"The Metaphysical Amorist" by J.V. Cunningham

Topics discussed in this episode include:

 -The "Plain Style" 
-Epigrams
-"Stoner" by John Williams 
-Stanzaic asymmetricity 
-Wacky rhyme schemes as evidence of revision 
-Stanzaic palindromes 
-The triplet as the couplet of couplets 
-Ladies (feminine endings) last 
-The curious case of iambic tetrameter 
-A gloss of glose 
-Plato, the worst third-wheel ever, returns 
-Earthy kids 
-"Love" as heuristic 
-Western love poets as pseudo-incels 
-Christianity is Platonism for the masses 
-Do we ever really know the ones we love? 
-Plato gets dumped, again 
-Hume slides in the DMs, gets curved 
-Duns Scotus lookin like a snack tho 
-Scotistic realism 
-Plato's epistemology in the Theaetetus 
-Amor Vincit Philosophia 

Text of the poem: 

The Metaphysical Amorist

You are the problem I propose, 
my dear, the text my musings glose: 
I call you for convenience love. 
By definition you’re a cause 
inferred by necessary laws— 
you are so to the saints above. 

But in this shadowy lower life 
I sleep with a terrestrial wife 
and earthy children I beget. 
Love is a fiction I must use, 
a privilege I can abuse, 
and sometimes something I forget. 

Now, in the heavenly other place 
Love is in the eternal mind 
the luminous form whose shade she is 
a ghost discarnate, thought defined. 
She was so to my early bliss, 
she is so while I comprehend 
the form my senses apprehend, 
and in the end she will be so. 

Her whom my hands embrace I kiss, 
her whom my mind infers I know. 
The one exists in time and space 
and as she was she will not be; 
The other is in her own grace 
and is She is eternally. 

Plato! you shall not plague my life. 
I married a terrestrial wife. 
And Hume! She is not mere sensation 
in sequence of observed relation. 
She has two forms— ah, thank you, Duns!— 
I know her in both ways at once. 
I knew her, yes, before I knew her, 
and by both means I must construe her, 
and none among you shall undo her. 

Transcript

Versecraft Episode 2:2 “The Metaphysical Amorist” by J.V. Cunningham 

Welcome back everyone to Part 2 of my two-part series on the Platonic dilemma of romantic love. If that phrase means nothing to you, I strongly suggest you pause this episode and listen to my previous episode on Dick Davis’s “Marriage As A Problem of Universals” first. Before we begin, I’m pleased to announce that Versecraft has just hit 500 downloads! It’s a small victory, but a victory nonetheless. Thank you so much to all of you for listening, and please continue to tell your friends about the show, and even rate it on Apple Podcasts if you’re feeling generous. I really do appreciate it—this show would simply be an exercise in nerdy futility without your amazing support. 

Today’s poem, “The Metaphysical Amorist,” is similar to last week’s poem in that it tackles the problem of whether and how we should love a person for themselves vs. loving them in order to ascend to loving a higher, more abstract ideal. Whereas Davis dealt explicitly with marriage, and adopted a serious, gently moralizing tone, Cunningham deals with love more generally, and frames his poem as a playful soliloquy by a smart but somewhat silly character. Written in a smooth, snappy, rhyme-heavy iambic tetrameter full of arguments and philosophical wit, the poem feels, to me, in the spirit of the wonderful 17th century metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell. For more on what metaphysical poetry is, please see my George Herbert episode. 

J.V. Cunningham, who lived from 1911 to 1985, was one of the most unique voices in mid-century American letters. Not only did he exclusively write very traditional formal verse at a time when even most formal poets were experimenting with free verse or loose techniques, but he was also the most prominent advocate in his time of what in rhetoric is known as “the plain style:” that is, a style which is focused on conveying a thought or an argument as clearly, succinctly, and elegantly as possible, with little tolerance for flowery language, unnecessary detail, figurative speech, or digression. This style very much suited his natural temperament, but he was also highly influenced by the ideas of his mentor, Yvor Winters, as well as the poet whom I believe to be Cunningham’s most significant touchstone—not Marvell, but another 17th century poet, Ben Jonson, who was himself one of the greatest exemplars of the plain style in English. 

Like Jonson, Cunningham wrote meticulously crafted, crystal clear, unadorned verse; like Jonson, his interests in Latin poetry, satire, and formal concision led him to become a master of the epigram. For those who don’t know, an epigram is a very short poem, averaging about two to four lines, which aim at pithily expressing a thought through some kind of witty play on words or catchy linguistic contrast. Here’s one of Cunningham’s:

Here lies my wife. Eternal peace

be to us both with her decease.

 That’s it, that’s the whole poem. Today, Cunningham’s legacy mostly rests on his accomplishments in this form. While I cannot deny Cunningham’s facility as an epigrammatist, I tend to believe his most impressive and significant work lies in other, more serious genres. Today’s poem, while not perhaps the most serious in his oeuvre, does shed some light on his ability to tackle substantial themes with sparkling grace. Before we get to it, I’ll just add two more facts which might make Cunningham especially interesting to the contemporary reader: firstly, that he was the mentor and principal influence on the prominent poet and metrist Timothy Steele, and secondly, that he was actually the model for the main character in John Williams’s novel “Stoner,” a book which has become incredibly popular in recent years, and rightfully so. 

Now, for the poem. It goes like this: 

The Metaphysical Amorist

You are the problem I propose,

my dear, the text my musings glose:

I call you for convenience love. 

By definition you’re a cause 

inferred by necessary laws—

you are so to the saints above. 

But in this shadowy lower life

I sleep with a terrestrial wife

and earthy children I beget. 

Love is a fiction I must use,

a privilege I can abuse,

and sometimes something I forget.

Now, in the heavenly other place 

Love is in the eternal mind

the luminous form whose shade she is

a ghost discarnate, thought defined. 

She was so to my early bliss,

she is so while I comprehend 

the form my senses apprehend,

and in the end she will be so. 

Her whom my hands embrace I kiss,

her whom my mind infers I know.

The one exists in time and space 

and as she was she will not be;

The other is in her own grace 

and is She is eternally. 

Plato! you shall not plague my life. 

I married a terrestrial wife.

And Hume! She is not mere sensation

in sequence of observed relation.

She has two forms— ah, thank you, Duns!—

I know her in both ways at once. 

I knew her, yes, before I knew her, 

and by both means I must construe her,

and none among you shall undo her. 

At first glance, this poem seems to be supremely formal, supremely polished: the smooth tetrameter lines, the absence of enjambment, and the full, chiming rhymes give it an almost stuffy urbanity, an impression which the poem, and the poet, fully embraces. However, the poem is a bit more irregular than we might initially give it credit for. To begin with, look at the division of stanzas: sestet, sestet, octet, sestet, and then, a stanza of nine lines, a nonet. If Cunningham had simply cut one line from this last stanza, the stanzaic pattern would be symmetrical—but, for some reason, he refuses to be symmetrical. Let’s jump ahead for a moment and look at what that last extra line is: “and none among you shall undo her.” By “undoing” his symmetrical scheme, Cunningham is refusing to strive for the abstract, perfect ideal: he is accepting the world, and his beloved, as they are, with all their imperfections. 

Another oddity here is the rhyme scheme. The first sestet follows an AABCCB rhyme scheme, and the second follows suit. Our initial impression then is that we are reading a poem in a very regular form. The next stanza is an octet—a variation, to be sure, but not so unusual in itself. What is unusual is the complete change in the rhyme scheme. The inner six lines follow an almost reverse scheme to the previous sestets—the outer two lines do not seem to rhyme at all. This is perhaps a trivial point, but if you read those inner six lines in reverse order, so that they align closely with the rhyme scheme of the previous sestets, the thought expressed still makes sense: 

The form my senses apprehend

she is so while I comprehend. 

She was so to my early bliss,

a ghost discarnate, thought defined.

The luminous form whose shade she is

Love is in the eternal mind. 

            I doubt Cunningham intended this palindromic quality, but it’s a cool hidden quirk in this poem. It’s only when we get to the next sestet, which follows yet another pattern, that we finally get rhymes for the two unrhymed lines in the octet: “place” with “space” and “so” with “know.” This spilling-over of rhymes, what we might call an enjambment of rhyme, may indicate that Cunningham is seeking to express logical continuity between the two stanzas by linking them with sonic continuity. The content of the stanzas bears out this hypothesis, but I’m also inclined to believe that this kooky rhyme scheme is evidence that Cunningham heavily revised this poem, moving many lines around until he could express himself exactly as he wanted. 

            Finally, the ending nonet announces its finality by ringing out in rhyming couplets. These are not heroic couplets, I might add, because we’re in tetrameter rather than pentameter. Because the stanza is composed of couplets, the final lines have to have even more umph to stand out, so Cunningham rhymes the last three lines in a row, a technique called a triplet. Alexander Pope, whom we will remember from the last episode, wrote almost exclusively in rhyming couplets, and he too would often end his sections with a triplet in order to give his conclusions extra emphasis. But Cunningham doesn’t stop there. Up until the final stanza, he has not used any feminine endings—then, in the final stanza, he uses five, three of them in the ending triplet. Cunningham thus shows us how conscious he is of his aural choices, preparing something as simple as feminine rhymes to sound like dramatic pyrotechnics by the end. 

            When reading this poem, I was reminded of something peculiar I’ve noticed many times when reading and writing poetry: namely that, for some reason, iambic tetrameter always seems to me to sound a little bit playful, a little bit unserious. This effect is especially intensified when the lines rhyme, and even more so when the rhymes are end-stopped, that is, do not enjamb, like in this poem. It’s actually because of this impression of un-seriousness that I personally avoid writing in iambic tetrameter, even though there are many poems I admire which use it. In thinking about why I might have this impression, it occurred to me that iambic dimeter also has this effect. Of course, a tetrameter line is nearly synonymous with two dimeter lines, so this isn’t surprising. But then I realized that iambic heptameter, a line with seven iambic feet, also has this effect. Then I realized the pattern: in lines that seem like a combination of two smaller lines, there is a call-and-response effect which gives such lines a slight sing-songy quality, a sing-songiness which of course is only exacerbated if there are also strong end rhymes. A dimeter just sounds like one foot following another, a tetrameter sounds like two dimeters, and heptameter sounds like a trimeter followed by tetrameter, or vice versa. The smaller, odd-numbered meters—trimeter and pentameter— because of both their asymmetricity and brevity, do not break down in the ear this way, therefore do not have this call-and-response effect, and therefore seem more somber, more conversational. Of course, some people are under the impression that any meter and rhyme at all sounds too song-like, and for that reason prefer lineated prose poetry of one kind or another. Several weeks down the line, I plan to do any episode contrasting the merits of verse and so-called “free verse,” and will go into this issue in much more depth. 

For now though, let’s return to the first stanza of our poem: 

You are the problem I propose,

my dear, the text my musings glose:

I call you for convenience love. 

By definition you’re a cause 

inferred by necessary laws—

you are so to the saints above. 

Now I know what you’re thinking: what on earth does “glose” mean? The easy answer is what you might suspect from the context: it’s an archaic form of the word “gloss.” By choosing this antiquated word to make his rhyme scheme fit, Cunningham gives us another clue, in addition to the end-stopped rhymed iambic tetrameter, that he’s going to approach his subject matter with his tongue at least somewhat in his cheek. He compares his beloved to a text he must analyze, a problem he must solve—as we will soon see, this is the same problem of universals we encountered in the Davis poem. He says he calls her “love” out of convenience, as if to call her what she truly is would be too complicated. He then identifies love, and therefore her, as “a cause inferred by necessary laws.” Cunningham here is cunningly, and hammily, playing with two ways in which the word “love” is used: as a pet name for his sweetheart, and as an abstract concept which can be logically deduced. By deliberately confusing the two, he makes the Platonic connection that his material lover is an embodiment or reflection of a divine, ideal cause, the form of love itself. Of course, things are not so simple. 

The second stanza reads: 

But in this shadowy lower life

I sleep with a terrestrial wife

and earthy children I beget. 

Love is a fiction I must use,

a privilege I can abuse,

and sometimes something I forget.

            With this “but,” a sudden trochaic substitution, the plot thickens, and the aforementioned problem emerges. The speaker is, after all, not married to the form of love, but a “terrestrial wife” in this “shadowy lower life.” Despite the suggestions of heavenly love which his beloved might evoke, she is still ultimately a material creature, as he is and as their children are. “Shadowy” of course references Plato’s allegory of the cave, where shadows represent the unreal phantoms of material existence as compared to the sunlit world of ideas. Appropriately, the terms “shadowy” and “terrestrial” mark the first use of anapestic substitutions in the poem. In speaking of imperfect materiality, Cunningham interrupts his otherwise quite pristine meter. “Earthy” is an interesting choice of diction— you would think, given the contrast to heaven, he would use the term “earthly.” “Earthy” accomplishes the task, but it also adds the connotation of roughness, plainness, and crudeness. Given that the speaker is talking about his own children, there’s no doubt an element of humor here. 

            Picking up on his earlier statement that he calls his wife “love” out of convenience, the speaker says that love “is a fiction I must use, a privilege I can abuse, and sometimes something I forget.” If we assume, as the speaker does, that true love is the platonic ideal of love, then any use of the word “love” in our shadowy, terrestrial world is not entirely accurate—it’s a heuristic to describe an analogous phenomenon. To put it more bluntly, it’s a fiction, a fiction which, with its lofty implications, can be used to manipulate people, but also carries a set of interpersonal obligations with it which can be fulfilled or forgotten. 

            Now let’s start from the beginning and read through the third stanza: 

You are the problem I propose,

my dear, the text my musings glose:

I call you for convenience love. 

By definition you’re a cause 

inferred by necessary laws—

you are so to the saints above. 

But in this shadowy lower life

I sleep with a terrestrial wife

and earthy children I beget. 

Love is a fiction I must use,

a privilege I can abuse,

and sometimes something I forget.

Now, in the heavenly other place 

Love is in the eternal mind

the luminous form whose shade she is

a ghost discarnate, thought defined. 

She was so to my early bliss,

she is so while I comprehend 

the form my senses apprehend,

and in the end she will be so. 

            In this stanza, Cunningham explicitly contrasts the misleading, earthly version of love with love as it exists in Plato’s metaphysics: a shining form within a heavenly, incorporeal world of ideas, of which his beloved is a mere shadow. He speaks of this spiritual realm as being within the “eternal mind,” a description which sounds less like Plato than his Hellenistic reformer Plotinus, who identified Plato’s ideas as existing within a Divine Intelligence, and thereby made Plato’s philosophy into a theology, a form of Pagan Monotheism. 

            The speaker then goes on to say that “she was so to my early bliss.” That is, during the early infatuation period of his love, his beloved did seem to him like the idea of love incarnate. This gets back to an idea I discussed last time—namely, that the Western tradition of love poetry, which is heavily influenced by Platonism, is very good at describing the first stages of love, but has very little to say about more advanced, more knowing stages of love. In order to keep their Platonic ardor alive, poets often defer the consummation of their love, to say nothing of building relationships, for years at a time, and thereby keep their idealization of the beloved intact. From Dante with Beatrice to Yeats with Maude Gonne we see this same tactic: the lover must exist in a state of immaturity, a state of arrested development, in order to write the poetry that he wants to write. Thus, it behooves him to choose a love that is inaccessible to him, whether due to political affiliation, marital status, socio-economic class, or some other reason. If the beloved is dead, that is best of all. 

            The speaker goes on, through the elegant counterpoint of the words “comprehend” and “apprehend”, to illustrate how Platonic psychology works: Senses apprehend, that is, seize and identify, material objects as specimens of forms; the mind then comprehends, that is, abstractly understands, the nature of forms themselves. The phrase “In the end she will be so” gives a nice verbal echo to the prior couplet, and also identifies a Platonic vision of the afterlife, wherein his beloved’s soul will rejoin her blueprint in the heavenly world of forms. At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s worth noting here that the Christian conception of heaven is much more rooted in Platonism than Judaism—via St. Augustine and others, Platonic ideas served as the groundwork for much of Christian theology, and if many of the Platonic ideas in this poem sound very Christian, that’s by no mean a coincidence. 

            The fourths stanza reads:

Her whom my hands embrace I kiss,

her whom my mind infers I know.

The one exists in time and space 

and as she was she will not be;

The other is in her own grace 

and is She is eternally. 

This stanza essentially serves to reiterate and sum up the contrast between the material lover and ideal love which the speaker has explored up to this point: the woman he kisses is not love itself, but a spatiotemporal, ephemeral creature. What I find most interesting about this stanza is the second line: “her whom my mind infers I know.” He’s saying that whereas his actual wife is the one he kisses, it is the form of love itself that he “knows,” implying that his wife, by contrast, is an entity that he doesn’t know. This might sound perverse, but I think it points to an important truth: We know our ideas about our spouses much better than we know our spouses themselves. Ideas are easy enough to understand and are accessible to all minds. People, on the other hand, are mysterious and complicated, and their true nature is accessible to no one— not even themselves. 

Now let’s begin again, and this time, read all the way through: 

You are the problem I propose,

my dear, the text my musings glose:

I call you for convenience love. 

By definition you’re a cause 

inferred by necessary laws—

you are so to the saints above. 

But in this shadowy lower life

I sleep with a terrestrial wife

and earthy children I beget. 

Love is a fiction I must use,

a privilege I can abuse,

and sometimes something I forget.

Now, in the heavenly other place 

Love is in the eternal mind

the luminous form whose shade she is

a ghost discarnate, thought defined. 

She was so to my early bliss,

she is so while I comprehend 

the form my senses apprehend,

and in the end she will be so. 

Her whom my hands embrace I kiss,

her whom my mind infers I know.

The one exists in time and space 

and as she was she will not be;

The other is in her own grace 

and is She is eternally. 

Plato! you shall not plague my life. 

I married a terrestrial wife.

And Hume! She is not mere sensation

in sequence of observed relation.

She has two forms— ah, thank you, Duns!—

I know her in both ways at once. 

I knew her, yes, before I knew her, 

and by both means I must construe her,

and none among you shall undo her. 

Like in Davis’s poem, Cunningham eventually can’t resist name-dropping Plato directly. The exclamation “Plato!” is by far the strongest trochaic substitution in the poem, and it marks the volta of this poem as well. Up to this point, the speaker has been content to contrast his earthly love with Platonic, unearthly love, but now we see that this contrast truly bothers him. He snaps out of his reverie, and refutes Plato with the simple response that he “married a terrestrial wife,” a response which echoes the second line of the second stanza, and makes clear that he must live based upon the actual obligations and connections he has made in his life, rather than grasp after a diaphanous ideal. 

But the speaker isn’t through with philosophers yet. Next, he addresses Hume, the great Scottish Empiricist, and denies that his love is “mere sensation in sequence of observed relation.” The polar opposite of Plato, Hume had claimed that everything the human mind experienced was merely “bundles of perceptions,” and that to call anything a discrete object was merely to impose an artificial mental construct onto a particular collection of sensations through time. Famously, Hume even denied the reality of causality, observing that all we can really know is that one thing follows another— we cannot logically prove a causal relationship between them. The speaker denies this way of thinking as well—just because he has now rejected Platonic ideas doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe in the existence of people or objects. He instead takes a middle path: his wife has “two forms” and “he knows her in both ways at once,” that is, both as a collection of material elements and as a unified identity: a person, his love, his wife. For this moderate view he says “thank you, Duns!” a reference to the famous Medieval philosopher Duns Scotus.

 Without getting too deep into the philosophical weeds here, we can say that Scotus’s position on the problem of universals fell somewhere between Aristotle’s and Plato’s: like Aristotle, he believed that universals only exist insofar as they are embodied in particular specimens; like Plato, he also thought these universals corresponded to ideas in the mind, which in turn pointed to ideas found in the mind of God. Whereas Aristotle thinks of universals as fundamental patterns of relation between physical objects, Scotus thinks of them, as Plato does, more like blueprints, but unlike Plato, Scotus doesn’t believe these blueprints have any actual existence in themselves before they’re enacted in the physical world. 

The speaker thus sees Scotus as a happy medium between the extremes of Plato and Hume, a philosopher who allows him to acknowledge the necessary materiality of love yet still allows him to think of his lover as a discrete entity representative of an ideal. The speaker ultimately believes that to recognize, understand, and love a person, we must view them as both material and ideal at once, both a composition of physical perceptions, but also a person who has a unifying identity with transcendent implications. 

The humor in all this is of course is that the speaker doesn’t feel capable of thinking for himself but must find a philosopher to latch on to in order to feel satisfied with his outlook on life. Cunningham thus paints a charming portrait of the sophomoric intellectual. 

            The speaker then succinctly sums up his new hybrid view by saying “I knew her, yes, before I knew her, and by both means I must construe her.” The speaker here draws upon the theory of knowledge that Plato lays out in his dialogue The Theaetetus, where the philosopher explains that everything we learn is really just a recollection of the world of forms that our soul has always known, but which we in our mortal forms have forgotten. The form of his love is what the speaker has always known, the version of her before he knew her as a human being. His knowledge of her as a form and his knowledge of her as a particular person must be synthesized in order for the speaker to reach a true conception of who she is. 

            Finally, he ends by pronouncing that none of “you”—that is no philosopher—shall undo her. That is, no philosophy can reduce his beloved to either a pale imitation of an idea on the one hand, nor a jumble of sense data on the other. The human being is more than is dreamt of in any philosophy, and the speaker, a man obsessed with philosophy, seems to have finally touched upon this revelation by the end of the poem. 

            With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s read through the poem one last time, as an old friend: 

The Metaphysical Amorist

You are the problem I propose,

my dear, the text my musings glose:

I call you for convenience love. 

By definition you’re a cause 

inferred by necessary laws—

you are so to the saints above. 

But in this shadowy lower life

I sleep with a terrestrial wife

and earthy children I beget. 

Love is a fiction I must use,

a privilege I can abuse,

and sometimes something I forget.

Now, in the heavenly other place 

Love is in the eternal mind

the luminous form whose shade she is

a ghost discarnate, thought defined. 

She was so to my early bliss,

she is so while I comprehend 

the form my senses apprehend,

and in the end she will be so. 

Her whom my hands embrace I kiss,

her whom my mind infers I know.

The one exists in time and space 

and as she was she will not be;

The other is in her own grace 

and is She is eternally. 

Plato! you shall not plague my life. 

I married a terrestrial wife.

And Hume! She is not mere sensation

in sequence of observed relation.

She has two forms— ah, thank you, Duns!—

I know her in both ways at once. 

I knew her, yes, before I knew her, 

and by both means I must construe her,

and none among you shall undo her.