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Renaissance Science

“Valediction” showcases Donne’s broad interest in Renaissance science. Prior to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was what some historians have referred to as a Scientific Renaissance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Whereas the Scientific Revolution centered knowledge production and technological innovation, the Scientific Renaissance emphasized the recovery of ancient Greek and Roman scientific developments. It’s for this reason that the “science” of the Renaissance period often seems more philosophical and speculative than what we’re used to now, in the twenty-first century. Perhaps the most philosophical and speculative of all the Renaissance sciences was astronomy, which drew heavily from the writings of a Greek thinker named Ptolemy. Ptolemy developed a cosmological model in which the universe consisted of set of nested spheres, at the center of which stood the earth. Donne references this model in the third stanza of “Valediction,” where the speaker mentions the “trepidation of the spheres” (line 11). In Ptolemy’s system, trepidation names a disturbance in the outer spheres that gets transferred to the inner spheres. In addition to astronomy, Donne’s poem features references to other key sciences of the Renaissance, including alchemy and geography.

Metaphysical Poetry

In 1779, the famous literary critic Samuel Johnson coined the term “metaphysical poetry” to describe the verses of a small number of seventeenth-century poets such as John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. Generally speaking, the word metaphysical refers to a type of philosophical thinking that is characterized by the use of abstract reasoning. When Johnson described certain examples of poetry as metaphysical, he wanted to underscore their tendency toward philosophical abstraction. For him, though, abstraction was a bad thing. He felt that metaphysical poets developed unnecessarily elaborate conceits and unsolvable paradoxes. What resulted was dense and intellectual verse that demonstrated the poet’s wit more than it pleased the reader. Despite Johnson’s personal distaste for it, metaphysical poetry made a significant comeback in the early twentieth century, largely due to an enthusiastic reception from famous poets like T. S. Eliot. Today, many scholars celebrate John Donne as one of the Renaissance’s finest metaphysical poets, and the ambitiously constructed conceits that appear in many of his poems show why. The elaborate metaphor of the draftsman’s compass in the final stanzas of this poem remains one of the most famous examples of the “metaphysical conceit.”

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