A term you'll meet in metaphysical and Petrarchan poetry.
If you're reading John Donne and a footnote calls some passage a conceit, set aside the everyday meaning. In poetry a conceit has nothing to do with vanity. It's a device: an elaborate, extended comparison between two things that seem to have no business being compared.
The word comes from the Italian concetto — a "concept" or clever idea. A conceit is a metaphor that refuses to quit. Where an ordinary metaphor touches its two subjects and moves on, a conceit holds them together and works out the comparison in surprising, sometimes outrageous detail.
The most famous kind is the metaphysical conceit, associated with Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. In Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," two lovers about to be parted are compared to the two legs of a drawing compass — one fixed at the centre, one roaming, but always leaning toward home. The comparison is intellectual, almost mathematical, and the pleasure is watching the poet make it fit.
An older tradition, inherited from the Italian poet Petrarch, gave us the Petrarchan conceit: the stock hyperboles of love poetry — eyes like the sun, teeth like pearls, a heart frozen by a cold mistress. By Shakespeare's day these had become clichés, which is exactly why Sonnet 130 ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun") mocks them, one exhausted comparison at a time.
When you meet a conceit, don't ask "is this comparison pretty?" Ask "how far will the poet push it, and does it hold?" The point is the sustained ingenuity — the sense of a mind testing an idea to its breaking point. A conceit that collapses is a failure; one that survives its own audacity is the whole reward.
Lexio is a free Chrome extension and web app that reads a word's actual context and tells you what it means in this sentence, not from a generic dictionary.
Try Lexio — free →
Read deeper. Understand everything.
© 2026 Lexio · Privacy · Credits