ABSTRACT
In a long reply to the various published attacks on his The Rehearsall Transpros'd (1672), Marvell claimed that they all came from the same hand, or at least had the same sponsor. He called in Donne's Metempsychosis to illustrate his description of this assailant's successive transformations, but then slipped into a five-page account of the poem itself, part summary and part quotation, numbering the stanzas in the margin as he came to them. He claims that Donne's fiction quite closely applies to his present case, but doesn't show how (The Rehearsall Transpros'd: The Second Part, 1673, pp. 62-7).
