ROBERT HERRICK, GEORGE HERBERT, HENRY VAUGHAN
The bed is ready, and the maze of love
Looks for the treaders; everywhere is wove
Wit and new mystery; read, and
Put in practice, to understand
And know each wile,
Each hieroglyphic of a kiss or smile,
And do it to the full; reach
High in your own conceit, and some way teach
Nature and art one more
Play than they ever knew before.
Donne celebrates his own love, Robert Herrick the love of others. His poetic antecedents can be traced to “rare arch-poet Jonson,” but his poems have a complete polish only seldom found in the archpoet’s. He concentrates less on argument than elaboration. Swinburne was hard on Jonson, but he calls Herrick the “greatest songwriter ever born of English race.” Coming from the deliriously melodious Swinburne, this alerts us to certain verbal qualities: a concentration on sound, even at the expense of sense.
Figurative language, delightful conceit, revived conventions: these are parts of Herrick’s small, intimate poetic arsenal, developed far from the urban commotion that surrounded Jonson’s verse. Even his epigrams seem leisurely. He expects us, after hearing a poem, not to judge or act, but to reflect and savor. His is a generally benign universe, with some of the charm of Marvell’s, though only a little of its latent violence and lacking its intellectual qualities. For Herrick, the natural order is rural. He gave up seeking the aristocratic patrons who drew writers such as Marvell into the turbulent politics of the day. History broke in on Herrick’s life with the English Civil War, and like other Cavaliers (those loyal to Charles I) he was cut to the quick by the execution of his king, but as a poet he was remote from affairs: pastoral in every sense.
Herrick was born in London in 1591. His father was a goldsmith and banker from Leicestershire, his mother a mercer’s daughter. The year after his birth, his father fell out of an attic window, leaving a sizable estate of £5,068, which was initially attached by the Crown because the dead man was presumed a suicide. Suicide was a felony, the estate was forfeit. After an anxious time, Juliana, the widow, saved the estate. Robert, his three brothers and two sisters were raised in Hampton, Middlesex, far enough from London for him to enjoy the river eyots, meadows and chalk hills, and Hampton Court with its stately to-ing and fro-ing.
It’s uncertain where he was educated, but he certainly mastered the Latin classics. In 1607 he was apprenticed as a goldsmith to his rich uncle. After six years he’d had enough of his overbearing relation, though his head was filled with the intricacies of his craft and a feeling for the fine ladies for whom his handiwork was destined. He went up to St. John’s College and, later, Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to study law, and there—despite a continual duel with his uncle to get funds from his inheritance—he secured a BA in 1617 and an MA in 1620. Three years later he was ordained along with his college friend John Weekes, to whom (under the name of Posthumus) he dedicated “His Age,” a long poem grounded in Horace. His formal mastery is nowhere clearer than in the fourth stanza, on his favorite theme of ephemerality. The fifth and sixth lines contain the essential quality of Herrick’s art:
But on we must, and thither tend,
Where Anchus and rich Tellus blend
Their sacred seed;
Thus has infernal Jove decreed;
We must be made,
Ere long, a song, ere long, a shade.
Why then, since life to us is short,
Let’s make it full up, by our sport.
The last couplet offers feeble consolation.
There is a biographical blank for a time: probably the young poet lived in London, earned the patronage of Endymion Porter, a friend of the Duke of Buckingham, and joined the Sons of Ben at the Apollo Chamber of the Devil and St. Dunstan in Temple Bar. His first (brief) recognition as a poet came in 1625 with verses on the death of James I. He must have started writing earlier, two or three years before he went to Cambridge. He was a perfectionist, a goldsmith even in his verse, and revised, compressed and rendered smooth with great dedication. Some of his epigrams are in poor taste, but few are flawed in execution.
In 1627 Porter secured him a place as chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham during the ill-starred expedition to the Isle of Ré in the Bay of Biscay to support the French Huguenots. Weekes went with him. The next year the duke was murdered. Herrick’s mother died, and he inherited far less than he had hoped. After the double setback—loss of patron and of expectations—he was given the living of Dean Prior, Devon.
Situated on the road between Exeter and Plymouth, on the edge of Dartmoor, it was a small and manageable parish and in some weathers and some frames of mind it seemed idyllic. The larger landscape finds no place in his poems, but the detail of blossom, river and meadows is there in full. The parishioners were rural folk, small landowners and farm workers, and maybe a handful of weavers—a far cry from the Devil and St. Dunstan. He was not in a hurry to become a parish priest: he did not settle there until 1630, maybe reluctantly. He expresses a dislike:
More discontents I never had
Since I was born than here,
Where I have been and still am sad,
In this dull Devonshire.
It may be more than imitation of classical dissatisfaction; but he wrote contented poems as well. Notable among them is “A Country Life: To his Brother,” which in form and moral resembles Jonson’s “To Sir Robert Wroth.” The difference is of class. Wroth was an aristocrat, Herrick’s brother a less exalted being. Herrick calls him to a life of paternity and good husbandry. “A Panegyric to Sir Lewis Pemberton” follows Jonson’s poem more closely, to good effect.
Herrick was ejected from his living in 1647 by the Parliamentarians. After some years in London, where in 1649 he published his Hesperides and Noble Numbers, without success for himself or his printer, he was reinstated at the Restoration and held his living from 1662 until his death in 1674. He had his devoted servant, Prudence Baldwin, and many friends. Most of his surviving poetry—over a thousand poems—was written before 1649.
He was a Cavalier, and loyalists said they liked his book, but few others did. A hundred and fifty years went by before a reprint. Abraham Cowley and Edmund Waller found readers, but Herrick, whose work is not unlike theirs in some respects, didn’t appeal. He wasn’t asked to contribute with other Sons of Ben to the Jonson memorial volume of 1638. He may have stopped writing because no one read him. It’s possible that a growing fashion for Donne’s poems, which hindered the reception of the work of Michael Drayton and others, had the effect of casting Herrick as an anachronism. A long time must pass before an anachronism is released back into time.
For Herrick the execution of Charles I ended a natural social order; he never adjusted to the new world. His best poem on the subject, “The bad season makes the poet sad,” speaks through convention with a profound personal conviction:
Dull to myself, and almost dead to these
My many fresh and fragrant mistresses;
Lost to all music now; since every thing
Puts on the semblance here of sorrowing.
Sick is the land to th’ heart; and doth endure
More dangerous faintings by her desp’rate cure.
But if that golden Age would come again,
And Charles here rule, as he before did reign;
If smooth and unperplext the seasons were,
As when the sweet Maria lived here:
I should delight to have my curls half drown’d
In Tyrian dews, and head with roses crown’d;
And once more yet (ere I am laid out dead)
Knock at a star with my exalted head.
The note is Horatian, intense feeling contained and heightened by technical skill. Herrick doesn’t judge. Perhaps the state was sick, but the “cure” was “desperate” and destroyed as much as it cured. Little work survives from the years after the death of the “brave Prince of Cavaliers.” Herrick, losing his England, lost his voice as well.
Like other Cavaliers, he is an “agreeable” writer, “consciously urbane, mature, and civilised,” as F. R. Leavis notes. He owed debts to Donne as well as Jonson, but his real masters were the Latin classics. Leavis overstates the “close relation to the spoken language” of the Caroline lyric. Herrick’s language is remote from the English spoken in his Devon parish, or the language of the merchant class from which he came. His is the language of the wits, old-fashioned even for the times. It is clear, but that’s not to say it is close to speech. On the contrary, had it been idiomatic it would have dated as much as the language of Jonson’s coarser comedies.
The poems abound in transitive verbs, suggesting movement if not action, and Herrick rejects the Spenserian manner tout court. He rejects, too, the refined Arcadian landscape. Literal experience underlies his pastoral. One might regard it more properly as rural, for nymphs and shepherds are replaced with figures very like his parishioners. It is England and Devon he writes of. At the opening of Hesperides he lists his subjects:
I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers:
Of April, May, of June, and July-flowers.
I sing of Maypoles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,
Of bride-grooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes.
I write of youth, of love, and have access
By these, to sing of cleanly-wantonness.
Youth, love, and that wonderful phrase “cleanly-wantonness”; weather, luxuries, ephemerality, myth, fairyland, dreamland, heaven and hell: the “Argument of his Book” accurately advertises its contents. Generally the poems address a single or imagined hearer. Sometimes he talks with himself, or with “Prew” (Prudence, his housekeeper). His words emerge from a shared solitude, as though to answer a rural silence. There is no public authority about them. His lived pastoral, enhanced with classical allusion, includes a good deal of practical wisdom and close observation. The earthy influence of Thomas Tusser’s verse advice to farmers is felt, but Herrick keeps his hands clean, his prosody under control.
Although he was a clergyman, it is striking that his poetry is almost totally innocent of the Fall. He is classical to such a degree that most of his poems are pagan in attitude. His “many fresh and fragrant mistresses,” preeminently Julia, but also Anthea, Perila, Sappho, Electra, Lucia, Corinna, Amarillis and others, are not virginal, are not Dante’s Beatrice or Petrarch’s Laura. They are courtable girls without metaphysical pretension. The poems can be erotically frank and joyful. When he celebrates a wedding, it is to enjoin the couple (notably his dear college friend Sir Clipseby Crew) to enjoy lawful bliss. The bed itself he animates enthusiastically:
And to your more bewitching, see, the proud
Plump bed bear up, and swelling like a cloud,
Tempting the two too modest; can
Ye see it brustle like a swan,
And you be cold
To meet it, when it woos and seems to fold
The arms to hug it? Throw, throw
Yourselves into the mighty over-flow
Of that white pride, and drown
The night, with you, in floods of down.
He urges consummation in those amazing pillows, his theme: carpe noctem. Frankness within a refined, conventional style gives it authority. He’s seldom solemn, always a wooer or a sad (though not bitter) elegist of happiness. In his “Farewell” and “Welcome” to sack he speaks with a whole voice, as if to a wife or mistress.
He suggests, with a few paradoxical adjectives, actual passion or disruption underlying a formal statement. The poems are perfect but celebrate the conscious or unconscious imperfections or relaxations of rule that beguile the heart. “A sweet disorder in the dress,” “an erring lace,” “bewitch” him more than “when art / Is too precise in every part.” He is delighted with the way Julia’s petticoat transgresses. A phrase such as “harmless folly” in “Corinna’s going a-Maying” provides a key. Or in “Upon Julia’s Clothes,” his most famous poem, the unstated, underlying image of fish and hook livens a brittle conceit. And in “To Music,” “the civil wilderness”—a phrase met with elsewhere in his poetry—is one of those expressions bordering on oxymoron. Some of the elegies—for example, the one on the death of Endymion Porter’s brother, or on his own dying brother—and poems such as “To Live Merrily, and to Trust to Good Verses” address the dark realm of passion and ephemerality. But usually the bright surface is unclouded. There are hints, sufficient to recommend present pleasure. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” “Fair daffodils, we weep to see”—such poems are suasive and in no sense morbid.
So generous, so pagan a poet at Dean Prior, with his cure of souls, made little impression on the poetry of the time. He was an anachronism, the last Cavalier, the man in whom the Elizabethan tradition of songwriting reaches—too late—its perfection. In the nineteenth century his verse was revived. In this century, his work and that of other Cavaliers has been overshadowed by the Metaphysicals. Herrick is as charming as Marvell, though he lacks his intelligence; technically he’s a peer of Donne, though without his scope. He speaks in many tones of a range of human experience. He does not get lost in Arcadia and is free too of the extremes of attitude, the posturing, which mar much Metaphysical verse. He does not display his learning: he uses it. His work is not, in Doctor Johnson’s phrase, “singular,” but general in application and normative in effect—a “moral” art, like Jonson’s, only gentler, more temperate, more pagan, and as durable.
Herrick made a poem—not a particularly good one—in the shape of a cross. George Herbert made poems in shapes too: an altar, Easter wings. This ingenious form of poetic devotion had to be appropriate and decorous. It traced its ancestry to the Technopaegnia of the Alexandrians, who insisted that shape must be relevant to content. The “corona,” or linked sonnet sequence, the acrostic poem that embedded the name of the queen, the beloved, or a religious figure (for example Sir John Davies’s Hymns of Astraea, which build around the acrostic ELISABETHA REGINA), are part of the classically sanctioned spiritual and secular play of poets who give themselves an additional formal challenge, on top of meter and rhyme, to try their skills. Such experiments prefigure the more arbitrary experimentation of Auden in suppressing the use of articles in certain poems, or the OuLiPo writers, or John Ashbery, in The Tennis Court Oath, setting himself challenges that baffle, then enhance, sense. Only poets in love with their language and their virtuosity set themselves such tasks.
There are analogies with music, the ways in which composers develop a “lettered” theme, or restrict themselves to a narrow range of notes and combinations in order to “say” something. George Herbert, like his brother Lord Herbert of Cherbury, was a musician, and when he was rector at Bemerton used to walk into Salisbury to make music with friends. In the slight poem “Church-Music” there is a wonderful movement of gratitude, expressed with natural, unforced synesthesia:
Sweetest of sweets, I thank you: when displeasure
Did through my body wound my mind,
You took me thence, and in your house of pleasure
A dainty lodging me assigned.
Now I in you without a body move,
Rising and falling with your wings:
We both together sweetly live and love,
Yet say sometimes, God help poor Kings.
Comfort, I’ll die; for if you post from me,
Sure shall I do so, and much more:
But if I travel in your company,
You know the way to heaven’s door.
God help poor Kings. When Charles I awaited execution, he read Herbert’s The Temple for consolation.
Born in 1593 in Montgomeryshire, Wales, George was the fifth son of Richard Herbert, scion of a distinguished Anglo-Welsh family, and Magdalen, a woman of parts and friend of Donne, who in her widowhood dedicated his celebrated, conceited “Autumnal” to her: “No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace / As I have seen in one autumnal face...” Richard Herbert died in 1596, leaving ten children. After three years the family removed to Oxford, and two years later to London. From twelve to sixteen, Herbert attended Westminster School; Lancelot Andrewes, then dean of Westminster, taught there during his first year, introducing the boys to a style of elaborate and trenchant expression. At the age of twelve he was writing satiric Latin verses against the Presbyterian polemicist Andrew Melville. He started his music studies and became proficient, especially (like Campion) as a lutenist.
After a decade of widowhood Magdalen married Sir John Danvers, a man twenty years her junior, in 1609, the year George went up to Trinity College, Cambridge. She continued to influence her son until her death in 1627. To her, when he was sixteen, he wrote from college a new year letter reproving “the vanity of those many love-poems, that are daily writ and consecrated to Venus,” and lamenting “that so few are writ, that look towards God and Heaven.” He enclosed two sonnets (quoted by Walton in his indispensible Life), one of them good, foreshadowing the Metaphysical aesthetic of “Jordan (i),” and resolves, “that my poor abilities in poetry, shall be all, and ever consecrated to God’s glory.”
My God, where is that ancient heat towards Thee
Wherewith whole shoals of martyrs once did burn,
Besides their other flames? Doth Poetry
Wear Venus’ livery? only serve her turn?
Why are not sonnets made of Thee, and lays
Upon Thine altar burnt? Cannot Thy love
Heighten a spirit to sound out Thy praise
As well as any she? Cannot Thy Dove
Outstrip their Cupid easily in flight?
Milton is gently prefigured here; also Herbert’s mature verse. His eldest brother, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, poet, diplomat and Neoplatonist, was urbane, worldly; he abandoned religion. George began on a similar path but took a different turning, from secular to divine vocation, particularizing his language as he went. He wrote these lines as much to please his mother as God. Yet all of his surviving English poems are devotional, despite his early secular ambitions and his reluctance—like Donne’s—to enter religious orders.
From this beginning he is a figurative writer: flame (faith), livery (the secular court), altar, song, dove. These are not counters to decorate an idea. Through development and contrast they extend meaning. Paraphrase cannot displace them. Ornamental metaphor merely glosses essentially prose meaning; conceit tends to displace meaning altogether. (For a vivid chain of conceits, one need look no further than Donne’s “Autumnal.”) Herbert’s figures, adapting familiar religious matter, are the argument, moving with inherent logic.
In 1613 he took his BA, became a minor fellow of Trinity College and wrote two Latin elegies on the death of that most elegized of men, Prince Henry. Despite delicacy of health, he took his MA and a fellowship in 1615–16. He was required to take orders within seven years, which he failed to do. At this time he was friendly with Donne, who had just taken orders himself.
He took the first step toward a secular career in 1618 when he became reader (praelector) in rhetoric at Cambridge. The next was in 1620 when he was elected public orator of the university. His friendships with Bacon (who let him read his works before submitting them for publication, and whose Advancement of Learning he helped translate into Latin), Donne and Lancelot Andrewes flourished. Lord Herbert, appointed ambassador to France in 1619, dedicated his treatise De Veritate to George and to William Boswell. In 1623–24 he served as MP for Montgomeryshire; a fellow MP was his Cambridge contemporary Nicholas Ferrar, who plays a crucial part in his immortality. In 1624 he was at last ordained deacon. Thus he debarred himself from further secular preferment.
The deaths of friends and patrons—including James I in 1625, Bacon and Andrewes in 1626 and his mother in 1627 (Donne preached her funeral sermon)—and the influence of Donne and Nicholas Ferrar sobered him. He was installed a canon of Lincoln Cathedral and received the living of Leighton Bromswold in 1626. Many poems of discontent and uncertainty date from this period. In 1628 he resigned his oratorship. He married (happily) Jane Danvers, a relation of his stepfather’s, after a three-day courtship and in 1630 received the living of Fugglestone with Bemerton, near Salisbury. In September of that year he was ordained priest at Salisbury Cathedral. Aubrey reports that the Earl of Pembroke “gave him a Benefice at Bemmarton (between Wilton and Salisbury) a pittifull little chappell of Ease at Foughelston. The old house was very ruinous. Here he built a very handsome howse for the Minister, of Brick, and made a good garden and walkes.” Donne died in 1631 and Herbert’s last firm link with London was severed.
His last three years were marked by devotion and unostentatious charity. In 1633 he died of consumption. At Bemerton, Aubrey tells us, “He lyes in the Chancell, under no large, nor yet very good, marble grave-stone, without an Inscription.” Shortly before his death he sent a manuscript of his poems, The Temple, to Ferrar at his religious community of Little Gidding, urging him to publish or burn the book as he saw fit. Ferrar published. Before the year was out two editions had appeared.
Ferrar is a key figure. Herbert was his friend and they must have discussed together, at Cambridge and later, issues of faith. Ferrar was more assertive than Herbert. At Little Gidding he maintained among his family a strict devotion to the Book of Common Prayer, to the forms of worship, and especially, in an age when Communion occurred in many parishes at most twice a year, a devotion to the central sacrament of the Anglican Church, which was celebrated at least every month (as it now is every Sunday). Vocal prayers drawn from the prayerbook and a thorough knowledge of the Psalms were the keys of Ferrar’s simple discipline. It is possible that Herbert, whose poems are, for all their freshness, a tissue of allusion to and expansion on scripture, shared this view—this vision—though within a parish, not a specialized community. Both men steered a perilous course between Puritanism and papism. What Herbert shares with Ferrar is a sense of the joy of faith when grace is present: as Maycock says in his Chronicles of Little Gidding, “It was a note that had not been heard in English devotional writing, a quality that had not been displayed in English religious life, for something like a hundred years.” Ferrar was not attempting to reestablish monasticism: his was a private venture, an attempt to live truly, according to scripture, with his family, and to bear witness through his and through their life. Herbert’s approach to his vocation and family, if less rigorously structured, was not unlike Ferrar’s.
In his short time at Bemerton Herbert revised poems and composed more than half of The Temple. The collection begins with “The Church Porch,” an extended moral and stylistic preparation for what follows.
Harken unto a Verser, who may chance
Rhyme thee to good, and make a bait of pleasure.
A verse may find him, who a sermon flies,
And turn delight into a sacrifice.
The short poems he described as “a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul.” There is throughout the book a continuity of tone, yet each poem represents a single experience.
His tone and phrasing affected Henry Vaughan. Indeed Vaughan echoes lines and forms, not as an imitator but as one whose imagination, poetic and spiritual, Herbert helped to constitute. Less directly, Richard Crashaw is Herbert’s debtor. Herbert had a number of near contemporary imitators and his book went through several profitable editions. Then, late in the seventeenth century, he went out of fashion. Addison, the most mechanical versifier of his age and a maker of fashion, pilloried him as a “false wit.” The error of Herbert’s early champions—men of faith—was to sell the poet on the strength of his piety, not his poetry (as Wilfred Owen’s advocates sold him, taking him at his word, on the strength of his pity, not his poetry). Even Ferrar’s advertisement for the first edition attests to this. Herbert’s form of piety became unfashionable even before the Enlightenment was in full swing.
Yet piety contributed to his reemergence. John Wesley, in the eighteenth century, adapted several poems as hymns, adjusting their prosody to suit the form, and published a selection without alteration. It remained for Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria, to revalue Herbert’s poetry. In a letter he confessed that at one time he had read Herbert to chuckle over quaint, obscure passages with indecorous diction. The mature Coleridge saw the matter differently: he praises the “style where the scholar and the poet supplies the material, but the perfect well-bred gentleman the expression and arrangements.” He perceives complex and fantastic thought expressed in a clear, plain language. With this he contrasts those later poets whose fantastic and complex language conveys trivial thoughts. “The latter is a riddle of words; the former an enigma of thoughts.”
Edgell Rickword says: “A writer survives in each generation, otherwise than as a figure in literary text-books, precisely to the extent that he interests us as a contemporary; one of the qualities of the classics is a perennial modernity.” This is wrong. A “classic” can emerge into different modernities and be eclipsed between times, as Jonson, or Langland, or Blake demonstrate. Or Donne, or Spenser, now occluded, or George Herbert.
It is in his development of syntax that Herbert resembles Donne. Otherwise, they have less in common than is normally supposed. Donne fills the canvas with himself and his drama; Herbert keeps proportion, retaining in his poems a sense of the context of his experience. A context can be natural, temporal or spiritual. He looks through or beyond manifest nature toward God. His eye never stops on mere detail. In this way he is the most transitive of the Metaphysical poets, passing from the finite and particular to the eternal, or recording a longing—or failure—to do so. He had what Charles Cotton described in 1675 as “a soul composed of harmonies.” Images are at times far-fetched, but generally suitable. Such qualities—the transitive nature of prayer, the surprising appositeness of image and diction—appealed to the imprisoned Charles I, and to William Cowper in his depression. The poems travel to extremes of experience but are shot through with consolation.
His spiritual struggle puts our different struggles into form; this is part of the universality of his poems. Another part is the pleasure they give, the surprise at each rereading of finding not the same poem but something different, some new semantic nuance that takes us into an area of the verse we had not felt before, or a metrical effect that surprises us, or an image that suddenly comes clear. Like Donne, he gives his poems a dramatic cast. Many begin in medias res, addressing, cajoling, lamenting. But he shies away from Donne’s attitudinizing. His poetic logic develops correctly; not Donne’s pseudo-logic but the strict logic of Sidney. A medieval quality, different from Donne’s new scholasticism, survives in the work. His allusions, his direct use of scripture and traditional imagery, his natural reversion to parable and allegory, imply that the Anglican devotional poet cannot but return to time-proven processes of spiritual imagination and response. A dependence on scripture takes the brittleness out of his erudition. He takes his bearings from a common source of wisdom. The esoteric he introduces either to make it familiar or to debunk it. Critics can attend too closely to the personal nature of his spiritual struggle, undervaluing the universal and didactic elements of poems spoken out of faith by a priest—a priest who is not above direct, sermony didacticism from time to time.
Herbert is a formal genius. Stanza shapes visually corroborate meaning or process. There are the picture stanzas, the technopaegnia. In a more subtle sense, in a poem such as “Mortification,” the stanza contracts and expands, a process that depends on syllabic length and indentation and imitates breathing:
When man grows staid and wise,
Getting a house and home, where he may move
Within the circle of his breath,
Schooling his eyes;
That dumb inclosure maketh love
Unto the coffin, that attends his death.
Each stanza enacts an identical rhythmic and visual process, as the baby grows into an old man bound for death. Life in all its ages is a rehearsal for the final verity. The shape is an emblem of mortification and finally of grace. The poem has an appropriate dwelling, an architecture, in this case heightened by the repeated “breath” and “death” rhymes in each stanza. “Denial,” “The Star” and “Frailty” are among the poems in which form itself is an object of meditation.
In “Love bade me welcome,” as Christopher Ricks points out, we sense an unstated, underlying pun on the word “host.” It is the structural occasion of the poem: God is the soul’s host at the table; he is also the consecrated host of which the sinner partakes at the holy table. Similarly, in “The Temper (i),” the word “temper” takes on a complement of meanings, including the tempering of steel.
The colloquial tone of the best poems is sustained by an undecorated diction. “Jordan (i)” advocates plainness, though in itself it is so complex that it is at odds with its statement. In general Herbert rejects verses that “burnish, sprout and swell, / Curling with metaphors.” His imagery includes stars, trees, food, wine—each with symbolic value but a firm literal sense. Objects begin as themselves, then cast a shadow beyond themselves, tracing a pattern of grace. Herbert works from small clauses and word clusters, advancing an idea or emotion by stages, controlling nuance to achieve a consistent metaphorical and literal meaning. “Prayer (2)” begins:
Of what an easy quick access,
My blessed Lord, art thou! how suddenly
May our requests thine ear invade!
The simple words are simply arranged. Yet “quick” means “speedy” and “vital”; “access” and “invade” carry military overtones. These suggestions corroborate literal meaning without distorting or displacing it. “Thou can’st no more not hear, than thou can’st die.” God is all-powerful, yet constrained by his own nature to be accessible and eternal. The paradox is contained:
Of what supreme almighty power
Is thy great arm, which spans the east and west,
And tacks the centre to the sphere!
Even at the height of cadence, Herbert contrives to bring God’s action to simple comprehensibility by the verb “tack.” It makes solid the vast motion of God. A minimal verb, it magnifies the agent and the action. Often, when he develops a rhetorical description, he magnifies the effect by reducing the terms of action.
Herbert can be as personal as Donne, but we focus less on him than on the experience he tells of. “Affliction (i)” is directly autobiographical but presents a general type, despite allusions to university, illness, incumbency, private frustrations: a type for the development of faith. Grief instructs him: ‘grief did tell me roundly, that I lived.’ Learning is of little use:
Now I am here, what thou wilt do with me
None of my books will show:
I read, and sigh, and wish I were a tree:
For sure then I should grow
To fruit or shade: at least some bird would trust
Her household to me, and I should be just.
The man afflicted longs for purpose, a tree’s purpose to give fruit and shade, a tree’s foundation, its roots. If he were a tree, he would stand in the same relation to a bird as God stands to him; only (by implication) unlike God he would be just to his tenant. This oblique blasphemy heightens a contrast in the following stanza and highlights the poet’s longing for a sign, even a negative proof. Colloquial diction builds to a metaphysical paradox suggested by Sidney’s love poems, used with an urgency beyond Sidney’s scope. Each monosyllable calls for a stress: “Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.”
Yet, though thou troublest me, I must be meek;
In weakness must be stout.
Well, I will change the service, and go seek
Some other master out.
Ah my dear God! though I am clean forgot,
Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.
When the poet dares to speak in the voice of Christ, it is with reversed affliction: Christ unable to comprehend the conduct of man, just as man is perplexed by God’s conduct, both His grace and His withholding of it. Herbert’s Christ is always in the garden or on the Cross.
His verbs, like Herrick’s, are usually transitive. A catalogue of verbs in any of the better poems proves him to be a poet of moral action rather than gesture. There’s movement even when thought is static. This quality we relish the more when we come up against the assured, elegant verse of Dryden and the brittle century for which his refinements paved the way. The simple drama of Herbert’s sonnet “Redemption” is unequaled in English poetry before or since. A new parable, worthy of the old:
Having been tenant long to a rich Lord,
Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancel th’old.
In heaven at his manor I him sought:
They told me there, that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possession.
I straight return’d, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts:
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth
Of thieves and murderers: there I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.
The Temple, or Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations appeared with Nicholas Ferrar’s authority in 1634; The Country Parson (1652) and Jacula Prudentium followed. Walton says that 20,000 copies of The Temple were sold in a few years.