Abstract
This essay places George Herbert's poetic invocations of sighs and groans in the context of early modern physiology and musical theory. While scholars have been interested in musical themes and medical discourses in The Temple, few have considered the merging of these or its implications for the experience of reading the poems aloud. By delineating the spirit-based physiology on which Herbert's musical and medical "tunings" rely, Clarissa Chenovick draws attention to the spiritual efficacy Herbert attributes to bodily expressions of penitence (especially sighs and groans), and to the ways he carefully designs poems like "Sighs and Grones" to elicit these expressions from the reader. These insights have significant implications for our understanding of Herbert's poetic project and for the role of voiced poetry in seventeenth-century English devotional practice. In "Voicing Text 1500–1700," ed. Jennifer Richards and Richard Wistreich, special issue, http://muse.jhu.edu/resolve/66.
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