Metaphysical Poetry & John Donne: 50 Important MCQs

Correct Answer: (B) John Dryden in A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693)

Textual & Critical Reference: John Dryden was the first to use the term regarding Donne in his 1693 critical essay A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire. Dryden famously wrote: ‘He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts.’

Correct Answer: (C) Life of Cowley

Textual & Critical Reference: Dr. Samuel Johnson formally coined the designation in his Life of Cowley (1779). He opened the critical evaluation by observing: ‘About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets.’ He used Abraham Cowley’s verse as the representative subject through which to analyze the entire school.

Correct Answer: (B) yoked

Textual & Critical Reference: Johnson wrote: ‘The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.’

Correct Answer: (C) Sir Herbert J. C. Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the Seventeenth Century

Textual & Critical Reference: Sir Herbert J. C. Grierson’s 1912 landmark anthology Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler, accompanied by Grierson’s profound introduction, marked the definitive turning point in modern literary taste, rescuing Donne and his contemporaries from nineteenth-century neglect.

Correct Answer: (B) Unified Sensibility

Textual & Critical Reference: Eliot formulated the concept of a ‘Unified Sensibility’ (or a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience). He celebrated the early seventeenth-century poets because they could ‘feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.’

Correct Answer: (B) In the seventeenth century, specifically under the influence of John Milton and John Dryden

Textual & Critical Reference: Eliot argued: ‘In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the two mightiest poets of the century, Milton and Dryden.’ Milton put feeling into language without intellectual subtlety, while Dryden thought intellectually without emotional resonance.

Correct Answer: (B) ‘Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging.’

Textual & Critical Reference: Ben Jonson remarked to William Drummond: ‘That Done, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging.’ Jonson also presciently observed that ‘Done himself, for not being understood, would perish.’ Jonson criticized Donne’s irregular, rugged, colloquial meters while nonetheless calling him ‘the first poet in the world in some things.’

Correct Answer: (B) 1623

Textual & Critical Reference: John Donne died in March 1631. His secular love lyrics and sacred verses had circulated widely in handwritten scribal manuscripts among friends and patrons during his lifetime. The first printed edition of his collected poems was published posthumously in London by John Marriot in 1633.

Correct Answer: (B) The New Astronomy and scientific discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo undermining the Ptolemaic universe

Textual & Critical Reference: The transition from the comforting, geocentric Ptolemaic-Aristotelian cosmos to the vast, uncertain Copernican heliocentric universe (verified by Galileo’s telescope) shattered scholastic certainty. Donne famously recorded this existential anxiety in An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary (1611): ‘And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, / The Element of fire is quite put out; / The Sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit / Can well direct him where to look for it.’

Correct Answer: (B) A Petrarchan conceit relies on familiar, sensory, and decorative comparisons (e.g., eyes like stars, lips like cherries), whereas a Metaphysical conceit constructs an elaborate, intellectual, and startling analogy between two seemingly incompatible realms of experience.

Textual & Critical Reference: While Petrarchan conceits rely on conventional sensory stereotypes of courtly romance, a Metaphysical conceit is an intellectual exercise (an ‘ingenious conceit’) that forces together disparate fields: geometry, cartography, alchemical distillation, metallurgy, astronomy, and scholastic theology.

Correct Answer: (B) Despite the word ‘Sonnets’ in the title, not a single poem in the collection is an orthodox 14-line sonnet.

Textual & Critical Reference: In the Renaissance, the word ‘sonnet’ was frequently used in its broader etymological sense (from the Italian sonetto, meaning ‘little song’ or short lyric). None of the 54 secular love poems in Donne’s Songs and Sonnets conform to the strict 14-line Petrarca or Shakespearean sonnet form; Donne invented bespoke, irregular stanzaic forms for almost every single poem.

Correct Answer: (B) ‘Busy old fool, unruly sun, / Why dost thou thus, / Through windows, and through curtains call on us?’

Textual & Critical Reference: Donne begins in media res with colloquial impudence, scolding the ancient cosmic celestial body as a ‘busy old fool’ and a ‘saucy pedantic wretch’. He commands the sun to go chide late schoolboys and sour apprentices rather than disturb lovers whose private bedroom constitutes the center of the universe.

Correct Answer: (B) The macrocosm/microcosm conceit, where the lovers’ bed is the center of the world and their room the entire sphere

Textual & Critical Reference: Donne employs the Renaissance Renaissance doctrine of Microcosm (the human being/little world) and Macrocosm (the great universe). By arguing that his mistress embodies all kingdoms and he embodies all rulers, the bed becomes the world’s axis; thus, in warming the two lovers, the sun fulfills its entire cosmological duty.

Correct Answer: (C) The Phoenix

Textual & Critical Reference: Donne writes: ‘The phoenix riddle hath more wit / By us: we two being one, are it. / So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit. / We die and rise the same, and prove / Mysterious by this love.’ The mythical phoenix dies in flames and resurrects from its own ashes, embodying how sexual consummation (the Renaissance pun on ‘dying’) renews their transcendent spiritual unity.

Correct Answer: (B) A pair of stiff twin mathematical compasses

Textual & Critical Reference: In stanzas 7–9 of A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, Donne introduces one of the most celebrated conceits in world literature: ‘If they be two, they are two so / As stiff twin compasses are two; / Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show / To move, but doth, if the other do… Thy firmness makes my circle just, / And makes me end where I begun.’

Correct Answer: (B) That their blood is already mingled inside the flea’s body without sin, shame, or loss of maidenhead

Textual & Critical Reference: The speaker points to the flea: ‘It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee, / And in this flea our two bloods mingled be; / Thou know’st that this cannot be said / A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead.’ The flea becomes simultaneously their bridal bed and marriage temple (‘This flea is you and I, and this / Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is’).

Correct Answer: (B) To the journey of the sun, noting that he has far more desire and shorter wings/spurs than the sun

Textual & Critical Reference: Donne comforts his weeping mistress: ‘Yesternight the sun went hence, / And yet is here today; / He hath no desire nor sense, / Nor half so short a way: / Then fear not me, / But believe that I shall make / Speedier journeys, since I take / More wings and spurs than he.’

Correct Answer: (B) ‘A bracelet of bright hair about the bone’

Textual & Critical Reference: Donne opens with chilling physical precision: ‘When my grave is broke up again / Some second guest to entertain… And he that digs it, spies / A bracelet of bright hair about the bone, / Will he not let’s alone, / And think that there a loving couple lies?’ (Act III). Future generations will worship them as relics of Mary Magdalene and a holy martyr.

Correct Answer: (B) Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star

Textual & Critical Reference: In Go and Catch a Falling Star, Donne commands seven impossible feats: catch a falling star, get with child a mandrake root, tell where all past years are, find who cleft the devil’s foot, teach him to hear mermaids singing, or keep off envy’s stinging. He concludes that even if one rode ten thousand days and nights until age snowed white hairs, he would report that nowhere lives a woman true and fair.

Correct Answer: (B) His clandestine, socially ruinous marriage to 17-year-old Anne More in 1601 and his subsequent holy ordination in 1615

Textual & Critical Reference: In December 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More (daughter of Sir George More, Lieutenant of the Tower), destroying his rising political career under Sir Thomas Egerton. Donne famously summarized the immediate catastrophe: ‘John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done.’ After years of poverty, he took holy orders in the Church of England in 1615 under King James I’s insistence, eventually becoming the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1621.

Correct Answer: (B) A damaged metal vessel (tinker/blacksmith metaphor), a captured town/viceroy (military siege), and an engaged bride needing ravishment (erotic/marital paradox)

Textual & Critical Reference: In Holy Sonnet XIV, Donne employs three startling conceits: (1) He is a dented vessel that God must break, blow, burn, and make new; (2) He is an usurped town that should be God’s, but Reason (God’s viceroy) is captive; (3) He is betrothed to God’s enemy (Satan) and begs God to divorce, imprison, and ravish him: ‘Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.’

Correct Answer: (B) ‘One short sleep past, we wake eternally, / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.’

Textual & Critical Reference: Donne systematically demotes Death from a terrifying cosmic tyrant to a humble servant (‘slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men’) who keeps company with poison, war, and sickness. Because Christian resurrection guarantees eternal life, the moment a believer dies, Death itself ceases to exist: ‘And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.’

Correct Answer: (C) 19

Textual & Critical Reference: There are 19 Holy Sonnets in total. The 1633 edition published 12; the 1635 edition added 4 more (making 16); and three additional sonnets (including ‘Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt’) were discovered in the Westmoreland manuscript, bringing the definitive modern scholarly canon established by Dame Helen Gardner to 19.

Correct Answer: (B) Puns on his own surname ‘Donne’ (done) and his deceased wife Anne’s maiden name ‘More’

Textual & Critical Reference: In stanzas 1 and 2, Donne confesses his original sin and habitual sins, repeating the anxious refrain: ‘When thou hast done, thou hast not done, / For I have more.’ In the third stanza, after God swears that His Sun (Christ) shall shine upon him at death, Donne joyfully concludes: ‘And, having done that, Thou hast done; / I fear no more.’ This plays brilliantly on ‘Donne’ and ‘More’.

Correct Answer: (B) His body is a geographical flat map and the physicians are cosmographers studying his passages

Textual & Critical Reference: Donne writes: ‘Whilst my physicians by their love are grown / Cosmographers, and I their map, whose lie / Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown / That this is my south-west discovery, / Per fretum febris, by these straits to die.’ He compares his painful journey through fever to Ferdinand Magellan sailing through stormy straits to enter the serene Pacific Ocean.

Correct Answer: (C) Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (Meditation XVII)

Textual & Critical Reference: The passage is from Meditation XVII of Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). Hearing the church funeral bell toll, Donne reflects: ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main… Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’

Correct Answer: (A) A defense of religious suicide under specific conditions of divine charity

Textual & Critical Reference: Biathanatos (from the Greek for ‘violent death’) is a philosophical and theological exploration in which Donne argues that self-homicide (suicide) is not so naturally a sin that it may never be lawful or excusable, citing Jesus Christ’s voluntary yielding of his life on the cross. Donne kept the manuscript strictly private during his life; it was published posthumously in 1647 by his son.

Correct Answer: (B) Elizabeth Drury, the 14-year-old daughter of his wealthy patron Sir Robert Drury

Textual & Critical Reference: Donne wrote The Anniversaries on the death of Elizabeth Drury, whom he had never met in person. He treated her death as a cosmic catastrophe that symbolized the total moral and physical decay of the universe (‘The world’s whole frame is out of joint’).

Correct Answer: (B) Death’s Duell

Textual & Critical Reference: Donne preached Death’s Duell, or, A Consolation to the Soule, against the dying Life, and living Death of the Body. Observers recorded that the emaciated Dean appeared to be preaching his own funeral sermon. A magnificent frontispiece engraving of Donne wrapped in his burial shroud (drawn from life as he posed on a wooden urn) was prefixed to the printed edition.

Correct Answer: (B) The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola (Composition of Place, Analysis, and Colloquy)

Textual & Critical Reference: Louis Martz proved in The Poetry of Meditation that Donne’s divine poems follow the strict formal tripartite structure of the Jesuit St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises: (1) Compositio loci (vivid sensory recreation of a scene, like the Last Judgment), (2) Analysis/Intellectual meditation, and (3) Colloquy (direct, emotional prayer to God or Christ).

Correct Answer: (B) The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations

Textual & Critical Reference: On his deathbed in 1633, the saintly Anglican priest George Herbert sent his manuscript to Nicholas Ferrar of the Little Gidding religious community. It was published that same year as The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, organized architecturally into three sections: ‘The Church-porch’, ‘The Church’, and ‘The Church Militant’.

Correct Answer: (B) Pattern poetry (Hieroglyphic or Concrete poetry / Carmen figuratum)

Textual & Critical Reference: In Easter Wings, the lines expand and contract on the printed page to form two pairs of flying angel/bird wings. In The Altar, the lines create the physical silhouette of a Christian stone altar. This form is known as pattern poetry, concrete verse, or carmen figuratum.

Correct Answer: (C) Rest

Textual & Critical Reference: God bestows strength, beauty, wisdom, honor, and pleasure, but keeps back ‘Rest’, reasoning: ‘If I should (said he) / Bestow this jewel also on my creature, / He would adore my gifts instead of me, / And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature.’ Thus, divine weariness serves as a mechanical ‘pulley’ that tosses man to God’s breast.

Correct Answer: (B) Major Premise (Had we world enough and time, coyness were no crime); Minor Premise (But we do not: Time’s winged chariot hurries near); Conclusion (Therefore, let us devour time: seize pleasure now).

Textual & Critical Reference: Marvell’s masterpiece is a textbook classical syllogism: Stanza 1 (Had we but world enough, and time – If condition), Stanza 2 (But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near – But condition), Stanza 3 (Now therefore… let us sport us while we may – Therefore resolution).

Correct Answer: (A) ‘A green thought in a green shade’

Textual & Critical Reference: In stanza 6 of The Garden, Marvell describes how the mind retreats from physical fruit into pure contemplation: ‘The mind, that ocean where each kind / Does straight its own resemblance find… Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade.’

Correct Answer: (B) ‘He nothing common did or mean / Upon that memorable scene, / But with his keener eye / The axe’s edge did try’

Textual & Critical Reference: Despite supporting Oliver Cromwell and serving as John Milton’s Latin Secretary under the Commonwealth, Marvell’s Horatian ode maintains astonishing poise, giving Charles I the most noble tragic depiction in English verse: ‘He nothing common did or mean / Upon that memorable scene, / But with his keener eye / The axe’s edge did try; / Nor call’d the gods with vulgar spite / To vindicate his helpless right.’

Correct Answer: (B) Silex Scintillans: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations

Textual & Critical Reference: Henry Vaughan published Silex Scintillans (Latin for ‘The Flashing Flint’ or ‘Sparks from the Flintstone’). The emblematic title represents the hard, flinty human heart struck by the divine steel of God’s grace to emit sparks of holy fire. Vaughan openly acknowledged George Herbert as his chief spiritual master.

Correct Answer: (A) ‘I saw Eternity the other night, / Like a great ring of pure and endless light, / All calm, as it was bright’

Textual & Critical Reference: Vaughan opens The World with breathtaking visionary grandeur: ‘I saw Eternity the other night, / Like a great ring of pure and endless light, / All calm, as it was bright; / And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years, / Driv’n by the spheres / Like a vast shadow moved; in which the world / And all her train were hurl’d.’

Correct Answer: (B) Richard Crashaw

Textual & Critical Reference: Richard Crashaw converted to Roman Catholicism, fled to Paris and Italy during the English Civil War, and died at Loreto. His poetry—particularly The Flaming Heart and A Hymn to the Name and Honour of the Admirable Saint Teresa—exhibits lush, sensory, baroque religious ecstasy filled with bleeding hearts, ecstatic wounds, and flaming darts.

Correct Answer: (B) Cavalier poets (‘Sons of Ben’) modeled their verse on classical Roman lyricists (Horace, Catullus), emphasizing elegance, lucidity, symmetrical form, royalist loyalty, and courtly gallantry, avoiding the obscure, knotty, and scholastic conceits of the Metaphysicals.

Textual & Critical Reference: While Metaphysical poets engaged in intellectual wrestling, complex philosophical metaphors, and rough colloquial meters, the Cavalier poets (followers of Ben Jonson) prioritized polished ease, melodic sweetness, clarity, royalist politics, and carefree carpe diem motifs (‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’).

Correct Answer: (B) Cleanth Brooks

Textual & Critical Reference: Cleanth Brooks famously argued that ‘the language of poetry is the language of paradox.’ He demonstrated that Donne’s The Canonization is not merely a witty display of clever figures, but a profoundly unified work of art where profane sexual love and sacred sainthood interpret and validate one another through organic paradox.

Correct Answer: (A) William Empson

Textual & Critical Reference: William Empson (a student of I.A. Richards at Cambridge) wrote Seven Types of Ambiguity at age 23. Empson showed how the deliberate ambiguities, syntactic tensions, and theological puns in Donne, Herbert, and Marvell enrich poetic meaning rather than obscuring it.

Correct Answer: (C) Whispers of Immortality

Textual & Critical Reference: In his 1920 poem Whispers of Immortality, Eliot contrasts seventeenth-century poets (John Webster and John Donne), who possessed an acute physical awareness of skeletal death, with modern people who reduce experience to sterile, abstract intellect.

Correct Answer: (A) Mario Praz

Textual & Critical Reference: Italian comparative scholar Mario Praz proved that Metaphysical conceits were not an isolated English eccentricity, but part of a wider European Baroque movement of concettismo (practiced by Giambattista Marino in Italy and Luis de Góngora in Spain) and Jesuit emblem literature.

Correct Answer: (B) Ramist Logic and Classical Renaissance Rhetoric

Textual & Critical Reference: Rosemond Tuve demonstrated that Metaphysical conceits were not spontaneous psychological leaps (as T.S. Eliot and the New Critics claimed), but rigorous, disciplined exercises governed by the formal logic and dialectic of Petrus Ramus (Ramism) and Renaissance rhetorical handbooks taught at Oxford and Cambridge.

Correct Answer: (B) Severe childhood physical abuse by his stepfather

Textual & Critical Reference: Oxford critic John Carey argued that Donne’s abandonment of his family’s persecuted Roman Catholic faith (which had martyred his relatives, including his brother Henry Donne who died in Newgate Prison) left him with lifelong guilt and apostate anxiety. This inner betrayal fueled his obsession with treason, changeability, secret contracts, and violent surrender in both his love and divine poetry.

Correct Answer: (A) Frank Kermode

Textual & Critical Reference: Sir Frank Kermode demonstrated that Eliot’s historical timeline for the ‘dissociation’ was completely arbitrary—critics had placed similar ‘dissociations’ in 5th-century Athens, the late Middle Ages, the Baconian scientific revolution, and the Romantic era. Kermode argued that Eliot invented the concept backwards to legitimize the aesthetic demands of French Symbolism and modernist poetic practice.

Correct Answer: (B) 1-Herbert (The Temple); 2-Vaughan (Silex Scintillans); 3-Crashaw (Steps to the Temple); 4-Cowley (The Mistress)

Textual & Critical Reference: Correct canonical pairings: George Herbert = The Temple (1633); Henry Vaughan = Silex Scintillans (1650/1655); Richard Crashaw = Steps to the Temple (1646); Abraham Cowley = The Mistress (1647).

Correct Answer: (A) Thomas Traherne

Textual & Critical Reference: Thomas Traherne’s ecstatic devotional prose and poetry lay in absolute oblivion for over two centuries until bookseller Bertram Dobell purchased anonymous handwritten notebooks discovered on a London street book barrow in the winter of 1896–1897 and established Traherne’s authorship, adding a major voice of luminous mystical innocence to the Metaphysical canon.

Correct Answer: (A) Henry King

Textual & Critical Reference: Dr. Henry King, Bishop of Chichester and a close personal friend of John Donne (who served as an executor of Donne’s will), composed the deeply moving metaphysical funeral poem The Exequy (c. 1624). The poem compares his sorrowful march through life to a slow, methodical journey toward the grave where his deceased wife awaits him.