888-1971). The sacred theme, which is ubiquitous in her works, will be analysed and interpreted. As a writer, translator, social activist and promoter of Indian culture in Poland and Polish culture in India and Tibet, Dynowska was an extraordinary woman. She does not belong to the group of the most outstanding Polish poets such as Wisława Szymborska, Czesław Miłosz or Zbigniew Herbert, yet her poetry is definitely unique due to the subject matter that is hardly found in Polish literature and the empirical sources of her work. What is more, Dynowska came to India in 1935. The experience of living in Hindu culture had a tremendous impact on her poems. Therefore, her poems and essays were published thanks to Dynowska's infatuation with Hindu culture, the writings of Krishnamurti and the spiritualism of Hinduism and Buddhism. The following works Mahayana Buddhism, On the subject of nature and art, Hindu poems were published thanks to the enterprise, which was funded by Wanda Dynowska and Maurycy Frydman. Indeed, they owed it to a Polish-Indian Library that was located in Madras. Surprisingly, only a few scholars such as Kazimierz Tokarski, Izabela Trzcińska and Ewa Dębicka-Borek scrutinised Dynowska's poetry at that time. In this article the poems titled Where are you?, My path, Shiva's Night, Near and far are interpreted. Furthermore, the philosophy proclaimed by Mircea Eliade, Gerardus van der Leeuw and Rudolf Otto is intertwined with a novel analysis of the poems. In addition, Polish sacrologists such as Stefan Sawicki and Zofia Zarębianka had a major impact on interpreting Dynowska's poetry. Consequently, the interpretation of the works shows that the sacred in the works of Wanda Dynowska is based on respect for the followers of each religion combining Christian, Buddhist and Hindu influences.

Keywords: Polish poetry, Wanda Dynowska, spirituality, Hinduism, Buddhism

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Marta Tiutiunnyk (Contact Author)

University of bielsko-biala ( email ), do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on ssrn, paper statistics, related ejournals, literary theory & criticism ejournal.

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The Best Examples of Metaphysical Poetry in English Literature

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

What is ‘metaphysical poetry’, and who were the metaphysical poets? The term, which was popularised by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century, is often used to describe the work of poets including John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell, although Johnson originally applied it to the poetry of Abraham Cowley.

Although the heyday of metaphysical poetry was the seventeenth century, the techniques employed by metaphysical poets continue to be used by modern and contemporary poets: see, for instance, the poetry of William Empson or the contemporary poems found on Calenture .

Below are some of the best and most illustrative examples of ‘metaphysical poetry’ from its golden age: poems which highlight the conceits, extended metaphors, wordplay, and paradoxes which many poets associated with the label ‘metaphysical’ embraced and utilised in their work.

1. John Donne, ‘ The Flea ’.

Mark but this flea, and mark in this, How little that which thou deniest me is; It sucked me first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea our two bloods mingled be; Thou know’st that this cannot be said A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead, Yet this enjoys before it woo, And pampered swells with one blood made of two, And this, alas, is more than we would do …

Like many of the best metaphysical poems, ‘The Flea’ uses an interesting and unusual conceit to make an argument – in this case, about the nature of physical love. Like Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (see below), ‘The Flea’ is essentially a seduction lyric.

Since this flea has sucked blood from both me and you, the poet says to his would-be mistress, our blood has already been mingled in the flea’s body; so why shouldn’t we mingle our bodies (and their fluids) in sexual intercourse? Of course, this rather crude paraphrase is a world away from the elegance and metaphorical originality of Donne’s poem with its extended metaphor …

2. John Donne, ‘ The Sun Rising ’.

Busy old fool, unruly sun, Why dost thou thus, Through windows, and through curtains call on us? Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run? Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide Late school boys and sour prentices, Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride, Call country ants to harvest offices, Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime, Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time …

This is one of Donne’s most celebrated poems, and it’s gloriously frank – it begins with Donne chastising the sun for peeping through the curtains, rousing him and his lover as they lie in bed together of a morning. Its ‘metaphysical’ quality is evident in Donne’s planetary imagery later in the poem: especially when he taunts the sun for being unlucky in love because its natural partner, the world, is already spoken for (because Donne and his beloved are the world) …

3. Anne Southwell, ‘An Elegie written by the Lady A: S: to the Countesse of London Derrye supposeinge hir to be dead by hir longe silence’.

Although all of the best-known metaphysical poets are men, it isn’t true that metaphysical poetry in the seventeenth century was solely the province of male poets. Anne Southwell (c. 1574-1636) proves this: born only a couple of years after Donne (probably), Southwell penned this metaphysical ‘elegy’ in which the Ptolemaic and Platonic versions of the universe are used as a way of understanding the power of prayer. This poem is not available elsewhere online, so we reproduce the first few lines below:

Since thou fayre soule, art warbleinge to a spheare, from whose resultances, theise quickned weere. since, thou hast layd that downy Couch aside of Lillyes, Violletts, and roseall pride, And lockt in marble chests, that Tapestrye that did adorne, the worlds Epitome, soe safe; that Doubt it selfe can neuer thinke, make fortune, or fate hath power, to breake a chinke. Since, thou for state, hath raisd thy state, soe farr, To a large heauen, from a vaute circular, because, the thronginge virtues, in thy brest, could not haue roome enough, in such a chest, what need hast thou? theise blotted Lines should tell, soules must againe take rise, from whence they fell.

4. George Herbert, ‘ The Collar ’.

I struck the board, and cry’d, No more. I will abroad. What? shall I ever sigh and pine? My lines and life are free; free as the rode, Loose as the winde, as large as store …

George Herbert (1593-1633) went to the grave without seeing any of his poetry into print; it was only because his friend, Nicholas Ferrar, thought they were worth salvaging that they were published at all.

In this poem, Herbert’s speaker seeks to reject belief in God, to cast off his ‘collar’ and be free. (The collar refers specifically to the ‘dog collar’ that denotes a Christian priest, with its connotations of ownership and restricted freedom, though it also suggests being bound or restricted more generally. Herbert, we should add, was a priest himself.) This central collar-metaphor signals this as one of Herbert’s greatest achievements in metaphysical poetry.

5. George Herbert, ‘ The Pulley ’.

When God at first made man, Having a glass of blessings standing by, ‘Let us,’ said he, ‘pour on him all we can. Let the world’s riches, which dispersèd lie, Contract into a span.’

So strength first made a way; Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour, pleasure. When almost all was out, God made a stay, Perceiving that, alone of all his treasure, Rest in the bottom lay …

Another of Herbert’s poems whose paradoxes and wordplay show him to be one of the greatest metaphysical poets. ‘The Pulley’ is a Creation poem which imagines God making man and bestowing all available attributes upon him – except for rest. Work is important so that man should worship the God who made Nature, rather than Nature itself.

We suppose one way of looking it is to say that God is advocating hard work as its own reward, and justifying having just one day of the week as a ‘day of rest’ on which to worship Him. Man should be ‘rich and weary’ – rich not only in a financial but in a moral and spiritual sense, too, we assume.

6. Henry Vaughan, ‘ The Retreat ’.

Happy those early days! when I Shined in my angel infancy. Before I understood this place Appointed for my second race, Or taught my soul to fancy aught But a white, celestial thought; When yet I had not walked above A mile or two from my first love, And looking back, at that short space, Could see a glimpse of His bright face …

The Welsh-born Vaughan (1621-95) is less famous than some of the other names on this list, but his work has similarly been labelled ‘metaphysical’. This poem is about the loss of heavenly innocence experienced during childhood, and a desire to regain this lost state of ‘angel infancy’, playing upon the double meaning of ‘retreat’ as both refuge and withdrawal.

7. Andrew Marvell, ‘ The Definition of Love ’.

My love is of a birth as rare As ’tis for object strange and high; It was begotten by Despair Upon Impossibility.

Magnanimous Despair alone Could show me so divine a thing Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flown, But vainly flapp’d its tinsel wing …

If we were going to try to pin down the term ‘metaphysical poetry’ to a clear example, we could do worse than this poem, from Andrew Marvell (1621-78). In ‘The Definition of Love’, Marvell announces that his love was born of despair – despair of knowing that the one he loved would never be his, because he and his beloved run on parallel lines which means they can never intersect and come together.

In other words, those who are best-suited to each other (if we interpret the ‘parallel’ image thus) are often kept apart (this poem has been interpreted as a coded reference to homosexuality: two men who love each other are ‘parallel’ in being the same gender, but seventeenth-century society decreed that they could never be together). A clever poem, but also a powerful one about frustrated love.

8. Andrew Marvell, ‘ To His Coy Mistress ’.

Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood …

Marvell, addressing his sweetheart, says that the woman’s reluctance to have sex with him would be fine, if life wasn’t so short. But such a plan is a fantasy, because in reality, our time on Earth is short. Marvell says that, in light of what he’s just said, the only sensible thing to do is to enjoy themselves and go to bed together – while they still can.

The poem is famous for its enigmatic reference to the poet’s ‘vegetable love’ – which has, perhaps inevitably, been interpreted as a sexual innuendo, and gives us a nice example of the metaphysical poets’ love of unusual metaphors.

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The Newest National Parks Feature? Poetry.

Ada Limón, America’s first Latina poet laureate, is helping us rethink wild spaces with some perfectly placed poems at a park near you

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If Ada Limón were left to her own devices for the day, she would rise, hug her husband and her dog, write a poem, and read a poem. Then she’d spend the rest of her waking hours learning the names of things—flowers, trees, insects, clouds. “There’s a beauty to naming, to learning the name, to identifying,” she tells me one morning in March. Once, while looking up the term for part of a magnolia tree, she discovered that the species is primarily pollinated by beetles, which are older than bees, and that its early ancestors lived alongside the dinosaurs.

“When people ask, ‘How do you keep finding things to write about?’ I’m like, ‘How do you not?’” she says. “How could you not wonder in awe at the magnolia tree and think of it existing among the dinosaurs? It’s endless.”

It has been a while since Limón, 48, had an entire day to spend as she pleased. In July 2022, she was named the 24th poet laureate of the United States—the first Latina to be awarded the seat—by the Library of Congress. Since 2006, she has published six poetry collections and an anthology , and currently she’s working on four book projects in addition to touring and promoting the projects she’s created in connection with her new post. In February, she was honored as one of Time magazine’s 12 Women of the Year. Even scheduling interviews with her involves coordinating with three people—an impressive contingent for a poet.

But Limón graciously takes my video calls from her home office in Lexington, Kentucky. Her 13-year-old pug snores next to her, she’s surrounded by hundreds of books, and she’s intentionally calm and engaged: “Before every reading, every event, every vacation, I put my hand on my heart and say to myself, Be present and enjoy this.”

Yet as much as she lives in the moment, Limón wants to encourage change, and that requires forethought. During their one-to-four-year tenure, each poet laureate in recent history has developed a project to bring the literary form to those who might not otherwise encounter it. Limón wanted her project to involve nature. “My first thought was, What if we flew planes over deforested land, with poems written on seed packets, and worked to reseed and replant places harmed by wildfires ?” She figured that the good people at the Library of Congress would ask her to dream a little smaller.

Instead, she opted to focus on the accidental encounter: How could she create opportunities for people to stumble upon a poem while in nature? The result is a dispersed exhibit of picnic tables engraved with poems by a variety of modern writers selected by Limón. The initiative is being rolled out at seven national parks this summer. At Mount Rainier , in Washington State, the late poet A. R. Ammons’s work “Uppermost” will accompany a view of the 14,411-foot peak from the park’s popular Paradise area:

The top / grain on the peak / weighs next / to nothing and, / sustained / by a mountain, / has no burden, / but nearly / ready to float, / exposed / to summit wind, / it endures / the rigors of having / no further / figure to complete / and a / blank sky / to guide its dreaming

Why national parks? According to Limón, these are places of “intentional nature,” destinations you might seek out in pursuit of an altered state. Maybe you’re looking to quiet your mind . Maybe you’re chasing an experience of wonder . Maybe you just felt restless and cooped up.

A pitfall for many motivated to get outdoors, however, can be missing the forest for the trees. Limón cites hiking to an objective, like a summit or a lake, as an example: “You’re supposed to be at ease, at peace, and in awe, but then you’re thinking, I have to get to this place.” It’s only by slowing down—to take a closer look at a flower, say—that the wonder begins to reveal itself.

“The connection between poetry and nature is that they both give us a moment to recognize what we’re going through. They give us space. They give us breath. They return us to ourselves.”

Like nature, poetry invites the mind to wander and take a break from its preoccupations. “Poetry is a place that holds so much mystery. It holds a space for the unknown and for the messy interior of the mind,” she says. She also hopes that people will use it to ponder language—but also the limits of language. “Poetry makes room for that. So often we stand in a forest and think, Oh, there are no words, and that’s enough.”

Each picnic table includes a prompt: “What would you say in response to the landscape around you?” Limón also asked 50 poets that question and compiled their responses into an anthology of nature poems titled You Are Here , published by Milkweed Editions in April. It’s the second half of her project and aims to offer diverse reflections on the many ways we engage with the earth, including “daily nature, urban nature , ourselves as nature,” Limón says.

Limón grew up in Sonoma County, California, a child of artistic, outdoorsy parents. (Her mother’s paintings adorn the covers of her poetry collections.) In school, the syllabus included field trips to the ocean, and she constantly learned about the plants and animals that surrounded her home. Words held a deep fascination. She graduated from the University of Washington with a major in drama, but a trusted professor suggested a second degree in poetry, which led to an MFA at New York University. That morphed into a career doing marketing for national magazines, an arrangement that subsidized her real passion. After juggling the two pursuits for a decade—and publishing three poetry collections—at the age of 34 she quit her job to write full-time. Accolades and awards followed, as well as a poetry podcast , a university teaching position, and a MacArthur “genius” grant.

Although Limón has been in Kentucky for more than a decade, memories of her time in New York continue to find their way into her work. Initially, the wilderness of her childhood felt distant from the city. Then she discovered the East River, the city’s winged and four-legged inhabitants, the plant life, the weather, “the bright ginkgo, with its foul smell, smashed on the sidewalks—all of that is part of nature,” she says.

“Nature is observing us as well. It’s reciprocal,” says Limón. “Noticing that kind of relationship, feeling seen by the world, not only makes you a better steward, it also makes you less lonely.”

You Are Here provides a more expansive view of the outdoors, in which the neighborhood gingko is of equal importance to the high peaks. Limón considered including archival works but decided against it. “The nature poem has changed,” she says. “You can’t have a nature poem extracted from the emotional impact of climate change. Everything is tied up in what we’ve done. Making room for complicated grief is just as important as making room for the beauty, the awe, and the wonder.”

Instead of perpetuating the old-school style she describes as “a white man standing on a mountain having an epiphany,” she wanted work with a broader array of perspectives. “You see a colonial, idealistic taming of the land in those [older] poems, or that nature exists just for the poet to observe it. What hubris, when in reality nature is observing us as well. It’s reciprocal.”

The experience of being witnessed is a recurring theme in Limón’s own work. “A Name,” the first poem in her collection The Carrying , published in 2018, reads:

When Eve walked among / the animals and named them— / nightingale, red-shouldered hawk, / fiddler crab, fallow deer— / I wonder if she ever wanted / them to speak back, looked into / their wide wonderful eyes and / whispered, Name me, name me.

Limón is masterful at simple, surprising shifts in perspective. When you give equal weight to the human and animal points of view—and perhaps throw a few plants into the mix as well—the world becomes a friendlier place. She’s an avid birder, and her half-acre backyard contains several feeders. When she forgets to fill them, the birds make it known. “They come by like: Hey, what’s going on? Noticing that kind of relationship, feeling seen by the world, not only makes you a better steward, it also makes you less lonely.”

Beginning this summer, Limón will visit each of the seven parks selected to receive a picnic table as part of the project. She tells me that she can’t wait to visit the redwoods of Northern California, where Chicano poet Francisco X. Alarcón’s “Never Alone” will be featured. The short piece addresses a phenomenon similar to what Limón feels when the birds seek her out, a kindred companionship.

Always / this caressing / Wind / this Earth / whispering / to our feet / this boundless / desire / of being / grass / tree / corazón

Limón is looking forward to her own personal shift in perspective amid the world’s tallest trees. “I’m obsessed with feeling small,” she says. “It’s very good for my brain. I can turn myself into an all-encompassing, looming force in my own life, but when I’m in the redwoods, I feel like the smallest speck.”

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