The Monster Mash
Michelle Rabe
Emerging from a cultural climate of political instability and religious tension, the Metaphysical poets suffocated in their “ambient fear,” a deeply pervasive fear, of daily life in this tumultuous atmosphere (Cohen viii). They struggled to ground themselves in society, to define themselves in political or religious terms, to assimilate themselves into any firm cultural roles, and, most significantly, to establish any personal identity. And, this kind of “anxiety,” this inability to center oneself on any solid concept or attribute, thrusts the poets in a melting pot of discordant images, a mesh of floating thoughts, and a labyrinth of clashing intellectual and passionate impulses (viii). Then they patch these incongruous pieces together to form a whole, and they instill integrity to the patchwork of conflicting ideals in their controversial metaphors. Instead of using vampires, ghosts, goblins, or zombies, to express their deep-seated anxieties, the Metaphysical poets’ metaphors are the monsters that reflect their culture’s unease. In a desperate attempt to “apprehend” and to “domesticate,” and to therefore “disempower,” these cultural anxieties, Metaphysical poets pieced together unanswered metaphysical musings in metaphors (viii). However, instead of being comforting or offering resolution, these metaphors are monsters that haunt and scare society. They are the “ultimate incorporation of [society’s] anxieties” about their “identities and [their] very humanity,” the deepest psychological issues that plague every individual (xii). In the 17th century, amidst cultural, political, social, and religious turmoil, these anxieties about identity and humanity were deeply ingrained and highly problematized in the unstable environment. Because 17th century Metaphysical poets were subject to this upheaval, their anxieties manifested into outlandish metaphors, ones that were scary, aberrant, deformed monsters conjured up in an attempt to assemble their identities.
These opposing concepts mashing in Metaphysical metaphors are monsters. A Metaphysical metaphor uses a “range of reference” and connects “emotional and mental concepts,” and observes “likeness between different things” (Willmott 6, Bennett 2). It is the “concrete” combined with the “abstract,” “the remote with the near,” and the “sublime with the commonplace” in order to generate a metaphoric representation of the chaotic 17th century existence (Bennett 3). Although their understanding of the world in which everything was “related and ordered” in a logical and deeply connected manner differed from the segregated language typical of 17th century poetry, they “extract the essence” of ideas in order to discover their commonality and identification with one another (Willmott 33-34). For the Metaphysical poets, understanding their experience is gluing together their fragmented selves by “constantly amalgamating disparate experiences” and fabricating an image as diverse, hybrid, and shocking as their own lives (Bennett 10). Clawing and grasping and struggling and reaching and straining for meaning and identity, Metaphysical poets “yoke together” experiences and senses and images and beliefs and descriptions that society frequently separates (11). “Above all,” Metaphysical metaphors are incredibly “aware” of the universe’s “intricacy” and its interconnected foundations; thus, their consideration of “unlike things” in “familiar terms” allow them to connect the “temporal and eternal” in a way that “reflects the truth about human experience” (Bennett 86, Willmott 39).
These metaphors’ monstrousness emerges because their figurative descriptions are “embodiment[s] of a certain cultural moment” and, therefore, they “signify something other than [themselves]” (Cohen 3). The metaphors themselves are metaphorical beyond their figurative representation of contrasting concepts. The metaphors are fragmented cultural notions that are “bound temporarily to form a loosely integrated net” that produces “an unassimilated hybrid” or “a monstrous body” (3). The metaphors are “odd somatic pieces stitched together” begging for a discovered unity and meaning (12). Metaphysical metaphors are so distinct, so hybrid, so patchy like quilt-work, so different that they stand as monsters that reveal a deeper cultural atmosphere of instability and drowning poetic souls. When attempting to trace Metaphysical metaphors to their roots and to exhaust their meanings, they never reaffirm their own identity in and of themselves because they are deeper metaphors. The metaphors are monsters.
The monsters are reflections of the Metaphysical poet’s identity, they are metamonsters. These metamonsters enable to formation of all kinds of identities” because they are constructed from strings of thoughts and musings and social pressures and sewn together to form a hulking entity (19). Piecing together varying concepts form diverse facets of life, love, and experience in metaphors creates monsters that reflect “new spirals, new and interconnected methods of perceiving the world,” that allow true, full, and complete exploration of identity—especially identity in an unsteady universe (7). And, because of their diversity and controversial fusion, these monsters are the “harbingers of category crisis,” challenging “boundary and normality,” “refusing compartmentalization,” deconstructing binaries, “evading” labels, “undermining” structure, unraveling expected “identity formation,” and normalizing “deviance” (ix, 6-7). These monsters dwell at the gates of difference” and, thus, they are highly threatening to previously constructed ideas of normalcy, “natural,” or even “human” (ix, 8). The metamonsters that the Metaphysical poets fashion have the potential to reveal the authors’ and 17th century society’s very “raison d’etre,” their very reason for being because they explore every aspect of identity (12).
“Figures of speech are done rather than made,” but really figures of speech are Donne rather than made (Skulsky 1). No Metaphysical poet has scarier metamonsters than John Donne. His metaphors are “living creatures,” remarkably “dazzling” because of their delightful, humorous, and striking “play between ordinary and tropical significances” (Skulsky 2, Hammond 155). He passed from “the trivial to the sublime” as well as from the erotic to the religious with an almost “disconcerting abruptness,” and this “evershifting play of wits” masterfully provides deeper insight into human identity and 17th century culture than one- dimensional metaphors can (Bennett 15, Smith 107). This profound juxtaposition coupled with challenges to the “morally conventional” generates monsters that reveal John Donne’s cultural place and his identity (Bennett 16).
No Metaphysical poem has a scarier monster than Donne’s “The Flea.” From this minuscule creature and “the lowest material,” “springs the highest wit” and one humongous monster (Hammond 155). In one tiny entity, Donne represents “you,” “I,” a “mariage bed,” and a “mariage temple” and every symbolism, moral implication, and poetic expression that stems from each of those objects (Donne 12-13). In addition to the amazing all-encompassing nature of such a tiny creature, Donne frames it in layered, mismatched religious and erotic descriptions to add a deeper dimension to the already dense metaphor. Although Donne’s poem describes a narrator coercing a female into fornication in an erotically charged tone, he bombards the stanzas with religious imagery, such as “sinne” and “guilt,” the idea of being “cloystered” like an abbey, and Christ’s crucifixion with the “purpled naile in blood of innocence” (Donne 6, 15, 20). The “flea and the blood” are “physically and morally objectionable” in an erotic, secular way by themselves, but by coupling this moral sin with the “background of scripture teaching,” the poem takes on religious and spiritual transgression (Hammond 155). Donne further develops his monstrous flea by having it engender a specific arithmetic of human interaction. The flea’s blood is “one blood made of two” and there are “three lives in one flea,” which shows Donne’s inability to describe flea in any sort of societally instituted way of measurement (Donne 8, 10). The flea disobeys erotic, religious, and mathematical constructions in a monstrous fashion. The spawning of the flea is a wicked “teratogenesis,” “resisting any hierarchical classification” or “binary oppositions” and (Cohen 7-9). The resulting metamonster is “polyphonous” and a reflection of the incarnation of competing ideals in the human person (8). The flea is a monstrous metaphor that is “difference made flesh,” feeding on flesh, mixing bloods in flesh, showcasing the connection between multiple flesh bodies, and symbolizing what occurs inside of one flesh (8).
The flea, however, extends further. It is “a deeper play of differences” that represents the “base of human nature” and the identity of Donne and every individual (Cohen 7). The tiniest being has the ability, means, and language to “express complex emotion” because of Donne’s ability to “recognize trivial, mundane affairs” in comparison with the gravity of human existence itself (Bennett 15). Through his mismatching of religious language and erotic themes and his own convoluted arithmetic to measure the metaphor’s depth and insight, Donne’s metamonster of the flea demonstrates how the 17th century “world itself,” in all of its confusion and contradiction, “mirrors the human organism in the inherent instability of its cravings and satisfactions” (Smith 108, Hammond 112). With wit, logic, and emotion, Donne equates “blood and life, lovers, a flea, a temple” and much more in a significant manner that allows Donne to connect and to meaningfully group his identity that has been fragmented in an unstable political and religious environment (Hammond 156). “The Flea” gathers the erotic and devotional sides of Donne, which society desperately attempts to separate, and thrusts them together to reveal how the human soul actually has a “beautiful order” and rooted interconnectedness (156).
Like Donne, Andrew Marvell constantly “balances one mode of being against another” and “counterposes opposites” in his metaphors (Skulsky 212-213). In a typical Metaphysical style, Marvell unites “seemingly opposing qualities into unexpected relation” in order to expose his personal struggle to unite seemingly conflicting aspects of his identity (213). Marvell most famously exemplifies his Metaphysical poetic ability in “On a Drop of Dew,” in which he likens a drop of dew to the human soul. “The Soul, that Drop,” is “bound in itself” as a “little globe” atop a “purple flower,” able to keep its shape as its own distinct microcosm due to surface tension (Marvell 19, 6-9). Like this dewdrop, the human soul “cannot be satisfied in the body” and instead finds shallow “rest” on the earth’s surface, but does not mix with the earth or lose its independence (Bennett 111). The drop is barely attached to the physical surroundings, just as the human soul is self-absorbed and divided from the totality of the physical body. Marvell draws together images as diverse as a dewdrop and the human soul, brings them together in a monstrous production, and reveals something deep about Marvell’s conception of human identity. The dewdrop’s and human soul’s entire points are to lose their materiality, ascend to heaven either by evaporation or death, and divorce physicality, and Marvell uses this metaphor to describe the comparable goal of human existence.
The poem’s form even echoes the monstrousness hybridity of Marvell’s metaphor by layering “one kind of speech over another” and incorporating different essences into a complete whole (Hammond 225). Furthermore, Marvell “regulates” the poem’s rhyme scheme as the fusion of the metaphor solidifies in the poem’s latter half (226). Whereas the beginning of the poem had an inconsistent rhyme scheme, the second half of the poem, beginning with the rhyme “unsecure”/“impure” and continuing in a dependable AABBDEDE organization, which parallels the full closure and unification of Marvell’s metaphor (Marvell 15-16). This mastery of language and poetic form shows Marvell’s awareness of “figurative speech as a double demonstration,” both “to be understood” and to be “pointed out while it is implemented” (Skulsky 214). In “On a Drop of Dew,” Marvell produces a jarring metaphor, accommodates this metaphor with his language, and then uses his language to indicate his awareness of his metaphor’s monstrosity.
And his marvellous metaphor is certainly metamonstrous in that it reveals a deeper idea of human purpose and goal. With one outlandish metaphor, Marvell “spotlights the predicament” of humanity in that humans have souls that are incompatible with the physical existence (Bennett 114). The dewdrop “scarce touch[es]” the flower and weeps at its “divi[sion]” from the spiritual, just as the soul dislikes its physical containment and “yearns toward its sacred origin” (Marvell 10-12, Smith 232). In both cases, the physical restricts the spiritual identity of the metaphysical, and Marvell uses this connection as a launching point for his metaphor that extends much beyond a comparison. “On a Drop of Dew” “expresses the dilemma of creatures of a double nature,” trapped between “the several elements of their being” and “struggling to reconcile” their senses and their spirits (Smith 232). Marvell incorporates “fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy” in his metaphor, in the dewdrop’s and soul’s quest to exist physically in the natural world and still retain their metaphysical identity (Cohen 4). Thus, this metaphor examines a more insightful consideration of human identity as a jumbled amalgamation, as an abject monster.
Still in the Metaphysical fashion, but unlike Donne or Marvell, Richard Crashaw’s metaphoric “wit works differently” by reflecting a “celebration” of unlike things rather than a tension or an unsolved “debate” between conflicting images (Smith 173). His sort of “lush ingenuity” unearths and emphasizes the “inherent paradoxicalness of the truths he contemplates,” but he does so in a glorifying fashion (174, 179). He sees difference, unites difference, and cherishes difference because it allows him to “get along with” the opposing nature of his social identity (Skulsky 4). In “On the Wounds of our Crucified Lord,” Crashaw demonstrates this in his metaphor of Christ’s wounds as things through which we sense feelings. Christ’s wounds are monstrous as they are forcibly and awkwardly equated with “Mouthes” and “eyes” (Crashaw 2). In an attempt to understand and identify with Christ’s suffering on the cross, especially his bloody sores and his painful whip marks, Crashaw likens the wounds with things he knows well. By focusing on two sensing mechanisms, the mouth and the eyes, Crashaw exhibits his love to “elaborate sensations,” sensations that are “peculiar and repellant,” but sensuous nonetheless (Bennett 94). Of course, because Crashaw stiches these images together with Christ’s wounds in an elaborate metaphor, he produces a monster.
Instead of simply being sensuous images or sensuous metaphors, Crashaw’s “one sensual image gives rise to another,” which “awakens” the senses beyond the physical, to reveal the much deeper metaphysical understanding of his own identity (Bennett 99, Cohen 17). Crashaw’s further redefinition of body parts, such as his metaphor of a “foot” that “hath got a Mouth and lippes,” further demonstrates Crashaw’s monster production (Crashaw 13). His metaphor portrays the Mannerist body, the perfect fusion of the spiritual, the impossible, and the fantastic with the physical familiarity of the human form. This body is rearranged in an unrealistic and surreal way, and Crashaw continues to extend the body into more unrealistic configurations. The already impossible body begins to weep jewels, such as “Ruby-Teares” and “Pearles” (Crashaw 19-20). Crashaw pairs the human anatomical form with the supernatural and the unattainable in a metaphor for Christ’s wounds and, in doing so, “dwell[s] on the sweetness of the mind and the body” in all its duality and contrast and creates a monstrous metaphor (Bennett 90).
Crashaw’s effort to relate the physical with the spiritual produces a metamonster that reveals the deeper cultural and personal implications for himself and for society. He connects the disassociated parts of his metaphor, but he draws upon such an odd comparison because this religious mystery is deeply unsettling to him. He is desperate to piece together any semblance of understanding of Christ’s Passion, and he creates a monster of the confusing pieces of his disjointed understanding that ends up reflecting a great amount about human identity. Pairing body parts, specifically body parts through which we sense things, with supernatural and impossible arrangements makes a monster that unites “immortality and corporeality” (Cohen 17). Crashaw’s “On the Wounds of our Crucified Lord” exemplifies the idea that, in order to have any sort of connection with Christ’s sacrifice, or any other deeply metaphysical and religious musing, mere mortals must compare it with commonplace things. Through analogy and comparison, humans can come to know the unfamiliar and come to sense and to grasp the extraordinary. Since Crashaw’s revelatory metaphor unites unlike ideas and pieces together components of human existence, it is a metamonster that represents humanity’s eternal struggle to marry the spiritual and the physical.
Metaphysical men mashed many musings into multiple metaphors that made monsters, monsters of metaphors, metamonsters. John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and Richard Crashaw are not simply showing that a flea represents sexual intercourse, a dewdrop is the soul, or Christ’s wounds are displaced body parts because Metaphysical metaphors are extraordinary metaphors. The figurative metaphors have deeper figurative implications, and their meanings extend beyond one level of metaphoric connection. Their metaphors are monsters that “bear self-knowledge, human knowledge” and that “ask us how we perceive the world” and why we perceive it in the way that we do (Cohen 20). In an attempt to string together disjointed aspects of their identities and smooth out uneasiness in their minds, they group a “multitude of fragments” and merge their diverging selves (3). They are Metaphysical monsters, residing “beyond the limits of the Thinkable” and physical, that are only accessible through clashing images and unconventional connections (20). These 17th century metamonsters have the power to expose society, to unleash the true “culture from the monsters they engender,” and to challenge everything humankind assumed about human experience (Cohen 3). In Metaphysical poetry, metamonsters are under every line, in every word, and threaded into the very fabric of any mashed metaphor. Be very afraid.
Works Cited
Bennett, Joan. Five Metaphysical Poets. London: Cambridge UP, 1964. Print.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1996. Print.
Crashaw, Richard. “On the Wounds of Our Crucified Lord” from Steps to the Temple. London: T.W. for Humphrey Moseley, 1646. Early English Books Online—EEBO. Web.
Donne, John. “The Flea” from Poems. London: Elizabeth Purslowe for Henry Seyle, 1633. Early English Books Online—EEBO. Web.
Hammond, Gerald. The Metaphysical Poets: A Casebook. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1990. Print.
Marvell, Andrew. “On a Drop of Dew” from Miscellaneous Poems. London: Printed for Robert Boulter, 1681. Early English Books Online—EEBO. Web.
Skulsky, Harold. Language Recreated: Seventeenth-Century Metaphorists and the Act of Metaphor. Athens: University of Georgia, 1992. Print.
Smith, A. J. Metaphysical Wit. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print.
Willmott, Richard. Metaphysical Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.
These opposing concepts mashing in Metaphysical metaphors are monsters. A Metaphysical metaphor uses a “range of reference” and connects “emotional and mental concepts,” and observes “likeness between different things” (Willmott 6, Bennett 2). It is the “concrete” combined with the “abstract,” “the remote with the near,” and the “sublime with the commonplace” in order to generate a metaphoric representation of the chaotic 17th century existence (Bennett 3). Although their understanding of the world in which everything was “related and ordered” in a logical and deeply connected manner differed from the segregated language typical of 17th century poetry, they “extract the essence” of ideas in order to discover their commonality and identification with one another (Willmott 33-34). For the Metaphysical poets, understanding their experience is gluing together their fragmented selves by “constantly amalgamating disparate experiences” and fabricating an image as diverse, hybrid, and shocking as their own lives (Bennett 10). Clawing and grasping and struggling and reaching and straining for meaning and identity, Metaphysical poets “yoke together” experiences and senses and images and beliefs and descriptions that society frequently separates (11). “Above all,” Metaphysical metaphors are incredibly “aware” of the universe’s “intricacy” and its interconnected foundations; thus, their consideration of “unlike things” in “familiar terms” allow them to connect the “temporal and eternal” in a way that “reflects the truth about human experience” (Bennett 86, Willmott 39).
These metaphors’ monstrousness emerges because their figurative descriptions are “embodiment[s] of a certain cultural moment” and, therefore, they “signify something other than [themselves]” (Cohen 3). The metaphors themselves are metaphorical beyond their figurative representation of contrasting concepts. The metaphors are fragmented cultural notions that are “bound temporarily to form a loosely integrated net” that produces “an unassimilated hybrid” or “a monstrous body” (3). The metaphors are “odd somatic pieces stitched together” begging for a discovered unity and meaning (12). Metaphysical metaphors are so distinct, so hybrid, so patchy like quilt-work, so different that they stand as monsters that reveal a deeper cultural atmosphere of instability and drowning poetic souls. When attempting to trace Metaphysical metaphors to their roots and to exhaust their meanings, they never reaffirm their own identity in and of themselves because they are deeper metaphors. The metaphors are monsters.
The monsters are reflections of the Metaphysical poet’s identity, they are metamonsters. These metamonsters enable to formation of all kinds of identities” because they are constructed from strings of thoughts and musings and social pressures and sewn together to form a hulking entity (19). Piecing together varying concepts form diverse facets of life, love, and experience in metaphors creates monsters that reflect “new spirals, new and interconnected methods of perceiving the world,” that allow true, full, and complete exploration of identity—especially identity in an unsteady universe (7). And, because of their diversity and controversial fusion, these monsters are the “harbingers of category crisis,” challenging “boundary and normality,” “refusing compartmentalization,” deconstructing binaries, “evading” labels, “undermining” structure, unraveling expected “identity formation,” and normalizing “deviance” (ix, 6-7). These monsters dwell at the gates of difference” and, thus, they are highly threatening to previously constructed ideas of normalcy, “natural,” or even “human” (ix, 8). The metamonsters that the Metaphysical poets fashion have the potential to reveal the authors’ and 17th century society’s very “raison d’etre,” their very reason for being because they explore every aspect of identity (12).
“Figures of speech are done rather than made,” but really figures of speech are Donne rather than made (Skulsky 1). No Metaphysical poet has scarier metamonsters than John Donne. His metaphors are “living creatures,” remarkably “dazzling” because of their delightful, humorous, and striking “play between ordinary and tropical significances” (Skulsky 2, Hammond 155). He passed from “the trivial to the sublime” as well as from the erotic to the religious with an almost “disconcerting abruptness,” and this “evershifting play of wits” masterfully provides deeper insight into human identity and 17th century culture than one- dimensional metaphors can (Bennett 15, Smith 107). This profound juxtaposition coupled with challenges to the “morally conventional” generates monsters that reveal John Donne’s cultural place and his identity (Bennett 16).
No Metaphysical poem has a scarier monster than Donne’s “The Flea.” From this minuscule creature and “the lowest material,” “springs the highest wit” and one humongous monster (Hammond 155). In one tiny entity, Donne represents “you,” “I,” a “mariage bed,” and a “mariage temple” and every symbolism, moral implication, and poetic expression that stems from each of those objects (Donne 12-13). In addition to the amazing all-encompassing nature of such a tiny creature, Donne frames it in layered, mismatched religious and erotic descriptions to add a deeper dimension to the already dense metaphor. Although Donne’s poem describes a narrator coercing a female into fornication in an erotically charged tone, he bombards the stanzas with religious imagery, such as “sinne” and “guilt,” the idea of being “cloystered” like an abbey, and Christ’s crucifixion with the “purpled naile in blood of innocence” (Donne 6, 15, 20). The “flea and the blood” are “physically and morally objectionable” in an erotic, secular way by themselves, but by coupling this moral sin with the “background of scripture teaching,” the poem takes on religious and spiritual transgression (Hammond 155). Donne further develops his monstrous flea by having it engender a specific arithmetic of human interaction. The flea’s blood is “one blood made of two” and there are “three lives in one flea,” which shows Donne’s inability to describe flea in any sort of societally instituted way of measurement (Donne 8, 10). The flea disobeys erotic, religious, and mathematical constructions in a monstrous fashion. The spawning of the flea is a wicked “teratogenesis,” “resisting any hierarchical classification” or “binary oppositions” and (Cohen 7-9). The resulting metamonster is “polyphonous” and a reflection of the incarnation of competing ideals in the human person (8). The flea is a monstrous metaphor that is “difference made flesh,” feeding on flesh, mixing bloods in flesh, showcasing the connection between multiple flesh bodies, and symbolizing what occurs inside of one flesh (8).
The flea, however, extends further. It is “a deeper play of differences” that represents the “base of human nature” and the identity of Donne and every individual (Cohen 7). The tiniest being has the ability, means, and language to “express complex emotion” because of Donne’s ability to “recognize trivial, mundane affairs” in comparison with the gravity of human existence itself (Bennett 15). Through his mismatching of religious language and erotic themes and his own convoluted arithmetic to measure the metaphor’s depth and insight, Donne’s metamonster of the flea demonstrates how the 17th century “world itself,” in all of its confusion and contradiction, “mirrors the human organism in the inherent instability of its cravings and satisfactions” (Smith 108, Hammond 112). With wit, logic, and emotion, Donne equates “blood and life, lovers, a flea, a temple” and much more in a significant manner that allows Donne to connect and to meaningfully group his identity that has been fragmented in an unstable political and religious environment (Hammond 156). “The Flea” gathers the erotic and devotional sides of Donne, which society desperately attempts to separate, and thrusts them together to reveal how the human soul actually has a “beautiful order” and rooted interconnectedness (156).
Like Donne, Andrew Marvell constantly “balances one mode of being against another” and “counterposes opposites” in his metaphors (Skulsky 212-213). In a typical Metaphysical style, Marvell unites “seemingly opposing qualities into unexpected relation” in order to expose his personal struggle to unite seemingly conflicting aspects of his identity (213). Marvell most famously exemplifies his Metaphysical poetic ability in “On a Drop of Dew,” in which he likens a drop of dew to the human soul. “The Soul, that Drop,” is “bound in itself” as a “little globe” atop a “purple flower,” able to keep its shape as its own distinct microcosm due to surface tension (Marvell 19, 6-9). Like this dewdrop, the human soul “cannot be satisfied in the body” and instead finds shallow “rest” on the earth’s surface, but does not mix with the earth or lose its independence (Bennett 111). The drop is barely attached to the physical surroundings, just as the human soul is self-absorbed and divided from the totality of the physical body. Marvell draws together images as diverse as a dewdrop and the human soul, brings them together in a monstrous production, and reveals something deep about Marvell’s conception of human identity. The dewdrop’s and human soul’s entire points are to lose their materiality, ascend to heaven either by evaporation or death, and divorce physicality, and Marvell uses this metaphor to describe the comparable goal of human existence.
The poem’s form even echoes the monstrousness hybridity of Marvell’s metaphor by layering “one kind of speech over another” and incorporating different essences into a complete whole (Hammond 225). Furthermore, Marvell “regulates” the poem’s rhyme scheme as the fusion of the metaphor solidifies in the poem’s latter half (226). Whereas the beginning of the poem had an inconsistent rhyme scheme, the second half of the poem, beginning with the rhyme “unsecure”/“impure” and continuing in a dependable AABBDEDE organization, which parallels the full closure and unification of Marvell’s metaphor (Marvell 15-16). This mastery of language and poetic form shows Marvell’s awareness of “figurative speech as a double demonstration,” both “to be understood” and to be “pointed out while it is implemented” (Skulsky 214). In “On a Drop of Dew,” Marvell produces a jarring metaphor, accommodates this metaphor with his language, and then uses his language to indicate his awareness of his metaphor’s monstrosity.
And his marvellous metaphor is certainly metamonstrous in that it reveals a deeper idea of human purpose and goal. With one outlandish metaphor, Marvell “spotlights the predicament” of humanity in that humans have souls that are incompatible with the physical existence (Bennett 114). The dewdrop “scarce touch[es]” the flower and weeps at its “divi[sion]” from the spiritual, just as the soul dislikes its physical containment and “yearns toward its sacred origin” (Marvell 10-12, Smith 232). In both cases, the physical restricts the spiritual identity of the metaphysical, and Marvell uses this connection as a launching point for his metaphor that extends much beyond a comparison. “On a Drop of Dew” “expresses the dilemma of creatures of a double nature,” trapped between “the several elements of their being” and “struggling to reconcile” their senses and their spirits (Smith 232). Marvell incorporates “fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy” in his metaphor, in the dewdrop’s and soul’s quest to exist physically in the natural world and still retain their metaphysical identity (Cohen 4). Thus, this metaphor examines a more insightful consideration of human identity as a jumbled amalgamation, as an abject monster.
Still in the Metaphysical fashion, but unlike Donne or Marvell, Richard Crashaw’s metaphoric “wit works differently” by reflecting a “celebration” of unlike things rather than a tension or an unsolved “debate” between conflicting images (Smith 173). His sort of “lush ingenuity” unearths and emphasizes the “inherent paradoxicalness of the truths he contemplates,” but he does so in a glorifying fashion (174, 179). He sees difference, unites difference, and cherishes difference because it allows him to “get along with” the opposing nature of his social identity (Skulsky 4). In “On the Wounds of our Crucified Lord,” Crashaw demonstrates this in his metaphor of Christ’s wounds as things through which we sense feelings. Christ’s wounds are monstrous as they are forcibly and awkwardly equated with “Mouthes” and “eyes” (Crashaw 2). In an attempt to understand and identify with Christ’s suffering on the cross, especially his bloody sores and his painful whip marks, Crashaw likens the wounds with things he knows well. By focusing on two sensing mechanisms, the mouth and the eyes, Crashaw exhibits his love to “elaborate sensations,” sensations that are “peculiar and repellant,” but sensuous nonetheless (Bennett 94). Of course, because Crashaw stiches these images together with Christ’s wounds in an elaborate metaphor, he produces a monster.
Instead of simply being sensuous images or sensuous metaphors, Crashaw’s “one sensual image gives rise to another,” which “awakens” the senses beyond the physical, to reveal the much deeper metaphysical understanding of his own identity (Bennett 99, Cohen 17). Crashaw’s further redefinition of body parts, such as his metaphor of a “foot” that “hath got a Mouth and lippes,” further demonstrates Crashaw’s monster production (Crashaw 13). His metaphor portrays the Mannerist body, the perfect fusion of the spiritual, the impossible, and the fantastic with the physical familiarity of the human form. This body is rearranged in an unrealistic and surreal way, and Crashaw continues to extend the body into more unrealistic configurations. The already impossible body begins to weep jewels, such as “Ruby-Teares” and “Pearles” (Crashaw 19-20). Crashaw pairs the human anatomical form with the supernatural and the unattainable in a metaphor for Christ’s wounds and, in doing so, “dwell[s] on the sweetness of the mind and the body” in all its duality and contrast and creates a monstrous metaphor (Bennett 90).
Crashaw’s effort to relate the physical with the spiritual produces a metamonster that reveals the deeper cultural and personal implications for himself and for society. He connects the disassociated parts of his metaphor, but he draws upon such an odd comparison because this religious mystery is deeply unsettling to him. He is desperate to piece together any semblance of understanding of Christ’s Passion, and he creates a monster of the confusing pieces of his disjointed understanding that ends up reflecting a great amount about human identity. Pairing body parts, specifically body parts through which we sense things, with supernatural and impossible arrangements makes a monster that unites “immortality and corporeality” (Cohen 17). Crashaw’s “On the Wounds of our Crucified Lord” exemplifies the idea that, in order to have any sort of connection with Christ’s sacrifice, or any other deeply metaphysical and religious musing, mere mortals must compare it with commonplace things. Through analogy and comparison, humans can come to know the unfamiliar and come to sense and to grasp the extraordinary. Since Crashaw’s revelatory metaphor unites unlike ideas and pieces together components of human existence, it is a metamonster that represents humanity’s eternal struggle to marry the spiritual and the physical.
Metaphysical men mashed many musings into multiple metaphors that made monsters, monsters of metaphors, metamonsters. John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and Richard Crashaw are not simply showing that a flea represents sexual intercourse, a dewdrop is the soul, or Christ’s wounds are displaced body parts because Metaphysical metaphors are extraordinary metaphors. The figurative metaphors have deeper figurative implications, and their meanings extend beyond one level of metaphoric connection. Their metaphors are monsters that “bear self-knowledge, human knowledge” and that “ask us how we perceive the world” and why we perceive it in the way that we do (Cohen 20). In an attempt to string together disjointed aspects of their identities and smooth out uneasiness in their minds, they group a “multitude of fragments” and merge their diverging selves (3). They are Metaphysical monsters, residing “beyond the limits of the Thinkable” and physical, that are only accessible through clashing images and unconventional connections (20). These 17th century metamonsters have the power to expose society, to unleash the true “culture from the monsters they engender,” and to challenge everything humankind assumed about human experience (Cohen 3). In Metaphysical poetry, metamonsters are under every line, in every word, and threaded into the very fabric of any mashed metaphor. Be very afraid.
Works Cited
Bennett, Joan. Five Metaphysical Poets. London: Cambridge UP, 1964. Print.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1996. Print.
Crashaw, Richard. “On the Wounds of Our Crucified Lord” from Steps to the Temple. London: T.W. for Humphrey Moseley, 1646. Early English Books Online—EEBO. Web.
Donne, John. “The Flea” from Poems. London: Elizabeth Purslowe for Henry Seyle, 1633. Early English Books Online—EEBO. Web.
Hammond, Gerald. The Metaphysical Poets: A Casebook. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1990. Print.
Marvell, Andrew. “On a Drop of Dew” from Miscellaneous Poems. London: Printed for Robert Boulter, 1681. Early English Books Online—EEBO. Web.
Skulsky, Harold. Language Recreated: Seventeenth-Century Metaphorists and the Act of Metaphor. Athens: University of Georgia, 1992. Print.
Smith, A. J. Metaphysical Wit. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print.
Willmott, Richard. Metaphysical Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.