THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

shapes of ‘The Altar’ and the sideways printed ‘Easter Wings’ make patterns which suggest their subjects). If he is a
less frenetic and startling poet than Donne, he is a far more searching and inventive one than Quarles. The two poems
called ‘Jordan’ (from the fount of their inspiration) describe the act of writing a sacred poetry which eschews a
structural ‘winding stair’ and the ‘curling with metaphors’ of a ‘plain intention’. As with his most influential models,
the parables of Jesus, Herbert’s illustrations of the central mysteries of God and his creation take the form of sharply
observed but ‘plain’ stories drawn from, and illuminated by, everyday experience.
The elegance of Herbert’s poetry is as much the result of art as it is an expression of a cultivated, but not forced,
spiritual humility. He had been born into a distinguished and cultured noble family but his decision to take deacon’s
orders in 1626, and his ordination to the priesthood and appointment as rector of a country parish in 1630 struck
many of his grand contemporaries as a deliberate turning of his back on secular ambition. According to Izaac Walton,
Herbert responded to a friend who taxed him with taking ‘too mean an employment, and too much below his birth’
that ‘the Domestick Servants of the King of Heaven, should be of the noblest Families on Earth’. He would, he
insisted, make ‘Humility lovely in the eyes of all men’. Herbert’s work is permeated with reference to service and to
Christ as the type of the suffering servant, but his poetry is equally informed by a gentlemanly grasp of the chivalric
code of obligation. Society, as we glimpse it in this world and the next, is hierarchical and ordered, and the human
response to God’s love can be expressed in terms of an almost feudal obligation. In ‘The Pearl’, for example, the poet
insists that he knows ‘the wayes of Honour, what maintains | The quick returns of courtesie and wit’. In the first of the
poems called ‘Aflliction’ he describes a changing understanding of service to a liege-lord, a service which at first
gives rich satisfaction (‘Thy glorious household-stuffe did me entwine’) and brings rewards (‘thou gav’st me milk and
sweetness; I had my wish and way’); as a process of disillusion sets in, the poem allows a sense of betrayal to surface,
but this in turn is transformed by the final insistence on an obligation shaped not by duty but by the more pressing
demands of love (‘Ah my deare God! though I am clean forgot, | Let me not love thee, if I love thee not’).
‘Redemption’ describes a tenant’s search for his ‘rich Lord’ only to find him mortally wounded amid ‘a ragged noise
and mirth | Of theeves and murderers’;
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the magnanimity of the Lord is proved in a dying gesture of assent to the tenant’s request. In ‘The Collar’ the
remarkable evocation of impatient resistance to service ends as the ‘raving’ protests subside in response to the steady
call of Christ. The call to the ‘Child’ (perhaps here both the disciple and a youth of gentle birth) evokes the willing
reply ‘My Lord’.
Herbert’s vocation as a priest of the Church of England, and his loyalty to its rituals, calendar, and discipline is
central both to his prose study of the ideal country parson, A Priest to the Temple (published in The Remaines of that
Sweet Singer of the Temple George Herbert in 1652), and to his Latin sequence Musae Responsariae (1633) (poems
which assert the propriety of Anglican ceremonial and orders in the face of Puritan criticism). It is, however, in The
Temple, the influential collection of his English poems published posthumously in 1633, that Herbert most fully
expresses his aspirations, failures, and triumphs as a priest and as a believer. Sections of The Temple are shaped
according to the spiritual rhythms and the ups and downs of religious experience. More significantly, the volume as a
whole possesses both an architectonic and a ritual patterning which derives from the shape of an English parish
church and from the festivals and fasts celebrated within its walls. The whole work is prefaced by a gnomic poetic
expression of conventional moral advice to a young man. The title of this preliminary poem, ‘The Church-Porch’,
serves as a reminder not only of a preparatory exercise before worship but also of the physical importance of the porch
itself (once the setting of important sections of certain church services). The titles of poems in the body of the volume
(‘The Church’) imply both a movement through the building noting its features (‘The Altar’, ‘Church-Monuments’,
‘Church-lock and key’, ‘The Church-floore’, ‘The Windows’) and the significance of its liturgical commemorations
(‘Good Friday’, ‘Easter’, ‘H. Baptisme’, ‘The H. Communion’, ‘Whitsunday’, ‘Sunday’, ‘Christmas’). Interspersed
are meditations on Christian belief and the varied experience of the Christian life. The ‘sacramental’ poems have a
particular importance. By means of repeated words and phrases ‘Aaron’ establishes a balanced contrast between the
ceremonially vested Jewish priest and his spiritually defective modern Christian counterpart. The poem’s debate is
determined by an exploration of the import of the words ‘Holiness to the Lord’ engraved on Aaron’s ceremonial
mitre. It is only when Christ himself is recognized as the true sanctifier of the parish priest that all unworthiness falls
away and the vested minister can properly present himself to his congregation, ready to celebrate the Holy
Communion: ‘Come people; Aaron’s drest’. The theology and typology of eucharistic celebration are also explored in
‘The Agonie’ and the concluding poem of the volume, ‘Love III’. ‘The Agonie’ takes as its central issue the human
study of Sin and Love. The effect of Sin is revealed in an agonized Christ ‘so wrung with pains, that all his hair, | His
skinne, his garments bloudie be’. The very hyperbole here allows for the conceit on which the poem turns; Sin is a
wine-press painfully proving the worth of Love and when in the concluding stanza the crucified Christ’s blood