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The Metaphysical poets
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Thomas Carew (pronounced Carey) wrote many lyrics and songs,
though with a rather more cynical tone than those of his friend, Sir
John Suckling. He is first noted for an elegy to John Donne and for
one of the best-known masques of the 1630s, Coelum Britannicum,
performed with settings by Inigo Jones in 1634. Carew’s Poems of
1640, the year of his death, range from the erotic to the satirical, and
express passion vividly, as in Mediocrity in Love Rejected:
Give me more love, or more disdain;
The torrid, or the frozen zone,
Bring equal ease unto my pain;
The temperate affords me none:
Either extreme, of love, or hate,
Is sweeter than a calm estate.
The poetry of Thomas Traherne is, more than any other poetry of the
seventeenth century, poetry of joy. He anticipates Christopher Smart in
his celebration of creation, and has even been compared to the nineteenthcentury
American poet Walt Whitman for his unconventional, exuberant
verse forms. Traherne was, however, more moderate in his life than these
comparisons might suggest. He was a devout man who worked in the
sphere of antiquities, publishing Roman Forgeries in 1673, which
documented the falsification of church documents by the church of Rome
in the ninth century. His poems were not published until after his death,
some in Christian Ethics (1675), more in Centuries in 1699 and, through
the good luck of his notebook being found in the 1890s, Poetical Works
in 1903 and Select Meditations in 1908. Like Henry Vaughan, he gives a
highly original depiction of childhood experience, and stresses the need
for the adult to return to an appreciation of childhood simplicity. But
what perhaps sets him apart is his expression of notions of the infinite.
Look how far off those lower Skies
Extend themselves! scarce with mine Eyes
I can them reach. O ye my Friends,
What Secret borders on those Ends?
(Shadows in the Water from Poems of Felicity)