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Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

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Herbert Discussing the Word 134<br />

‘Ah my deare angrie Lord’. 19<br />

It is here that the reader sees how much of Herbert’s<br />

relationship with God is one of antagonism and love, and as the poem continues, the reader<br />

sees it is also a relationship of rebellion and submission. The affection and condescension<br />

contained in that little phrase is unexpected for a poet often esteemed for his piety and<br />

seeming simplicity. It is a wonderful admission of the role of the angry, punishing God in<br />

Herbert’s theology, but it also contains the affection and love Herbert experiences that<br />

tempers the concept of the wrathful God, and as the poem continues the reader sees how<br />

vibrant, how humorous, and how genuine Herbert’s relationship with God is and how it<br />

speaks to his view of God’s affection for him. The next seven lines read:<br />

Since thou dost love, yet strike;<br />

Cast down, yet help afford;<br />

Sure I will do the like.<br />

I will complain, yet praise;<br />

I will bewail, approve:<br />

And all my sowre-sweet dayes<br />

I will lament, and love. (2-8)<br />

This summary of what God should expect from Herbert is a lovely piece of oxymoronic<br />

irreverent reverence which provides the reader with the insight to observe that Herbert is<br />

pious, yet playful; submissive, yet assertive, and as the reader continues on in The Church<br />

one sees that what leads Herbert to believe that he may approach God so familiarly is the<br />

Incarnation. Humanity can talk to God familiarly, and expect him to respond in a like<br />

19 All quotations of Herbert’s poetry are from Helen Wilcox (ed.), The Complete English Poems of George<br />

Herbert (Cambridge, 2007).

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