Why dost thou shade thy lovely face? EDWARD SHERBURNE The proud Egyptian Queen, her Roman Guest INTRODUCTION. I METAPHYSICAL POETRY, in the full sense of the term, is a poetry which, like that of the Divina Commedia, the De Natura Rerum, perhaps Goethe's Faust, has been inspired by a philosophical conception of the universe and the rôle assigned to the human spirit in the great drama of existence. These poems were written because a definite interpretation of the riddle, the atoms of Epicurus rushing through infinite empty space, the theology of the schoolmen as elaborated in the catechetical disquisitions of St. Thomas, Spinoza's vision of life sub specie aeternitatis, beyond good and evil, laid hold on the mind and the imagination of a great poet, unified and illumined his comprehension of life, intensified and heightened his personal consciousness of joy and sorrow, of hope and fear, by broadening their significance, revealing to him in the history of his own soul a brief abstract of the drama of human destiny. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge-it is as immortal as the heart of man.' Its themes are the simplest experiences of the surface of life, sorrow and joy, love and battle, the peace of the country, the bustle and x stir of towns, but equally the boldest conceptions, the pro foundest intuitions, the subtlest and most complex classifications and 'discourse of reason', if into these too the poet can 'carry sensation', make of them passionate experiences communicable in vivid and moving imagery, in rich and varied harmonies. It is no such great metaphysical poetry as that of Lucretius and Dante that the present essay deals with, which this |