Andrew Marvell
Poet, satirist, and MP for Hull, Andrew Marvell wrote some of English poetry’s wittiest lyrics — including “To His Coy Mistress” — yet his verse stayed in shadow for two centuries before its rediscovery.
Era
metaphysical
7 poems
metaphysical
The Good-Morrow
One of Donne’s greatest love poems. Waking beside his beloved, the speaker calls everything before this love a childish sleep, and argues that their joined love makes one little room a whole world that cannot die.
Death Be Not Proud (Holy Sonnet 10)
John Donne addresses death as a powerless braggart and argues that, for the faithful, it is only a short sleep before eternal waking. A reading of Holy Sonnet 10’s argument, form, and famous closing paradox.
John Donne
Foremost of the Metaphysical poets, John Donne fused intellect, passion, and faith — from audacious love lyrics to the Holy Sonnets and the sermons that made him Dean of St Paul’s.
The Flea
A man argues a woman into bed using a flea that bit them both. It’s the most dazzling sophistry in English, and a sly comedy in which she acts while he only talks, kills the flea, and demolishes his logic with a fingernail.
To His Coy Mistress
Vegetable love, worms, and birds of prey — Marvell’s seduction poem is stranger and more aggressive than “seize the day” suggests, and the mistress never gets to answer.
No Man Is An Island
It isn’t a poem, and it isn’t really about friendship. Donne wrote “No man is an island” as prose while gravely ill, and its subject is death — the funeral bell you hear for a stranger tolls for you too.