16th & 17th Century Literature

The phrase “metaphysical poets” was first used by John Dryden in his Discourse Concerning Satire (1693), where he remarked that Donne “affects the metaphysics” in his love poetry. Samuel Johnson’s Life of Cowley (1779) later made the label famous, applying it to Donne, Herbert, Crashaw and Cowley — poets who, in Johnson’s words, “yoked heterogeneous ideas by violence,” fusing wit, paradox and passionate argument into startling conceits.

The Spenserian sonnet rhymes abab bcbc cdcd ee. Its three quatrains are chained together — the second rhyme of each quatrain becomes the first rhyme of the next — so the argument flows continuously instead of breaking into blocks. The closing couplet then seals the thought. Spenser used this form throughout Amoretti (1595), his 89-sonnet sequence addressed to Elizabeth Boyle, giving his courtship a musical, forward-moving unity.

“The Pulley” was written by George Herbert and published in The Temple (1633), the collection of his religious poems issued after his death. Its witty conceit imagines God bestowing every blessing on man except “rest,” so that weariness will pull him back to his Maker — as a pulley lifts a weight. The poem’s playful logic and tender close make it one of Herbert’s most loved devotional lyrics.

Dryden’s “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” was written for 22 November 1687, the feast of St Cecilia. By legend a Roman martyr, Cecilia is the patron saint of music, and her feast was kept in London with new odes performed to music each year. Dryden, Poet Laureate since 1668, wrote this grand ceremonial ode for such an evening, tracing music’s power from the creation of the world to its unmaking at the last trumpet.

Part I of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress was published in 1678. Bunyan, a Bedford tinker imprisoned for unlicensed preaching, wrote much of the book in Bedford gaol. This first part follows Christian’s journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City through Slough, Vanity Fair and the Delectable Mountains. Part II, following his wife Christiana and her children, appeared in 1684. It remains the greatest Puritan allegory in English.

Bacon’s essays are subtitled “Counsels, Civil and Moral.” The full title of the collection is The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, first issued in 1597 and enlarged in 1612 and 1625. The subtitle captures their double aim: “civil” counsel for worldly conduct — travel, marriage, ambition, empire — and “moral” counsel for the inner life, making the essays both practical handbooks and philosophical meditations.

The witches first meet Macbeth and Banquo on the heath in Act 1, Scene 3. Returning from battle, the two generals encounter the “weird sisters” amid thunder and hail. The witches hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and “king hereafter,” while telling Banquo he will father kings. The scene opens with their chant, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” fixing the play’s moral confusion from the start.

The sleepwalking scene occurs in Act 5, Scene 1 of Macbeth. Lady Macbeth, broken by guilt, walks in her sleep endlessly rubbing at an imagined bloodstain — “Out, damned spot! out, I say!” A doctor and a gentlewoman watch in horror as she relives Duncan’s murder. The scene is her tragedy’s climax: the imagination she suppressed in ambition returns as madness, mirroring Macbeth’s own tormented sleeplessness.

Meera’s songs are addressed to Krishna as Giridhar — the lifter of the Govardhan mountain — and also as Govind. The name recalls Krishna’s feat of holding up Mount Govardhan on his finger to shelter the people of Vrindavan from Indra’s storm. For Meera this is no distant deity but the heroic, protective beloved she claims as her husband, turning theology into an intimate love song.

Tagore’s translation is titled “One Hundred Poems of Kabir,” published in 1915. Working with the scholar Kshitimohan Sen, Tagore rendered a hundred of Kabir’s songs into spare English prose-poems. The book carried the weaver-saint’s nirgun devotion — God without form, found within, beyond temple and ritual — to readers across the world, making Kabir a global figure of Indian mysticism.

The King James Bible, published in 1611, was the work of committees of translators appointed by James I, and its appearance was a national prose event. Unlike versions made by single scholars, it carried royal authority and was read aloud in every parish church, so its cadences entered the ears of the whole nation. For two centuries it was the one book most Englishmen knew by heart.

Its influence on prose style was profound. The translators’ majestic, rhythmic periods — built on parallelism and balance, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find” — taught English prose music. Phrases from it passed into the language itself: “a thorn in the flesh,” “the powers that be,” “fight the good fight.” Puritan writers like Bunyan and poets like Milton drew on its diction, giving seventeenth-century prose a shared biblical English.

In short, the King James Bible made the Bible England’s prose school: generations learned to write grave, measured English by echoing its sentences.

These are the closing lines of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 10 (“Death, be not proud”), the poem in which the speaker puts Death itself on trial. Through the sonnet Death has been belittled — a slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men, no stronger than poppy or charms. The final couplet delivers the verdict.

“One short sleep past” treats dying as mere sleep, drawing on St Paul (1 Corinthians 15): as sleepers wake, so the dead shall rise. “We wake eternally” is the Christian answer — resurrection turns death’s apparent victory into a nap before eternity. Then the great paradox: “Death, thou shalt die.” The personified killer is himself executed; at the Resurrection, death will cease to exist.

The conceit’s wit thus ends in doctrine: what began as clever argument closes as faith. Donne turns metaphysical paradox into theology, and the sonnet’s last line kills its own subject.

After climbing the Hill Difficulty, Christian reaches the Palace Beautiful, a station of rest kept by four grave virgins — Discretion, Prudence, Piety and Charity. They question him about his journey, feed him, and show him the armoury, where he is fitted against the coming fight with Apollyon, and the Delectable Mountains shining in the distance.

The allegory is of the Church as a house of refreshment. The virtues as hostesses show that the pilgrim is received not by merit but by grace; the armoury teaches that rest is preparation for battle, not escape from it. Bunyan places this comfort deliberately before the Valley of Humiliation — the hardest fight follows the sweetest rest, as in the Christian life.

So the Palace Beautiful figures fellowship: no pilgrim walks alone, and grace feeds him before the road’s darkest stretch.

The Porter scene (Act 2, Scene 3) opens with a drunken porter imagining himself the keeper of hell-gate, admitting a farmer, an equivocator and a tailor. It is Shakespeare’s famous comic relief, placed immediately after Duncan’s murder, letting the audience breathe before Macduff discovers the body.

But the comedy carries damnation. The knocking that the porter answers echoes through the scene — conscience knocking, or Christ knocking at the door of a guilty house. The “equivocator” is a direct hit at the casuistry exposed by the Gunpowder Plot trials of 1605–06, when Catholics were accused of equivocating under oath; Shakespeare’s audience would catch the topical sting.

The scene thus deepens horror by contrast: laughter on the edge of hell. It is Shakespeare’s method — the grotesque joke making the tragedy darker, and the castle revealed as hell even as the porter jokes.

Meera was a Rajput princess of Merta, married into the royal house of Mewar, where rank demanded seclusion, honour and obedience. She defied all three. She sang of Krishna in public, danced before his image, and mixed freely with wandering saints — “the world gossips,” she admits in her songs, and sings on regardless.

Legend sharpens the defiance: the Rana, her husband’s kinsman, sends her a cup of poison, which she drinks as God’s gift and survives. She abandons palace, husband’s house and family honour for the beloved, choosing the open road of devotion over the closed doors of royalty.

Her defiance is Bhakti’s social shock in miniature: a high-born woman claims God directly, in public song, without priest or permission — proving devotion outranks birth, gender and custom. Her songs turn the palace’s shame into the devotee’s pride: what Mewar called dishonour, Bhakti calls sainthood.

The sentence neatly maps the double movement of the age this paper covers, roughly 1500 to 1700. The Renaissance, reaching England through humanism and the rediscovered classics, freed the mind: man became the measure of things, antiquity a second scripture, and the world a field for ambition, art and inquiry. Puritanism answered with the disciplined soul: the freed mind must be watched, examined and chastened by conscience. The literature of the paper lives in the tension between these two forces.

The Renaissance spirit is everywhere in the set texts. Spenser’s Amoretti (1595) shows the freed mind turning love into art — “One day I wrote her name upon the strand,” and the poet answers mortality with “I’le eternize.” Marlowe’s Faustus is the Renaissance scholar incarnate, trading his soul for infinite knowledge and power in the mighty line. His opening soliloquy — weighing logic, medicine, law and divinity, only to abandon them all — is the freed intellect surveying every field and finding each too small. Bacon’s essays, subtitled “Counsels, Civil and Moral,” apply the liberated intellect to worldly success — travel, marriage, ambition, empire — with cool, secular confidence.

Against this stands Puritan discipline. Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) maps the soul’s journey as a road of constant self-examination, where every stage — Slough, Vanity Fair, the Delectable Mountains — tests the pilgrim. Herbert’s The Temple (1633) makes devotion exact: poems shaped like altars and wings, wit harnessed to prayer, the clever mind bowed in worship. Here freedom is not the absence of restraint but obedience joyfully chosen.

Donne bridges both worlds: the sceptical wit of the Songs and Sonets and the disciplined faith of the Holy Sonnets are the same mind, first freed then chastened. Macbeth is the paper’s great warning about freedom without discipline. The Renaissance mind unbound — “vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself” — becomes a nightmare of blood and sleeplessness. Intellect without conscience is the tragedy.

So the paper traces an arc: morning in Spenser’s hopeful courtship, midnight in Macbeth’s Scotland, and inward dawn in Herbert and Bunyan. The Renaissance freed the mind to dare greatly; Puritanism taught the soul to dare rightly. English literature needed both — and this paper, moving from Faustus’s pride to Christian’s humility, is the record of their quarrel and their reconciliation. The two impulses never fully merge, and that unresolved tension is the period’s genius.

Spenser’s Amoretti, published in 1595 together with his marriage ode Epithalamion, is a sonnet sequence of 89 sonnets tracing his courtship of Elizabeth Boyle, whom he married in 1594. Unlike a mere collection of love poems, it has a narrative arc — doubt, hope, and resolve — that makes it one of the most unified sequences in English.

The sequence moves like a courtship. Early sonnets record uncertainty and the lady’s coldness; the middle sonnets plead and reason; the later ones turn toward hope. Sonnet 75, “One day I wrote her name upon the strand,” sits near this happy turn: the lady calls his writing “a vain assay,” and the poet answers that verse will “eternize” her — mortal hand achieving immortal fame. The debate between doubt and hope, begun in sonnet 1, finds its answer here. The early sonnets are full of such negotiation: the poet’s languishing eyes, her “cruel” fairness, his hope that time will soften her.

The Spenserian form itself serves the narrative. The chained rhyme — abab bcbc cdcd ee — links each quatrain to the next, so the argument flows continuously, sewing doubt into reply without the clean breaks of the Shakespearean sonnet. This musical continuity mirrors the courtship’s gradual progress: feeling develops rather than jerks. The final couplet of each sonnet seals a small advance, like a step won. Each sonnet’s turn — the volta — converts doubt into a small hope, so the reader feels the courtship advancing week by week.

The sequence is also Neoplatonic in spirit: the lady is idealized as heavenly beauty, and love is refined upward toward marriage rather than consumed in frustration — unlike Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, which ends in renunciation. Spenser’s love is patient, reverent and public in its intent. Even the famous blazon-sonnets praise her beauties only to gather them into a moral whole, virtue crowning beauty.

Crowned by Epithalamion, the marriage song, Amoretti completes what it began: courtship ending not in sighs but in wedding bells. Critics have noted how the sequence’s calendar movement — through the seasons toward the wedding day — makes time itself the ally of love. As a sonnet sequence it is remarkable for this wholeness — 89 sonnets forming a single story of love disciplined, tested and fulfilled.

The opening road of The Pilgrim’s Progress — from the Wicket Gate to the Cross — is Bunyan’s allegory of conversion, following the Puritan ordo salutis, the order of salvation. Every stage figures a step by which the convicted sinner passes from despair to grace, and the geography is theology made visible.

It begins with Evangelist pointing the burdened Christian to the “strait gate,” where Good-Will receives him — grace, not merit, opens the way. Almost at once he sinks into the Slough of Despond, the mire of despair that every awakened conscience must cross; Help pulls him out, for despair itself is part of the road. Then comes Mr Worldly Wiseman, urging the easier path to Legality’s village of Morality — and Christian, warned by Evangelist, turns back. Salvation is not by moral effort. The Interpreter’s emblems — the man with the muck-rake who prefers straw to a celestial crown — warn Christian against worldliness even after conversion has begun.

At the Interpreter’s House he receives instruction before deliverance: doctrine before experience. The Interpreter shows him the dusty parlour, Passion and Patience, the fire burning despite water — emblems of the inner life he must understand. Only then does he reach the Cross. Here the burden falls from his back and tumbles into the sepulchre — conversion as a physical release, the most famous moment in the book. Three Shining Ones complete the work: forgiveness, new clothing, and a sealed roll.

The road’s logic is exact. Despair must come before grace — the Slough prepares the Cross. The law, in Worldly Wiseman and the burden itself, shows sin but cannot remove it; only the Cross can. Instruction precedes deliverance because the Puritan convert must understand what is happening to him. Bunyan, who knew despair in his own Bedford imprisonment, writes this road from experience: no one skips the Slough.

So the short stretch from gate to Cross contains the whole gospel in miniature: conviction, despair, instruction, and release. Bunyan makes conversion not a doctrine to be believed but a road to be walked — and every reader is invited to walk it. Later stages repeat the pattern in miniature — every valley has its Slough, every hill its Cross — but the first crossing is the decisive one.

Kingship is the political spine of Macbeth: the play tests three kings — Duncan, Macbeth and Malcolm — and through them asks what makes rule legitimate. Shakespeare, writing for the newly crowned James I, treats kingship as stewardship: the crown must fit the man, and the land’s health mirrors the king’s.

Duncan is remembered as a sainted king — gracious, generous, quick to reward: “I have begun to plant thee, and will labour to make thee full of growing.” Yet he is politically naive, misreading both Cawdor and Macbeth: “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” His virtue is real but unguarded, and his murder wounds nature itself — the play’s unnatural deeds follow. His “single state of man” speech shows a king who feels deeply but judges poorly — the opposite of the vigilance kingship requires.

Macbeth is the usurper, and the play never lets him wear the crown comfortably. His titles are “borrow’d robes”; Angus’s image fixes him forever — “like a giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief.” Having seized power by crime, he can only keep it by crime: each murder breeds the next, from Banquo to Macduff’s family. Tyranny becomes insomnia — “Macbeth shall sleep no more” — and Scotland under him is a sick body: “bleed, bleed, poor country.” Lady Macbeth’s goading — “screw your courage to the sticking-place” — supplies the resolve he borrows, like his robes, from others. His kingship is power without legitimacy, and it hollows him out.

Malcolm is the answer. Tested in England, he falsely confesses to lust, greed and falsehood to prove Macduff’s loyalty — a trial that shows the prudence Duncan lacked. Crowned at Scone, with his promised “measure, time and place,” he represents legitimate, measured rule: the land cured, the thanes restored. His testing of Macduff, though built on lies about himself, proves he understands that a king must know men — the very art Duncan lacked.

The play’s politics are thus clear: Duncan’s goodness without vigilance fails, Macbeth’s strength without right destroys, and Malcolm’s tested virtue heals. Kingship, for Shakespeare, is not seized but deserved — the crown fits only the worthy head. The play thus offers James I, sitting in the audience, a mirror: rule by right, tested by trial, healed by justice.

The Bhakti movement, sweeping India from the south from about the eighth century and flowering in the north in the fifteenth and sixteenth, democratized holiness: it opened sainthood beyond caste, beyond priesthood, beyond Sanskrit learning — and, crucially, beyond gender. Meera, the Rajput princess-saint of the sixteenth century, is its most luminous proof that women could claim God directly.

Her life is the defiance itself. Born a Rathore princess of Merta and married into the royal house of Mewar, she rejected every demand of rank — seclusion, honour, obedience. She sang of Krishna in public, danced before his image, and mixed freely with wandering saints. “The world gossips,” she admits in her songs, and sings on. Legend tells that the Rana sent her a cup of poison, which she drank as God’s gift. Palace, husband’s house and family honour were all surrendered to the beloved. She calls herself the Lord’s handmaiden yet acts with a queen’s authority, commanding even kings to make way for her devotion.

Her bridal mysticism claims spiritual equality. Addressing Krishna as Giridhar, her husband-lover, Meera makes the soul the bride and God the bridegroom — a relationship needing no male mediator, no priest, no permission. This is theologically radical: a woman speaks to God as an equal partner in love. Her songs turn the intimate language of marriage, normally a woman’s subordination, into her instrument of liberation. Where the male bhaktas often argued theology, Meera simply loves — and her love, being public, becomes a social act as much as a spiritual one.

Nor is her devotion merely personal. In the set songs she widens her prayer to the whole jan, the people — her bhakti embraces the folk, the lowly, the suffering. Like Kabir, she bypasses temple and ritual, but where Kabir’s God is nirgun and formless, Meera’s is the beloved person, proving Bhakti had room for both. Her songs travelled by mouth across Rajasthan and beyond, carried by singers rather than scriptures — fitting for a saint who trusted song over text.

Meera’s place in the movement is therefore double: she is its most famous woman saint, and she is the evidence of its promise. Bhakti said holiness belongs to whoever loves God; Meera — princess turned wandering singer — made the whole of India believe it.