"To All Angels and Saints": Herbert's Puritan Poem

Abstract

all Angels and Saints is locus classicus The Temple for establishing of Rome to Herbert;1 it seems to show him as only most uneasy and faint-hearted of Protestants. Surely committed Protestant would long to crave [the] special aid of angels and saints and Virgin, or would express his regret at now not feeling free to act on this desire. This poem seems to manifest, clearly and poignantly, the reluctance of conservative Anglicans to give up the old devotions; it seems especially to prove that in Herbert, as Donne, devotion to Mary, though suppressed, is not easily rejected.2 There would seem, to borrow a phrase from poem, to be no appeal from view of Herbert proposed by Martz, Ross, and others on basis of all Angels and Saints. Its author simply could not have been a wholehearted Protestant. This view misrepresents both poem and its relation to Herbert's religious position as a whole. To see all Angels and Saints as reluctantly Protestant, one must either focus exclusively on its first half (as Ross and Grant do) or see it as riddled with crippling ambiguities (as Martz does), because second half of poem-straightforwardly read-places Herbert more company of Cartwright and Milton than that of Andrewes or Cosin (or Saint Frangois de Sales). As Helen White alone among Herbert's critics has noticed, what is ultimately striking about all Angels and Saints is not its Catholicism but its Puritanism; one can see at work it some of most historically characteristic and significant features of Puritan mind.3 It is this, rather than its apparent hankering after Rome, that gives poem a unique and important place Herbert's aouvre. Paradoxically, moreover, we shall also see that it is precisely Puritanism of poem that allows for-in a sense, creates-its apparent Catholicism. It would be well at this point to have text before us.