“Let Wits Contest”: George Herbert and the English Sonnet Sequence

According to Izaak Walton, Magdalen Herbert opened her mail one day in early 1610 and found two sonnets by her son George, lately off to Cambridge, along with a resolution that he would consecrate his “poor Abilities in Poetry” to “God’s glory.”¹ No doubt Mrs. Herbert felt proud, and based on George’s future life and work, we can imagine that his youthful resolve was sincere. But perhaps Magdalen was not the only intended audience for the two New Year Sonnets. Cristina Malcolmson reminds us that young George grew up among an extended family – the Sidney-Herbert clan – who enjoyed friendly poetic rivalry, writing answer poems on various topics and sending them around, or perhaps reciting them to one another of an evening.² Coterie exchange of verse was part of young George’s family culture, a family that included Mary Sidney Herbert, her son William Herbert, George’s brother Edward, friends John Donne and Benjamin Rudyerd, and of course, always, the ghost of Sir Philip Sidney.

So perhaps the New Year Sonnets also served as a kind of mail-in entry for an ongoing contest of wits. The university upstart proves his worthiness to join the older generation’s poetic play, taking up a familiar topic and demonstrating that he can score points on the experienced players. Critics have long noticed that these poems seem experimental, unconstrained, fiery, arrogant.³ This seems fitting. George learned to debate at school, and at home he learned that the composing of a poem could be an opportunity for good-spirited one-upmanship. In these poems, the young show-off not only displays his technical skills with the sonnet form, but claims the moral high ground, too. Hence that dramatic, Donne-like opening in sonnet 1:

My God, where is that ancient heat towards thee, Wherewith whole showls of Martyrs once did burn, Besides their other flames.

The poem casts the sacred/secular love debate in terms of a poetic competition: “Cannot thy Dove / Out-strip their Cupid easily in flight?” (ll. 8–9). In the second sonnet, the conceits are still more Donne-like, and we perceive a critique not only of love poetry’s inferior subject, but its inferior art: “Such poor invention burns in their low mind,” scorns the speaker, referring to those who would write of roses and lilies in a pair of cheeks. Here we see an early suggestion of Herbert’s ambitions to demonstrate that the Dove can outstrip Cupid through inspiring superior art as well as holier subject matter.

The topic of earthly versus divine love was an already long-established commonplace for poets in the period, and we can find an early family reference in Sidney’s comments in the Defence about poetry being better employed in “singing the praises of the immortal beauty: the immortal goodness of that God who giveth us hands to write and wits to conceive.”⁴ Though the debate was undertaken seriously by all parties, this did not neutralize the element of playful competition, especially with regard to the artistic aspects of the endeavor. Herbert never lost this polemical approach in his art. Malcolmson has observed that “George Herbert’s ‘sacred parody’ . . . should be seen as a process of answering on a large, even a lifetime scale” (emphasis added).⁵ We might be tempted to imagine that after 1610, young George threw in his lot with sacred verse, opened his Bible, and never looked back – with the exception of a few pointed comments in the “Love” and “Jordan” poems. But instead it seems that Herbert needed love poetry in general, and the English Petrarchan sonnet sequence in particular, as a sparring partner all the way through “The Church.”⁶ Numerous scholars have noted how Herbert drew from English Petrarchism as a source of topics, stylistic models, and motifs.⁷ In this essay, however, I would like to consider how Herbert sought to renew the sequence as a purveyor of meaning, and how a useful rivalry with love poetry can be seen to persist not only in particular poems but in the ordering of...