Sin and the Sonnet: Sidney, St. Augustine, and Herbert's "The Sinner"

Sin and the Sonnet: Sidney, St. Augustine, and Herbert's "The Sinner" by Chauncey Wood Almost forty years have passed since Joseph Summers observed that Sidney was "one of the few poets whom Herbert obviously echoed," and Louis Martz pointed out the importance of "Herbert's [poetic] kinship with Sidney."1 Nevertheless, few studies of Herbert have followed the suggestions made by Martz and Summers and drawn detailed comparisons between the two poets.2 This oversight is regrettable, because a comparison of the language and imagery of a sonnet like "The Sinner" with some of Sidney's love sonnets can lead to a new vantage point for critical insight into Herbert's other poems. Given Sidney's prominence as a poet in the age, his standing as the Renaissance equivalent of a celebrity, and what to the age would have been an important connection with Herbert's family, it behooves us to consider all of Herbert's sonnets in light of Sidney's ventures in the same form — especially those sonnets like "The Sinner" that are almost antipodal in subject to the usual fare in Astrophil and Stella.1 With Sidney's sonnets more clearly in the foreground, Herbert's achievements in the form will be much more apparent both in terms of similarities and differences. When Herbert, in the New Year of 1609/10, wrote to his mother "to declare my resolution to be, that my poor Abilities in Poetry, shall be all, and ever consecrated to Gods glory," he was not yet seventeen years old.4 For this brilliant and successful youth, newly matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, the task of reforming the secular love sonnet from earthly to heavenly concerns may well have appeared quite straightforward. Thus, to the rhetorical question "Cannot thy Dove I Out-strip their Cupid easily in flight?" (H. 8-9) the sixteen-year old poet presumably answered "yes." However, the job of the Christian poet is both more difficult and more complex than that of the secular verser. While there exist parallels between the love of God and the love of a lady, between praising a lady and praising God, there are as well profound differences. At his simplest and most overt level, in a poem like "A Parodie," Herbert praises God by contrasting the spiritual union between God and the Christian with the spiritual union asserted for secular lovers 20Chauncey Wood in the poem by the Earl of Pembroke that is parodied. However, one does not get far into the business of praising God before one sees that the aspect of God most pertinent for mankind to praise is God's love as displayed in his redemption of unworthy man. Because that redemption took the form of Christ's death, the Christian poet is confronted with some very unpromising materials for the redirection of the sonnet tradition. It is one thing to write a pair of New Year's sonnets praising God, but another to write a sonnet about the redeeming crucifixion. Indeed, since it was man's fall from grace that necessitated the redemption, the Christian poet might feel charged withthe obligation to write poems about sin and sinners, and perhaps even to venture them in the sonnet form as a corrective. It is therefore noteworthy that Herbert uses the sonnet form in The Temple for far more than simple parallels with — or diatribes against — love sonnets. In his more covert and more complex mode he can write a sonnet on the topic of redemption, which shows Christ on the cross. There is a sonnet called "Avarice," and of the four poems mentioning sin or sinners in their titles, two — "Sinne" (I) and "The Sinner" — are sonnets. Joseph Summers has said of the first New Year's encomiastic sonnet that it is "a self-conscious and satirical declaration of independence from the traditional style as well as subject matter of the Elizabethan sonneteers."5 This is true, and I hope to show further that Herbert underscored his declaration of independence by continuing to write in the sonnet form and to parody the conventions of sonnets even in poems like "The Sinner." But the mature Herbert knew well that if writing...