Herbert’s Prayerful Art by Terry G. Sherwood

Abstract

between Tennyson and Lushington. Hallam is indeed invoked in stanza 9, but only as one who had foretold the perfection into which Cecilia would grow. More to the point, but unmentioned by Dellamora, he has also been invoked in stanza 2, where Tennyson remembers his own bliss on first being told of Hallam’s love for Emily, presumably a vicarious bliss that was itself a substitution for less accessible pleasures. The implausible array of substitu­ tions that become necessary to accommodate the supposed communication of forbidden desires, of which Edmund Lushington is made the apparently unwitting recipient, seems on anything other than ideologically motivated grounds hardly worth the candle, particularly given the difficulty of recon­ ciling them with the generative future anticipated for Cecilia and Edmund in the poem’s closing stanzas. The point is an important one because of this study’s recurrent impulse at its least intellectually disciplined moments merely to invert the supposed value terms of Victorian sexual ideology. Neither Victorian nor modern ide­ alization of male-male exchange is ultimately more conducive to engagement with the complexity of human socio-sexual relationships than Victorian or modern idealization of male-female exchange, whether inside or outside mar­ riage. And passing invitations to the labouring classes and women to share spaces wrested away from hetero-marital orthodoxy, or even from fastidi­ ous Arnoldian high-mindedness, need to be extended much less cursorily to make them sound forth with something more resonant than the sincerity of political convenience. Keith w ilson / University o f Ottawa Terry G. Sherwood, Herbert’s Prayerful Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989). ix, 190. $45.00 cloth. Among many valuable recent studies of Herbert, this important book pro­ vides us with the most just appraisal yet of Herbert’s religious thought. This book follows Terry Sherwood’s earlier book on Donne (Fulfilling the Circle: A Study of John Donne’s Thought [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984]), which has received wide recognition for a similar treatment of its subject and which supports the exposition in this new study. Here Sher­ wood argues for an accommodation among recent interpretations of Herbert through a perceptive historical and (broadly) phenomenological approach. Sherwood identifies fundamental elements in Herbert’s thought and relates these both to traditional medieval and to contemporary Protestant religious doctrine and devotion. Sherwood thus seeks to discriminate Herbert’s dis­ tinctiveness in relation to his theological context. 353 Sherwood’s focus on prayer or, more broadly, the “prayerful,” as the es­ sential category for comprehending Herbert’s art, emphasizes the mutuality in the relation between human and divine in Herbert’s poetry. While terms such as “spirituality” or even “prayer” may seem exasperatingly loose or else limiting, as Sherwood acknowledges, they are made specific by reference to the “life of prayer” as “personal communion with God” (4). These terms prepare for Sherwood’s concentration upon the human experience expressed in the poetry. What is at issue is the human side of the relation between human and divine and the value of human effort, despite a theological (and, we might add, contemporary theoretical) context which minimizes the im­ portance of the human subject. “The influence of Reformation thought on Herbert and his British contemporaries has encouraged the view that he believed in a debilitated self radically dependent on God. Yet much in Her­ bert’s prayerful art moderates this influence . . . . The dialogue with God confers importance on the human partner” (5). Sherwood’s exploration of Herbert’s principal motifs, images, and themes throughout The Temple es­ tablishes his final claim that for Herbert God rewards the human effort “to make prayerful art . . . with the spiritual experiences of sweetness, fitness, delight, and quickness.” Despite the constants of human frustration, power­ lessness, pain, and failure, “these rewards restore what has been lost in the created self” (6), including the arts of language and the relation of the self to others through a “calling.” These assertions inform the demonstration throughout the book. By demonstrating the physical and bodily, even physiological, foundation for spiritual meaning in Herbert, Sherwood stresses consistently the key themes of conformity of the human to the divine and participation of the human in the divine...