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Innovation et tradition de la Renaissance aux Lumières

 | 
Franck Lessay
, 
François Laroque

II. Penser l’innovation

New Science and New Poetry: the “Subtle Knot”1

Margaret Llasera

Résumé

Un nouveau genre poétique émerge en même temps que les théories cosmologiques de Gilbert, Kepler et Galilée qui confirment l'hypothèse révolutionnaire de Copernic. Dans une synthèse qui réunit la mort, l'astronomie et les recherches anatomiques, John Donne forge une nouvelle vision du cosmos tout en regrettant la dislocation de l'ordre ancien. Le vieux thème de la mutabilité se transforme en une exploration de l'idée de mouvement et, en cela, Donne suit les préoccupations mécanistes de l'époque. Le fonctionnement invisible des phénomènes naturels intéresse aussi bien les hommes de science que les poètes : Henry Vaughan intègre à ses interrogations sur la nature de l'amour divin des métaphores tirées de théories d'optique. La mise en cause du discours imagé par les membres de la Royal Society coïncide avec la disparition de la poésie “métaphysique” anglaise, qui avait tissé, dans un “noeud subtil”, nouvelle science et nouvelle poésie.

Texte intégral

  • 1 I have developed some of the ideas expressed here in Représentations scientifiques et images poétiq (...)
  • 2 Textual references are to J. Donne's Poetical Works, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, Oxford, O.U.P., 1990.

1It is well-known that the astronomical discoveries of the early seventeenth century fired the poetic imagination. Galileo's sighting of countless new stars, of mountains on the moon and of moons circling Jupiter changed the world picture irrevocably, and within a year of the publication of Sidereus Nuncius, John Donne, in “An Anatomie of the World” or “The first Anniversary” of 1611, refers to the changing heavens and to the new science or “new philosophy” that — regrettably in his opinion — calls into doubt the old world order. Bemoaning the decline of man and of the cosmos, in this poem and in its sequel, “Of the Progresse of the Soule” or “The second Anniversary” of 1612, Donne is nonetheless fascinated by the new notions even if he harshly criticizes man's hankering after piecemeal knowledge on this earth when “In heaven thou straight know'st all” (line 299)2.

  • 3 This is the suggestion put forward by Robert Ellrodt, who examines different theories in Les Poètes (...)
  • 4 See Maureen Sabine, Feminine Engendered Faith, London, Macmillan, 1992, pp. x-xi, 78-81.

2The two poems are themselves strikingly novel. Ostensibly listing the virtues of Sir Robert Drury's daughter, Elizabeth, who died at the age of fourteen, the poems are in fact reflections upon the degenerate condition of man and meditations upon death that move from a sombre and even scornful estimation of our life on this earth to a joyous celebration of the liberated soul in heaven. The hyperbolic praise of Elizabeth Drury is embarrassing as such, and goes way beyond what a poet would need to say even if the work were commissioned. Thus the meaning attributed to Elizabeth's soul requires further elucidation and has been interpreted in various ways: as the Idea of virtue, beauty, perfection or vitality, or as the reminder that our own soul is immortal and a warning not to cling to the decaying body of our mortal world; more theologically, Elizabeth's death has symbolized Christ's sacrifice, the dissolution of the universal church3 or England's loss of the Virgin Mary herself4. But going beyond the difficulty of an overall explanation, when in any case the poet is obviously unconcerned about following a single allegorical thread, it is interesting to note that the vision of a soul holding this earth together until it travels, through the cosmos, to heaven also allows for an extraordinary number of scientific reflections that encompass many of the newest medical and cosmological ideas of the time. Like a latter-day Vesalius dissecting and commenting upon a corpse before a host of avidly curious spectators, at a time when William Harvey, after studying anatomy and dissection in Padua was in London working out his theory of the circulation of the blood which he was to teach from 1615, Donne undertakes to “anatomize” the body of our ageing earth, man's own body and mankind's body of knowledge. Regretting the decay of the body in question, he is delighting in an imaginary and very modem dissection.

An Anatomy of the Cosmos

3The explosion of new scientific theories in the seventeenth century threw into doubt many cherished Systems of thought and this led Donne and others to see not so much an advance of knowledge as a proliferation of alternative beliefs and therefore a jarring of the former harmony. To stress this new dislocation, however, Donne needs to highlight the very ideas he distrusts. Thus, a melancholy Jacobean elegy that treats the traditional theme of mutability, decribing the physical and intellectual warping of man as well as the flawing of the perfection of the heavens, also turns out to be an unprecedented anatomico-astronomical exploration of the body and of the cosmos in a newly-wrought synthesis of the microcosm and macrocosm. A new deterioration goes hand-in-hand with new science in a poem that both shatters old ideas and reasserts them, this time in the new mood of doubt and disquiet.

4That the “body” of the earth is cemented and animated, until her death, by the soul of Elizabeth Drury is a notion based on one of the most seminal theories of seventeenth-century cosmology put forward by William Gilbert in his work De Magnete (1600). After an exhaustive study of the properties of the loadstone and of loadstones of different shapes, Gilbert experimented with a round magnet and eventually suggested that the earth itself is nothing but one big magnet. He went on to conclude that magnetism is indeed the force that gives the earth cohesion and he described this force as the world soul. Kepler was to develop this idea and suggest, in support of the Copernican theory, that the sun's action on the planets is magnetic. Such notions were to influence Newton in his discovery of universal gravity. In “The first Anniversary”, John Donne takes hold of the Gilbertian notion of a magnetic anima mundi in order to convey the force of Elizabeth Drury's soul:

She that should all parts to reunion bow,
She that had all Magnetique force alone,
To draw, and fasten sundred parts in one [...]
Shee, shee is dead... (11.220-2, 237)

5Thus a revolutionary concept concerning the cohesion of the earth and the role of magnetism in agglutinating the separate pieces is invoked in a passage regretting the dislocation of a world that is “deprav'd”, “corrupt” and “out of joynt” (ll.194, 192).

  • 5 My italics.

6The voyage of the soul to heaven, in “The second Anniversary”, is the pretext for allusions to contemporary cosmological Systems, which are all satirized (ll.185-219). Leaving earth, Elizabeth comes to the inferior region of the air which is the place of meteorological phenomena (“Meteors”), then the middle region, followed by the sphere of rire, the moon, Venus, Mercury, the sun, Mars, Jupiter and the firmament. At first reading we feel this to be the Ptolemaic universe, but it is not quite so. First, perhaps with Kepler's refutation in mind (Dioptrice, 1611), the poet has doubts about the sphere of fire: “For th'Element of Fire, she doth not know, / Whether she past by such a place or no” (ll.193-4). Then, the positions of Venus and Mercury are reversed with regard to the Ptolemaic order; only a Copernican voyager, travelling from the earth to the sun, would reach first Venus, then Mercury. As for the whereabouts of the sun, it is uncertain whether Elizabeth's soul meets the sun or not: “If she meet the body of the Sunne...” writes the poet with sceptic humour5. Indeed, following the Copernican theory, a traveller could well miss the sun (as well as Venus and Mercury) when leaving the earth in the direction of Jupiter. Finally, the primum mobile, a key element of the Ptolemaic structure, goes unmentioned; Copernicus had eliminated it and Gilbert had supported him, arguing that magnetism made the earth turn, not the primum mobile. So Donne manages quite a tour de force in discreetly blending the two major Systems while treating both as uncertain. While attached to the old world picture, then, he is by no means a stickler for Ptolemaic theories. Generally, in “The first Anniversary”, much irony is cast upon the complexities of the Ptolemaic System, such as the theory of the precession of the equinoxes: “Where [the Sun] rose to-day / He comes no more, but with a couzening line, / Steals by that point, and so is Serpentine” (ll. 270-2); similarly, Copernicus's heliocentric theory is mocked with the phrase: “The Sun is lost, and th'earth, and no mans wit / Can well direct him where to look for it” (ll. 207-8); and a humorous reference is made to Tycho Brahe's hypothesis that the sun was nearer to the earth than either Ptolemy or Copernicus thought: “[The Sun] meanes to sleepe, being now falne nearer us” (l. 274). In fact, while obviously enjoying cosmological speculation, Donne's aim is to denigrate man's futile theorizing in order to stress the importance of reaching not the cosmos but heaven. The soul pays no attention to concrete elements marking its trajectory. On the one hand the cosmos is mapped out in a very visual way and the celestial stages and heavenly bodies are seen — or not seen — as if Galileo's telescope were being used; on the other hand the soul has neither the desire nor the leisure to study these “landmarks” of a voyage that does, in fact, take place instantaneously: “ere she can consider how she went, / At once is at, and through the Firmament” (ll. 205-6). Man's theories as to the organization of the cosmos are nullified, but the complexities of the theories concerning the celestial movements across such vast distances enhance the very ideas of distance and speed and add to the glorification of God.

  • 6 See Marjorie Nicolson, “Kepler, the Somnium and John Donne”, Journal of the History of Ideas, I (19 (...)
  • 7 Ignatius his Conclave, ed. T. S. Healy, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1969, p. 7.
  • 8 The Sermons of John Donne, eds. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson, Berkeley, Univ. of California Press (...)

7Thus with the advent of Keplerian and Galilean astronomy, John Donne's representation of the passage from life on earth to life in heaven is expressed very much in the form of a cosmic voyage. The cosmic voyage as such is also broached in his overtly satirical work Ignatius his Conclave that was published in January 1611 and that makes explicit references to Galileo and Kepler. Indeed, Kepler suspected Donne of having plagiarized his own work, the Somnium sive Astronomia Lunaris, which describes the lives of lunar inhabitants; although the Somnium was not published until 1634, it was already circulating in manuscript form6. It is perhaps with such lunar men in mind that Donne imagines Ignatius'banishment to the moon where he could set up a new church, the “Lunatique Church”7. Thus the cosmic voyage is very much part of Donne's satirical vision and he seems to approach it with something of the fantastic that is found later in Cyrano de Bergerac's L'Autre monde ou les états et empires de la lune (1656). This leads me to suggest that the “Anniversaries” also have something fantastic about them. Is it possible to take these poems entirely seriously? A young girl flies through space at dizzy speed and indeed arrives at her destination at the time of departure; she does not quite know where she is going nor what she sees; the heavenly bodies are not exactiy where they should be and they are lurching wilfully through space; our poor old earth is twitching and shuddering like the body of a man beheaded. Excessive or grotesque, the rollicking movements evoked are ultimately comic. Either the poet is thoroughly enjoying a new version of the cosmic dance, or he is (implicitly) contrasting the agitation of the material world with the serenity of the divine realm. It seems however that beyond the traditional theme of mutability and beyond Christian conceptions of heaven, beyond the exuberance and the nausea, the faith and the melancholy, Donne is interested in the subject of movement per se. Matter crumbles and reforms ceaselessly, flesh evolves from hour to hour, the earth rotates perpetually, the cosmos also moves without end, and all these different movements are linked. Such an attitude is part and parcel of a mentality that was to see the triumph of mechanism. Donne may mock at the calculations and patterns invented by man to account for the complex movements of the planets, with their circles, eccentrics, meridians and parallels, but he is nonetheless obsessed by the movement of the bodies in the heavens, as he is by the movement of all “bodies”. From the trepidation of the spheres down to the seismic upheaval of the earth's surface and on to the fluidity of flesh itself, change is rife. The human body is but a conglomeration of atoms that are constantly being reorganized and that are dispersed at death. What becomes of the atoms of a drowned man eaten by a fish that is, in its turn, eaten by a man? Donne believed — or at least, preached — that, on Judgement Day, God collected all the scattered atoms together again “in the twinckling of an eye”8.

  • 9 E.g. “The Dampe”, “Loves exchange”.
  • 10 It is difficult to date the poems included in Donne's “Songs and Sonets”, first published in 1633. (...)

8The removing and the restoration of flesh is a vision that recurs in John Donne's poetry and seems to be influenced by the work of anatomists and by anatomical illustrations such as those found in Vesalius' De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543). The body — his own body above all — is very much the centre of Donne's world and he is passionately interested in a science that takes the human body as its field of study. Although he often waxes ironical on the theme of scientific knowledge, medical research is less subject to mockery. Donne is absorbed in the idea of his own death that leads him to ponder on the dissolution of the flesh. In many of his love poems, the youthful body stretched out in bed cross-fades into the bare skeleton lying in the tomb or, on a more modem note, into the corpse exposed on the dissection table. An area of study that — literally — probes to the heart and that brings together the scientific and the macabre can but stimulate the Jacobean imagination of a poet given to philosophizing on his body in the grips of death. Part of Donne's poetic technique is also to shock: introducing the stomach-chuming image of dissected flesh into a love poem9 brings that shudder appreciated by the sophisticated reader weary of honeyed or wistful lyrics and eager for hard-boiled modernism. But Donne's interest in dissection goes beyond the poetic device. Anatomical engravings influenced his way of seeing the body, that he dissects, as it were, by the imagination. The skin is the mere packaging of the body (“The second Anniversary”, 1.176) that does not, for him, veil the muscles, tendons, sinews and bones. In “A Valediction: of my name, in the window”10, the poet sees his body, stripped of flesh, as reduced not only to a skeleton but to the mere trace of a skeleton, “this ragged bony name” (l. 23) engraved by the poet on the window of his mistress's bedroom. This frail shadowy outline, these few scratches on the glass make us think today of an X-ray photograph; the anatomist has dissected the body until there remains but the sign.

9But in this love poem, the reconstitution of the body, that is of course the return of the lover, is possible. The poet asks the lady to preserve his body and to reassemble the different parts, which is another way of saying that he will return, that he will materialize again out of a mere memory of a body. He imagines the dissected body to recompose itself, he sees the muscles, the sinews and the veins stick back on to the bare bones, rather as if he were thumbing backwards through anatomical plates showing a step-by-step dissection:

The rafters of my body, bone
Being still with you, the Muscle, Sinew, and Veine,
Which tile this house, will come again:
Till my return, repaire
And recompact my scattered body so. (ll. 28-32)

10Partly a sophisticated joke, this poem is also a serious evocation, not just of love and of the force of physical love, but also of the resurrection of the body after the processes of death and decay. If man can remove flesh piece by piece from the skeleton, then surely God can easily put it back again. Dissection in all its newness corroborates age-old beliefs.

11The anatomical plate becomes for Donne a synthesis of his ideas concerning the resurrection, and ultimately a micro-illustration of the leap from tomb to macrocosm. We have seen in “The second Anniversary” how the voyage of the soul to heaven is instantaneous but at the same time lengthily mapped out. With an extraordinary elasticity of the imagination, Donne is both convinced of the proximity and the remoteness of God. By the paradox of a journey which is both short and long (“thy long-short Progresse”, l. 219), the dramatic metamorphosis of death that liberates the soul is conveyed in all its intensity. The moment of death — the split-second journey — is also imagined in this poem in the form of a body stretched from earth to heaven. The death-cum-voyage, as the soul passes through the successive spheres of the cosmos to reach the stars, strung like beads in the firmament, becomes itself the act of threading beads which are the celestial bodies or vertebrae linking heaven and earth, just as the spine links different parts of the body:

As doth the pith, which, lest our bodies slacke,
Strings fast the little bones of necke, and backe;
So by the Soule doth death string Heaven and Earth. (ll. 211-13)

12In this image, the immaterial soul contains within itself the architecture or “anatomy” of the cosmos which takes on the appearance of a dissected corpse stretched out in glorious array. At the same time, death is no longer that moment when the body loses its life but, on the contrary, the moment when, in a sublime arching gesture, it embraces outer space, superposing microcosm on macrocosm. The universe is patterned by a kind of human X-ray that elegantly replaces the “perplexed” Systems of astronomers and the crippling shackles of astrologers who had “impal'd within a Zodiake / The free-borne Sun” (“The first Anniversary”, ll. 253,263-4). The new map of the sky is an anatomical plate.

Movement and Metaphor

  • 11 The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture, London, Routledge, 1995, (...)

13Haunted nonetheless by the fragmentation of the flesh more, perhaps, than by spiritual preoccupations, Donne is particularly concious, as we have seen, of the flux of matter. John Sawday has shown how, in “The second Anniversary”, Donne is alert to problems posed by the movement of the fluids of the body, notably phlegm and blood, which seem to challenge the laws of reason and defy human perception11. But solid flesh also seems as mobile as liquid. In the same poem, the bodies of two lovers take on the fluidity of water and even the gazing eye starts to liquefy:

Poor cousened cousener, that she, and that thou,
Which did begin to love, are neither now ;
You are both fluid, chang'd since yesterday;
Next day repaires, (but ill) last dayes decay.
Nor are, (although the river keep the name)
Yesterdaies waters, and to daies the same.
So flowes her face, and thine eyes... (11.390-397)

14Donne is therefore keenly aware of the phenomenon of movement in both solid and fluid matter, and in this he follows to a certain extent the interests of the seventeenth-century mechanistic scientists. Galileo and Gassendi asserted that all phenomena can be explained by the movement of particles. This theory was not contrary to the beliefs of alchemists who explained the transmutation of metals by the movement and rearrangement of particles. One can add that Donne was less interested in the essence of things than in the individual and the particular: like the alchemist, but also like the atomist Robert Boyle, he speculates upon the changes that take place in such or such a particular object. Boyle was to show in The Sceptical Chemist (1661) and in The Origins of Forms and Qualifies (1667) that the old doctrine of Forms did not explain particular phenomena. As the century progressed, it came to be increasingly accepted that matter is the same throughout nature and that material phenomena were to be explained by the organization of particles. Descartes advanced the theory of impact to explain the movement of particles; Newton proposed the notions of attraction and repulsion occurring within the framework of matter that evolved, conglomerated, separated and reformed endlessy. In words reminiscent of Donne's, Newton was to write:

  • 12 The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. H. W. Turnbull et al., Cambridge, Cambridge U. P., 1959-77, (...)

For nature is a perpetuall circulatory worker, generating fluids out of solids, and solids out of fluids, fixed things out of volatile, & volatile out of fixed, subtile out of gross, & gross out of subtile...12

15The notions of the perpetual circulation of fluids and the separation of substances were familiar to alchemists and hermetists throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  • 13 The Hermetical and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus, ed. A. E. Waite, London, Elliott, 1894, vol. (...)

16The concepts of the separation and the reorganisation of matter and the role of separation in the creation of the universe had been laid out by Paracelsus: “[I]n the beginning of the Great Mystery of the separation of all things there went forth first the separation of the elements so that before all else those elements broke into action...”13. Donne takes up the Paracelsian ideas on the creation of the universe in his verse letter “To the Countesse of Huntingdon”, probably written in 1603:

Untill this raw disordered heape did breake,
And severall desires led parts away,
Water declin'd with earth, the ayre did stay,
Fire rose, and each from other but unty'd,
Themselves unprison'd were and purify'd... (ll. 38-42)

17In these lines, the elements separate from chaos and make for their place according to a principle that is Aristotelian but that also seems to foreshadow the principle of gravitation, for Donne introduces in his description of the genesis of the cosmos an explanation of separation, a theory on the mode of the functioning of matter, since he uses the term “desires”: “severall desires led parts away”. The notion is indeed somewhat occult but not that far from the concept that was to appear later in Newton's work, the concept of attraction, a concept that was indeed criticized as occult by the first readers of his Principia (1687). Although Donne mocked scientific discoveries and although the notion of “progress” was inconceivable for someone convinced of the decline of the world, he was nevertheless keenly sensitive to ideas that were in the air and that stimulated scientists, philosophers and theologians alike. Full of nostalgia for a golden age that he represents as lost with the death of Elizabeth Drury, Donne is, despite himself, carried along on a current of thought that is both alchemical and Chemical and that was to play an increasingly important role in the course of the seventeenth century.

  • 14 The second Anniversary”, l. 184.
  • 15 Astronomia Nova (1609) in Gesammelte Werke, eds. W. Von Dyck and M. Caspar, Munich, Bech, 1938 et s (...)
  • 16 La Structure poétique du monde: Copernic, Kepler, Paris, Seuil, 1987, pp. 108-10.

18The substructure and the transformation of matter are constant preoccupations of John Donne: the ageing, decay, and putrefaction of the flesh; the crumbling or the fossilization of bone; the resurrection of the “glorified” body in its refined form; the distillation of liquids and the refining and transmuting of metals; the Christian concept of transubstantiation; the separation of substances, be it at the time of the creation of the world or in everyday changes affecting the weather or the body. Death itself is a time of intense activity: the “hatching” of the soul14 and the instantaneous flight to heaven, and also the endless movement of the atoms of the flesh as the process of putrefaction takes hold. These various processes, that are a very real aspect of Donne's representation of the physical world, are invisible (even if the end resuit, such as dust in the tomb, is itself concrete). In the same way, the organization of the cosmos is theoretical, even if such or such a celestial body had become much more clearly visible with the advent of the telescope. As Kepler put it, the orbits are not actual rings in the sky15. A cosmic System is a representation of the heavens, a representation of reality, that can never be “seen” as such. This has led Fernand Hallyn to suggest that the Copernican representation is rather like an anamorphosis of the Ptolemaic system: Copernicus, like a Mannerist painter, stands off-centre and observes the planetary System from a lateral perspective, thus seeing a new and more aesthetically satisfying configuration16. In Donne's “Anniversaries”, the representations of the celestial movements have a comic lilt about them. The ordered cosmic dance of a Sir John Davies has become a kind of disordered and discordant anti-masque, which is a way of casting doubt upon the legitimacy of the choreographies, be they by Ptolemy, Copernicus or Tycho Brahe.

  • 17 Book I, Aphorism 20, Works, eds. J. Spedding, R. E. Ellis, D. D. Heath, London, 1857-74, vol. I, pp (...)

19The very invisibility of a phenomenon is however what renders it particularly appealing, for a poet or for a scientist. The paths of the planets, the workings of magnetism, the functioning of light, the process of generation and growth, the flowing of the blood, the onslaught of disease, the alteration of substances, the formation of meteorological phenomena are all invisible processes that still preoccupy scientists today and that inspired poets and scientists alike in the seventeenth century. A planet is not invisible, nor is light, but what was becoming increasingly important in the seventeenth century is the stress laid on the functioning of invisible processes. Interest in planetary movements soared when the telescope permitted increasingly precise observations of planetary positions and hence fuelled the Copernican hypothesis. William Gilbert's experiments on magnetic forces took magnetism firmly out of the realm of mystery and magic into the field of physics; Kepler's work on the geometric movement of the light ray was a definitive departure from the light metaphysics tradition that still bogged optics down in theology. Paracelsian ideas on the transformation and the separation of substances played a growing role in the fields of alchemy, chemistry, meteorology and medicine and were highly influential throughout the seventeenth century. The secret processes of the body were being better understood as dissections and vivisection became more common. Such preoccupations can be seen as part of the interest in movement in the seventeenth century, movement, that is, considered in a very general way, in the sense of process, operation, mode of functioning. This is the meaning Francis Bacon has in mind when he States that the aim of science is to examine “the secret motion of things” — movements as diverse as the generation of gold, the growth of grass, the assimilation of food, the emission of articulated sounds, or the rotation of the earth — and when he fruitfully defines heat, at the end of his inductive study in the Novum Organum, as movement17. This is not the same attitude to movement as that of Galileo, who ushered in the era of the mathematics of motion with his Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienzi in 1638, establishing the laws of falling bodies. But movement in a very general sense is not unrelated to the mathematical physics of local motion; and indeed, anything connected with the idea of movement (which was itself becoming metaphorical) had, for the layman, a modem aura about it.

  • 18 Analogy and metaphor have the same function in this domain and it is unnecessary to make a distinct (...)
  • 19 Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena (also known as Astronomioe Pars Optica); French trans. by C. Chevalley,(...)

20The scientist who undertakes to explore processes that are invisible must nonetheless have recourse to some kind of mental imagery. He must represent in his mind’s eye what he imagines as reality. Thus the epistemology of the non-observable is carried out through imagery often based on analogy or metaphor18. Newton’s forging of the notion of attraction is necessarily of analogical origin. Although analogy still plays an important role in scientific discovery today, it was, in the seventeenth century, before the systematic mathematization and modelization of concepts, a vital aid to scientific advance, even if the scientist had to beware of being influenced by false analogies, as Bacon often pointed out. When William Gilbert asserts that the earth is a huge magnet, he is basing his assumption on an analogy between the round-shaped magnet he used in his laboratory — that he indeed called a terrella — and the globe of the earth. (Doubtless the idea of using a round magnet was itself induced mirror-wise by the old microcosm/macrosm analogy.) As for the invisible force of the magnet, he can only liken it analogically to the power of the spirit, and thus considers magnetism to be the anima mundi, an eminently useful conceptual tool. Not unsimilarly, Kepler bases his theory of the immateriality of light on an analogy with the divine: since Christ emanates endlessy from God without weakening the source of divine love, so light emanates endlessly from the sun without weakening the sun's energy; light must therefore be incorporeal and can only be studied as a mathematical abstraction or “ray”19. The poet who marvels at the mysteries of the universe acts likewise, forging his mental representations through similar analogies and/or archetypes.

Metaphor and Metaphysical Poetry

21One of the characteristics, however, of English poets in the earlier seventeenth century, and particularly Metaphysical poets, is that they are keenly interested also in the very ideas — and analogies — being put forward by scientists. Metaphysical poets are, moreover, much noted for their complex use of imagery that involves a dazzling display of analogy and metaphor. Imagery has of course always been the stuff of poetry, but what is new about Metaphysical imagery is the incongruity or the subtlety or the unexpectedness of the comparison. A love poem by John Donne can involve conceits that draw elements from aspects of society as diverse as: the court, the law, trade, mining, war — and science. Magnetism, optics, alchemy, medicine or astronomy are amongst the many areas of study that appeal to his inquisitive mind. But whereas eighteenth-century poets write poetry on the subject of science and in praise of scientists, the Metaphysicals use scientific notions as analogies for other fields of interest. The scientific mentality is appropriated and a scientific concept or analogy becomes itself an analogy for something else. New scientific ideas or thorny scientific problems debated at the time are incorporated into a new kind of poetry, and the very newness of the science or of the scientific debate is itself novel and is a novel ingredient of poetry.

22Navigational science, for example, that concerns movement within a global and cosmic perspective, provides John Donne with a rich mine of metaphors he integrates into his lyrical verse. Crossing the Atlantic safely and landing at the desired destination was, of course, a problem of growing importance during the reign of Elizabeth. Mariners could calculate their latitude approximately by using the astrolabe and the quadrant in conjunction with Regiomontanus' Ephemerides (1494) setting out the positions in the night-sky of stars and planets; Kepler was to produce far more precise details on planetary movements in his Rudolphine Tables of 1627. It was much more difficult to calculate longitude, which requires comparing the local time on board with the local time of such or such a town on land. Carrying two docks on board, one to be reset daily by the sun and the other to be left at the time zone of the port of departure, was not a satisfactory solution since docks were far too unreliable. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, only the observation of an eclipse, for which there existed tables setting out the times of an eclipse in different places, could allow mariners to calculate their longitude. This vexed question is alluded to by Donne in “A Valediction: of the booke” where he is evoking the strength and the duration of love. The poet would like to leave his mistress for a period of time so as to gauge the strength of his love more satisfactorily. The greatness or “height” of love is measured according to the fires of passion in the presence of the lady, says the poet, much as one calculates latitude according to the height in the sky of such or such a brilliant star, but the long-lasting nature of love, like longitude, can only be calculated during her absence, taking “eclipses” — if any — into account:

abroad I'll studie thee,
As he removes farre off, that great heights takes;
How great love is, presence best tryall makes,
But absence tryes how long this love will bee;
To take a latitude
Sun, or starres, are fitliest view'd
At their brightest, but to conclude
Of longitudes, what other way have wee,
But to marke when, and where the darke eclipses bee? (ll. 56-63)

23This love poem is also — or is indeed primarily — an ingenious exposition of navigational concerns and hence of the poet's knowledge and ultimately of his wit; at the same time, the metaphors involving latitude and longitude give new vigour and piquant to the conventional imagery of stars and eclipses. The ship was traditionally the emblem of man's voyage through life; trans-Atlantic crossings, where ships could not follow a coastal route as they did round the Mediterranean, involved complex but uncertain navigational techniques that give a modem touch to an age-old travel theme. As so often with John Donne, the amorous relation-ship (imaginary or real) is set within the vast framework of cosmic patterns — here, the shifting positions of the stars and planets and the changing time scale. We can notice that the movement of a ship can only be reckoned in relation to these other movements. Of course, the progress of a ship is not entirely “invisible” to the seamen on board who see the prow cleaving the waves. But just as the path of a planet across the sky is part of the mental representation of an invisible celestial pattern, so the movement of the ship across the sea can only be estimated within the same abstract cosmological System. Like cosmic representations, the laws of love are subject to relativity.

24John Donne's scientific and technical references are self-conscious in that he flaunts his knowledge ostentatiously and enjoys turning scientific speculation into a poetic device; the scientific or technological metaphors (and analogies and conceits) are forged deliberately to be part of a new poetic genre. This is not necessarily the case with all poets interested in scientific imagery. Writing in the middle of the century, Henry Vaughan seems to think or rethink his religious preoccupations using scientific imagery in a way that is intimately connected with his own intuitions. His poem “Mid-night” is particularly illustrative of this point:

  • 20 The Complete Poems, ed. A. Rudrum, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1995, stanza 1, p. 174-5. First publishe (...)

When to my eyes
(Whilst deep sleep others catches),
Thine host of spies
The stars shine in their watches,
I do survey
Each busy ray,
And how they work, and wind,
And wish each beam
My soul doth stream,
With the like ardour shined;
What emanations,
Quick vibrations
And bright stirs are there?
What thin ejections,
Cold affections,
And slow motions here?
20

  • 21 The Extasie”, 1.7.

25Wondering how starlight “works”, the poet draws on both old and new theories of light in order to provide an analogy for the “functioning” of the soul. We can notice that the speaker is gazing at the stars much as the stars or “spies” are eyeing him, a notion partially influenced by Plato's theories of vision whereby man sees thanks to the current of fire that issues from his eyes and meets up with external rays of vision emanating from objets (Timaeus, 13). A communication is set up between the stars and man, via the beams of light that move back and forth and intertwine, much as for Donne the souls of lovers, with “eye-beams twisted”, meet through their mutual gaze21. The number of terms referring to the movement of light is remarkable and the aim of the poet is to contrast the lethargy of his soul with the vitality of the starlight. But it is worth distinguishing the actual terms employed. This “busy ray” connecting star and soul, “work[ing]” across vast distances, is a Hermetic concept. “Wind” is a more literary term taken from George Herbert's “The Star” (1.27) where it suggests the scintillation that makes light shimmer like a garland of braided beams and represents the adoration of God. “Emanations”, “ejections”, and “vibrations” are Latinisms that are very close to terminology used by Kepler in his treatise Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena (1604). Emanation is the Neoplatonic concept taken up by Kepler to convey his particular theory of the flowing of light, and “ejections” sounds close to ejaculatio that was also used by Kepler to describe the way in which light is “projected”. “Vibrations” brings to mind Kepler's use of the verb vibrare to depict the trembling quality of light; Descartes referred to the trembling of light (La Dioptrique, 1637) and Malebranche was to develop an explicitly vibratory theory (La Recherche de la vérité, 1674). “Affections”, on the other hand, while indicating first and foremost the poet's sentiments, is also reminiscent of the term affectio used in Latin translations of Aristotle's theories of vision where it denotes the effect of the visual species on the eye: for Aristotle, images came forth from objects and touched or “affected” the eye. Thus, the poet's torpid soul is passive and seems unable to pour forth vital beams like the star.

26This rapid survey of one stanza of “Mid-night” shows how Henry Vaughan, while deeply concerned with the quality of his relationship with God and with the difficulty he has in feeling divine inspiration, is also reflecting very carefully on theories of the movement of light. Light was, for Vaughan, intimately connected with God, since God is Divine Light. Kepler, as we saw, begins his treatise Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena by establishing that light emanates from a source as the divine emanates from God, and this basically Christian notion is particularly present also in the Neoplatonic and Hermetic visions of the divine and of the nature of the universe. But whereas Kepler begins with a concept that is an archetype — the love of God — and uses this as an analogy to study the invisible movement of the light ray, Vaughan seems to be particularly influenced by scientific theories concerning the movement of light and his analogies are reversed. He uses his scientific knowledge as a tool with which to grasp the divine and to reflect upon the nature of the emanation of God's love and its effect upon his soul. The way God is represented here has something scientific about it; this is a new step on the path along which God was eventually to become the Engineer. But the scientific aspect of the metaphors is so deeply entwined in the thought processes and so carefully integrated into the poetic aesthetics of starlight that it can easily be missed.

  • 22 Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, eds. J. J. Cope and H. W. Jones, St. Louis, Washington (...)
  • 23 I have taken the liberty of transposing Donne's definition: “That subtile knot, which makes us man” (...)

27Metaphysical poetry covers the period that goes approximately from John Donne to Henry Vaughan, i.e., from 1600 to 1660. This is the period during which one can say that classical science is being constituted. The founding of the Royal Society in 1662, somewhat along the lines envisaged by Francis Bacon, marks the institutionalization of science, henceforth to be a central, collectively-organized element of society rather than the business of brilliant individuals. Bacon, while aware of the heuristic nature of analogy, had stressed the danger of false reasoning that stems from false comparisons and had thus argued in favour of conceptual and terminological exactitude. The growing concern over the kind of language suitable for scientific and philosophical writing led the members of the Royal Society to try to banish metaphor from their texts and to develop a “naked, natural way of speaking[...] as near the Mathematical plainness” as possible22. This evolution of the linguistic debate, coupled with the rise of utilitarianism, sounded the death knell for Metaphysical poetry. Poets moved away from a genre involving the elaboration of ingenious imagery that had often been drawn from speculative science. Henceforth, science and wit were incompatible, just as devotional or love poems could no longer accommodate scientific references. This does not mean that science was to disappear from poetry. James Thomson declares his unbounded admiration for the author of Principia in the panegyric “To the Memory of Isaac Newton”. In Pleasures of the Imagination, Mark Akenside undertakes to explain didactically Newton's theories of the rainbow. Such poetry, while not excluding metaphor in order to express scientific ideas or to recreate the emotion the ideas inspire, did not use scientific theory metaphorically to express other notions like love of woman or love of God. John Donne and Henry Vaughan had integrated scientific concepts into their way of thinking. Full of surprise effects and therefore new as well as transitory, eminently bold on the aesthetic plane, the Metaphysical metaphors are also scientifically sound. The new, sparkling conceits, “subtle knots” as Donne might have called them23, are the remarkable vehicles of scientific theories that are elegantly woven into the aesthetic fabric. Without “new” science, they would have been less novel and less stimulating.

Notes

1 I have developed some of the ideas expressed here in Représentations scientifiques et images poétiques en Angleterre au XVIIe siècle: à la recherche de l'invisible, Paris, CNRS éd./ENS éd., 1999.

2 Textual references are to J. Donne's Poetical Works, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, Oxford, O.U.P., 1990.

3 This is the suggestion put forward by Robert Ellrodt, who examines different theories in Les Poètes métaphysiques anglais, Paris, Corti, 1960,1, vol. I, pp. 137-40, 453-4.

4 See Maureen Sabine, Feminine Engendered Faith, London, Macmillan, 1992, pp. x-xi, 78-81.

5 My italics.

6 See Marjorie Nicolson, “Kepler, the Somnium and John Donne”, Journal of the History of Ideas, I (1940), 259-80.

7 Ignatius his Conclave, ed. T. S. Healy, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1969, p. 7.

8 The Sermons of John Donne, eds. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson, Berkeley, Univ. of California Press, 1955, vol. VIII, p. 98.

9 E.g. “The Dampe”, “Loves exchange”.

10 It is difficult to date the poems included in Donne's “Songs and Sonets”, first published in 1633. Many, but not all, were written by 1603.

11 The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture, London, Routledge, 1995, pp. 17-19.

12 The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. H. W. Turnbull et al., Cambridge, Cambridge U. P., 1959-77, vol. I, pp. 365-6.

13 The Hermetical and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus, ed. A. E. Waite, London, Elliott, 1894, vol. II, p. 253.

14 The second Anniversary”, l. 184.

15 Astronomia Nova (1609) in Gesammelte Werke, eds. W. Von Dyck and M. Caspar, Munich, Bech, 1938 et seq., vol. XVI, pp. 14-15.

16 La Structure poétique du monde: Copernic, Kepler, Paris, Seuil, 1987, pp. 108-10.

17 Book I, Aphorism 20, Works, eds. J. Spedding, R. E. Ellis, D. D. Heath, London, 1857-74, vol. I, pp. 267-8.

18 Analogy and metaphor have the same function in this domain and it is unnecessary to make a distinction between them.

19 Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena (also known as Astronomioe Pars Optica); French trans. by C. Chevalley, Paralipomènes à Vitellion, Paris, Vrin, 1980, pp. 106-8.

20 The Complete Poems, ed. A. Rudrum, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1995, stanza 1, p. 174-5. First published in Silex Scintillons, Book I, 1650.

21 The Extasie”, 1.7.

22 Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, eds. J. J. Cope and H. W. Jones, St. Louis, Washington U. Studies and London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959, p. 113.

23 I have taken the liberty of transposing Donne's definition: “That subtile knot, which makes us man” (“The Extasie”, I. 64).

Auteur

Professeur de littérature anglaise à l'Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis. Spécialiste du XVIIe siècle, elle est l'auteur de Représentations scientifiques et images poétiques en Angleterre au XVIIe siècle : à la recherche de l'invisible (Paris, Éds CNRS/ENS, 1999). En collaboration avec Michèle Le Dœuff, elle a publié Sir Francis Bacon : “La Nouvelle Atlantide” suivi de “Voyage dans la pensée baroque” (Paris, Payot, 1983). En collaboration avec Armand Himy, elle a publié John Donne and Modernity, Confluences, XI (Paris X-Nanterre, 1995).

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