Patterns and Patterning: A Study of Four Poems by George Herbert

Abstract

Bart Westerweel, Patterns and Patterning: A Study of Four Poems by George Herbert. Amsterdam: Rodopi (Costerus. New series, vol.41), 1984. 273 pp. $37. Distributed in the USA by the Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey. by Michael Piret This is a contextual study after the manner of Rosemond Tuve and in the tradition of Rosemary Freeman. Its aim is "to establish the intended meaning of certain poems by George Herbert," its method the application of historical information about pattern poems and Renaissance emblematics to "The Altar," "Easter-wings," "The Pilgrimage," and "Love" (III). Westerweel seems fully aware of the special accidents that can befall imprudent contextual studies, and indeed he objects to the way in which "Tuve's scholarly method, however useful as a means of transmitting information, has a tendency to crush the poem through sheer weight of annotation." He even invokes an article in which F.R. Leavis, almost furiously attacking the New Scholarship that Tuve represented, had dismissed A Reading of George Herbert as a species of book that was "inimical to criticism, that is, to intelligence" (Scrutiny, 19 [1953], 162-83). "Relevance," says Westerweel, "would seem to be a key term here." The sage contextual scholar must avoid irrelevance, and vigilantly "sift evidence that clarifies the poem's meaning from material that does not." Perhaps the fundamental problem with Patterns and Patterning is that its evidence hasn't been sifted rigorously enough. For instance, common sense dictates that in studying the influence of emblems on Herbert's poetry, we should restrict ourselves to materials that Herbert had some chance of seeing. But Westerweel is continually unwary about chronological short-circuits, relating Herbert to the texts of English emblem books by George Wither (1635) and Francis Queries (1635), when it's hard to see why. He pertinently argues that the emblems in these books are relevant because they were derived from Continental books published before Herbert's death in 1633. But their texts are a different matter. We know, for example, that the poetic text of A Collection of Emblèmes was composed from scratch by Wither, and cannot even be 54 BOOK REVIEWS called the translation of some earlier Continental source, yet Westerweel introduces it into his discussions of Herbert time and again. And even while giving plentiful attention to Wither, he virtually ignores Daniel Cramer's Emblemata Sacra (1622), which is startlingly full of heart images that we have come to identify with Herbert, and which probably helped to shape his poetic imagination if any emblem book did. (The relevance of Cramer to Herbert was chiefly established, of course, by the most prominent study of this subject, Barbara Lewalski's Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, which is never mentioned by Westerweel.) We get the feeling that connections are being made forthe sake of making connections, and not very precisely at that. He provides a theoretical argument for occasionally preferring analogies to sources in explication — and it's a considerable one — but here it routinely opens the floodgates to a broad stream of analogical digressions which, unchecked by the kind of discipline that Tuve applied, can be just as unhelpful as the source-hunting that Westerweel is trying to shut out. The hazard of relating a poet analogically to traditions that were "in the air" during his period lies in the temptation to drift away from the poet, into a cloud of vagueness. Patterns and Patterning repeatedly withdraws into such clouds. In his chapter on "The Pilgrimage"forexample, Westerweel unpacks the traditional burden of the poem's penultimate line, "After so foul a journey death is fair." He asks rhetorically, "What does Herbert mean when he calls death 'fair'?" There follows a twenty-page dissertation on the traditions of contemptus mundi and the ars moriendi, and on the emblematic images dulce amarum and desiderans dissolvi. Through the scholarly haze, we hear Westerweel insisting that the poem ends triumphantly. The final words, it seems, contain nothing of the exhausted despair with which other critics have characterized them, but "express the pilgrim's faith" as he "pursues his way eagerly." Such a misrendering of the gutted, drained conclusion of "The Pilgrimage" is possible only...