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  • "Yet I love thee":The "Wayes of Learning" and "Groveling Wit" in Herbert's "The Pearl"
  • Christopher Hodgkins

The word "yet" is a sharp little monosyllable. Like the arrow pointing on the highway, it signals a sudden turning away, or across, or back. Especially if repeated, the word "yet" adds a certain dynamic tension, a touch of interior drama, to any statement, whether it be the tension of a considered contrast between differences, or the drama of an outright conflict between opposites. So we should attend closely when George Herbert, Cambridge scholar, repeats three times in his poem, "The Pearl," this adversative formula: "I know . . ." he insistently assures his auditor, "Yet I love thee" (emphasis mine).1 If we were to ignore for a moment the questions of what and how Herbert claims to know, and the question of whom he nevertheless claims to love, that which remains is a remarkable, and rather worrying, opposition: an opposition between knowledge and love.

Here speaks the immensely learned Mr. Herbert, Fellow of Trinity College and former University Orator; here also speaks the holy Mr. Herbert, composer of three poems entitled simply "Love"; and Mr. Herbert seems to be saying that he loves his beloved in spite of what he knows. The connotation of a romantic rivalry, carefully considered and then rejected, is palpable. He sounds a little like the speaker of Shakespeare's sonnets, telling his dark lady that he loves her anyway, despite everything.

Of course, in "The Pearl," Herbert's immortal beloved – that is, the one whom he loves in spite of what he knows – is not a dark lady, but God; and the potential rivals to God whom Herbert considers in the poem's first stanza are not literally sexual (those wait until stanza 3) but rather "the wayes of Learning." These ways of intellectual and scientific knowing include logic ("What reason hath from nature borrowed, / Or of it self, like a good huswife, spunne"), civil law ("laws and policie"), astronomy and astrology ("what the starres conspire"), natural philosophy and physics ("What willing nature speaks, what forc'd by fire"), cosmography ("Both th' old discoveries, and the new-found seas"), and chronicle "historie" (ll. 3-8). There may be a hint of [End Page 22] sexual connotation in the references to a feminized "nature," who, whether because she is "willing" or because she is "forc'd," is standing "open" to his expansive curiosity. "Yet," insists Herbert, despite these siren calls of learning, "I love thee" (ll. 9-10).

My reason for teasing out these intimations of a rejected affaire du coeur is that George Herbert was heir to an Augustinian Christianity which, particularly in its Calvinistic forms, has always had a lovers' quarrel with learning. Like both Augustine and Calvin, Herbert was classically trained and deeply read, so it would seem absurd to call him anti-intellectual; yet from some angles and to some interpreters, Herbert, like his spiritual forbears, has appeared hostile to the ways of learning and of reason. A generation ago, Stanley Fish laid this charge influentially in his readings of "The Holdfast" and "The Pearl," arguing that these poems end with a stark renunciation of all human knowledge, and indeed all human agency.2 Kenneth Alan Hovey also has noted Herbert's apparent scorn for natural philosophy in the poem "Divinitie," but has defended Herbert from charges of obscurantism by noting Herbert's close association with Sir Francis Bacon, and by claiming that Herbert rejected not Bacon's "new science" of nascent empiricism, but only the speculative "Epicycles" and "spheres" of medieval cosmology ("Divinitie," ll. 25, 26).3

Richard Strier has taken a mediating position, stating a more nuanced view of "The Pearl" and other Herbertian lyrics on learning. Unlike Hovey, Strier sees Herbert in friendly opposition to Bacon, rejecting Bacon's merely cumulative and instrumentalist program of empirical inquiry because it falls short of full divine knowledge. But unlike Fish, Strier claims that Herbert's attack in these poems is on what we would call rationalism, not on reason itself.4 Nevertheless, all three of these critics, and a good many more, have noted how often Herbert disputes the value of human knowledge. And...

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