‘Whom the Lord with love affecteth’: Gender and the Religious Poet, 1590–1633

Abstract

This essay is concerned with the work of four English poets from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries — Mary Sidney (the Countess of Pembroke), John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer and George Herbert — who, despite their differences of class, gender and chosen literary form, shared a common inspiration, the profound sense that they were among those ‘whom the Lord with love affecteth’.1 The impact and expression of religious experience took a variety of poetic shapes in the work of the four writers. Mary Sidney produced a verse translation of the psalms, revising the text of the first 43 psalms drafted by her brother before his death, and single-handedly translating the remaining 107 psalms into increasingly sophisticated lyric verse forms. John Donne wrote occasional religious verse and dramatic meditative sonnets, while Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum is an extended verse narrative of the Passion, and George Herbert’s The Temple includes a sequence of over 150 devotional lyrics. Their work reached the reading public by a variety of routes over four centuries. Sidney’s psalms, completed around 1599, and Donne’s religious verse, written in the first three decades of the seventeenth century, are known to have circulated in manuscript, reflecting the courtly tradition of coterie writing which eschewed the public mode of print.2 Lanyer, a middle-class woman on the margins of court society, took the bold step of publishing her own small book in 1611.3 Herbert’s The Temple came out in printed form immediately after his death in 1633, the same year as the belated posthumous publication of Donne’s poems. The complete text of the Sidney Psalm translation was not published until 1823.4KeywordsWoman WriterLate SixteenthFemale BeautyEnglish PoetAmorous SoulThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.