‘TYES OF GRATEFULNESS’: LEARNING TO SAY THANK YOU IN GEORGE HERBERT'S LYRICS

Abstract

Over the past half century, scholarship has positively broadened and deepened the affinities between George Herbert's poetry and Calvinist theology. On the other hand, Stanley Fish and A. D. Nuttall have traced a negative poetics, a ‘self-consuming’ poetics, that results, they argue, from Herbert's unattractive Calvinism. Fish maintains that, if God is all, then Herbert's poems ‘urge us to rest in the immediate apprehension of God's all-effective omnipresence [and] they become the vehicles of their own abandonment’. But are impotence and futility the defining qualities of the speakers in the devotional lyrics of the parson-poet of Bemerton? The article suggests that the poet who laments that humanity's best efforts ‘turn to bubbles straight’ can at the same time celebrate that God's grace crosses the divine–human divide and makes two one. What for Fish and Nuttall comprises the greatest weakness of Herbert's poetics is, at its best, its greatest strength – on the one side radical human dependence, modesty, and the recognition of the need for gratitude in the presence of grace, and on the other the divine's often unexpected capacity to originate, renew, and sustain. In Herbert's verse, recognition or acknowledgement of the re-generating power of grace is a requisite, even crucial, first step in the expression of thanks. The article continues by demonstrating how Herbert's poetics of gratitude and grace work in perhaps unlikely ways by attending to two undervalued devotional lyrics from The Temple – ‘Gratefulnesse’ and ‘Self-condemnation’.