George Herbert (1593-1633) belonged to the school of seventeenth-century which included John Donne, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley and Thomas Traherne. Helen Gardner’s introduction to her edition, The Metaphysical Poets (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), is an expert discussion of the leading features of this school. Present-day Bemerton residents have provided an excellent illustrated biography of Herbert: http://www.georgeherbert.org.uk/about/ghb_group.html. I highly recommend also Amy M. Charles, A Life of George Herbert (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,1977). Guides to some of Herbert’s best-known and best-loved poems follow.

George Herbert at Bemerton by William Dyce. 1860. Oil on Canvas: Guildhall Art Gallery, London
(Present-day pilgrims to Herbert country will find that the walk between church and cathedral is much the same as in Dyce’s day.)

http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/dyce/paintings/4.html

The Temple

In the last three years of his life, while he was parish priest at Bemerton near Salisbury in the south of England, Herbert completed a body of poems that offered spiritual guidance to his parishioners,  “they are a picture of spiritual conflicts between God and my soul before I could subject my will to Jesus, my Master”. Shortly before his death, he collected these and sent them to his friend, Nicholas Ferrar, leader of the Anglican spiritual community of Little Gidding in Cambridgeshire. Ferrar was to publish the collection, only if Ferrar thought they might “turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul.”  Since its first publication in 1633, The Temple has been a delight and an inspiration that has given comfort and hope to spiritual seekers and poetry lovers alike.

The title suggests at least five meanings:

1. 1. 1. A building to praise God;
      2. An arrangement of poems to praise God;
      3. The human body as the temple of the holy spirit;
      4. The Church as the body of Christ;
      5. Creation as God’s temple.

“Aaron”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44356/aaron 

Since it tells us how he viewed his vocation as priest to the Temple, “Aaron” is a suitable place to begin this discussion. Like other Herbert poems, it is a virtuoso verbal performance, rhyming on the same five words in each of its five stanzas, and ingeniously varying the contents within this rigid frame. In the Old Testament Book of Exodus, Aaron, Moses’s brother, is a prophet and temple priest. He is traditionally interpreted as a model for Christian priests to follow.

Stanza 1 sets up an image of the ideal priest by interpreting the symbols of Aaron’s body and priestly garments–in descending order, head; breast; and the bells affixed to the base of the priest’s tunic. The the true priest’s task is to lead his people to salvation.

In Stanza 2 the speaker, presumably Herbert himself, measures himself against this ideal, and finds himself wanting. In a series of antitheses he finds in himself profaneness instead of holiness; darkness instead of light; and noisy passions that draw him to hell rather than to heaven.

Stanza 3, the hinge point and centre of the poem, nevertheless gives cause for hope. Though a “poor priest” the speaker has, he says, another head (i.e. governor–a pun), another heart, and another music. All these bring life instead of death; they bring him rest and clothe him “well.”

Stanza 4 reveals that this alternative, inner priest is Christ. Christ is the speaker’s only head, heart and breast. Christ strikes the old man dead, and clothes the speaker anew in himself. The stanza is based on St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians 4. 22-24: “That you put off the old man which is corrupt…And be renewed in the spirit of your mind. And that ye put on the new man which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.” (Like many of his contemporaries, Herbert was steeped in the King James version of the Bible (1611), and his poetry often weaves in allusions which his original readers would recognise, but which modern people may need to be alerted to.)

Stanza 5 confirms the speaker’s transformation through Christ. Christ is described as the one “who lives in me while I do rest.” When the speaker’s unworthiness and his self doubts are at rest, i.e. all aspects of his complex self-hood, then Christ is resurrected and lives in him. Then Christ “tunes” the speaker’s preaching so that it becomes music. Christ’s indwelling perfects the speaker’s priestly vocation.

QUESTION: Herbert was an expert musician–can you find the music metaphor in each stanza of “Aaron”?

“Affliction I”

https://www.ccel.org/h/herbert/temple/Afflictions.html 

Five of Herbert’s poems have the title “Affliction.” The first in The Temple, “Affliction I,” is an intensely personal and honest poem. Herbert often writes of the ups and downs of his spiritual life, thereby setting an example from which others can learn and derive comfort. The tension between Herbert’s pastoral purpose (his priestly desire to be a true shepherd to his flock) and his inventive language and mastery of verbal techniques produces the unique beauty of his poetry. Paradoxically, his poems often achieve simplicity after negotiating complex and structured forms. Sometimes they move beyond simplicity to the ultimate goal of silence. They escape from language and the reality produced by language into a higher reality.

In “Affliction” the speaker recollects his spiritual path to the point that he has now reached. The recollection begins with the words, “When first…,” which open the poem. The stanzas that follow retrace the stages he has passed through, finally reaching the present with the word “Now” which begins stanza 10 (line 55).

The speaker remembers his past life as having been dominated by expectations, ambitions, wills and desires: “I had my wish and way”; “Whereas my birth and spirit rather took the way that takes the town…” He began confidently, believing that Christian service would do no more than deepen the happiness that he expected in life. But he has been proven wrong. His worldly desires have not been met. Instead his life has been given up to scholarship and the priesthood: “wrap me in a gown.” Yet the inducements from God have been sufficient to keep his Christian commitment going. The realisation/summary of how things have worked out dawns in stanza nine, where the speaker turns from his past to his present state. He realises that an arduous inner transformation has occurred in spite of his resistance. Therefore he will continue on the path:

Thus doth thy power cross-bias me, not making
Thine own gift good, yet me from my ways taking. (lines 53-4)

Stanza 10 goes even further: the speaker reveals how he has given up the active willing and ambition that dominated the early stages of his spiritual journey. Instead he knows that he is being called upon to wait. His only remaining “willing” is to be useful, like a tree that offers shade and shelter to birds.

But then, in the last stanza, his troubled mind returns, and he threatens after all to abandon his Christian service (lines 64-65). The closing prayer is a paradox, an expression of inner division that is typical of Herbert: “Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.” This may mean: “Don’t let me love you in this half-hearted, painful and reluctant way: let me love you wholeheartedly, or let me go.” 

A key feature of Herbert’s appeal as a sacred poet is his honesty about the ups and downs of spiritual life; he recognises that spiritual life is a slow and uncertain process that demands trust and persistence.

Herbert’s Poetics (Theory of Poetry) in Three Poems: “Jordan I,” “Jordan II” and “The Forerunners” 

The title “Jordan” refers to Herbert’s wish that his poetic Muse should be made Christian by being baptised in the River Jordan, where John the Baptist baptised Christ (Mark 1: 9-11). Jordan is the successor to the springs on Mount Helicon sacred to the nine Muses, who in classical mythology are the inspirers of  music, poetry, drama, astronomy and history.

“Jordan I”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44364/jordan-i

“An obscure poem written against obscurity,” “Jordan I” simultaneously describes and parodies the kinds of poetry that Herbert does not want to write. 

Stanza 1 urges poetry to express the unadorned truth, which is inherently beautiful–a reference to Plato’s idea of God as the Good, the True and the Beautiful. The stanza 1 rejects poetry that is decorated with fictions and falsities (wigs, not natural hair) and is elaborately structured (“a winding stair”). He urges poets to take as their subject the true “chair” of divine reality inherent in the physical world, in other words the (Platonic) Ideas, which are the metaphysical originals of material objects. They should not write about the latter, because they are just imitations (“a painted chair”) of the Ideas (the “true” chair).  Poets should avoid being merely “imitators of imitations,” which is how Plato sees them in The Republic Book 10.

Stanza 2 dismisses the artifice of pastoral poetry. “Pastoral” comes from the Latin word, “pastor,” meaning a shepherd. Fashionable in court circles in the seventeenth century, pastoral poetry privileges a heightened, unreal version of romantic love. Herbert parodies the contents of such poetry in such references as “enchanted groves,” and the form created by such unusual words as “purling,” meaning “flowing with a babbling sound.”  The line, “And sudden arbours shadow coarse-spun lines?”,  mixes the subject of pastoral poetry–“sudden arbours” with its medium–“coarse-spun lines” (of writing). But how can the arbours “shadow” the lines? Shouldn’t this be reversed? Surely the lines are the Platonic imitations (shadows), and the arbours are real, or at least, in Plato’s terms, more real. Arbours are  garden shelters formed by trees and bushes. Difficulties multiply, because “coarse-spun” is a metaphor, in this case a description applied to a shepherd’s rough woolen garments. Therefore, the written lines have taken on some of the physical characteristics of their referents. Furthermore, “sudden arbours” forcibly combines a feeling (of surprise) with physical objects. All of this demonstrates simultaneously through examples the stanza’s closing assertion–that such poetry takes the reader on a complicated search through multiple stages for meanings that are still uncertain, even at the end: “…he that reads divines (i.e. “guesses”)/Catching the sense at two removes.” This is precisely what Herbert has forced the reader of Stanza 2 to do.

Stanzas 1 and 2 make their points through a series of rhetorical questions (questions that don’t expect an answer). Stanza 3 changes the pattern and offers a resolution through statements. Herbert grants licence to true shepherds to sing their songs. He grants the same licence to those who want to produce “riddling” poetry, a point he makes in the parodic “riddling” line which refers to drawing cards in the game of Primero: “Riddle who list [want] for me, and pull for prime.” He says that he is not jealous of the conventional poetic allusions to nightingales and springtime. In return for his forbearance he insists that pastoral poets should not criticise his poetry, the plain meaning of which is summed up in the phrase, “My God, My King.” Thus the paralleling, or even compounding, of subject and form in “Jordan I” continues to the end: when the subject is plain poetry, the language likewise is plain. Like many of Herbert’s poems, “Jordan I” finishes by reducing poetic language to an ultimate simplicity. The silence that follows invites the reader to transcend the limited version of reality which language makes and mediates.

The shape of “Jordan I” embodies the tension in Herbert’s poetry between, on the one side, a virtuoso skill with language powered by an ingenious intellect, and on the other a commitment to writing poetry that is “pastoral” in the sense of “a guide for the Christian flock” of which he is a “pastor.” He sees his talents as God’s gift, and wants to glorify God rather than himself. He does not want to submerge his sacred subject matter or pastoral (priestly) vocation in beautiful poetry that merely glorifies itself.

“Jordan II”

https://www.ccel.org/h/herbert/temple/Jordan2.html

Trinity College Chapel, Cambridge University, where Herbert was a student from 1609. By 1616 he had been promoted to Fellow and Master of Arts. In 1620 he was appointed Cambridge University Orator.

The themes of “Jordan I” are further developed in Herbert’s second “Jordan” poem, which outlines the speaker’s progress as a sacred poet. The first two stanzas, introduced by “When first…,” trace the busy inventiveness of his early efforts and his determination to “shine,” through words such as “lustre” and “excel”.   In stanza 1  “quaint” (unusual) and “trim” (slickly apt), “curling”, and “decking” tell the reader that he tried to create highly decorated verse, far removed from his original “plain” intention. In “Curling with metaphors”–“curling” is itself a metaphor!–the triplet, “burnish, sprout, and swell” (polish, put out undisciplined shoots) captures his delight in undisciplined creativity, with strong overtones of “puffing up” with pride. Finally, the marketing metaphor (“as if it were to sell”) is at the opposite pole from “heavenly joyes,” the subject of his poetry announced in line 1.  The distance travelled in a mere six lines embodies the speed with which the speaker lost sight of his original pure intention.

The pace accelerates even further in Stanza 2, through the metaphors “runne” and “sped,” and the idea of “thousands of notions.” Line 2 suggests frenetic activity through the alliterating opposites, “blotted” and “begunne.” The pun on “quick” (fast/alive), and the over-subtle distinction between “not quick enough” and “dead” add to the creative frenzy. The stanza’s last two lines call a halt by summing up the speaker’s lack of progress, despite his activity. He realised that his original aspiration to “clothe the sun,” i.e. produce poetry worthy of Christ as its subject, was not only impossible but also self-contradictory. The self-aggrandising joys that the speaker found in his over-vigorous creative efforts were the opposite of the heavenly joys he began by wanting to “mention.” Instead of “clothing” the sun they “trample[d] on his head”, i.e. debased or distracted from his sacred subject.  

The simile that opens Stanza 3  evokes the flames of hell, or the selfhood that the speaker wove into the his intricate verse. “As flames do work and winde when they ascend,/So did I weave my self into the sense.” The alliteration of “work and winde” and the consonance of “self…sense” mimic the interweaving of ego with lines of poetry. Beginning with “So did…”, line 2 of this stanza is the poem’s nadir. Rescue, introduced by “But…” alliterating on “bustled,” meaning the poet’s and his poem’s hyperactivity to this point, takes the form of a friend’s whisper. This inner voice–of  conscience, wisdom or Christ–suggests that all this restless effort of the intellect and the ego is peripheral, long-winded, and a “pretence,” signifying both pretentiousness and false pretences. Instead of contriving “thousands of notions,” the poet should simply “copy out” the sweetness in love, seemingly a much easier task. Returning to the money metaphor of Stanza 1, the voice of conscience suggests that this would “save expense,” meaning the squandering (expending) of talent and time.  The simplicity of the last three italicised lines mimic the goal–the kind of poetry that a poet should cultivate. In particular, the last line  (four stressed syllables instead of the usual five, in an irregular metre) mimes the artlessness, directness and sincerity that “Jordan II” establishes as the goal of sacred poetry. 

“Jordan II” passes through linguistic and metaphoric complexity to arrive at simplicity–a pattern that many others of Herbert’s poems repeat. 

“The Forerunners”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50701/the-forerunners

“The Forerunners” is a companion work to “Jordan I” and “Jordan II” in that it sets out Herbert’s theory of poetry and language closer to the end of his career. Herbert was only forty when he died, but in each stanza of “The Forerunners” he struggles to accept what he feels to be his declining creativity in old age.  Ironically, the quality of “The Forerunners” itself convincingly negates the speaker’s anxiety that his creative powers may be in decline.

Like “Jordan II,” “The Forerunners” is autobiographical. Herbert traces three stages in his poetic development:

1. The stage of an unbaptised muse (poetic inspiration) , when his aim (like that of other poets) was to serve erotic love and to create poetic beauty.
2. The stage when his muse was baptised, washed in tears and brought to church—then the poet’s beauteous words served “true beauty”—one of Plato’s definitions of God.
3. The final stage–the present– when the poet accepts an aging body and declining creativity, if only his inner, spiritual life will be “livelier than before.”

In stanza 1 the speaker utters his distress at the aging of his body, and more importantly, of his mind–his declining creative powers–the “disparking” of his “sparkling notions.” Harbingers are messengers sent ahead to warn the people that the monarch and his entourage are travelling towards them. The harbingers requisitioned lodgings for courtiers and servants by making chalk marks on the people’s doors. In stanza 1 the harbingers are bringing the message of Herbert’s aging. The chalk marks are his white hairs. The only consolation comes in the last line, when he remembers that however “dull” and “cloddish” he may become, the monosyllabic simplicity of Thou art still my God will stay with him as an indelible and uplifting conviction. 

The second stanza meditates on the significance of the “best room” that the harbingers have left him. This room is his heart where the phrase Thou art still my God is lodged. This “simple dittie” is “fine and wittie” poetry if it pleases God.

The opening line of Stanza 3 continues the poet’s attempt to surrender his “sweet phrases, lovely metaphors,” but the question in line two, “will ye leave me thus?” introduces memories of the progress of his talent: how he washed poetry corrupted by worldly loves–“stews and brothels”–with tears of repentance, brought it to church and dedicated all his best work wholly to God.

In stanza 4, the speaker questions “lovely enchanting language” as if it were a mistress enticed by a “fond lover” to flee from the Church towards her “bane.” This is a dreadful fate. Herbert warns that harm and corruption come to the language and to the poet who misapplies it.

In stanza 5, he suggests that the proper poetic “dress” (language) for those foolish enough to “love dung,” i.e. the earthly bodies of women, is “canvas” (coarse, heavy cloth), and not “arras” (the finest of tapestries). Plato’s philosophy shapes the end of this stanza–poetry borrows its beauty from God, who is Beauty. Earthly beauty, such as beautiful poetry, is a borrowed light, showing the way to divine beauty. 

The final stanza introduces seasonal imagery. Herbert surrenders the “birds of spring” (his fresh young poetic inspiration), and says that he will pay “winter” (old age) the “fee” due to it. In the first line of the last stanza, “pass” means “care,” i.e. “I don’t care if you go.” It’s a statement of surrender and reconciliation. The last stanza gives up the writing of embellished verse and the other joyful activities of life’s springtime, provided that the poet’s spiritual life is livelier than before. He will be happy if God will grant him an unbroken awareness of his presence, embodied in Thou art still my God, which is repeated like a mantra or liturgical prayer in stanzas 1, 2 and 6. (This recalls the summary of the “work” of contemplation in The Cloud of Unknowing: “a little blind love, directed to the naked being of God himself only”): Throughout The Forerunners therefore, the joy of inventive, complex language is contrasted with Thou art still my God, a statement of devotion so simple that it promises to transcend language entirely. 

Simplicity is the Goal

The paradigm of verbal complexity and ingenuity pursued to an end point embodying and celebrating unity and simplicity, fits many of Herbert’s poems. The seventeenth century saw the  dawn of science in the modern sense, and this search for new knowledge expanded impressively even in Herbert’s lifetime. In poems such as “The Agonie,” “Vanitie”  and “The Pearl,” he comes to terms spiritually with the new learning; or (it’s truer to say) he affirms Christian revelation as offering a knowledge deeper than science. 

“The Agonie”

https://www.ccel.org/h/herbert/temple/Agonie.html

Stanza 1 establishes the context as the new learning, defined in terms of scientific measurement and exploration. Stanzas 2 and 3 counterpoise these material forms of knowledge with the knowledge embodied in Christ’s crucifixion. “The Agonie” progresses from the multiplicity of the philosophers’ measurements; to a dualism, the antithesis of Sin and Love; to a union–the communicant’s participation in the suffering love of the redemption. The poem is built on a Biblical text: And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground  (Luke 22.44).

The first word of the first stanza, “Philosophers,” applies to modern scientists, whose discoveries (says Herbert) depend on measuring, and who have, in their eagerness to know, even measured fountains in heaven.  The exaggeration comments humorously on pride as an inevitable component of the search for knowledge. (Perhaps think of the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” the eating of which in the Book of Genesis proves so disastrous for humanity.) Instead of measuring the physical or even the heavenly worlds, Stanza One continues, it better suits (“behoves”) humanity to measure Sin and Love, whose vastness shatters the boundaries of the physical and imaginary worlds.  Not many care to measure these.

Stanza 2 takes these few daring souls on an exploration of Sin, the “press and vice” that wrung blood and tears from Christ as he prayed on Mt Olivet on the night of his arrest. Stanzas 2 and 3 develop the common metaphor of Herbert’s time, often portrayed in “emblem” books  (books of symbolic engravings), of Christ being crushed in the wine press of his passion. The emerging liquid is at one and the same time the Redeemer’s blood and the wine of the Communion sacrament.  The metaphors of wine (“press”) and carpentry (“vice”) transmute into a hunting metaphor, as “pain” like a hunting dog pursues “his cruel food” (suffering) through every vein– i.e., Christ’s blood, shed in pain as the price of humankind’s redemption.

Sin’s antithesis, Love, is the subject of Stanza 3. Wine is the key metaphor in “The Agonie.” Here it merges the two referents of A) communion wine and B) Christ’s blood. In Church of England theology,  communion wine, tasted by all the communicants in the congregation, symbolises Christ’s redeeming blood. In Roman Catholic theology, communion wine, drunk by the officiating priest alone, “transubstantiates,” i.e. transforms by a miracle, into Christ’s actual blood. As they intermingle through Stanza 3, the wine-blood metaphors verbally imitate the transformation, symbolic or actual, since Herbert was the archetypal Anglican, of Christ’s blood into the communion wine:

Wine: “juice”, “abroach” (e.g. broaching a new wine cask); “taste”; “that liquour sweet and most divine”; “I as wine”

Blood: “on the crosse a pike” (i.e. the spear cast into Christ’s side); “my God feels as blood”

The interweaving of metaphors and antitheses in Stanza 3 is a miracle of mimesis (imitation). The single, simple act of redemption outstrips all the discoveries of scientists and philosophers. 

“Vanitie”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50697/vanity-i

This poem is an extreme expression of Herbert’s sense of the ultimate futility–“Vanitie”–of earthly knowledge, even though he was himself a deeply learned man. Once again, outward multiplicity and physical immensity are countered by inward simplicity and oneness. The Astronomer (Stanza 1), the Diver (Stanza 2) and the Chemist (Stanza 3) “search round” their different spheres but find only death. They roam through the whole of creation, but fail to find the eternal life which is “at hand.” This is “their “deare God” within themselves: “The kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:21)

Stanza 1: The Astronomer’s quick mind can pierce the planets, as beads are pierced on a thread. He’s like a house-buyer or a shopper walking from door to door. He observes the dance of the planets as if they were ladies or lovers. He knows them so well that he can predict their risings and settings–i.e. when they are fully visible and when they are occluded. The circling of the planets suggests the “searching round” of “poore man” (humankind, see Stanza 4).

Stanza 2: The Diver, who is both “nimble” and “ventrous” (brave), risks his life to find the pearl, which God has hidden well, with the purpose of saving the life (soul), both of the diver and the woman who will wear it. Worn with excessive pride, the pearl is the woman’s destruction (damnation) and the diver’s danger (of drowning and of damnation). The wealth and beauty that the Diver seeks is even more destructive than the knowledge sought by the Astronomer.

Stanza 3: The Chemist seeks the first principles of the physical world. These principles are like young birds, hidden in their nest until the Chemist’s brilliance uncovers them and explains them now grown up–i.e. spelled out or made clear–to more ordinary minds. The Chemist dresses the principles neatly so that they can be understood by “ordinarie suitours at the doore,” i.e. by seekers after knowledge who lack the brilliance of the discoverer. The metaphors in this stanza are densely intertwined!

Stanza 4: Herbert shifts his technique from exposition to a series of rhetorical questions. The questions uncover humans’ innate sense of God’s law, placed in each person’s heart–“Embosomes”.  They reveal God’s nurturing of this inner truth with “showers and frosts”–outward suffering or hard inner thoughts and feelings. Created with an inborn love and awe, we don’t need to seek out God’s commandments, any more than we need to search the universe for knowledge and wealth.

“The Pearl”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44369/the-pearl-56d2236f54f07

In structure “The Pearl” follows the same plan–a progression from multiplicity to simplicity. The parable in Matthew 13. 45-46 likening the kingdom of heaven to the “one pearl of great price”, which a merchant sells all that he has to purchase, will have held a special appeal for a mind like Herbert’s, which loves to move through complications, of words and experience, to arrive at a unified essence. The one pearl of great price is an obvious metaphor for such an essence. “The Pearl” identifies oneness and simplicity, the perfection and eternity suggested by the sphere or circle, with deepest truth. Herbert also explores the “price” of this pearl, meaning the renunciations needed to attain it.

 

Each of stanzas 1-3 offers a concise and self-contained compendium of the multifarious activities associated, firstly with the new exploratory learning of the age, secondly with worldly glory, and thirdly with pleasure. The brief similes and metaphors in these stanzas powerfully evoke visual images. Examples are the similes of reason “like a good huswife” spinning or discerning universal laws; and of the seeker for honours importuning and flattering the world like a servant (line 17). The notion of tying “a true love knot” on the world (line 16) is a mildly satirical comment on a romantic cliché. Gentle humour is implicit in the grumbling of the senses that they are five, and so should democratically override the single will that restrains them.

The final stanza brings together the diverse and complex “ways” of learning, honour and pleasure in the negative, condemnatory and still multifarious metaphor of the labyrinth. The labyrinth is negative because it is the place where one loses oneself. It is negative also because of its place in classical mythology and poetry as the home of the Minotaur, the monster to whom human sacrifices were made. According to the myth, Theseus, the slayer of the Minotaur found his way out of the labyrinth with the help of a silken “clew” (ball of thread). Herbert transforms the “clew” into a metaphor for unity, the single factor of God’s grace, which accomplishes the speaker’s salvation at the end of the poem.

The ending of “The Pearl” moves easily and without tension between this world and heaven, between the reality perceived and enjoyed by the senses and the inner kingdom of the heart.

Refreshment

“The Flower”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50700/the-flower-56d22df9112c4

The ups and downs of spiritual and creative life are the premise of this happy poem. The speaker expresses ever-deepening responses to a joyful mood. “The Flower” is the obverse of “Affliction.” It celebrates a “now” of spiritual peace and fruition. Transforming through each stanza, the flower metaphor is a symbol of change as a premise of life on earth, contrasting with God who is eternal. Yet despite its changing referents–the Lord’s returns, the speaker’s cold heart, the eternal flowers of Paradise, the speaker’s fluctuating states of mind and spirit–the sustained presence of the flower as metaphor imparts an overall unity to the poem. Simplicity, containing complexity and change, is a leading feature of Herbert’s verse.

The first three stanzas take delight in his renewed experience of God’s presence. Metaphors of blossoming spring flowers, melting winter frosts, and returning greenness embody his heart-felt joy. Stanza 3 compares the flowers’ revival to resurrection from death and the raising up of his spiritual life. All depend on God’s word, which we should trust, and which we would understand “if we could spell,” i.e. “if only we were wise.”

Stanzas 4, 5 and 6 compare the changes in spiritual life with a longed-for constancy. They dramatise fluctuations but at the same time long to be free of them. The seasons of steady  striving use the imagery of spring. Falling into sin and God’s anger revert to winter–“what frost to that?”; and a fire hot enough to consume the poles. Yet stanza 6 recaptures the joyful mood of the poem’s first stanza, using the paradoxes of budding in old age, and of living and writing after what seemed like death. “The Flower” indicates just how much Herbert’s poetry-writing meant to him: his recovery from despair is naturally accompanied by “versing.”  Yet the last three lines assert God’s primacy, even over this–“O my onely light…”

What It Means to Be Human

“Man”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44368/man-56d2236eea1a1

“Man” begins by asserting that only a person who intends to live in it will bother to build “a stately habitation”; and goes on to ask, what house is more “stately”–i.e. more worthy of honour–than “man” himself–humankind? Compared to humans, whose souls are eternal, the rest of creation is waning and transitory. 

The following seven stanzas develop the theme of humankind’s pre-eminence in creation. Three focus on the powers of humans, and four on natural phenomena as humanity’s servants.

Humans share in but excel all the levels of nature. They are more fruitful than trees. Since man alone has reason and speech–parrots owe their speaking to us– humans are, or should be, more noble than animals. Our bodies are proportionate and symmetrical, and all the parts interact harmoniously. This human harmony corresponds with and participates in the regular movements of the moon and tides. Humans find their prey in the most distant parts of the world; human vision reaches to the farthest star; each human being is a microcosm–a tiny version–of the macrocosm–the universe itself; herbs cure us because they find in us an analogy to themselves.

Stanza 5 begins the catalogue of the aspects of nature that serve humankind. All the actions of the winds, the earth, the planets, and the waters do us good, either by delighting us or offering themselves for our use. The stars, night, music and light are our natural (kinde) benefactors. In their physical existence–their “descent”–they serve our flesh. In encouraging us to look above themselves for their origins, they are kind to our intellects. The waters that so dutifully ring the earth are our highways. When the waters are “distinguished”–kept apart by land masses–they provide us with a dwelling place. Down below in streams and pools water is our drink; when it falls from above it grows the crops and is our food.  Wherever it comes from, it makes us clean. If this one element of water is so beautiful, then surely all other elements–fire, earth and air–are equally so. Stanza eight  reveals humans’ blindness to the natural world. Humans trample unknowingly on the herbs that restore their health. The poet wonders at the vastness of this love that creates humans as one world (a microcosm) living within the greater world (the macrocosm) that serves them.

The last stanza responds to the ideas and the question in stanza 1. Since the “stately habitation” that God has built–the human being– is indeed “so brave a Palace” the poet prays that God may dwell in it, as logic (Stanza 1 has shown) demands. If God does dwell within the human being, then the human will at last dwell with God [presumably in heaven, but possibly also on earth]. Until this happens, Lord, make us wise enough to serve you with the same dedication that the whole world serves humankind. True to contemporary scripture-based androcentrism, “Man” assumes that God created the universe out of love, to serve human beings. Thus, both the world and humans will be fulfilled as God’s servants. “Man” closes with a vision of humanity and the world unified in God’s service.

“Man” seems remarkable for not mentioning the Fall of Adam and Eve, or sin. On the contrary, as in “The Pulley,” humans are presented as lacking only one thing–fully-realised Godliness.

I hope that the above laborious exposition of “Man” is useful as a reading aid. However, it’s important to read the poem aloud after analysing it, so that you can respond fully to its beauty and power.

“The Temper”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44374/the-temper-i

The title puns on at least three meanings of “temper”: (1) the tempering (strengthening) of metal in the blacksmith’s forge; (2) “mood” or changing human feeling; and (3) the engraving of God’s love in enduring poetry, as the worker in steel engraves inscriptions.

“The Temper” works by resolving dichotomies, by uniting or joining opposites, by bringing together elements that are stretched across vast distances. In order, the dichotomies are: heavens and hell (stanzas 2 and 4); the speaker’s moods ranging from exultation to despair; Gods immensity versus human littleness (stanzas 3 and 4); the vastness of creation which even so is too small to contain the Creator (stanza 3); hope and fear (stanza 5); the human form (self? soul?) stretched or contracted (stanza 6), i.e. tempered; flying with angels or falling with dust (stanza 7).

Incidental images include “rack” (stretch as on a rack, implying resistance and pain); the world or creation as a “tent”  too small to house God its creator; the Biblical metaphor of humankind as “dust”; the metaphor of God “measuring” (arms or weapons) with humanity; and of humanity as a gauge (measuring device) for God’s vastness; the idea of the created universe as God’s “tent”; the soul sheltering under the eaves as a bird nestles under a roof; the notion of humans as being God’s “debters”–they owe him what they can never repay; the musical metaphor of tuning the human soul “To make the musick better”.

Stanza 7 resolves the speaker’s questions (stanzas 1-4) and prayers (stanzas 5-6). Once again, separation, dualism, and distance are all brought into oneness: immortality and mortality, God as the one creator of all dualisms: “Thy hands made both”; God’s power and love, accepted by the speaker, who has learned to love and to trust, “Make one place ev’ry where”.  (Note the paradox.) The second last line is especially moving, because the typography embodies the unity of God’s love and the speaker’s love: “Thy power and love, my love and trust”.

“The Pulley”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44370/the-pulley

This narrative poem records God’s thoughts at the making of the first human, before the Fall narrated in the Book of Genesis. God takes on the persona of a chemist or a cook, pouring blessings on his new creation. The countless “riches” of the world “[c]ontract into a span,” meaning that  humans limited by time and place can enjoy them in a lifetime. Strength, beauty, wisdom, honour, and pleasure are among the gifts that God pours over the first humans from his “glasse of blessings” (line 2).

“The Pulley’s” pivot, closing stanza 2, is God’s realisation that of all his treasures, only “Rest” is still lying in the bottom of his “glasse.” This of course is an attitude and a delay suited to “Rest.” Stanza 3 begins a dramatic first-person monologue, in which God decides not to bestow this, his last treasure, on his new creation. He sees that if he endows humans with rest, they will rest in God’s gifts (“Nature”), and not in himself (“the God of Nature”), i.e. in creation, not in the Creator (line 14). (The notion of “resting in Nature” invites further thought.) As a result, both the Creator and his creature would lose out.

Stanza four is rich in word play, repetitions, and “r-” and “w-” alliteration: “rest,…repining restlesnesse…rich and wearie….wearinesse.” God confirms all the other gifts that he has freely bestowed on humans, and also his withholding of rest: if goodness doesn’t bring humans to him, weariness might. 

The poem reveals the endlessness of human desiring. Yet Herbert’s point is that, out of his intense and humble love, God will accept humans who truly come to him, however self-interested their motive. The ending, “yet weariness/ May tosse him to my breast,” suggests that, when put to the test, God’s love for humans is unconditional, like the love of a mother for her child.

“Vertue”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44375/virtue

Herbert’s poetry speaks to our time partly because of what Douglas Bush calls its “complete security of belief” (English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945, p. 143). It offers a profoundly optimistic view of human beings, their destiny and their place in the universe. No poem presents these ideas more powerfully or more succinctly than “Vertue,” Herbert’s most anthologised poem.

The perfection of this poem’s craft gives an enduring form to spiritual insight. Its devices include repetition with variation. “Sweet day…Sweet rose…Sweet spring”–elements often associated with courtly love and passion in general, are beautiful but transitory. Contemplation of each one brings the thought that these contrasting kinds of sweetness come to an end. Words and metaphors such as “fall,” “angrie and brave,” “rash gazer” imply that these sweetnesses conceal mortal danger. Stanza 3 adds “my musick”–lyric poetry itself–to the list of things that pass: “And all must die.” Redemption comes, however, in stanza 4 which transforms the application of of “sweet”– now the reference is to “a sweet and vertuous soul,” and this lives for ever. Like timber that season-by-season, through fires and floods, has grown stronger, such a soul chiefly lives–lives  fully–even at the holocaust, when the created world at last burns to ashes. Once again the single entity–the “sweet and vertuous soul”–transcends those things that are multiple–i.e. complex human experiences and the countless beauties of the created world.

The End of Life

In contrast with the heroic defiance of death in John Donne’s explosive sonnet, “Death be not proud…”, the spirit of Herbert’s poems, “Mortification” and “Death” is prayerful and quiet. Yet all three poems end in hope or trust.  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44107/holy-sonnets-death-be-not-proud

“Mortification”

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A03058.0001.001/1:80?rgn=div1;view=fulltext

The title “Mortification” plays on three meanings: a) the state of being dead; b) the doing of penance for sin; and c) life itself as a process of dying. The poem’s thesis comes in the opening exclamation–“How soon doth man decay!” This idea shapes the poem, as each stanza portrays a stage of life as in reality an experience of death: babies’ swaddling clothes are their shrouds; the  music and company in which the young man delights is truly the tolling of his funeral bell; the middle-aged man who buys a home is preparing his coffin; the old man’s wheel chair foretells the bier that will carry his coffin to the tomb–throughout life, and well before he realises, a man is preparing his funeral rites.  Yet the last two lines combine these realities in a paradoxical prayer: “Yet Lord, instruct us so to die,/ That all these dyings may be life in death”–i.e. 1)  Teach us to live in such a way that each stage of our dying life may bring us closer to eternal life; 2) Teach us to die to sin, and day by day be transformed into true life in the spirit; 3) Teach us how finally, on our death beds, to attain true life.

“Death”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50703/death-56d22dfa49664

Like Donne’s pyrotechnical sonnet, this poem begins by addressing a personified Death directly. However the tone is quieter and more reasoned, and the poem develops as  a stage-by-stage argument. Stanzas 1 to 2 paint the physical decay that follows death–before the Redemption, this was all anyone could see of Death. The images recall the late medieval obsession with the gruesome details of the body’s decay.  Stanza 3 points out that this gruesome image “fell short”–bones, sticks and dust were merely the remnants left behind by resurrected souls: the image is that of a baby bird who has broken through its shell and is beginning to grow feathers (“fledge”). The poem’s next section (the antithesis, stanzas 4 and 5) dwells on Death’s present beauty, when  “our Saviour’s death” “has put some bloud /Into thy face” (lines 13-14). Death is now fair and glad; sought after as a good; looking forward to his final transformation on judgement day, when his “hideous uncouth” bones will be clothed in beauty. The final stanza crowns the argument–“Therefore.” Therefore we can go to an “honest faithfull” grave with as much assurance as we go to our beds to sleep. We can trust our bodies, which are “half that we have” to our grave. ((Herbert implies that we can trust the other half of ourselves, our immortal soul, to God.) We can be indifferent as to whether our pillows are the soft feathers of our beds or the dust of our physical graves–we are safe and loved equally in both.

“Love III”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44367/love-iii

The faith so powerfully affirmed at the end of “Death” is reaffirmed even more movingly in the poem that follows. “Love III” is the fitting and much admired conclusion to The Temple. Here the poet fulfils the command received at the end of “Jordan II”–to “copie out” the “sweetnesse” in love. One of Herbert’s favourite describers, “sweetly,” is applied to Love’s own action in line 5: “sweetly questioning.”

The scriptural basis of “Love” (identified with Christ as the Son of God) is Luke 12: 37:  Blessed are those servants whom the lord when he cometh shall find watching: verily I say unto you that he shall gird himself, and make them to sit down to meat, and will come forth and serve them. The narrative of ”Love III” also recalls Christ’s washing of the disciples’ feet at the last supper (John 13: 4-16), especially Peter’s reluctance to be served in this way. The speaker’s reluctance is similar: “My deare, then I will serve” (line 16).

The narrative equates with a) Christ welcoming a redeemed soul into heaven; b) the Christian receiving holy communion–the consecrated bread that represents Christ’s body; c) the joy of redeemed sinners at Christ’s Second Coming. 

The speaker and Love use contrasting speech meters. Those of the speaker are irregular and hesitant, matching his indecision and sense of unworthiness–“I the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare,/ I cannot look on thee” (lines 9-10). But Love’s are regular, confident and reassuring : “Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,/ Who made the eyes but I?” (lines 11-12). Against the speaker’s sense of his unworthiness, Love insists on the reality of the redemption won on Calvary: “Who bore the blame but I?” In contrast with the speaker’s questioning of himself and his redemption, Love’s questions to the speaker are persuasive, and his words are simple: “You shall be he” (line 8). In fact, despite its wealth of Biblical associations, simplicity of vocabulary and sentence structure is the outstanding aspect of “Love III.” Monosyllables prevail, featuring especially in the last line of each of the three stanzas. The poem’s (and The Temple‘s) closing line, as often in Herbert’s poetry, invites the reader to share in the speaker’s illumination and joy, to take part in a moment filled with trust, peace and love.

George Herbert: A Few Basic Texts and Studies

Primary Texts

Auden, W. H. , ed.: Herbert, Poems and Prose.  London: Penguin, 1973.

Drury, John and Victoria Moul, eds. George Herbert: The Complete Poetry, with Translations from the Latin by Victoria Moul. UK: Penguin Random House, 2015.

Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber and Faber, 1963.

Hutchinson, F. E., ed. The Works of George Herbert. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959.

McCloskey, John Mark, Paul R. Murphy. The Latin Poetry of George Herbert. Ohio University Press, 1965.

Tobin, J. J. M. Herbert: The complete English Poems. London: Penguin Classics, 2004.

Wall, John N., ed. The Country Parson; The Temple. New York: Paulist Press, circa 1981.

Wilcox, Helen, ed. The English Poems of George Herbert. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007; repr. 2013.

Studies

Drury, John. Music at Midnight. The Life and Poetry of George Herbert. London: Allen Lane, 2013.

Eliot, T. S. Review of  Herbert J.C. Grierson, ed. Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century. Times Literary Supplement 20 October, 1921.

—. “George Herbert.” The Spectator, 12 March 1932;rpt.  C. A. Patrides, ed. George Herbert: The Critical Heritage. London: Psychology Press, 1983: 332-346.

—. George Herbert. 1962. Intro. Peter Porter. Writers and Their Work. London: Northcote House, 1992.

Malcolmson, Cristina. Heart-Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Nuttall, A. D. Overheard by God: Fiction and Prayer in Herbert, Milton, Dante and St John. London: Methuen, 1980.

Patrides, C. A., ed. The English Poems of George Herbert. Everyman’s Library. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1974.

Schoenfeldt, Michael C. Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1991.

Sherwood, Terry G. Herbert’s Prayerful Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1959.

Stein, Arnold. “George Herbert: The Art of Plainness.” Seventeenth-Century Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. William R. Keast. London: Oxford UP, 1971: 257-78.