Metaphysical Poetry

Read and Journaled by _______________________

A Few Notes on the Metaphysical Period of Poetry:

 Late 16th, mostly 17th century English

 Broke with Renaissance love poetry that put the object of the sonnet on a pedestal
 Meditations on love, death, God, and human frailty
 Famous for its difficulty and obscurity
 Full of wit, irony, paradox, conceit, complex rhyme, scale shifts
 After reducing the elaborate style of metaphysical poetry to the truism of the poem’s meaning, it can
seem cliché.
 A tendency to psychological analysis of emotion of love and religion
 A penchant for imagery that is novel, "unpoetical" and sometimes shocking, drawn from the
commonplace (actual life) or the remote (erudite sources), including the extended metaphor of the
"metaphysical conceit"
 Simple diction (compared to Elizabethan poetry) which echoes the cadences of everyday speech
 Form: frequently an argument (with the poet's lover; with God; with oneself) use of syllogism
 Meter: often rugged, not "sweet" or smooth like Elizabethan verse. This ruggedness goes naturally with
the Metaphysical poets' attitude and purpose: a belief in the perplexity of life, a spirit of revolt, and the
putting of an argument in speech rather than song.
 The best metaphysical poetry is honest, unconventional, and reveals the poet's sense of the complexities
and contradictions of life. It is intellectual, analytical, psychological, and bold; frequently it is
absorbed in thoughts of death, physical love, and religious devotion.
 Philosophical Issues
 Passage of time
 Difficulty of being sure of any one thing
 Uneasy relationship of human beings to each other and God
 Fearful, obsessive qualities that death inspires in human consciousness

A Brief Guide to Metaphysical Poets:

The term "metaphysical," as applied to English and continental European poets of the seventeenth century, was
used by Augustan poets John Dryden and Samuel Johnson to reprove those poets for their "unnaturalness." As
Goethe wrote, however, "the unnatural, that too is natural," and the metaphysical poets continue to be studied
and revered for their intricacy and originality.

John Donne, along with similar but distinct poets such as George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughn,
developed a poetic style in which philosophical and spiritual subjects were approached with reason and
often concluded in paradox. This group of writers established meditation—based on the union of thought and
feeling sought after in Jesuit Ignatian meditation—as a poetic mode.

The metaphysical poets were eclipsed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by romantic and Victorian
poets, but twentieth century readers and scholars, seeing in the metaphysicals an attempt to understand pressing
political and scientific upheavals, engaged them with renewed interest. In his essay "The Metaphysical Poets,"
T. S. Eliot, in particular, saw in this group of poets a capacity for "devouring all kinds of experience."

John Donne (1572 – 1631) was the most influential metaphysical poet. His personal relationship with
spirituality is at the center of most of his work, and the psychological analysis and sexual realism of his work
marked a dramatic departure from traditional, genteel verse. His early work, collected in Satires and in Songs
and Sonnets, was released in an era of religious oppression. His Holy Sonnets, which contains many of Donne’s
most enduring poems, was released shortly after his wife died in childbirth. The intensity with which Donne
grapples with concepts of divinity and mortality in the Holy Sonnets is exemplified in "Sonnet X [Death, be not
proud]," "Sonnet XIV [Batter my heart, three person’d God]," and "Sonnet XVII [Since she whom I loved hath
paid her last debt]."

George Herbert (1593 – 1633) and Andrew Marvell (1621 – 1678) were remarkable poets who did not live to
see a collection of their poems published. Herbert, the son of a prominent literary patron to whom Donne
dedicated his Holy Sonnets, spent the last years of his short life as a rector in a small town. On his deathbed, he
handed his poems to a friend with the request that they be published only if they might aid "any dejected poor
soul." Marvell wrote politically charged poems that would have cost him his freedom or his life had they been
public. He was a secretary to John Milton, and once Milton was imprisoned during the Restoration, Marvell
successfully petitioned to have the elder poet freed. His complex lyric and satirical poems were collected after
his death amid an air of secrecy.

Poets.org
Excerpts from T.S. Eliot’s "The Metaphysical Poets"

First published in the Times Literary Supplement, 20 October 1921.

It is difficult to find any precise use of metaphor, simile, or other conceit, which is common to all the poets and
at the same time important enough as an element of style to isolate these poets as a group. Donne, and often
Cowley, employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically 'metaphysical'; the elaboration
(contrasted with the condensation) of a figure of speech to the furthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it.
Thus Cowley develops the commonplace comparison of the world to a chess-board through long stanzas ("To
Destiny"), and Donne, with more grace, in "A Valediction," the comparison of two lovers to a pair of
compasses. But elsewhere we find, instead of the mere explication of the content of a comparison, a
development by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader.

On a round ball
A workeman that hath copies by, can lay
An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,
And quickly make that, which was nothing, All,
So cloth each teare,
Which thee cloth weare,
A globe, yea world by that impression grow,
Till thy tears mixt with mine doe overflow
This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.

Here we find at least two connections which are not implicit in the first figure, but are forced upon it by the
poet: from the geographer's globe to the tear, and the tear to the deluge. On the other hand, some of Donne's
most successful and characteristic effects are secured by brief words and sudden contrasts:

A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,

where the most powerful effect is produced by the sudden contrast of associations of 'bright hair' and of 'bone'.
This telescoping of images and multiplied associations is characteristic of the phrase of some of the dramatists
of the period which Donne knew: not to mention Shakespeare, it is frequent in Middleton, Webster, and
Tourneur, and is one of the sources of the vitality of their language… And in one of the finest poems of the age
(a poem which could not have been written in any other age), the "Exequy" of Bishop King, the extended
comparison is used with perfect success: the idea and the simile become one, in the passage in which the Bishop
illustrates his impatience to see his dead wife, under the figure of a journey:
Stay for me there; I will not faile
To meet thee in that hollow Vale.
And think not much of my delay;
I am already on the way, And follow thee with all the speed
Desire can make, or sorrows breed.
Each minute is a short degree,
And ev'ry houre a step towards thee.
At night when I retake to rest,
Next morn I rise nearer my West
Of life, almost by eight houres sail,
Than when sleep breath'd his drowsy gale....
But heark! My Pulse, like a soft Drum
Beats my approach, tells Thee I come;
And slow howere my marches be,
I shall at last sit down by Thee
.
…It is to be observed that the language of these poets is as a rule simple and pure; in the verse of George
Herbert this simplicity is carried as far as it can go - a simplicity emulated without success by numerous modern
poets. The structure of the sentences, on the other hand, is sometimes far from simple, but this is not a vice; it is
a fidelity to thought and feeling. The effect, at its best, is far less artificial than that of an ode by Gray. And as
this fidelity induces variety of thought and feeling, so it induces variety of music. We doubt whether, in the
eighteenth century, could be found two poems in nominally the same metre, so dissimilar as Marvell's "Coy
Mistress" and Crashaw's "Saint Teresa"; the one producing an effect of great speed by the use of short syllables,
and the other an ecclesiastical solemnity by the use of long ones:

Love thou art absolute sole lord

Of life and death.

…their (the metaphysical poets’) attempts were always analytic'; …after the dissociation, they put the material
together again in a new unity. It is certain that the dramatic verse of the later Elizabethan and early Jacobean
poets expresses a degree of development of sensibility which is not found in any of the prose, good as it often
is. … there is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling, which is exactly
what we find in Donne:

in this one thing, all the discipline

Of manners and of manhood is contained
A man to join himself with th' Universe
In his main sway, and make in all things fit
One with that All, and go on, round as it
Not plucking from the whole his wretched part
And into straits, or into nought revert,
Wishing the complete Universe might be
Subject to such a rag of it as he;
But to consider great Necessity.
We compare this with some modern passage:
No, when the fight begins within himself
A man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head,
Satan looks up between his feet - both tug -
He's left, himself i' the middle; the soul wakes
And grows. Prolong that battle through his life!
It is perhaps somewhat less fair, though very tempting as both poets are concerned with the perpetuation of love
by offspring, to compare with the stanzas already quoted from Lord Herbert's Ode the following from
Tennyson:
One walked between wife and child,
With measured footfall firm and mild,
And now and then he gravely smiled.
The prudent partner of his blood
Leaned on him, faithful, gentle, good
Wearing the rose of womanhood.
And in their double love secure,
The little maiden walked demure,
Pacing with downward eyelids pure.
These three made unity so sweet,
My frozen heart began to beat,
Remembering its ancient heat.

The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is something which had happened to the
mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and
Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are
poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to
Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is
constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary.
The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with
the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming
new wholes. …The possible interests of a poet are unlimited; the more intelligent he is the better; the more
intelligent he is the more likely that he will have interests: our only condition is that he turn them into poetry,
and not merely meditate on them poetically. A philosophical theory which has entered into poetry is established,
for its truth or falsity in one sense ceases to matter, and its truth in another sense is proved. The poets in
question have, like other poets, various faults. But they were, at best, engaged in the task of trying to find the
verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling. And this means both that they are more mature, and that they
wear better, than later poets of certainly not less literary ability.It is not a permanent necessity that poets should
be interested in philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our
civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity,
and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results.
The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to
dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. … But poets more classical than they have the same essential
quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind.

Literary Terms:

Sonnet - a sonnet is a distinctive poetic style that uses system or pattern of metrical structure and verse
composition usually consisting of fourteen lines, arranged in a set rhyme scheme or pattern. There are two main
styles of sonnet, the Italian sonnet and the English sonnet. The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, named after
Petrarch (1304-1374) a fourteenth century writer and the best known poet to use this form, was developed by
the Italian poet Guittone of Arezzo (1230-1294) in the thirteenth century. Usually written in iambic pentameter,
it consists first of an octave, or eight lines, which asks a question or states a problem or proposition and follows
the rhyme scheme a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a. The sestet, or last six lines, offers an answer, or a resolution to the proposed
problem, and follows the rhyme scheme c-d-e-c-d-e.
When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
"Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?"
I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait."
John Milton, "When I Consider How My Light Is Spent"
The sonnet was first brought to England by Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in the sixteenth
century, where the second sonnet form arose. The English or Shakespearean sonnet was named after William
Shakespeare (1564-1616) who most believed to the best writer to use the form. Adapting the Italian form to the
English, the octave and sestet were replaced by three quatrains, each having its own independent rhyme scheme
typically rhyming every other line, and ending with a rhyme couplet. Instead of the Italianic break between the
octave and the sestet, the break comes between the twelfth and thirteenth lines. The ending couplet is often the
main thought change of the poem, and has an epigrammatic ending. It follows the rhyme scheme a-b-a-b, c-d-c-
d, e-f-e-f, g-g.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all to short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d:
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d.
By thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wandered in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Shakespeare, Sonnet XVIII. See Benet’s Readers Encyclopedia, Handbook to Literature, Literature: An
Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Michael Prevatte, Student, University of North Carolina at
Pembroke

Paradox- reveals a kind of truth which at first seems contradictory. Two opposing ideas.

ex:
Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage.

I have always taught it that it is something that seems contradictory on

the surface, but on closer inspection actually holds a truth.
In Macbeth...."Fair is foul and foul is fair"; "lesser than he but
greater"; "not so happy, yet happier"
In 1984..."War is Peace"; "Freedom is Slavery"; "Ignorance is strength"
Pathetic fallacy - The attribution of human traits to nature or inanimate objects.
[Coined by John Ruskin in 1856.]

"A good metaphor should never be missed, and Hardie, a poet before she was a novelist, is alert, in a labored
sort of way, to the possibilities of some fine pathetic fallacy. One passage, after a pointless bout of cruelty by
Hannie, describes her black mood: `She felt rudderless and directionless, like the dead sheep the November
rains had carried down the river. Day after day it had drifted up and down, up and down, moving swiftly away
with the pull of the sea's ebbing tide, pushing back again as it rose. Bloated, a perch for the gulls. Until it
snagged on some drowned tree and left off its journeying.'" Catherine Lockerbie, Green Unpleasant Land, New
York Times Book Review, Dec 22, 2002.

Personification - giving human qualities to animals or objects.

Anthropomorphism - is used with God or gods. The act of attributing human forms or qualities to entities
which are not human. Specifically, anthropomorphism is the describing of gods or goddesses in human forms
and possessing human characteristics such as jealousy, hatred, or love.

Mythologies of ancient peoples were almost entirely concerned with anthropomorphic gods. The Greek gods
such as Zeus and Apollo often were depicted in anthropomorphic forms. The avatars of the Hindu god Vishnu
possessed human forms and qualities.

Current religions holds that is not logical to describe the Christian God, who is believed to be omnipotent and
omnipresent, as human. However, it is extremely difficult for the average person to picture or discuss God or
the gods without an anthropomorphic framework.

In art and literature, anthropomorphism frequently depicts deities in human or animal forms possessing the
qualities of sentiment, speech and reasoning.

Reminds me of the old Mark Twain quotation "God created man in his image, and man, being a gentleman,
returned the compliment."

Lyric - a lyric is a song-like poem written mainly to express the feelings of emotions or thought from a
particular person, thus separating it from narrative poems. These poems are generally short, averaging roughly
twelve to thirty lines, and rarely go beyond sixty lines. These poems express vivid imagination as well as
emotion and all flow fairly concisely. Because of this aspect, as well as their steady rhythm, they were often
used in song. In fact, most people still see a "lyric" as anything that is sung along to a musical instrument.

Metaphysical conceit - a far-fetched and ingenious extended comparison (or "conceit") used by metaphysical
poets to explore all areas of knowledge. It finds telling and unusual analogies for the poet's ideas in the
startlingly esoteric or the shockingly commonplace -- not the usual stuff of poetic metaphor.

Iambic Pentameter - The term describes the particular rhythm that the words establish in that line. That rhythm
is measured in small groups of syllables; these small groups of syllables are called "feet". The word "iambic"
describes the type of foot that is used (in English, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable). The
word "pentameter" indicates that a line has five of these "feet."

Couplet - a style of poetry defined as a complete thought written in two lines with rhyming ends. The most
popular of the couplets is the heroic couplet. The heroic couplet consists of two rhyming lines of iambic
pentameter usually having a pause in the middle of each line. One of William Shakespeare’s trademarks was to
end a sonnet with a couplet, as in the poem “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day”:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long as lives this, and this gives life to thee.
By using the couplet Shakespeare would often signal the end of a scene in his plays as well. An example of a
scene’s end signaled by a couplet is the end of Act IV of Othello. The scene ends with Desdemona’s lines:
Good night. Good night. Heaven me such uses send.
Not to pick bad from bad, but by bad mend.
See A Handbook to Literature, Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Mirriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature,
Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Monica Horne, Student, University of North
Carolina at Pembroke

Poetic contraction – the creative shortening of a word to preserve rhythm or rhyme.

ex: ever – into – e’er; morning –into – morn

Inversion – words out of order; Another device of poetry is the changing of the usual order of words. This is
called inversion, and is found mostly in the work of older classical poets. But it is sometimes used by modern
writers for the sake of emphasis. Emily Dickinson was fond of arranging words outside of their familiar order.
For example in "Chartless" she writes "Yet know I how the heather looks" and "Yet certain am I of the spot."
Instead of saying "Yet I know" and "Yet I am certain" she reverses the usual order and shifts the emphasis to the
more important words. In these lines she calls attention to the swiftness of her knowledge and the power of her
certainty. Similarly in "Love in Jeopardy" there is a peculiar but logical inversion. Humbert Wolfe wrote:
Here by the rose-tree
they planted once
of Love in Jeopardy
an Italian bronze.
Wolfe was describing an old statue and he wanted to suggest an old-fashioned effect. He got his "antique" effect
partly by using queer rhymes like "once-bronze," and "zither-together," partly by twisting the ordinary manner
of speaking. Had he written "Once upon a time they erected (or planted) a bronze figure named 'Love in
Jeopardy' (or Danger) next to a rose-tree" it would have seemed commonplace, and the poet would have lost the
quaintness of the picture as well as the arresting oddity of phrasing.

This is one reason why a writer chooses poetry rather than prose. By a trick of a word or the turn of a phrase, he
arrests the attention of the reader, and makes him see old things in a new light. Even the very shape of a poem
says " Stop! Look! and Listen!"

Slant rhyme - is also known as near rhyme, half rhyme, off rhyme, imperfect rhyme, oblique rhyme, or
pararhyme. A distinctive system or pattern of metrical structure and verse composition in which two words have
only their final consonant sounds and no preceding vowel or consonant sounds in common. Instead of perfect or
identical sounds or rhyme, it is the repetition of near or similar sounds or the pairing of accented and unaccented
sounds that if both were accented would be perfect rhymes (stopped and wept, parable and shell). Alliteration,
assonance, and consonance are accepted as slant rhyme due to their usage of sound combinations (spilled and
spoiled, chitter and chatter). By not allowing the reader to predict or expect what is coming slant rhyme allows
the poet to express things in different or certain ways. Slant rhyme was most common in the Irish, Welsh and
Icelandic verse and prose long before Henry Vaughn used it in English. Not until William Butler Yeats and
Gerald Manley Hopkins began to use slant rhyme did it become regularly used in English.Wilfred Owen was
one of the first poets to realize the impact of rhyming consonants in a consistent pattern. A World War I soldier
he sought a powerful means to convey the harshness of war. Killed in action, his most famous work was written
in the year prior to his death.

Now men will go content with what we spoiled

Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled,
They will be swift with the swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery,
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.

Alliteration - the repetition of initial sounds in neighboring words.

Alliteration is the genus, whereas, assonance and consonance are the species. So an example would be
alliteration and then more specifically and exactly consonance or assonance.

"lady lounges lazily" is both alliteration and consonance

Assonance - the repetition of vowel sounds but not consonant sounds as in consonance.

ex:
fleet feet sweep by sleeping geeks.

Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds, but not vowels, as in assonance.

ex:
lady lounges lazily , dark deep dread crept in

Metaphysical Poetry

Death, be not proud (Holy Sonnet 10)

by John Donne (1572 – 1631)

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou'art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy'or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
 This flea is you and I, and this
The Flea Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
by John Donne Though parents grudge, and you, we're met,
And cloister'd in these living walls of jet.
MARK but this flea, and mark in this, Though use make you apt to kill me,
How little that which thou deniest me is ; Let not to that self-murder added be,
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee, And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know'st that this cannot be said Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ; Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Yet this enjoys before it woo, Wherein could this flea guilty be,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two Except in that drop which it suck'd from thee?
; Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thou
And this, alas! is more than we would do. Find'st not thyself nor me the weaker now.
'Tis true ; then learn how false fears be ;
O stay, three lives in one flea spare, Just so much honour, when thou yield'st to me,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are. Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee.

Love (III)
by George Herbert (1593 – 1633) I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin. "Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack Go where it doth deserve."
From my first entrance in, "And know you not," says Love, "who bore the
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning blame?"
If I lacked anything. "My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my
"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here": meat."
Love said, "You shall be he." So I did sit and eat
"I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
To His Coy Mistress
by Andrew Marvell (1621 – 1678)
But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
Had we but world enough, and time, And yonder all before us lie
This coyness, Lady, were no crime. Deserts of vast eternity.
We would sit down and think which way Thy beauty shall no more be found,
To walk and pass our long love's day. Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side My echoing song: then worms shall try
Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide That long preserved virginity,
Of Humber would complain. I would And your quaint honour turn to dust,
Love you ten years before the Flood, And into ashes all my lust:
And you should, if you please, refuse The grave's a fine and private place,
Till the conversion of the Jews. But none, I think, do there embrace.
My vegetable love should grow Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Vaster than empires, and more slow; Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
An hundred years should go to praise And while thy willing soul transpires
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze; At every pore with instant fires,
Two hundred to adore each breast; Now let us sport us while we may,
But thirty thousand to the rest; And now, like amorous birds of prey,
An age at least to every part, Rather at once our time devour
And the last age should show your heart; Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
For, Lady, you deserve this state, Let us roll all our strength and all
Nor would I love at lower rate. Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
 Eyes, hands, and feet they had like mine;
Another sun did with them shine.

'Twas strange that people there should walk,

And yet I could not hear them talk:
That through a little watery chink,
Which one dry ox or horse might drink,
We other worlds should see,
Yet not admitted be;
And other confines there behold
Of light and darkness, heat and cold.

I called them oft, but called in vain;

No speeches we could entertain:
Yet did I there expect to find
Some other world, to please my mind.
I plainly saw by these
A new antipodes,
Whom, though they were so plainly seen,
A film kept off that stood between.

By walking men's reversèd feet

I chanced another world to meet;
Though it did not to view exceed
Shadows in the Water A phantom, 'tis a world indeed;
by Thomas Traherne (born 1637) Where skies beneath us shine,
And earth by art divine
Another face presents below,
In unexperienced infancy Where people's feet against ours go.
Many a sweet mistake doth lie:
Mistake though false, intending true; Within the regions of the air,
A seeming somewhat more than view; Compassed about with heavens fair,
That doth instruct the mind Great tracts of land there may be found
In things that lie behind, Enriched with fields and fertile ground;
And many secrets to us show Where many numerous hosts
Which afterwards we come to know. In those far distant coasts,
For other great and glorious ends
Thus did I by the water's brink Inhabit, my yet unknown friends.
Another world beneath me think;
And while the lofty spacious skies O ye that stand upon the brink,
Reversèd there, abused mine eyes, Whom I so near me through the chink
I fancied other feet With wonder see: what faces there,
Came mine to touch or meet; Whose feet, whose bodies, do ye wear?
As by some puddle I did play I my companions see
Another world within it lay. In you another me.
They seemèd others, but are we;
Beneath the water people drowned, Our second selves these shadows be.
Yet with another heaven crowned,
In spacious regions seemed to go Look how far off those lower skies
As freely moving to and fro: Extend themselves! scarce with mine eyes
In bright and open space I can them reach. O ye my friends,
I saw their very face; What secret borders on those ends?
 Are lofty heavens hurled In other selves, what can it mean?
'Bout your inferior world? But that below the purling stream
Are yet the representatives Some unknown joys there be
Of other peoples' distant lives? Laid up in store for me;
To which I shall, when that thin skin
Of all the playmates which I knew Is broken, be admitted in.
That here I do the image view