Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Definition of Love’ (1681)

Why are 17th century poets like John Donne, George Herbert and Andrew Marvell called ‘metaphysical’ poets? You can trace the name back to John Dryden, who in an unabashedly sexist comment accused John Donne of “affect[ing] the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses… perplex[ing] the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love.”

Well, the Metaphysical poets proved that you can in fact engage the heart with science.

In this week’s poem, Andrew Marvell builds a geometrical and astronomical metaphor to describe doomed love, born of “Despair/ Upon Impossibility.” Like a geometrical object, Love is defined by its angles and lines: oblique lines meet, but these two parallel lovers will never join, no matter how infinite their span. Poles, planispheres (two-dimensional maps), conjunctions, oppositions – this is the language of astronomical measurement, which is what it takes to describe a love born like an “object strange and high.”

The Definition of Love

			1
My Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.

			2
Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne'er have flown
But vainly flapped its tinsel wing.

			3
And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended Soul is fixt,
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowds itself betwixt.

			4
For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect loves; nor lets them close:
Their union would her ruin be,
And her tyrannic pow'r depose.

			5
And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as the distant Poles have placed,
(Though Love's whole world on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embraced.

			6
Unless the giddy Heaven fall,
And Earth some new convulsion tear;
And, us to join, the world should all
Be cramped into a Planisphere.

			7
As lines so Loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet:
But our so truly parallel,
Though infinite can never meet.

			8
Therefore the Love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the Conjunction of the mind,
And Opposition of the stars.

Image credit: Kepler’s diagram of the geocentric trajectory of Mars through several periods of apparent retrograde motion. Astronomia nova, Chapter 1, (1609), via Wikipedia

George Herbert’s “Vanity (I)” (1633)

Science has always made people uncomfortable. Witness the recent comments from the U.S. House Science (Denial) and Technology Committee:

We’ve had climate change since the day the earth was formed, whenever that was, depending on whatever you believe. — Rep. Bill Posey (R – FL)

I just don’t know how y’all prove those hypotheses going back fifty, a hundred, you might say thousands or not even millions of years, and how you postulate those forward. — Rep. Randy Weber (R – TX)

These confused politicians are part of a long tradition that stretches back to the beginnings of modern science itself. George Herbert was a friend of Francis Bacon, but the pious Herbert wanted nothing to do with Bacon’s radical ideas about the natural world. Herbert’s recent biographer John Drury explains:

Long before the discoveries of Darwin and modern astrophysics, some explanation of how everything had come into existence and how it worked was required. Divine creation provided that, had no challengers, and held the field. The natural world presented no moral problems. Rather, it provided ample scope for the investigation of the heavens and the earth which was beginning to gather pace among intellectuals, led by Herbert’s older friend Sir Francis Bacon. In his early poem ‘Vanity (I)’ Herbert was chary about such ‘philosophy’ as it was called, dismissing astronomy and chemistry as too speculative to occupy the valuable time of the practical Christian.

Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert, John Drury p. 12

In Herbert’s “Vanity (I),” we find the classic accusations: science is a result of pride and presumption, rendering the dynamic living world inert or dead. Notice also the metaphor of the rape of nature, which pops up frequently throughout history — and was not only used by the opponents of science.

In spite of Herbert’s condemnation of the most effective and intellectually honest way to comprehend nature, we can appreciate the language of one of the 17th century’s greatest poets.

Vanity (I)

                  The fleet astronomer can bore,
And thread the spheres with his quick-piercing mind:
He views their stations, walks from door to door,
                  Surveys, as if he had designed
To make  purchase there: he sees their dances,
                        And knoweth long before,
Both their full-eyed aspects, and secret glances.


                  The nimble Driver with his side
Cuts through the working waves, that he may fetch
His dearly-earned pearl, which God did hide
                  On purpose from the vent'rous wretch;
That he might save his life, and also hers,
                         Who with excessive pride
Her own destruction and his danger wears.


                  The subtle Chymick can devest
And strip the creature naked, till he find
The callow principles within their nest:
                  There he imparts to them his mind,
Admitted to their bed-chamber, before
                          They appear trim and drest
To ordinary suitors at the door.


                   What hath not man sought out and found,
But his dear God? who yet his glorious law
Embosoms in us, mellowing the ground
                   With showers and frosts, with love and awe,
So that we need not say, Where's this command?
                          Poor Man, thou searchest round
To find our death; but missest life at hand.

Image credit: “Vanitas,” Adam Bernaert (1665)

George Herbert’s “The Storm” (1633)

Why does nature move us? Driving through the South Dakota Badlands this summer was a moving experience. The bare, jagged landscape evoked feelings of calm, happiness, and awe — how can a bunch of rocks have such emotional resonance?

Neurobiologists have struggled to understand the biological basis of a sense of beauty. As Bevil Conway and Alexander Rehding wrote:

Insofar as beauty is a product of the brain, correlations between brain activity and experiences of beauty must exist. At what spatial scale, and within what brain regions, do we find these correlations? What functions do the brain regions implicated serve in other behaviors? What signals during development and experience are responsible for wiring up these circuits? And perhaps most critically, how does the activity of these circuits integrate across modalities and time to bring about the dynamic, elusive quality of beauty?

We don’t know what it is about natural beauty that specifically activates those circuits, or even what those circuits are. But an psychological link between nature and our brains seems to be a universal trait.

In “The Storm,” the great English metaphysical poet George Herbert links the awe-inspiring action of a thunderstorm with the movement of his conscience.

The Storm

If as the winds and waters here below
                                    Do fly and flow,
My sighs and tears as busy were above;
                                    Sure they would move
And much affect thee, as tempestuous times
Amaze poor mortals, and object their crimes.

Stars have their storms, ev'n in a high degree,
                                    As well as we.
A throbbing conscience spurred by remorse
                                    Hath a strange force:
It quits the earth, and mounting more and more
Dares to assault thee, and besiege thy door.

There it stands knocking, to thy music's wrong,
                                    And drowns the song.
Glory and honour are set by, till it
                                    An answer get.
Poets have wronged poor storms: such days are best;
They purge the air without, within the breast.

Image credit: Badlands National Park, Michael White, 2014.

William Carlos Williams’ “Labrador” (1948)

It’s National Poetry Month, and we’re continuing our focus on the poems of William Carlos Williams.

As much as we might wish to have a unified understanding of nature, we have no choice but to break it into tractable chunks. Richard Feynman put it eloquently in his Lectures on Physics:

If we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of the stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts – physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on – remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!

In his poem “Labrador,” William Carlos Williams expresses the same tension between the seamless workings of nature and and his “straining mind.” The poem recalls a vacation Williams took to Labrador, where he swam in the icy waters of Northern Canada.

The poem begins with an image of nature’s forces in action: the firm rocks and the “waters of the world” that wash around them. Set against this display of power is Williams, cold, pale, with his awkward limbs. His straining, observing mind, struggles to find concepts to comprehend the sea. But the sea, unmarred by the poet’s entry into the water and not recognizing the categories with which he divides the world, simply lifts Williams and his mind in a single, effortless gesture.

Labrador

How clean these shallows
how firm these rocks stand
about which wash
the waters of the world

It is ice to this body
that unclothes its pallors 
to thoughts
of an immeasurable sea,

unmarred, that as it lifts
encloses this
straining mind, these
limbs in a single gesture.

“Labrador,” William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems, ed. Charles Tomlinson (New York: New Directions, 1985), originally published in The Clouds, (Wells College Press/Cummington Press, 1948)

Read more science poems at the Finch & Pea.

Image credit: William Bradford, “Near Cape St. Johns, Coast of Labrador” (1874), via Wikimedia Commons