Early 17th c. Verse

1
Early 17th c. Verse

• A Tale of Two Schools?
• The Cavalier Poets---Sons of Ben
• John Donne and the Metaphysicals

2
Some Traditional Cavalier Characteristics

• Balance//Parallelism
• Polite Courtly Diction and Tone
• Octosyllabic Couplets and Caesurae
• ExampleStill to be Neat (p. 1444)

3
Metaphysical Poets

• Origin of term
• Some characteristics
• Colloquialism (Jonson Donne, for not keeping of
  accent deserved hanging)
• Intellectual complexity
• Argumentation
• Anti-Petrarchanism
• Metaphysical conceits (discordia
  concorsharmonious discord)

4
How Ive Organized this Unit

• Religion, Politics, Love
• Elegy 19 (p. 1283)
• The Two Schools

5
John Donne
6
John Donne

• Jack Donne/Dr. Donne
• Keep track of poetic persona

7
The Flea (p. 1263)

• Argumentation
• Metaphysical conceit
• Mixture of secular and religious language

8
Secular/Religious language

• The Canonization (p. 1267)
• The Relic (p. 1280)

9
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning(p. 1275)

• Blending of religious and secular
• Colloquial, intellectually complex, argumentative

10
Carpe Diem Poems

• Herrick To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
  (p. 1659)
• Trochaic tetrameter
• (Trochee stressed, unstressed)
• Flow, movement
• Classical sources

11
Carpe Diem

• Marvell To His Coy Mistress (p. 1703)
• Iambic tetrameter couplets
• (iamb unstressed, stressed)
• Begins with familiar courtly elementshyperbole,
  blazon
• A darker turn

12
Jonson, To Penshurst (p. 1434)

• Sidney family home
• Country house poem
• How is this poem structured?
• Shaped through description of the estate
• Awareness of social hierarchy
• (peasants to kingJonsons background)
• Time also adds order
• Negative contrastclassic Jonson?

13
Lanyer Cookham

• Justifying the poets voice
• Elegiac (ll. 7, 9, 14, 128)
• How do pastimes differ from Penshurst?
• (line 161)
• Virtuous women (l. 81 ff)
• Preserving the estate through poem (lines 205-100