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A conceit is a type of metaphor, a comparison of two unlike things for the purpose of creating an extended meaning. For instance, "Life is a bowl of cherries" is a conceit that tells us several things about the nature of life. It is sweet and delicious, but it doesn’t last forever. The comparison, which at first seems surprising or out of place, adds depth to both literature and ordinary conversation, and at the same time, a conceit helps to boil down an idea that may be fairly complex into a simple turn of phrase.

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Many of John Donne's poems contain metaphysical conceits and intellectual reasoning to build a deeper understanding of the speaker's emotional state. A metaphysical conceit can be defined as an extended, unconventional metaphor between objects that appear to be unrelated. Donne is exceptionally good at creating unusual unions between different elements in order to illustrate his point and form a persuasive argument in his poems.

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In literature, there are two main types of conceit, the metaphysical and the Petrarchan.

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Petrarchan conceits, named for the medieval Italian poet Petrarch, are exaggerated comparisons between the beloved and the natural world. "Her eyes are heavenly stars" is a Petrarchan conceit.

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Donne has been taken to be the apex of the 16th-century tradition of plain poetry, and certainly the love lyrics of his that parade their cynicism, indifference, and libertinism pointedly invert and parody the conventions of Petrarchan lyric, though he courts admiration for his poetic virtuosity no less than the Petrarchans. A “great haunter of plays” in his youth, he is always dramatic; his verse cultivates “strong lines,” dissonance, and colloquiality. Carew praised him for avoiding poetic myths and excluding from his verse the “train of gods and goddesses”; what fills it instead is a dazzling battery of language and argument drawn from science, law and trade, court and city. Donne is the first London poet: his early satires and elegies are packed with the busy metropolitan milieu, and his songs and sonnets, which include his best writing, with their kaleidoscope of contradictory attitudes, ironies, and contingencies, explore the alienation and ennui of urban living. Donne treats experience as relative, a matter of individual point of view; the personality is multiple, quizzical, and inconsistent, eluding definition. His love poetry is that of the frustrated careerist. By inverting normal perspectives and making the mistress the centre of his being—he boasts that she is “all states, and all princes, I, nothing else is”—he belittles the public world, defiantly asserting the superior validity of his private experience, and frequently he erodes the traditional dichotomy of body and soul, outrageously praising the mistress in language reserved for platonic or religious contexts. The defiance is complicated, however, by a recurrent conviction of personal unworthiness that culminates in the Anniversaries (1611–12), two long commemorative poems written on the death of a patron’s daughter. These expand into the classic statement of Jacobean melancholy, an intense meditation on the vanity of the world and the collapse of traditional certainties. Donne would, reluctantly, find respectability in a church career, but even his religious poems are torn between the same tense self-assertion and self-abasement that mark his secular poetry.

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Donne’s influence was vast; the taste for wit and conceits reemerged in dozens of minor lyricists, among them courtiers such as Aurelian Townshend and William Habington, academics such as William Cartwright, and religious poets such as Francis Quarles and Henry King. The only true Metaphysical, in the sense of a poet with genuinely philosophical pretensions, was Edward Herbert (Lord Herbert of Cherbury), important as an early proponent of religion formulated by the light of reason. Donne’s most enduring followers were the three major religious poets George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and Henry Vaughan. Herbert, a Cambridge academic who buried his courtly ambitions in the quiet life of a country parsonage, wrote some of the most resonant and attractive religious verse in the language. Though not devoid of tension, his poems substitute for Donne’s tortured selfhood a humane, meditative assurance. They evoke a practical piety and a richly domestic world, but they dignify it with a musicality and a feeling for the beauty of holiness that bespeak Herbert’s identification with the nascent Anglican church of Archbishop William Laud. By contrast, the poems of Crashaw (a Roman Catholic) and the Welsh recluse Vaughan move in alternativetraditions: the former toward the sensuous ecstasies and effusions of the Continental Baroque, the latter toward hermetic naturalism and mystical raptures.

However, in the context of the Civil Wars, Vaughan’s and Crashaw’s introspection began to look like retreat, and, when the satires of John Cleveland and the lyrics of Abraham Cowley took the Donne manner to extremes of paradox and vehemence, it was symptomatic of a loss of control in the face of political and social traumas. The one poet for whom metaphysical wit became a strategy for holding together conflicting allegiances was Donne’s outstanding heir, Andrew Marvell. Marvell’s writing is taut, extraordinarily dense and precise, uniquely combining a cavalier lyric grace with Puritanical economy of statement. His finest work seems to have been done at the time of greatest strain, in about 1650–53, and under the patronage of Sir Thomas Fairfax, parliamentarian general but opponent of King Charles I’s execution, to whose retirement from politics to his country estate Marvell accorded qualified praise in “Upon Appleton House.” His lyrics are poems of the divided mind, sensitive to all the major conflicts of their society—body against soul, action against retirement, experience against innocence, Oliver Cromwell against the king—but Marvell sustains the conflict of irreconcilables through paradox and wit rather than attempting to decide or transcend it. In this situation, irresolution has become a strength; in a poem like “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” which weighs the claims of King Charles and Cromwell, the poet’s reserve was the only effective way of confronting the unprecedented demise of traditional structures of politics and morality.

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Metaphysical conceits, made popular by the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, are comparisons between unlike things designed to bring forth the metaphorical meaning of the poem. At the beginning of "The Sun Rising," Donne calls the sun a "busy old fool" for ending his night with his lover, which begins an extended discussion of the relationship between love and time.

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Analysis

The poem simply titled “Song” is often referred to by its opening line, “Goe, and catche a falling starre” to distinguish it from other poems published as Donne’s Songs and Sonnets. This 27-line poem is deceptively light, upon first reading, as so much of Donne’s poetry appears. On the surface, it suggests attitudes about love and the relations between the sexes, but once again Donne’s poem carries a spiritual metaphor. The tone is lightly satirical, with deeper truths peeking out from underneath the poet’s assumed worldliness and cynicism.The meter for this poem is slightly unusual for Donne. It is not a typical “song” meter, even though that is its title. The title “Song” also gives a certain lightness and flippancy to the poem which is matched by the early lines about doing impossible things. The early lines prepare us for a cynical perspective that calls to mind the attitude of the jaded courtier singing to a collection of adults who are well-schooled in the vagaries of love.This poem is not just about misogyny or even a sincere statement about the alleged infidelity of women. Yes, on the surface the poem could read as a way for a young, scorned lover to cope with a woman who was false to him. And misogyny in love poems, read with a contemporary lens, might even seem like a convention in seventeenth-century poetry. Yet, a spiritual reading suggests a gender-neutral criticism of fallen humanity. As much as people may pledge themselves to be true to the divine, they fall short and might sin two or three times in the course of an afternoon. People are false the world over.