Metaphysical Joy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2025
The book concludes with a reflection on one of the main features of the joy of love, its unreality: joy is or feels like it is out of this world. For many of the authors surveyed in this book, joy’s unreality does not suggest its naivety or foolishness but its very power to bridge phantasm and reality, the transcendent and the immanent. The conclusion opens up onto the European Renaissance: while the language of phantasmatic love’s joy is taken up by Petrarchist poetry, it is in seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry that is found the continuation of a language of love’s joy as the arresting and expansion of the present moment. John Donne and Thomas Traherne write of a joy that is here and now yet experienced as an everywhere, they write of its power to bring us out of ourselves and to reveal the transcendent within human love.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.