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When it was suggested I re-sat Eng. Lit to improve my grades, I was not pleased, even less so, discovering I had to study the poems of John Donne. What did I know about metaphysical poetry? Following a late night discussion in the pub: the kind of stuff you sort of knew what they were talking about but found impossible to explain. Let Chambers deal with that one straightaway: ‘metaphysical is abstract; supernatural; fanciful; beyond nature or the physical; addicted to far-fetched conceits – applied by Johnson to Donne, Cowley and others’.

A revelation. A poet who lead an extraordinary life, whose work, equally, proved to be astonishing: controversial, sensual, intellectually demanding, passionate language, at once abstruse and demotic, startling imagery. That over-worked description, ‘hype’, remember, derives from ‘hyperbole’, something Donne vigorously embraced, whole-hearted or heartbroken, – and here’s possibly the most splendid love poem ever written.

Over four centuries later, he’s still in tune with our day and age – were he writing today, literary critics would probably label his work ‘cutting-edge’. And Donne would smile.

Carole Baldock (a version of this piece is at www.poettext.com)

The Good-Morrow

I wonder by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not wean’d till then?
But suck’d on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?
‘Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be;
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone;
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown;
Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres
Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies, was not mix’d equally;
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die.