In Our Time - The Metaphysical Poets

Episode Date: June 19, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Metaphysical poets, a diffuse group of 17th century writers including John Donne, Andrew Marvell and George Herbert. Mourning the death of a good friend in 1631, the poet Thomas Carew declared: “The Muses' garden, with pedantic weeds O'erspread, was purg'd by thee; the lazy seeds Of servile imitation thrown away, And fresh invention planted.”The gardener in question was a poet, John Donne, and from his fresh invention blossomed a group of 17th century writers called the metaphysical poets. Concerned with sex and death, with science and empire, the metaphysical poets challenged the conventions of Elizabethan poetry with drama and with wit. And they showed that English, like Italian and French, was capable of true poetry.Unashamedly modern, they were saluted by another great modernist, T.S. Eliot, who admired their genius for imagery, the freshness of their language and the drama of their poetic character. But what do we mean by metaphysical poetry, how did it reflect an age of drama and discovery and do poets as different as John Donne, Andrew Marvell and George Herbert really belong together in the canon of English literature? With Tom Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London; Julie Sanders, Professor of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham; and Tom Cain, Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, morning the death of a good friend in 1631, the poet Thomas Carey declared, The Muses Garden with pedantic weeds or spread was purged by thee, the lazy seeds of servile imitation thrown away, and fresh invention planted. The gardener in question was a poet John Dunn, and from his fresh invention blossomed a group of 17th century writers that are called the metaphysical poets.

Concerned with sex and death, with science and empire, the metaphysical poets challenge the conventions of Elizabethan poetry and drama with wit and with startling metaphors. But what do we mean by metaphysical poetry? How did it reflect an age of drama and discovery and do poets as different as John Dunn, Andrew Marvell and George Herbert really belong together in the canon of English literature.

With me to discuss the metaphysical poets are Julie Sanders, Professor of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham, Tom Cain, Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Newcastle-Pontaine, and Tom Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Tom Healy, can we start with this term metaphysical? What do we mean about it with relation to metaphysical poetry? Well, if we break it down into its two-component parts, the world of physics for the Renaissance was the world.

of natural sciences, those things happened in the material world, but also phenomena such as the physical attractions we might feel for one another. And the Greek word meta means after, in this sense. So meta was in a sense after those things in the physical world, the world of ideals, the abstract qualities, the very essence and nature of being itself. And for the Renaissance too, it was also the world of the divine. So all those things which take place beyond the natural world. But also the Greek world, word meta, also means with or alongside. And so there was an important way this poetry explored those ideas, those essences, those senses of ideals and higher being, what it is to be in love, what it is to be

fundamentally human, through the process of the physical world, the nature of the physical world. So they brought together images, metaphors, analogies from the everyday world of experience, but use them to direct it to these higher and more abstract questions, and indeed often towards the divine, the nature of man's relation with the spiritual. Would it be rather pathetic to illustrate this with some lines from John Dunn's poem, The Flea? Well, the Flea is a rather playful line, and it is very useful in a way, because a lot of this poetry was also very playful in its manner. It was filled with a type of comic humour.

Mark but this flea and mark in this, how little that which thou deniesst in me. It sucked me first and now sucks thee. And in this flea our two blood's mingled bee. So Dunn takes a very ordinary and indeed slightly odd image of a flea sucking two lovers and uses the suggestion that the blood, their blood, which comes together in the flea's body is interpenetrates.

Is this really our co-mingling? Can we be reduced to the very essence of a drop of blood? But equally, there's something extremely comic in this because the poet is, of course, trying in many ways to interpenetrate with his mistress as well in a rather more complete and physical sense. And so he uses the flea as an excuse. He wants us as an audience to be very aware that this is a slightly bizarre and slightly comic

and indeed slightly desperate act upon the poet. Because one of the things this poetry has is an extraordinary dramatic sense. When Kerry celebrates done in his allergy, he talks about the way that he develops what he calls a strong masculine line. And this is a sense of directness, a sense of immediacy. We're plunged into a world where we're. have a strong theatrical sense, a sense that the poet's eye, the address,

has an immediacy about it, an engagement with the world, which is not overly polite, which is not mannered, which does not use excessive and extended forms of commonplace poetic imagery. And direct address, unruly son. Unruly suddenly,

I struck the board and cried, no more, I will abroad. And so there is a feeling of that often passion and anger of all sorts of aspects from despair to elation that the poets go through. Julie Sanders, metaphysical makes it all sound very high-minded, but, well, what's wrong with that? But are metaphysical poems as much about action as contemplation? And can you give us an example of that? Well, they certainly are.

I think a couple of very good examples really see John Dunn and Andrew Marvell rethinking love poetry in the metaphysical ways that Tom's described, but with this incredible sense of energy and theatricality, Dunn's elegy on his mistress going to bed, which has that very famous idea of the woman's body as territory to be colonised, oh my America, my newfoundland. But the poem is full of these kind of prepositions that drive it before, license my roving hands and let them go,

and it kind of propels the reader through. Behind before, beneath, above, below. I'm glad you did it in that order. I'll let that rest. And again, you get the same sort of energy and dynamic, I think, in Andrew Marvell's to his coin mistress, which, of course, comes in that long line of Carpe Die-Dem, seize-the-day type poetry.

It's a seduction poem, had we but world enough in time, this coinless lady were no crime. But again, the poetry urges you forward. And Marvell uses those kind of extravagant metaphors, the idea of vegetable love, the slow, incremental growing of a relationship, which, of course, he challenges because time is pushing on through this poem.

They're energetic, they're active, and they're earthy in places too. I mean, this is a seduction poem to his coin mistress. The graves are fine and private place, but none, I think, do their embrace, says Marvell. And it's the hyperbole. I mean, we can come to whether this is only belongs to a metaphysical poet in a moment, but just to try to get some idea of where they are. In that same poem, he's talking about an hundred years would go to praise thine eyes and on thy forehead goes 200 to a door each breast,

30,000 for the rest. That's going, it's some, isn't it really? It's taking all those conventions of love poetry and pushing them almost a breaking point, it seems to me, and there's, I mean, there's that playfulness that Tom's already mentioned, but I think there's also a kind of force and destructiveness in that too, of seeing how far things go. But in, when going back to Tom was saying about the flee,

it's bringing in ideas of the time, the idea of the circulation of blood was around, the idea of Don is still, it might be the crushing the three, the nail goes through, the idea of Christ might be coming in, Dunn was a, had started off as a very strong Roman Catholic, and so, so the bringing ideas in,

which, all the poets do, but is this in a particular way which we could describe to metaphysical poets alone? I think so. I mean, I suppose all poets use the raw material of their era, but it's that very precise, almost kind of zoom-like quality with which they sees new ideas of optics, new ideas of the body and anatomy, but ally those, put those alongside to go back to the idea of the meta,

alongside traditional conventional, poetic forms, and see what that does. There's a kind of possibility of fracture, a possibility of a kind of explosion that happens. Yeah, and when you were quoting, Oh, my America, my newfound land, my kingdom, safest when with one man man, man, I mean, they're bringing empire into the relationship of a man or the woman there, aren't there? This is the era of exploration, cartography, new ideas of mapping.

So as well as kind of the veins, giving a new way of mapping the body, we've got new ideas of geography coming in here, new ways of seeing the world. I mean, I think one of the things that metaphysical, in some ways, is sometimes used to suggest the high-minded or the abstract, but actually what they did was to enable you to see with fresh eyes the world around in all kinds of exciting ways. Can you give us one or two more examples, though?

I'm just trying to get the listeners just familiar with all this territory before you move on to probably dissect and demolish it between the three of you. Well, for example, in the Good Morrow, which again is the kind of typical duncan seat of the two lovers in their bedroom trying to sort of shut the world out. But in that very process, the world comes in, let's see discoverers to new worlds have gone, he says, at one point the sort of dismissive line of this first person speak.

I mean, these voices in these poems. poems are incredible. You get a sense of this world of maps and geography, and yet he recreates the bed of the lovers as a new sphere, as a new space to exist. Tom Kane, the term metaphysical, as I understand it, cropped up with regard to these poets as a term of abuse, first of all, William Drummond complained about metaphysical ideas and scholastic quiddities of his fellow poets, and he disliked that in Dunn, and then later dried and said something of the same, and Johnson, Samuel Johnson or later, said, something not entirely dissimilar.

So they got a bad press from the fellow perch in the first couple of hundred years. Can you explore that, please? Yeah, well, I mean, it's interesting that Tom Healy has talked about the meanings of metaphysical that you can now apply. But in fact, I think for probably about 200 years at least, it was used as a really rather vague term of abuse. And what German, for instance, writing about the same time as Carrier's elegy, sometime in the 1630s, just after that,

Don's death. What he means is simply that it reminds him of medieval scholastic philosophy, I think, that it's picky, it's looking at using images which are recondite irrelevant in a way to the business of emotional life as he sees it ought to be investigated. It's like John's idea of a pair of compasses representing a love is parting, yeah. It is an insult. I mean, when he talks about philosophical quiddities, quiddity is quibble. He's talking about poets like done quibbling in the way that the medieval, the discredited medieval philosophers

were seen as quibbling about, in that famous parody example, how many angels you could get on the head of a pin. And I think, and Drummond is a rather old-fashioned Petrarchan poet. continues to write the sort of verse that Spencer or Sydney were writing in the 16th century, well into the 17th century, and it's clear where he's coming from in that sense. Dryden, what, 60 years later, is still essentially saying the same thing when he talks about done affecting the metaphysics. I think it's, again, he clearly disapproves,

and I think, again, all he really means by that is that he sounds like this kind of quibbley, medieval scholastic philosopher. And usually are the difficult ideas when he ought to be charming and warming the heart of the person that's attempting to seduce. Yes, the poor dears won't understand it. He perplexes the minds of the fair sex with these difficult ideas.

Don't have no problem whatsoever about perplexing minds, though, did he? No, I mean, one of the characteristics in Dunn's poetry is that it doesn't give any hostages to the reader. I will have no readers that I would teach, she says somewhere. In other words, his readers have to be up with him. And one of the interesting things about his attitude to women is that, ostensibly at least, in the poems that he addresses to the women,

he is doing them, giving them the compliment, that they will understand these arguments. This is still not the case through the 18th century, as Dryden's and Dr. Johnson's complaints about him show. the end of the 18th century, Dr Johnson is still complaining, essentially, that this is too difficult, that it's divorced from real feeling. Just to come in on the word readers, Don was not printed in his lifetime.

His poems circulated quite amply in manuscripts. I did quite a few poets, and there was a feeling that print was rather vulgar, and it was better to keep them in manuscripts. Or they went to poets who copied them into their own commonplace books. So that's how they were around. It was a very small, what we would now call, a cult, a niche audience. I don't know why I said that. It was obvious anyway. Right.

Let's talk a little bit more about the attraction of difficulty in Dunn. Right. Well, I think part of it is just to do with that this is just the authentic voice of the man. The sort of thing that Julie has talked about, the way in which there's a great deal of drama in the delivery, is all that it's also true that done works in this way, that this very fresh voice works in terms of thinking about the experience

and looking for analogies. And these analogies, these ways of explaining love, parting, death, whatever it may be. Can you give us some examples or some analogies from Forbidden Morning, a valediction? Okay, well, in that poem. Morning with the U. Morning with the U, yes. The lovers are parting. The man, the done voice, is going on a journey, and he's saying, we part quietly, we part without grief.

And he goes through in that poem a succession of analogies, which end with this famous comparison of the parted lovers to a pair of what he calls stiff twin compasses. And not to go through the whole poem, he starts with a very odd comparison in which the whole of the first verse

is about a man dying, and as a good man dies, so we should part. The good man dies quietly. You can't even tell when his soul leaves his body. So he uses that comparison. That's how they should part. Then he moves on to... That introduces another comparison,

which is about the difference between earthquakes, which are obvious and frightening, and the movement of the spheres, which is huge but quiet. Now, they're parting. is like the movement of the spheres. And so he goes on, through a succession of such comparisons,

till he gets to this beautiful image in which the parted lovers are like gold leaf, gold to airy thinness beat. They're not parted, they're just expanded infinitely. And any other poet, I think, would have stopped there. But he starts again with this word if. He said they're not two, they're one. And then you start off again.

if we are two. And at that point you get the compass image, which ends the poem, if they be two, they are too so as stiff twin compasses are two. Thy soul the fixed foot makes no show to move, but doth if the other do. And I think the reader's response is a kind of,

obviously it's surprise how are they like compasses. And you gradually work it out. This is essentially the way it works that you say, yeah, that's right, that works. Tom Hilly, sorry to keep surnames in, but there are two tombs this morning. Hovering in the background to this is Philip Sidney. He, as it were, put down a challenge to English poets.

He said the English language had it with the best language in the world, but where were the poets now? In his defence of poetry published when Dunn was 27, did that have a direct effect on Don and his generation, if so, how? Yes, I mean, Sydney was, a great hero for the English poets who came afterwards. And Sydney wanted to see a an English poetry, a vernacular English poetry developed that could challenge the best of anything on the continent. There's often a feeling that England came late to the Renaissance

that France and Italy were far in advance of it and figures like Petrarch who loomed over it that England could not suggest a counterpart for. And Sydney very much wanted, an English tradition to develop that used to the full, the resources of its own vernacular, that English was a special language. But along with that, Sydney proposes that one of the important points of eloquent language is that it can, as he says,

overcome the limitations of our infected will, that the things that, that knowledge of the divine, the knowledge of perfections that we had lost when we fell biting the apple with original sin. But that eloquent language could give us some glimpse, some intimation of the way that we might recapture that association and the perfect knowledge that came with it. So these poets,

it very much took up this challenge. How can we use language to get beyond the ordinary, get beyond, in a sense, the limitations of a fallen world and glimpse something higher? At the same time, recognizing that language was inevitably fallen, that this was an unstable medium to which to try to do this. And so these two features are always in place, this desire towards an ideal,

the desire towards an English poetry that could fulfill what Sydney had set out as its challenge, but equally an anxiety and also in some ways a humorous exploitation of this instability that language presents. Julius Sanders also this most people listening will say, but this was the great age of trauma, and this was Shakespeare, Marlowe Johnson, and so on. How did that, and Don, we know, and the others, was done directly, was a great, admirer of the drama, went to the theatre, and quote, Johnson quoted him, and so, and how, do you think that fed into his poetry? Oh, I think it's deep in his poetry.

I think, I think actually it's deep in the sort of three chief metaphysical poets that she done, Herbert and Marvell, I think all absorb things from the world of the theatre, worlds of the commercial theatre, but those opening lines, I mean, we've already sort of hinted at those incredible, explosive opening lines of Dunn's poetry, these voices that kind of explode onto the page, and busy old fool, unruly sun, for God's sake, hold your tongue and let me love. It's as if someone is, you know, entering onto the stage and drawing the audience in.

Ben Johnson famously said have done, you know, the first poet in the world in some things. And I think there's this cross-filtration going on between the world of drama, which clearly they're exposed to, and all that kind of excitement of what soliloquy, might do, what blank verse might do of what this vernacular language being kind of stretched in all kinds of muscular ways on the stage might then do in poetry.

And I think what you see with done poems is a kind of mise en cent being set up, little scenes, the bedroom, which I've already mentioned in The Good Morrow, which reoccurs in the sun rising, and then these characters, these persona, these roles that he takes on and plays with. Tom Cain, there's heavy competition at that time for great writing and great poetry. So let's find out what was distinctive. Keep Dunn as the key, which he was, and the fulcrum of the

metaphysical poets, as they later became called. What was distinctive about them? Well, one of them was, what Judas has said, this directness of language, the use, from the drama may be, but at any rate from somewhere, of a very colloquial idiom. I mean, we think of, Dunn has the

reputation of being difficult, but he also uses this vocabulary and register, which is very colloquial in a way that is not the case with his contemporaries, and it's not the case with slightly earlier generation, on the whole. I mean, you can actually find bits of

that kind of thing in Sydney, for example. But that's different. The poems tend to be preoccupied with certain, for example, in the love relationship, the focus with Dunn is nearly always on mutual love for the first time. There's a strong,

much stronger emphasis than before, on sexual, the sexual element, the physical element in the love relationship. In the poems nearly always explore a little dramatic scene, as Julius said, but they tend to be dramatic monologues as well. Tom, Tom Healy. I think another thing that stands out is that for many poets' form should be a paramount, that there should be an awareness of the linguistic eloquence that's going on. although these poets are masters of form, it's not usually form that we're first aware of when

we confront them. It is much more this sense of a dramatic voice. So, in it, say, an opening of a sonnet, which Dunn writes, which is a perfectly formed sonnet, it's not that sense that he has fulfilled the criteria of form that many sonneteers would first look for. I am a little world made cunningly of elements and an angelic sprite, but black sin hath betrayed to endless night, my world's both parts, and oh, both parts must die. I mean, that gives us that sense of a dramatic engagement,

which fulfills all the qualities of the sonnet, but what we're not immediately aware of in reading that is that this is a well-crafted sonnet. So the craft, in a way, is hidden by the drama, by the theatricality. Can I pick up with you, Julisand, a point made by Tom Kane about the mutuality of the love there. I mean, some people have said it's not really,

it's ordering these women to get and dress so you can go to bed with them and so forth. So it's not a mutuality. There's a sort of an invoking kingship, claiming. And will you develop that, please? Well, I think you have to remember again that these are voices that he's exploring. And I think what's so fascinating about Don is that you have to get

to the ends of the poems. and very often that assertive, sometimes imperial, sometimes misogynist voice is somehow exposed, unraveled by the poem. I mean, Elegie on his mistress going to bed, I think is a fine example. I mean, it's been critically contested down the years. But by the end, it's not the woman who's naked. It's the speaker of the poem who says, well, to teach you first, you know, here I am, I'm naked.

And there's something actually that makes that speaker incredibly vulnerable by the end for all of those imperial metaphors and, analogies, I think. Tom Kane, it was an idea of expanding horizons. Science had thrown the idea of where the earth was, and therefore where man

was in relation to the spheres, you talked to in turmoil. It could be thought of as an extremely disruptive age, of which it seems, Don, and the others took advantage. Although they understood and had to live with the uncertainty. Yes, yes. The new philosophy calls all in doubt, he says.

The element of fire, by which presumably means the sun is quite put out. And that, I think we've done it. It's actually skepticism about the new philosophy, the new discoveries cast doubt on everything, on the stability of everything, which is one of the reasons, I think, that he turns to the mutual love relationship

as something possibly stable. But he is very interested, very interested in new ideas. He himself is extremely interested in the whole business, of colonization and its ethics. He preaches later on. The booty of empire, my empire. I mean, it's... Yes, yes.

So it's worth remembering in that poem and in other poems that while the woman is the land and he is the prince, she is nevertheless a whole country, as it were. But yeah, the relationship there is of a ruler and the ruled

in some way. But he and his family before him have been engaged very much in the business of exploration. I mean, Don didn't have the money to invest in colonizing Virginia, but he was very, very interested in the whole business and very interested in the ethics. One of the striking things about him

is his interest in the humanity, the full humanity of the native peoples that are discovered, which may sound obvious. but was not at the time. Tom, I know you wanted to get in about something else. Tom Healy, can I just ask you this? I think people listening will say, yes, but Shakespeare was around at this time.

And if we're talking sonnets, these are, in a lot of people's view, the supreme sonnets, and it's only, I think, fair to offer. It's a terrible googly. But what distinction would you draw between Shakespeare's sonnets and the similar work have done? That is a remarkably,

challenging question. In many respects, I think it has to be said that much is shared. And to try to make a firm distinction between the two, it is partly a tone of a voice. There is an anxiousness about Dunn's voice. There's a stridency about it and uneasiness about it that Shakespeare in his sonnets doesn't quite express in the same way. And I think it is, with Dunn, that he's constantly bringing our attention to the way the, if we're going to look towards higher ideals, if we're going to explore this realm of being an abstraction, are we really secure by using the materials that we have? And this creates a sense of paradox within Dunn because I mean, one of the things he's fascinated by is the anatomy of the body, the body itself, not simply

as a compendium of emotions, but just its physicality. This is a great age of medical exploration. You mentioned the circulation of the blood, but of anatomy, of dissection. And Dunn uses fascinating images of dissection, of the body being actually taken to bits and explored. But, of course, the more you explore the body, the question of how is this really the human?

Is there a distinction between the matter and the abstract? So he will use a line, like he says in the ecstasies, Love mysteries and souls do grow, but yet the body is the book. Now that's similar to Shakespeare. Shakespeare has a similar idea of how we read in a way. But with Dunn, there's a pursuit of the scientific without the belief in the scientific, as Tom has mentioned. I mean, he is anxious about the nature of the new philosophy and the way that science actually makes us often less certain about our relation with the divine, with the metaphysical. than previously.

So this tension, I think, is one of the things that is particularly distinctive about Dunn. Would you say, do you realise that the term applied to that a masculine expression is a difference too? It's an interesting one.

Again, I think it's this sense of roleplay that I find in Dunn. So the masculine expression is part of exploring these characters, these voices that he's trying to portray. But there is something very particular about Dunn's stresses, Dunn's emphases, I think, in the poem.

You get these incredible kind of rushes of adjectives or verbs, really strong, stressed words. And I suppose it's also the context in which that masculine expression is being deployed because so many have done's sonnets are actually about attention and struggle with God. And there's a fundamental difference, I think, to the Shakespearean sonnets. But they know some of those he actually, I think, creates himself in what might be termed by his own age, a more subservient position,

a less masculine position. He is the lover trying to be accommodated with God. He talks about being ravished by God. Tom Hila, let's turn to the religious poems we've done. We must try to bring in Marvell and Herbert. Definitely, yeah. Okay, well, I'm going to see if you're done for the moment if you don't mind. Yes.

He, this series of poems called Holy Sonnets. What elements did he bring? to those poems that were that were different from what he brought to his love poetry? The urgency. I mean, that of course there is no question in this age's

perspective that God is the ultimate should be, the ultimate focus of human endeavours. So in one respect, God is the ultimate lover. The Bible sanctions this in the song of songs and its reading of its imagery

of the relationship between the beloved and the bride. And so the individual becomes the seeker after unification with God, much in the same way the lover seeks after unification with the earthly beloved. But for Dunn, that means that there becomes even a greater sense of urgency of trying to forge this relationship between the divine, which he knows should exist, but which he's very aware that. his flawed, his sinful body,

prevents him from doing. So we've mentioned this theatricality, this striving. There is a forcefulness in the holy sonnets that's rarely found anywhere else, certainly not found even in Herbert or Vaughn. Batter my heart, three-person God, for you as yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend that I may rise and stand,

overthrow me and bend your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new. I mean, that desire to be made new is a fear, of course, that God is not making him new. Why are you not making me new? And does that mean that I am not saved? Does that mean that I am condemned literally to die both a physical death,

but also a spiritual death? And that feeling of immortality is something that haunts done. Before we say goodbye, I'm very reluctantly, but we have to, to done. Tom Kane, can you just say if you were done, was brought up as a Catholic. He was the great, great nephew of Thomas Moore, a Catholic family. He converted to Anglicanism.

People think it was cynical, but there is a thing that something had happened to his brother, the Jesuits had God. But he converted to Angina and became dean of St. Paul, gave great sermons and so on. Can you just give us some take on from what Tom Healy said, some view of the way that religion penetrated his thoughts and his in his metaphysics? Well, the change takes place in some time in his 20s, the change from the Catholicism of his youth to Anglicanism of some sort. He sees it as a continuity in the end. He says, really, this Anglican church is the same church that I was brought up in.

the Catholic Church is a newfangled kind of counter-reformation invention. So there is a way in which I think he would have argued that the great sermons, for example, and the ideas in them are really just part of a great, great tradition going back to the early church. But the ways in which these ideas, and especially maybe the Catholic youth penetrate the poems, are in terms of the sort of very tortured approach that Thomas referred to. And interesting, that comes out, that poem, Batter My Heart.

It's interesting to see how my and I keep coming up. Nothing else. It's never we in Dunn's religious poetry. It's always this solitary individual. And in what I think is the greatest of them, Good Friday, 16, 13, riding westward, you have this extraordinary image of the man on the horse. in this empty landscape, contemplating the crucifixion, and what it means for him done in the middle of England,

riding from one place to another. Judas Anders, George Herbert, what called one of the metaphysical poets, was much more associated with religious poetry. Can you outline that association, maybe looking at his poem, The Temple? Yeah, well, the Temple is this remarkable collection of poems, not published until 1633, so later than when he was writing them.

But he, again, circulating in manuscript. But he imagines this kind of space, this architecture of faith. And in a way, walks the reader through it so that you get poems about the church porch, the floor, the windows. But built in there, again, is this remarkable exploration of a complex relationship with his God. And he does that through form and through image. imagery and through metaphor, all the things we're beginning to identify as what the metaphysical poets did, a different tone, a different kind of urgency to done.

I suppose you hear echoes have done in something like the collar. Tom Healy quoted it earlier. I struck the board and cried no more. There's that urgent, strident voice, I suppose. But other poems are the sonnet prayer, which, again, rethinking that conventional love poetry form, but just finding all of these incredible analogies to try and think about what the relationship of prayer,

the experience of prayer is, from everything from church bells heard beyond the stars, exotic spices. But in the end, coming down to that simple phrase, well known to Radio 4 listeners, something understood. And Tom has mentioned the solitariness of done, the eye. Herbert often has a friend within his poem.

The friend who we are left in Little Dood, is God himself or Christ, urging, speaking to Herbert, pushing him towards understanding. Herbert is anxious himself that he may not understand properly, but he's aware of a much more interventionist God. He doesn't feel alone in the world in the way that Dunn does. And so that gives him a greater sense of confidence. I mean, that the temple has an order.

It has a sense of pilgrimage. It has a sense of progression to it, that he takes us through. and gives us in the final lyric of Love 3 in the church a sense of a type of reassurance, of sacramental reassurance in which the pilgrim is finally invited by God to sit in the inn and partake of the innkeeper's food, which is, of course, Christ himself, the body of Christ himself.

I did sit and eat. Sorry, Julie. I was thinking, and also what you find in Herbert is a very different response. to those kind of possibilities of what the vernacular English language might do. Some people have described it as a complex simplicity. But in a poem like Jordan 1, he worries, is all good structure in a winding stair he asks?

And he starts to sort of question whether actually the ornamentation, the extravagant metaphors have gone too far and he starts to pull back on that in very interesting ways. Yeah. And I mean, in that, he's also writing for a congregation, as it were, for people to understand. The simplicity is there because he wants his readers to understand, and this is a whole community of Christians that he's writing for.

And so you do get this sense of, not only of a community of readers, but in Herbert somehow there is this sense of other Christians, it's not just God who is there alongside him, but it's other Christians who are there alongside him. And that I think is the big distinction, the simplicity and the sense of a community, a congregation. A poem may find him who a sermon flies, Herbert says.

Sorry, I talk to her of you, so if you say it again. A poem may find him who a sermon flies is one of Herbert's infectors. Now Andrew Marvell, as the particular of the Troika, Dunn and Herbert and Marvell, very different. Again, MP for the same area, that Wilberforce is going to be an MP4, involved in, obviously involved in politics in many ways. How does he fit into this, Tom Kane? Well, he's a generation younger than, I mean, Herbert's younger than Dunn and Marvell's yet younger again.

I think the hyperbole you talked about is something which is much stronger in Marvell. The way in which he uses the so-called metaphysical conceit has been mediated by fashion in the intervening years. And it's become something which is witty, hyperbolic, but is not necessarily very explorative. So the vegetable love that Julie quoted in the Coyne Mistress is, as you

said, I think at the outset, a conscious exaggeration. There's a famous, in fact most of Marvell's conceits tend to be like this. At the end of a long country house poem on Appleton House as Twilight comes, the salmon fishermen go home

and they put their boats on their heads. And he said, like the antipodes in shoes. Now this is witty, exaggerated. It doesn't actually make sense, as the compass conceit does, once you start to undo it. It draws attention to itself. And with Marvell, it's a quality of poised, sophisticated wit, I think,

which one would pick out, balance. Balance is the word most often, the adjective most often used about him. But Tom Haley, would you pull him into the metaphysical, to the, let's say the three, say that we can still talk about the metaphysical poets and talk with some sense in that common term of Dunn and Marvell and Herbert. Yes and no. I mean, not the entire canon of Marvell's poetry. Marvell writes various types of poems, particularly after the Restoration. He wrote a series of satires, which are not metaphysical poems in any stretch of the imagination. But the lyric Marvell, yes, and the marvell of even long poems like Upon Appleton House. in them Thomas mentioned the sophistication

he loves his narrators as being very both comic and serious at the same time he is the master of this that we are never quite sure that his narrators of his poems are really secure in their material

they're building up these elaborate senses of imagery but where are they leading to is it to something extremely profound or is it to something fundamentally pathetic and comic? So is the metaphysical, idea of metaphical poet, is it on our part a conceit to hold these together who quite better go their individual ways?

I think that if it hadn't developed in the way it did over the centuries, if it hadn't been adopted as a label, it wouldn't be one you would choose, certainly. And I think that if we didn't see the... if they weren't introduced to us as a group, I'm not sure that I would come to Herbert and identify him as a person who is very light done in the way he uses language.

Or certainly I wouldn't with Marvell, as Tom Healy says. Marvell owes a lot to other writers who've gone before, and Ben Johnson in particular, Thomas Carey. There's a whole lot of different traditions in Marvell. But I think there's also a sense, that Marvell is aware of his predecessors in that way. And I suppose the kinship that a label like metaphysical poets finds is a kinship of poets picking up on each other

and not the servile limitation that Dunn broke with. They reconfigure anew each time, Herbert and Marvell. But we can see lines. And I suppose what you see with Marvell is what happens to some of the approaches to poetry that Dunn made when the English Civil War kicks in. Thank you very much, Julius Anders, Tom Healy and Tom Cain. Next week we'll be talking about the Roman historian Tacitus.

Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4.