The relationship between form and content in the religious verse of the metaphysical poets is of great importance in tracing the development of a tradition which includes such dissimilar poets as Donne and Traherne. The nature of the personal religious experience, as expressed in the religious poetry of the first half of the seventeenth century, undergoes significant change. This change is most apparent in the verse of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne, and may be described basically in terms of the time when individual soul and God are united. For Donne this union is unattainable in the present and is to be found only after death, as the Divine Poems and the Anniversaries demonstrate; in the poems of Traherne, however, it is experienced at the moment of birth and becomes a continuing, present reality. As we trace in the work of the four poets the gradual bringing into this world of the soul's union with God, we discover also a process in which the barriers of the self are broken down. Individual personality becomes increasingly identified with the Divine Personality, and finally nothing intervenes between present reality and the long-sought vision. This vision, symbolized in Donne's Anniversaries by the liberation after death of the soul of Elizabeth Drury, is progressively interiorized in the verse of the later poets, and in Traherne's lyrics finds a new embodiment in the living experience of the poet. Such a change can be traced in the forms the poets use. We may find not only in the inner structure of line and stanza, but also in the total visual arrangement and organizing principle of a poem or group of poems, formal equivalents to the kind of vision expressed. The Anniversaries and Divine Poems of Donne and the poems in Herbert's The Temple are notable for the complexity of their controlling figures and the intricacy of their verbal structure. In Vaughan's Silex Scintillans and in the poems of Traherne, however, we find simpler and more flexible organizing principles and a corresponding decline in the use of complex symbols and conceits„ In general, the formal and structural changes which occur between Donne and Traherne may best be seen as a progressive simplifying and paring down -- a removal, in the verse itself, of all that might stand between individual soul and God. But while the nature of the actual religious experience changes in the four poets, and with it the inner structures and outer forms of their verse, there remains one single, informing vision of God. God is encountered and described in different ways, but His essential nature is recognized as changeless and unconditioned. In the same way we must examine the different formal principles within a larger context. In all four poets the concept of the poem as a celebration of and a sacrifice to God remains constant. In all four poets the act of poetic creation itself is analogous to the greater creative Act of God; the poems themselves are individual acts of praise which celebrate as they embody the multiplicity-in-unity of the Creation. Within this context a study of the best and most characteristic verse of these poets shows that there is nothing accidental or unplanned in the methods of organization each used to convey his religious experience. The different poetic forms we encounter, many of them unique, are our first and most compelling guide to the spiritual core of the poetry; they are the means by which we recognize not only the uniqueness of the individual experience, but also its place in the larger framework of universal praise. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

An examination of the stanzas of The Faerie Queene reveals a structural complexity that prosodists have not previously discovered. In the prosody of Spenser's epic, two formal prosodic orders function simultaneously. One is the visible structure that has long been acknowledged and studied, eight decasyllabic lines and an alexandrine bound into a coherent entity by a set meter and rhyme scheme. The second is an order made apparent by an oral reading and which involves speech stresses, syntactical groupings, caesura placements, and enjambments. In an audible reading, elements are revealed that oppose the structural integrity of the visible form. The lines cease to be iambic, because most lines contain some irregularities that are incongruent with the meter. The visible structure is further counterpointed by Spenser's free use of caesura and frequent employment of enjambment to create a constantly varying structure of different line lengths in the audible form. This study also examines precedents that Spenser could have known for the union of music and poetry. English lyric poetry written for existing melodies is analyzedand the French experiments with quantitative verse supported with musical settings are discussed. Special emphasis is given to the musical associations of the Orlando furioso, particularly its relation to the tradition of singing narrative poetry to folk melodies. Internal support for the thesis that Spenser deliberately employed musical techniques in his prosody comes from his use of the Tudor masque in the structure of the epic. Evidence is offered to show that the processional masque is the unifying foundation for the whole of The Faerie Queene, A characteristic of the sixteenth-century masque was its combination of art forms, and Spenser found a method for integrating the arts of music and literature. Spenser uses musical techniques in the prosody that he could have expected would echo musical experiences of his reader, thereby creating the accompanying music. The musical techniques not only unify the individual stanzas; they also integrate the prosody with the larger organizing plan of the epic,