"Use alone": Usefulness and Revision in George Herbert's The Temple (original) (raw)
Related papers
Divine and human agency in the poetry of George Herbert
Anglican Theological Review, 2023
In this article, I explore the technical poetic strategies by which George Herbert represents the relation between divine and human agency. In Herbert's poetry, God works upon the human will not by external influence but by indwelling human nature and enabling it from within. I show that Herbert follows the contours of an Augustinian theology according to which God is both immanent and transcendent, both "in and beyond" the human being. My reading of Herbert considers two groups of poems: first, poems of divine revelation that depict God and humanity engaged in a dialogue in which only one voice speaks ("JESU," "Heaven," and "Coloss. 3.3"), and second, poems about believers' growing awareness of the interpenetration of divine and human agency in their lives ("Aaron," "The Odour"). In both groups of poems, God's action is represented as both internal to and beyond the resources of human agency.
Spiritual Attainment in Herbert's Human Figure: "The Collar" and "Love (3)"
Academia Letters, 2021
Underneath the simple style of George Herbert's only known collection of religious poetry, The Temple, is an artistic precision that shapes what is in fact a highly complex meditation on the relationship between man and Christ. Imaging various figures for this elusive union, Herbert employs both biblical and perhaps lowly metaphors to evoke the many anxieties and eventual resolutions that occupy and console the mortal speaker. Within these deceptively simple poems is also an imperative progression for the human figure and his relationship to the divine character, as he moves drastically from a childlike ingratitude for which he is gently scolded, to an apologetic unworthiness that finally reaches self-acceptance. Specifically, this spiritual development takes root in "The Collar" and ends rather peacefully with "Love (3)." Perhaps the opening declaration in "The Collar" best establishes the speaker's position as child: "I struck the board and cried, 'No more; / I will abroad!" (Lines 1-2). As the "board" suggests a communion table, the reader immediately understands the title to signify a clerical collar, which will cleverly become emblematic of a slave's collar. These expressions of infantile behavior, namely the cry of hasty determination and the aggressive, affirming action, are apt for Herbert's image, as they evoke the ungrateful and tired attitude of the speaker. The tension is realized as he continues, assessing the fruitlessness of a life devoted to religious practice. Herbert draws from passion symbolism and also employs Eucharistic imagery to evoke a feeling of loss and emptiness, as the speaker asks, "Have I no harvest but a thorn / To let me blood, and not restore / What I have lost with cordial fruit?" (7-9). He acknowledges that his desire did once exist, that "there was wine" and "corn,"-both emblems of the fruition of the Last Supper-but this former abundance has been dried by the speaker's "sighs," and drowned by his incessant "tears," as he again contemplates this theme of exhausted waste: "Is the year only lost to me?" (10-13). The repetition of the word "me" is also particularly
George Herbert, a perfiguration of the ideal Restoration clergyman, was supremely known as what Barnabas Oley (a Royalist divine) claimed, 'primitive holy and heavenly soul', had the power to manipulate and communicate the God to create a strong mythological impulse of the religious domain of the seventeenth century England (Poetry Foundation 2&3). Herbert's primary aim and concern was to relocate the soul to a new and higher place to attain his God, and to deliver His messages to his fellow people. The creative impulse of Herbert's poetry is so akin and deep as to interpret something like that of mythological stories. Herbert shared the basic theological concept of his age to vivify the inner recesses of his soul by making a mythological milieu with his devotional prayer. Herbert's The Temple is a plea of his dejected heart to God, is a record of his spiritual journey throughout his devout life all by alone, and likewise might be able to find out the rebirth of his soul at the cost of his enormous prayer-his painful sacrifice. Herbert's aim is to establish a sense of devotion in such a way as to make the soul proficient how, through prayer, to be perennial from its obsession and eternal damnation. This paper is exploring Herbert's deepest attempt of bridging a close connection with his God, and thereby exploring the different voices into an unified sense of devotion.
Redemption in the Poetry of George Herbert
Études Épistémè, 2007
In the eleventh of the thirty-nine Articles of Religion of the Anglican Church, ratified in 1571 at the order of Elizabeth I, the bishops state the new church's position on the contentious issue of the justification of sinful man before God in language that locates the Church of England squarely in the camp of Reform. Humankind, unable to redeem itself by adherence to the Law given to Moses, has been redeemed by God Himself through the incarnation, passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Believers "are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by faith, and not for our own works or deservings." 1 Justification by faith, believers are assured, "is a most wholesome doctrine, and very full of comfort". Those desiring further elucidation are referred to the Church's officially sanctioned Book of Homilies, expanded from one to two volumes that very year. The "Homily on the Salvation of Mankind" to which the eleventh article refers was probably the work of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, author and compiler of the original Book of Common Prayer. While the content of the sermon differs in no significant way from doctrinal formulations on the subject made by continental Reformers at the time, it is an official statement of Church of England doctrine, composed and circulated in the vernacular, and as an integral element of the intellectual culture of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England bears consideration in a discussion of devotional literature, specifically the poetry of clergyman George Herbert. At the risk of burdening this introduction with redundant theological citations, it may prove fruitful to a discussion of the central Christian teaching of redemption as it appears in Herbert's collection, The Temple, to quote a passage from the "Homily" as a keynote for the themes that such a discussion hopes to touch on. Drawing from St. Paul as scriptural authority, the author of the sermon enumerates "three things which must go together in our justification…"
Putting things in Perspective: George Herbert's "Sinne" (II)
In his second meditation on the nature of ‘Sinne’, Herbert concludes that ‘devils are our sinnes in perspective’. This final line is regularly read by critics in two important ways – either in terms of a ‘perspective glass’ or telescope, by which we see our sins magnified; or, as in Wilcox’s gloss, as a picture giving ‘a distorted or fantastic impression’. Such readings are informed, of course, by anamorphic paintings like Holbein’s The Ambassadors, and the comments of Shakespeare’s Richard II on ‘perspectives, which, rightly gazed upon,/Show nothing but confusion; eyed awry,/Distinguish form’. Yet (as Herbert himself notes earlier in the poem) ‘We paint the devil foul, yet he/Hath some good in him, all agree’, and anamorphic images are not the only examples of perspectival painting in the period. Is there an alternative reading of this poem that engages with perspective not as a distortion, the deficit model of something ‘seen askew’, but reads Herbert’s conceit in more positive terms? How might our view of the poem change when we take into account, say, the perspectival scenery introduced in the period for court masque productions? This may seem an unusual angle to approach the private devotional verse of The Temple, but Herbert’s family were closely involved in these seventeenth-century dramatic spectacles, and considering his early court hopes, it seems difficult to imagine that he would have been ignorant of this cultural phenomenon. My paper will read ‘Sinne (II)’ in the context of such illusionistic perspectival sets; and – in keeping with this conference’s engagement with ideas of ‘choice observations’ – it will draw attention to the ways in which Herbert positively encourages his readers to shift their positions throughout The Temple, to look at poems from new angles, to add depth to their readings of verse and scripture.