Marbrook’s metaphysical poetry

Do you remember hearing the term “metaphysical poets?” Perhaps it was in your freshman English class. You might recall it being used during a survey of English poets like John Donne and Andrew Marvell. But it is not a term often heard today. Why is that? And what the hell does a high-falutin term like metaphysical poetry mean anyway?

Samuel Johnson first coined the name in 1779 to describe certain bards of the 17th century. He identified them with the use of elaborate metaphors, where comparisons of unlike things were used to convey complex, abstract ideas. Johnson may have used the term in a scornful way, but the legacy of the poetry stands on its own. Consider John Donne’s No Man is an Island. With such metaphors the term conceit came in to being. This was used in a non-derogatory way to refer to the complex ideas expressed in elaborate and sometimes strange symbols and metaphors, often invoking transcendent visions.

In the modern period, the metaphysical tradition went forth unnamed and morphed its way through time, often by other names like symbolism. But it could still be found in works like Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours, a spiritual journey that must rely on the language of symbolism and metaphor to face the unknown in a transcendent form. There, Rilke deals with the paradoxical nature of mortality and suffering, a feared plight, and an opportunity for transcendence at the same time:


It feels as though I make my way
through massive rock
like a vein of ore
alone, encased.

I am so deep inside it
I can’t see the path or any distance:
everything is close
and everything closing in on me
has turned to stone.

Since I still don’t know enough about pain,
this terrible darkness makes me small.
If it’s you though—

press down hard on me, break in
that I may know the weight of your hand,
and you, the fullness of my cry.

(Book of Hours—The Book of Poverty and Death, III, 1, translation by
Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy)


Poetry can sometimes be “difficult,” but this should not be confused with the inexplicable. For great poets, words do not land by accident, even if they come to the poet out of thin air. Metaphysical poetry has the reputation for being difficult, but with some work, one can find stunning beauty in its expression.

I invite you to consider the metaphysical verse of Djelloul Marbrook, a poet with a large collection of work. Marbrook was the winner of the Wick Poetry prize for his debut collection, Far from Algiers which deals with notions of belonging to a family and a culture that silently holds on to its prejudice and its rejection of difference.

Today’s featured poem is what I consider to be the modern version of metaphysical poetry. Why? Because this poem, like others from Marbrook’s tenth poetry collection, Singing in the o of Not, deals with the complex notions of identity, alchemical thinking, and Sufism. All in one short poem. Marbrook seems to use these concepts as a way of getting to the bottom of the ills that drive our culture in dark directions and our adherence to tribal notions of identity. But the poet also presents the mystical idea of going naked into the night without a name, terrifying and transcendent. Seeing the stars in a new way, virtue separated from glory and self-adulation, embracing what we don’t know as a starting point, rather than what we do know, or think we know. An elixir for our humanity. And the language is always inventive, songs sung, bringing us back to the beginning, before we had names or ideas of Being to separate us from others. In that way, the poems provide a prism to look through—and hear through— or in Marbrook’s telling, a place to see the dervish disappear.

I hope my reading does justice to this wonderfully constructed song-poem.

 No one cloaked in clothes 

Sing, burglar, sing to the unseen,
to no one cloaked in clothes,
to vast unbelonging,
not longing to complain
but to consort
with shapeless ones
for whom to name is to disdain.

Sing yourself inside out—
elementals hear you,
angels, devas, daemons, creatures
who depend upon your words
to sing cities into being,
to christen perilous thought.

Sing yourself into a panther,
meteor-eyed and bounding
star to star ravening
to limn aeons' worth of dreams.

Sing, intruder, not to be seen
or even to be remembered
but to complete a holy circuit
of companions longing for you
in the etheric of your fingertips.

Sing, saboteur, to water
thyme-delirious greenswards
and white woods of heaven,
to celebrate the eye of zero,
to vanish in it.


From Singing in the o of Not, Leaky Boot Press

Photo artwork by Djelloul Marbrook