Herbert's Poems Research Articles

"The Pulley": Rundles, Ropes, and Ladders in John Wilkins, Ramon Lull, and George Herbert

"The Pulley":Rundles, Ropes, and Ladders in John Wilkins, Ramon Lull, and George Herbert Roberta Albrecht Since 1941, when F.E. Hutchinson's edition of The Works of George Herbert was published, various commentators have referred to the Pandora myth as a way to understand the narrative of "The Pulley," one of the most famous poems in The Temple.1 Louis L. Martz agrees that the poem is, at least in part, informed by "the story of Pandora," which tells how Zeus gave this first mortal woman a box of gifts, all of which escaped except Hope.2 Mary Ellen Rickey develops the classical allusion to show how "The Pulley" argues "the superiority of God's care for His people to that of classical figures for their subjects."3 Helen Vendler reinvents this commentary to include the central question addressed by the poem, which is "not how it is that man has Hope (as in the story of Pandora) but rather how it is that man is depressed."4 Richard Strier picks up this thread, studying how Herbert employs the Narcissus myth (as opposed to the story of Pandora) as a way of expressing a kind of "anti-humanism."5 With few exceptions, commentators studying the poem insist that its informing principle is some version of the Pandora story. My essay veers in another direction, studying how John Wilkins's description of pulleys and Ramon Lull's treatise on the divine dignities inform Herbert's witty conclusion. John Wilkins on Archimedes's Concept of Mechanical Advantage It is highly unlikely that George Herbert ever met the much younger John Wilkins (1614-72). In 1624, when Herbert's name appeared on the official printed lists for Parliament at Oxford, Wilkins was a mere boy studying Latin and Greek with Edward Sylvester, who kept a private school in the Parish of All Saints in Oxford. Amy Charles's observation that Herbert's "name does not appear in the Commons Journals for this session" is evidence that he did not even attend.6 Because Wilkins's most important works were not published until after Herbert's death, we can assume no connection between the [End Page 1] two. Nevertheless, his Mathematicall magick. Or, The wonders that may be performed by mechanicall geometry (1648) explains what Herbert and his contemporaries, those with more or less Latin and Greek, had already learned about pulleys and other machines from Archimedes. Because Wilkins's treatise was written in English, it appealed to a wider audience than just the learned few. Also appealing were his illustrations of pulleys, each of which demonstrated Archimedes's concept of a good mechanical advantage. These showed how different combinations of pulleys and ropes will produce different effects. If we review Wilkins's work alongside Herbert's poem, we begin to understand how the metaphor fits the situation. Archimedes (287-212 B.C.), it will be remembered, once startled Syracusans by single-handedly moving a great ship. As if by magic, he simply pulled on the end of a rope. Wilkins shows how things previously thought magical are really quite ordinary, in the sense that they function according to certain natural laws. "The Pulley," he declares, "is of such ordinary use, that it needs not any particular description."7 Nevertheless, he proceeds to explain the differences among various kinds of pulleys in regard to composition and function. All require rundles, or wooden rollers, which are instruments for hanging the cords bearing the weights. Some pulleys are composed of two rundles, some more. Some pulleys are activated by a force that pulls up, some by a force that pulls down. Which direction will determine the mechanical advantage, that is, the ratio of output force and input force used to activate the device. But mechanical advantage will also be determined by the number of rundles and ropes. A good mechanical advantage results when less force is required to lift more weight. Wilkins begins his treatise with the simple pulley, which requires that a person pull down on the end of a rope with the same amount of force as the weight on the other end. (The weight of the rope itself is negligible.) He explains...

Johann Gerhard and George Herbert: The ‘Veiled’ Lutheran and the Irenic Writer

As scholars continue to examine the variety and complexity of religious life in early modern England, we recognize that figures such as George Herbert resist our efforts to place them in convenient categories. However, we can account for this resistance by comparing Herbert's poetry to the Lutheran theologian Johann Gerhard's popular devotions of the same period. An intertextual study of Herbert's poems and Gerhard's devotional classic reveals their shared emphasis on baptism as an essential defining element of the Christian's life within the communion of saints. This emphasis synthesizes the tradition and sacramental piety of the old faith with the emphasis on the efficacy of the biblical word that marks the new faith of the Reformation and, at the same time, provides an irenic foundation for their interaction with the Church in early modern England.

"To be thy Praise, / And be my salvation": The Double Function of Praise in The Temple

“To be thy praise, / And be my salvation”:The Double Function of Praise in The Temple Margaret J. Oakes In her comprehensive study of Protestant poetics, Barbara Lewalski notes the forms and variety of George Herbert's poems of praise: Hymns were by definition joyful praises of God or thanksgivings to him: in Herbert this category covers the broad range from the elegant simplicity of the hymn portion of "Easter" to the lofty eloquence of "Providence." (300) Herbert's overall corpus of poetry reflects his obsession with praise: approximately forty-eight poems in the Bodleian MS. of The Temple, two additional from the Williams MS., and his two early sonnets to his mother either directly praise God or talk about the act or writing of praise. When Herbert engages in this type of poetic expression, however, these acts have a double function. Of course, Herbert makes use of praise as a way of honoring or thanking God. But he also intends it to be a means of creating a participatory role in his own salvation: his poems are responses from an individual sparked by the gift of grace. For Herbert, the recognition of one's own salvation establishes a duty to glorify God in return in whatever form, literary or otherwise, the Christian is able. Louis Martz comments that Herbert uses his art as "a means of partaking in the salvation offered by a transcendent power" ("Voices," 103). But Herbert is not only convinced that he must praise, he is obsessed with the proper method of doing so, taking up the subject time and time again in his poetry: Joseph Summers has noted that "One of the chief sources of the Christian's and the poet's 'miserie' was that he could not properly praise God" (106). Thus, it is also important to examine Herbert's concerns about the methods of praising that he attempts and the impediments he overcomes in order to worship the Lord in ways that he considers correct. The physical illness and pain that plagued Herbert throughout hislife distract him from his task, but these problems are exacerbated by [End Page 120] emotional issues such as a lack of confidence and motivation, and, on the opposite end of the spectrum, a concern over exhibiting too much pride in his poetic ability. These complications are what make Herbert's poetry more than just flaccid applause or naïve Sunday School rhymes: Herbert is fully and equally aware of the pitfalls of Christianity and the need to write good poetry. On this last point I depart from Summers, who claims that "the beauty of language, like the soul's, can live only if it is 'lost' to the proper object" (119). In The Temple, Herbert is very careful not to lose his mastery over beautiful language; rather, he knows that a confident use of one's abilities can assist the soul in finding its final place with God. Of course, a major sticking point for a post-Calvinist Protestant in contemplating salvation was the complex and evolving doctrine of predestination. Jean Calvin's notions of unconditional predestination had been interpreted narrowly by later Continental and English thinkers. Calvin's disciple Theodore Beza maintained that God "hathe determined from before all beginning with hym selfe, to create all thyngs in their tyme, for his glory, and namely men: whom he hath made after two sorts, cleane contrarie one to the other" (2.A.iii). English theologian William Perkins declared in 1590 that God "hath ordained all men to a certain and everlasting estate, that is either to salvation or condemnation, for his own glory" (186). But countering these views were theologians such as Jacobus Arminius: his growing rejection of hard-line doctrine in the Netherlands had been crystallized by 1610 into a set of articles which, while not retreating to the Pelagian and semi-Pelagian position that the human will rather than divine grace initiated the steps toward eternal salvation, stood firmly for the propositions that predestination was conditioned by God's foreknowledge of the individual's response to the offer of grace, and that a believer could both resist and fall from grace. Many of the theological and...

Herbert's "Enchanting Language": The Poetry of a Cambridge Orator

Herbert's "Enchanting Language":The Poetry of a Cambridge Orator Helen Wilcox In 1787, Henry Headley asserted in his Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry that "he who now takes up the poems of Herbert would little suspect that he had been public orator of an university."1 Yet the plain historical facts are that George Herbert, author of The Temple (1633) and the most popular devotional poet of the seventeenth century, was also a highly regarded Cambridge University Orator between 1618 and 1628. This paper is an attempt to understand why Herbert's poems and the very idea of oratory have been (and to some extent still are) kept separate in the minds of readers and critics. As part of this series of articles reconsidering Herbert in his Cambridge contexts, I wish to explore the extent to which Herbert the devotional poet and Herbert the Cambridge orator were indeed doing different work with their "enchanting language."2 In order to complement the other articles in this issue of the George Herbert Journal, therefore, the focus of my study will not be on Herbert's involvement with the politics of religion or of state during his Cambridge years, but on his attitudes to what we might term the politics of language. I It is fair to say that orators and oratory were not always viewed in a very positive light during the English Renaissance. In Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, the disreputable coward and braggart Parolles (whose name, not coincidentally, is related to the French for "words") is described as a "good drum . . . but a naughty orator" (5.3.249). What the courtier Lafew means by the phrase "naughty orator" is very clear in the context of the play, since Parolles has told extravagant lies in several attempts to get himself out of trouble after losing the regimental drum. In addition to being unreliable, if not downright dangerous, oratory was seen as a hollow art, as the reference to Parolles as a "drum" also implies. It was commonly assumed that oratorical rhetoric remained at the level of expression and ornament, and was thereby empty of any argument. Francis Bacon attacked the kind of education [End Page 53] which concentrated on the skills of classical oratory, referring to the "first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter."3 Bacon's criticism suggests that orators are concerned with language as the dress of ideas, and not with the ideas themselves. However, the wording of this comment by Bacon also reminds us of a fundamental anxiety about rhetoric as "study." Dorothy Osborne, commenting on the style of letters (in which she herself excelled), claimed that they should be "free and Easy as ones discourse, not studdyed, as an Oration."4 There is a sense here that oratory is learnt rather than felt, and thus that it is an aspect of art rather than nature. Margaret Cavendish wrote of her distrust of "Formal Orators, that speak Premeditated Orations," and contrasted this with another, distinctly preferable, category whom she termed "Natural Orators, that can speak on a Sudden upon any subject, whose Words are as Sweet and Melting as Manna from Heaven."5 It is notable that, since "Natural" or unstudied oratory is associated with a divine gift, orations that are "Premeditated" are by implication linked with a lack of integrity or an absence of genuine emotion. This suspicion of oratory as divorced from sincerity is a commonplace of more recent times than the Renaissance. In 1905 Yeats rejected the kind of drama that seeks to "convince others" rather than to give expression to "emotion," claiming that in such circumstances "all would be oratorical and insincere."6 As recently as 2003, a character in Jane Stevenson's novel The Empress of the Last Days is led to observe that the English have a habit of confusing "sincerity with inarticulacy."7 The more unpolished and rhetorically inept speakers are, he implies, the more likely their listeners are to trust them. The polished linguistic skills of an orator, far from convincing an audience with persuasive rhetoric, are assumed to be deceptive, a dangerous disguise for insincerity and the cloak of empty...

Herbert's Biblically-Titled Poems

Herbert's Biblically-Titled Poems

Marsyas's Howl: The Myth of Marsyas in Ovid'sMetamorphosesand Zbigniew Herbert's “Apollo and Marsyas”

Research Article| March 01 2001 Marsyas's Howl: The Myth of Marsyas in Ovid's Metamorphoses and Zbigniew Herbert's “Apollo and Marsyas” JOANNA NIŻYŃSKA JOANNA NIŻYŃSKA Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature (2001) 53 (2): 151–169. https://doi.org/10.1215/-53-2-151 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation JOANNA NIŻYŃSKA; Marsyas's Howl: The Myth of Marsyas in Ovid's Metamorphoses and Zbigniew Herbert's “Apollo and Marsyas”. Comparative Literature 1 March 2001; 53 (2): 151–169. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/-53-2-151 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsComparative Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. University of Oregon2001 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Stairway to Heaven: Up and Down

STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN-UP AND DOWN In 1956 Zbigniew Herbert wrote poem Top of Stairs, which he would publish much later in Report From Besieged City. This volume appeared in 1983 with an emigre publisher, and was immediately reprinted by one of underground publishers in Poland at time. Martial Law was still in effect, and although restrictions were gradually being loosened by (still-confident) military authorities (or simply: junta, as we called then), certainly no one even dreamed of political transformation that was to come five years later. And readers at that time had no doubt that Herbert's poem referred to reality of daily life in totalitarian state in which they lived. The message of poem, as is usually case with Herbert, was by no means unambiguous (today especially, we can see complexity of meanings it contains). Yet at time metaphor of stairs-with those who know standing at top, and at bottom, sweepers of squares, hostages of a better future-- seemed clearly to reflect marked division between them (the authorities) and us (society). One is tempted to read Adam Zagajewski's poem Ruchome schody (Escalator) in context of Herbert's earlier poem-or, more precisely, in context of that earlier reading of Herbert's poem. That is to say, in work of author of Pragnienie (Desire, 2000), one is tempted to see a poetic portrait of a democratic society -just as poem by author of Pan Cogito became a metaphor for situation of a society enslaved by a self-styled dictatorship. In contrast to Herbert's stairs, however, those of Zagajewski are moving-as if this mobility, this constant displacement, were supposed to represent exchange of elites within a democratic system; as if it represented principle of change in a free society that is subject to rule of a just law. And in place of soulless, severe Dictator, there appears the President, laughing and carefree! Even if one were to stay a moment on this particular level of interpretation, in sphere of socio-political reflection, sadness pervading this human landscape would be disturbing. Here we are shown an anonymous capital of Western world, somewhat reminiscent of Paris (St. Bartholomew's Paris): a city bubbling over with insouciance, sated and complacent; a city that has long enjoyed its hard-won rights and freedoms (treating even its own history dispassionately); and with a lofty indifference toward anything taking place outside of itself. Increasingly, it is these large metropolitan areas of Western Civilization that form setting for Zagajewski's poems. For it is there that one can easily observe processes and changes taking place in developed human collectivities at end of twentieth century. First of all, passions have faded and given way to cold irony, mockery, and scorn. Fortunately, conflicts and political clashes, too, are disappearing (another symptom, paradoxically, of decline). The siege of cities, uprisings, and struggles are things of past. Peace and wellbeing now govern this region of world; they have become our lot. But price paid for this is restless craving and boredom-a great boredom that spreads like a depression over a country where everything is subject to negotiation, calculation, deal-making and compromise; where money has taken place of arms, and where lofty emotions have sailed off like a luxury ocean liner on a one-way transatlantic journey. And finally-unification. Physical diversity, diversity of human types, multiplicity of ways of being (So many faces, so many hands) does not translate into a diversity of mind, spirit or character. What triumphs is an overall sameness; there is only one imagination, stimulated by simulacra of mass culture. In his essay Solidarnosc i samotnosc (Solidarity and Solitude), Zagajewski once wrote that a unification of collective will is desirable in sphere of political conflict-while sphere of expression requires quite opposite: differentiation. …

:Theory and Theology in George Herbert's Poetry: Divinitie and Poesie Met

In seventeenth-century England the poet George Herbert became known as 'Divine Herbert', his poetry a model for those aspiring to the status of inspired Christian poet. This book explores the relationship between the poetry of George Herbert and the concept of divine inspiration rooted in devotional texts of the time. Clarke considers three very different treatises read and approved by Herbert: Savonarola's De Simplicitate Christianae Vitae, Juan de Valdes's The Hundred and Ten Considerations, and Francois de Sales's Introduction to the Devout Life. These authors all saw literary production as implicit in a theological argument about the workings of the Holy Spirit. Clarke goes on to offer a new reading of many of Herbert's poems, concluding that implanted in Herbert's poetry are many well-established codes which to a seventeenth-century readership signified divine inspiration.

The Word Within: Predicating the Presence of God in George Herbert's The Temple

The Word Within: Predicating the Presence of God in George Herbert's The Temple

Facing Pages: Layout in the Williams Manuscript of George Herbert's Poems

Facing Pages: Layout in the Williams Manuscript of George Herbert's Poems

Gambling on the Divine: The Culture of Card Games in Herbert's Temple

Gambling on the Divine: The Culture of Card Games in Herbert's Temple by Brandie R. Siegfried So it is more suitable for the thinking person to play at cards . . . than at other games. — The Book on Games of Chance, 1564 [I will] deal unto you Christ's Cards, wherein you shall perceive Christ's rule. The game that we will play at shall be called The Triumph, which, if it be well played at, he that dealeth shall win; and the Standers and lookers on shall do the same; insomuch that no man that is willing to play at this Triumph with these cards, but they shall be all winners and no losers. — Hugh Latimer, Christmas Sermon, 1529 "Turn their eyes hither, who shall make a gain" writes George Herbert in the dedication to The Temple, "Theirs, who shall hurt themselves or me, refrain."1 Within a very few pages of Herbert's project, such "gain" will be shuffled together with a variety of game images, where a trump card will share metaphorical value with the triumph of Christ, and where transformation and discovery are intimately linked to divine gambles. Although both Michael Clifton and Anna K. Nardo have discussed the significance of play and gaming within Herbert's work,2 1 would like to expand our vision of the ludic by providing a brief cultural history of English cards and gaming. More specifically, I will situate this historical knowledge in relation to three of Herbert's poems — "Jordan" (I), "Submission," and "Love" (III) — in order to demonstrate the extent to which many of Herbert's best-wrought conceits depend, for their poetic power, upon a particular spin of game-derived meaning. I Card games and gambling are the pastimes most frequently referred to in The Temple, and this makes sense when we consider the history of cards and particular card games in relation to both politics Card Games in The Temple73 and religion in early modern England. On an obvious level, cards have to do with class and status. The face cards depict the various levels of power at court, while the original suits reflect four major class divisions: the cup or chalice represents churchmen, the sword marks the soldier, the coin stands for the merchant, and the stick or wand is a token for the common laborer. Although in England the stylization of each suit had evolved somewhat from the original patterns, this class division remained firmly entrenched in popular culture.3 The significance of their representative value in terms of class and status is dramatically emphasized as late as the French Revolution, when "the Kings and Queens of all suits were banished" at the same time that the royal family was beheaded.4 Moreover, in English card games, the ace functioned in much the same way as the pawn in chess: though normally the lowliest in terms of playing power, depending on the game and the particular arrangement of other cards, the ace could become the most valuable.5 In other words, while the face cards kept their customary continental value, the English ruled that the nonaristocratic ace had the potential for outstripping even the king. We also know that cards had a very real place in England's economic life. As early as 1463, an act of parliament prohibited the importation of foreign-manufactured packs; during Elizabeth's reign Raleigh made a fortune through his monopoly on playing cards, and by 1590 cards had become a common means of advertising or promoting propaganda (for instance, a special pack was published celebrating the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588); by 1615 playing cards were being taxed; and by 1628 "The Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards" was incorporated by royal charter.6 In addition, packs were commonly put to double use, providing both a ludic pastime and an instructional tool. Decks often combined the characteristics of playing cards and Schoolbook: one side would have the usual suit for scoring while the other contained information on astrology, heraldry, history, philosophy, geography, arithmetic, language (alphabet decks were very popular) and even the carving of fowl.7 Some games mixed knowledge of the card's specialty ("The...

George Herbert and Elizabeth Bishop

Joseph ?. Summers George Herbert and Elizabeth Bishop Elizabeth Bishop had a dream about George Herbert which she recorded in her Notebook: "They discuss the difference between his work and Donne's [Elizabeth Squires gave the impression it was the metrics] and touch upon Miss Moore's, which is said in the dream to beat Donne's but not his. 'This may have been subconscious politeness on my part,' Bishop notes, 'He had curls and was wearing a beautiful dark red satin coat. He said he could be "useful" to me. Praise God.' ,n He was. I got to know Elizabeth Bishop because she wanted to meet someone who was working on Herbert. I think she probably knew Herbert's poem better than anyone else I have known. She used to travel everywhere (Nova Scotia, Key West, Paris) with a copy of The Temple in her suitcase. She remarked that she once had to quit reading Herbert because she caught herself trying to write seventeenth-century poems rather than twentieth-century ones. I think "The Weed" is an example.2 When Elizabeth wrote me (October 4 and 5, 1954) about my book on Herbert, she remarked, "I'd been thinking that it was the hymn-singing Baptist backwards . . . village life that made me so susceptible to Herbert in the first place, and perhaps more or less the same thing was true in your case." (She was certainly right.) But by the time she was in college she knew that she admired a number of modern secular poets and wanted to write something like them, and she found congenial their usual rejection of familiar public rhetoric and the consciously poetic for a language close to that of a fairly ordinary conversation between literate friends. Herbert fulfilled, often better than Pound did, Pound's dictum that poetry should be at least as well-written as prose. Bishop found Herbert helpful as she consistently sustained her own high vision of that standard: no Herbert and Elizabeth Bishop49 inversions and no inflations, no rolling Ciceronian periods and no pontificating, no elevated "poetic diction." She had the keenest eye I've ever known — some times it seemed more like a nose — for the pretentious, the inaccurate, the derivative, and the dead. Occasionally Bishop quoted Herbert in a poem: "This morning's glitterings reveal / the sea is 'all a case of knives' " in "Wading at Wellfleet" is from one of Herbert's oddest metaphors in "Affliction" (TV): My thoughts are all a case of knives, Wounding my heart With scattered smart, As wat'ring pots give flowers their lives. Nothing their fury can control, While they do wound and pink my soul. (H. 7-13)3 Rarely, Bishop would unconsciously take an image or phrase from Herbert. "The Man-Moth" ends: Then from the lids One tear, his only possession, like the bee's sting, slips. Slyly he palms it, and if you're not paying attention he'll swallow it. However, if you watch, he'll hand it over, cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink. That "one tear" seems a direct descendant of the one "drop" which Christ "slipt" From thy right eye, (Which there did hang like streamers near the top Of some fair church to show the sore And bloody battle which thou once didst try) which filled the glass in which God had preserved the poet's tears (cf. Psalm 56:8) in the third poem which Herbert called "Praise." When I sent her the text of a lecture on her poetry I gave at Oxford that contained this observation, she wrote (October 19, 1967), "Of course I'm amazed at the obvious reflection of Herbert in the 'one tear' stanza — I'm sure you are quite right, but it had never occurred to 50Joseph H. Summers me at all . . . I'm always delighted when people discover these things." Bishop found Herbert's devotion to monosyllables completely congenial. I've never tried to count, but I have the impression that there are more monosyllabic lines in Herbert and Bishop than in any other significant poets in English. Sometimes Bishop's monosyllables seem Herbertian even when there is no obvious...

George Herbert and Robert Overton

Sidney Gottlieb George Herbert and Robert Overton For the purposes of literary scholarship, some pairings make a great deal of sense, even at first glance. The essays in the present volumeprovide several good examples: Herbert and Elizabeth Bishop, Herbert and Frost, Herbert and Sidney, Herbert and Donne.1 While elaborating on the subtleties and intricacies of these connections is no simple critical challenge, the essential "rightness" and value of these linkings is obvious and inarguable. All the more reason for me to feel some trepidation as I turn to the subject of my essay, which in the context of these others may need a little explaining, if not defending. George Herbert and Robert Overton: the title proposes not a match of strong poets but rather what may appear to be a fearful asymmetry. The examination of such asymmetries need not be tiresome, and in fact, as the work of various scholars has shown, it can be very revealing, sharpening our sense of what makes Herbert's poems so brilliant, distinctive, and if not inimitable than at least perilously imitable. Stanley Stewart, Helen Wilcox, and Helen Vendler, among others, have many interesting things to say about "Herbert and . . .": that is to say, Herbert and Harvey, and Wesley, and Washbourne, and Colman, and Knevet, and on and on.2 Still, though, their studies provide chastening answers to the question of what remains after the epigones fall far short of Herbert's metrical, structural, and musical inventiveness, his intellectual and emotional density, and his experiential integrity: alas, we are often left with failed wit, prolixity rather than profundity, and, in Vendler's harrowing phrase, "solemn tastelessness."3 This may not be the most promising way to introduce yet another discussion of "Herbert and . . . ," especially when I acknowledge that Overton too is sometimes prolix, often solemn, and 186Sidney Gottlieb not often witty. But let me describe briefly why I find the study of Herbert and Overton, the radical military leader, pamphleteer, and friend of Milton, so fascinating and potentially important. My primary effort will be to examine some of the broader implications of Overton's selections from and adaptations of Herbert, written into his length manuscript miscellany written while he was in prison. First, a comparison of a few texts and techniques will reinforce the usual lessons about Herbert's stylistic excellence and his imitator's deficiencies, but also provide useful insight into the life and mind as well as interests and poetic talents, such as they are, of Overton — who, although I hesitate to push such judgments, is historically a far more significant person than Herbert. I hope I need not apologize too much for focusing on Overton as much as Herbert. Imagine for a moment if we were to discover a manuscript volume written by, say, Churchill, in which he copied out and modified selected poems of, say, Hardy. It would be perverse if all that we paid attention to were stylistic and technical details, and if our chief arguments revolved around affirming Hardy's poetic superiority to Churchill. I also want to use the Herbert-Overton connection as a springboard for some observations on large topics that deserve (and are starting to receive) extensive investigation: on not only the midseventeenth -century reception ofHerbert but the conditions of poetic reading at this time; on "editorial" interventions in the transmission of poems, by Herbert and others (the simple change in terms, from thinking of Overton as a "poet" to Overton as an "editor," opens up some interesting areas of study); on the dynamics of mid-seventeenthcentury manuscript culture; and on Herbert and radicalism, defined both broadly and specifically, a much-neglected topic. I will not be able to treat each of these topics extensively, but I hope to indicate that in examining Herbert and Overton, there is much more at stake than tracing what happens when a relatively unskillful poet rewrites a skillful one. Let me begin with a few words about Overton's background and the circumstances under which he reworked Herbert.4 Overton's life was marked by a series of military successes and political and personal misfortunes. We know little about his early life, not much more than that he...

"This Book of Starres": Learning to Read George Herbert

Reviews James Boyd White, "This Book of Starres": Learning to Read George Herbert. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1994. 292 pp. $37.50 by W.A. Sessions The poem from which James Boyd White takes his title is about the proper reading of "Holy Scriptures." The ambiguities in Herbert's original poem point to the kind of dialectic that White would have readers of George Herbert learn: the incompleteness of "starres" as "poore books" can only be contrasted to what "lights" toward full meaning in "This book of starres." This dialectic obtains in White's own book in a method of analysis that combines two distinctly differing styles. The first is a rather old-fashioned New Critical reading and the second, a poststructuralist digressive selfconstruction . Such a self informs White's book and seeks a point of contact with the text itself as some sort of soteriological center. The first emphasis on close reading subsumes the Eliot thesis of tradition and talent and the Whiteheadian thesis of process: "The life of this poetry is not," White comments, "in poems as artifacts, but in the process of poetry-making that produced them, in the process of poetry-reading they require" (p. 150). This process excludes, fairly rigorously, any cultural engagement, although White does attempt some theological background early on, largely unfocused. What it does include is its firm dialectic of two selves, the reader's and the poet's, in that order and with a fluidity that extends to the poetry: "Herbert's conception of a person, then, is not as a single thing, but as a place of tension, conversation, conflict, and uncertainty — though here his parts are for the moment united in the poem itself" (p. 81). In fact, it is precisely in the text that person is revealed: "In reading Herbert's poems we are given a brokeness of language and self that in some way parallels his, which it is our task and opportunity to face," says White in the last line of his last chapter (p. 264). This self that is defining its multiple selves in reading Herbert's multiple selves (textualized into a book) is quite well-defined early on 56Book Reviews in White's argument. It is none other than a dramatized White, the product of a topology of region as well as mentality, and so throughout the book White takes his reader into other texts he knows, which for him form a contrast for his apprehension of Herbert. Ranging from the Iliad to Winnie-the-Pooh, such texts focus on three New England poets, particularly Emerson, Dickinson, and Frost. If frequently the extra-textual analyses do not help but interrupt, too cozily assuming a familiarity with the reader, at other times the insights are worth the breaks in the argument. Dickinson's movement from the spiritual to the physical landscape, the obverse of most contemporary poems and fiction, reveals a special technique of Herbert's seen all the more clearly for the comparison. If White's styles — close reading and poststructural solipsism — in combination are refreshing, there is some reason for caveat lector, at least for the omnivorous graduate student ready to "psyche" out the analysis and label it. White's mind is much too subtle for such labelling, and if repetitive or redundant in analysis, certainlyobviating any new ideological reading of Herbert, White's double style does keep the narrative of discovery going (unlike many other Renaissance critical texts). If few presses and few editors today allow such generous and lengthy readings as White's, the readings do provide what is rare in critical texts today. The reader sees text leading to text in a sequence that itself is salvific if followed, at the least therapeutic, because it evokes mystery and acceptance, as in "Love" (III). In short, Herbert reveals Herbert. In such a process, of course, it is a genuine question if such readings as White's add anything new or intend to. To the master Herbert studies from Tuve, Summers, and Stewart to Fish, Vendler, and Bloch, White adds few original readings. Similarly he offers little of the impact of new ideologies on Herbert texts, such as Schoenfeldt demonstrates...

Generosity and the Limits of Authority: Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton

Book Reviews83 William Flesch, Generosity and the Limits ofAuthority: Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992. 277 pp. $35.95. by Janis Lull In Generosity and the Limits ofAuthority: Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton, William Flesch compares three poets rarely treated together and finds common ground in their concentration on generosity and its antitheses: abandonment, loss, and "extremity," a final stage of emptiness in which the subject ceases to believe that plenitude is possible. While Flesch links the poetic exploration of extremityto the work of such theorists as Blanchot, Mauss, Freud, and Wittgenstein, the strength of the book lies more in its sensitive readings of particular works than in the explanatory power of the theories. The moments of extremity Flesch finds in such works as Herbert's "Love" (III) or Shakespeare's Richard II can usually be illuminated by theories familiar to the poets themselves — Protestant theology, for example, or the social thought associated with feudalism. While Flesch explores these connections, he also senses that many presentday readers will empathize more easily with Herbert's crises of faith or Shakespeare's nostalgia for authority when they are described in the language of modern philosophy, psychology, and anthropology. In his first chapter, "Public and Private in Herbert," Flesch compares Herbert's Protestant faith to Wittgenstein's analysis of skepticism. Just as Herbert's speakers often find the assurance of God's nearness hidden in their feelings of estrangement, so Wittgenstein maintains that the very act of doubting the external world assures us that it exists, in the form of the "language game" that makes doubt possible in the first place. In many of Herbert's poems, Flesch argues, the speaker's act of questioning his membership in God's community ultimately assures him that he does belong. But Flesch also discovers in Herbert, as in Wittgenstein, a sense of loss so profound that it cannot be redeemed even by God's grace. In his analysis of "Love" (HI), for instance, Flesch emphasizes the past-tense verbs in the final line: "So I did sit and eat." While Flesch agrees with other critics that the poem dramatizes God's generosity in justifying the unworthy speaker, he also insists that the feast portrayed in the poem's present-tense dialogue — "You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat" — is not the eternal feast of love in heaven because it is over by the end of the poem. At best, 84Book Reviews "Love" (III) is a brief, lyrical vision of heaven, and Flesch finds in the last line a suggestion that the speaker may be excluded forever from God's community. He thus connects Herbert's most intense anxieties not with the fear of damnation but with the fear that the divine generosity of grace can be exhausted, leaving the human subject completely outside any system of relations to God or, in Wittgenstein's terms, outside the real. Flesch's skill as a reader leads him to an important insight: in the same way that the past-tense ending of "Love" (III) undermines its vision of present grace, so real despair haunts the fringes of Herbert's poetry of faith and gives it its deepest resonance. Flesch brings out the nature of this despair especially well in his treatment of "The Sacrifice" and "Redemption," poems that represent the Incarnation as a kind of divine bankruptcy rather than as a fulfillment. Having identified a neglected note in Herbert's poetry, however, Flesch sometimes tries too hard to hear it, as in his unpersuasive reading of "The Pulley." His assertion that the poem is "not about everlasting rest but about everlasting exile from rest" (p. 83) ignores the suggestions of reassurance hidden, as so often, in Herbert's puns, especially in "let him keep the rest" (1. 16). Flesch's philosophical-cultural approach is helpful in highlighting an undercurrent of "extremity" in Herbert's English lyrics, but it works even better when he turns to Shakespeare, a poet more overtly concerned with exchange and loss and often discussed in such terms. Flesch demonstrates, for example, how Rkhard II reflects the feeling of decline surrounding the early modern transition from a feudal gift economy to a...

:Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship

Michael C. Schoenfeldt here offers the first major exploration of the connections between George Herbert's devotional poetry the social practices political discourse of his day. Viewing and Country Parson as part of the larger civilizing process of Western Europe, Schoenfeldt shows how Herbert discovers in the discourses of courtesy theology a common vocabulary of authority, selfhood, petition, discipline. Before entering the priesthood, Herbert nourished contacts in court, was elected University Orator at Cambridge, served in Parliament. In turning to God, Schoenfeldt argues, Herbert did not simply turn away from the secular world but also turned its language, particularly the language of courtesy, into the medium for his lyric worship of God. The confluence of courtesy spirituality in Herbert's poetry provides a fascinating insight into a society searching for an appropriate discourse of reverence in a time of baffling change. The first five chapters investigate the manifold ways in which Herbert's life works exemplify the interdependence of social religious behavior in the English Renaissance. The sixth final chapter extends this investigation into the nervous eroticism of Herbert's poems. Considering Temple as well as Herbert's letters, speeches, Latin poems, collections of foreign proverbs, translations, Country Parson, less familiar lyrics, Schoenfeldt offers a thorough detailed reading of Herbert's rich conflicted corpus. Prayer Power is not only a bold redefinition of the accomplishment of one of the finest poets of the English Renaissance but also the first sustained study to advance a cultural poetics of the religious lyric.

Sacred Measures: Herbert's Divine Wordplay

Sacred Measures: Herbert's Divine Wordplay by Kathleen J. Weatherford The poem "The Sonne" gives clear testimony to Herbert's delight and belief in the power of puns. Herbert argues that the particular splendor of the English language is that it gives one name to different yet subtly and significantly related things: "How neatly doe we give one onely name / To parents issue and the sunnes bright starre" (11. 5-6).1 Both "the sun" and "a son" provide "light" and "fruit"; both chase away "dimnesse"; both bring "new discov'ries of posteritie." Of course, the real point of the poem is that our name for Christ, "The Sonne of Man," (1. 14) is the most significant meaning of "Sonne," which fully embraces the other two. "Sonne" in the poem acquires a three-in-one meaning that not only demonstrates the consonance of sound but also the relation between God's creations and sacrifice: man, the sun, and Christ. The earthly is related to the celestial, which in turn is related to the divine, yet not in a manner that highlights the distinction between them but rather fuses the three into one. Herbert's poem makes a unity out of differences, and as Chana Bloch in Spelling the Word so aptly expresses it " 'in one word' . . . convey[s] a world."2 Like other writers of the time, Herbert viewed verbal ambiguity as a poetic possibility to be exploited to make his poetry function on multiple levels simultaneously. Herbert's puns are not just stylistic or ornamental devices; they are figures of thought that can convey issues of real philosophical and theological importance and that have precedence in Biblical as well as classical tradition. M.M. Mahood's assessment in Shakespeare's Wordplay of the Elizabethan attitude towards multiple meanings of one word applies equally well to the function of wordplay in Herbert's poetry in general and in "The Sonne" in particular: "If a word has several meanings they are shown, through the serious punning which so exasperated a later generation, to bear a kind of transcendental relationship to one another."3 Not all of Herbert's wordplay draws attention to itself with the fanfare of "The Sonne" however. Over the last twenty-five years, Herbert criticism has done much to reveal the wealth of puns Herbert's Divine Wordplay23 throughout The Temple and to help readers recognize the considerable importance ofwordplay throughout Herbert's writing. In UtmostArt Mary Ellen Rickey presents a thorough discussion of Herbert's use of the "serious pun" and rightly maintains that for Herbert the making of puns was an activity that sought to "fuse together in the multiple meanings of a single word the important elements of a poem."4 Rickey points out that unlike other "metaphysical poets" who tended to use metaphors and images in succession, Herbert developed the "highly unusual custom of sustaining two or more families of metaphor throughout a poem and thereby giving multidimensional treatment to his theme."5 In Equivocal Predication: George Herbert's Way to God, Heather Asals takes the issue of Herbert's wordplay a step further and maintains that punning expresses Herbert's "vision of the universe."6 According to Asals, the "basic difficulty" of Herbert's language is that "it defies arithmetic and says that one thing equals two, or, ? sonne is light and fruit.' "7 Asals' main point is that although Herbert makes propositions that are mathematically impossible, he makes statements that grasp a religious truth and create a bridge between our own fallen and fragmented world and the perfect and infinite "oneness which is in God."8 For Herbert punning is "the many and the one of language itself,"9 and puns reflect the pattern of the Many and the One of God. Asals is, in fact, the first critic to take significant notice of one of Herbert's most important puns, that on "measure," and a variety of other significantly relatedterms like "number," "count," and "score" that concern, in at least one of their meanings, the art of writing poetry: Some of Herbert's most important equivocations are terms for his poetry itself. 'How shall I measure out thy bloud?' he asks...

"Worthy to be here": Protestant Sacramental Devotion and Herbert's "Love" (III)

"Worthy to be here": Protestant Sacramental Devotion and Herbert's "Love" (III) by Parker Johnson Richard Strier has suggested that explanations of Eucharistie theology do not fully answer important questions about the relation of Herbert's poems to the Sacrament, and he calls for a somewhat different orientation toward this topic: The major question is not Herbert's theological account of the Eucharist but his devotional relation to it. The technical discussion will not answer the key question of whether Eucharistie devotion is or is not at the center of Herbert's poetry. Again, "Love" (III) is a more crucial text.1 I agree that the technical theological discussion does not finally answer the question and that "Love" (III) is a crucial text; I wish to show that Eucharistie devotion is indeed central to Herbert's poems.2 To pursue Strier's question, we must determine what kind of sacramental devotion is an appropriate context for elucidating "Love" (III). The well-established Protestant devotional tradition of sacramental preparation and self-examination, explained in numerous treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, provides such a context. The critical issue, as these treatises explain, in sacramental preparation is the worthiness of the receiver, an issue directly addressed in "Love" (III). The worth ofthe receiver, his claim to the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, depended upon a devotional act of preparation and self-examination in which the question of worthiness is considered from many points of view. The worth of the speaker in "Love" (III), his fitness as a guest at Love's banquet, is the critical issue in the poem. The scriptural demand for devotional preparation for the Supper is unmistakably clear: "But let a man examine himself . . . For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and 50Parker Johnson drinketh damnation to himself" (1 Cor. 1 1 : 28-29). The Book of Common Prayer, in its invitation to the Communion, reminds participants of Paul's words, "how he exhorteth all persons diligently to try and examine themselves, before they presume to eat of that bread, and drink of that cup."3 This selfexamination was broadly construed as preparation for the Supper, conscientious meditation during the Supper, and reflection afterthe Supper upon the benefits one had received. Jeremiah Dyke resorts to the imagery of clothing and banquet in his rhetorical question: "When we are invited to our neighbors Tables to feast with them, how do we spruce up our selves, in our comelier and cleanlier apparrell, and how much rather will we choose to be absent, then to come in undecent and homely attire?"4 The Second Helvetic Confession (1566) contains the most expansive doctrinal definition of the selfexamination required of participants in the sacrament; participants should examine themselves according to the commandment of the apostle, especially as to the kind of faith we have, whether we believe that Christ has come to save sinners and to call them to repentance, and whether each man believes that he is in the number of those who have been delivered by Christ and saved; and whether he is determined to change his wicked life, to lead a holy life, and with the Lord's help to persevere in the true religion and in harmony with the brethren, and to give due thanks to God for his deliverance.9 Conversion was prerequisite both for the sacrament itself and for the devotional self-examination attendant upon it. Dyke states flatly that "No man is fit to be a partaker of the seale of the covenant, who is not in the covenant of grace."6 Thomas Doolittle claims that self-examination "is a necessary Duty; not necessary to the Being and Essence of a Christian, for that is supposed: for Conversion must go before participation of [sic] this Holy Ordinance, which is not appointed of God to beget, but to encrease Grace."7 The Lord's Supper is not a converting ordinance, but it is, among other things, an occasion for public acknowledgement of one's faith. Richard Vines writes that the sacrament is a "barred" ordinance and that only a "baptized HERBERTS "LOVE" (III)51 visible Professor of the Gospel" is to be admitted: Manyare in...

Pattern Poetry as Paradigm

From roughly the eighteenth century until the 1970s, pattern poetry, that is, poetry in which a visual image is formed by the placement of words or letters, when it received any attention at all, was strongly under attack by almost all critics and observers. This was not because of its mimesis, since until the early twentieth century most visual art was itself mimetic. Rather, the feeling was that the pattern poem was intermedial, that it lay conceptually between the literary and visual art media, and that it was therefore unable to stand on its own and was thus inherently mediocre. In recent years, however, many of our own artists, literary as well as visual, have explored the potentials of the intermedia-sound poetry, the happening, concrete and postconcrete poetry, and so on-and, in due course, attention has been given to earlier intermedial works, suggesting a fairly widespread taste for such forms at present. Emblem poetry, previously ignored or denigrated by most observers up to the 1950s, was reevaluated by Mario Praz (1964) and others in the 1960s and since (see, e.g., Hatherly 1983 and Pozzi 1981). The same appears to be happening with pattern poetry. Just to describe the situation in the United States, when I wrote a little monograph on George Herbert's pattern poems (Higgins 1977), I could find almost nothing on pattern poetry as such in Englisha chapter here or there (Hollander 1975), but nothing substantial. A little book by Kenneth Newell (1976) had been published, but by an extremely obscure press; it was unlisted in the usual sources, and I knew of it only later when I found a copy of it in the New York Pub-

The Rest That Remaineth: A Study of Five Poems by George Herbert

The Rest That Remaineth: A Study of Five Poems by George Herbert by Andrée Luxton In his 1976 explicetion of "The Pulley," Stuert Hunter suggests Psalms 95 and Hebrews 3 and 4 as possible sources for George Herbert's use of the term "rest" in thet poem. In his useful commentery, Hunter notes Poul's reference to "the Sebboth repose of the feithful."1 He continues, "Biblical scholars are generally agreed that the Old Testament understanding of the meaning of the Sabbath encompassed not only the idea of physical repose but also the promise of a future final Sabbath rest for the faithful in the bosom of God." Hunter concludes that at "the bosom of God" Herbert's pulley finally reaches its "point of stasis, or finel rest" where "men's restlessness is satisfied." Hunter's recognition of the relationship between Hebrews 3 and 4 and "The Pulley" is both volid and important. So is his reolizotion of the essentiel connection between "Sebboth rest" and eternal rest in the Epistle to the Hebrews. However, the implications of the Hebrews passage and its relotion to Herbert's The Temple extend much further. The following detailed analysis of Hebrews 3 and 4, paralleled with a close reeding of both "The Pulley" ond an additional four Herbert poems — "Aaron," "Peace," "Sunday," and "Even-song" — will show something of Herbert's broader consideration of the ideals of rest explored by the author of Hebrews.2 Hebrews 3:14 end 4:14 frame the Hebrews passage on rest. Hebrews 3: 14 reeds, "For we ore mode portokers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence stedfest unto the end," and Hebrews 4:1 4, "Seeing then that we have a greet high priest, thot is pessed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession." Here lies the assurance of belief. In Hebrews 3:14 the perfect tense of "gegonamev" ("we have become") suggests both a present and a continuous relationship between the human and the divine. Then in 50Andrea Luxton Hebrews 4:14, the dependent douse that transletes from Greek as "Seeing then ... let us hold fast" relies on the certointy of "we hove e greet high priest." The relationship remains conditional, dependent on humanity's belief; however, the humonity end divinity of Christ thet fits him for the role of high priest ensures humenkind's ecceptonce end its "right" to shore with Christ in the kingdom.3 Between these two verses of assurance, the author of Hebrews uses typology as he looks to the past, present, and future in order to define the "rest" of the kingdom. He first notes the unbelief of the Israelites that prevented their entering into God's rest and the relevence of the promise of rest in the deys of David. Both these situations carry overtones of physical rest and rest from strife, as well as the accompanying spirituel rest. Then the outhor introduces ß second rest, the rest of God connected to creetion and the Sabbeth (verse 4). However, all these preceding rests are types to an ontitype of e much more fulfilling rest (verse 9). This better end final rest Donald Hagner defines as "the rest that is meant to be the portion of Christians (this mey indeed be subdivided into the rest available at present and the future rest of eschatology proper)."4 Some disagreement exists among commentators on Hebrews as to whether this last rest is only in the present, or both present and future. However, most agree with Hagner and see implicit in the final promise a "present rest" to enjoy "in anticipation of the final eschatological rest."5 This, of course, would be the antitype to which all types point. The author of Hebrews helps distinguish between the rests of the present and future by introducing a different Greek word in Hebrews4:9. In his discussion of "The Pulley," Hunter cleims that "Paul" uses the Greek term "katapausis" to suggest "the Sabbeth repose of the feithful"; "ketepausis" does recur eight times throughout Hebrews 3 and 4 and the cognate verb three times.6 However, in Hebrews 4:9 "ketopousis" is replaced by "sabbatismos." It is...