Baptisms and Burials: The Presence of the Book of Common Prayer in Herbert's Nature Poetry

Few readers of George Herbert are not moved by the natural beauty of lines such as "Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, / The bridall of the earth and skie" ("Vertue") however often they may appear in anthologies. In lyrics such as this one, Herbert depicts nature with absolute clarity, often juxtaposing it with images of death. The stanza continues, "The dew shall weep thy fall to night; / For thou must die." In this poem, and in the structure of The Temple as a whole, we find an up-and-down movement, an oscillation between the beauty and glory of nature and the finality and desolation of death. Images of flowers and the seasons recur in Herbert, usually revealing a profound appreciation for a world destined to die.¹

Herbert's attention to the natural world is not unusual among English poets. Romantic writers such as Wordsworth and Clare, for instance, focus just as, if not more, intently on individual creations of nature.² Unlike these later poets, however, who in the wake of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century developments in botany tended to value nature in its individuality,³ Herbert and Renaissance poets such as Donne and Marvell saw nature as representing something beyond itself, a book full of meaning for man to peruse.⁴ Much of this meaning in nature Herbert derived from his study of the Book of Common Prayer (BCP), a text he would have used on a daily basis as a clergyman.

In her recent book, Common Prayer, and several related articles, Ramie Targoff has emphasized Herbert's debt in The Temple to the Book of Common Prayer.⁵ Targoff points out that critics have long acknowledged the presence of Scripture behind Herbert's work, but have neglected the equal importance of the Prayer Book. Herbert continually mixes the first-person singular and first-person plural points of view in The Temple, merging the lyric voice of the poet with that of his readers. This fluctuation is much like that of the language of the BCP, which moves frequently back and forth between first-person statements of the clergyman leading the service, and plural statements that reflect on the spiritual state of both the speaker and the congregation.

The example of Herbert is part of a larger argument Targoff makes, that the personal and the liturgical often overlap in seventeenth-century verse, reversing the older view of critics such as Louis Martz and Barbara Lewalski that the religious lyric voice originates in its separation from communal church language.⁶ Targoff points out that even the printing of The Temple indicates its immersion in Anglican liturgy: when published by Cambridge University Press in 1633, it appeared in duodecimo rather than quarto binding, with no dedicatory material, as was usually the case with volumes of poetry. Instead it looked more like the Bible or the BCP, which also were published in duodecimo size for easy portability and personal use. The Cambridge Press published no other volume of poetry in 1633, an indication that the editors probably saw it more as a liturgical volume than a collection of lyric poems.⁷

At key moments in the BCP liturgy – in the sacraments such as Public Baptism, in the Litany recited three times a week, in the daily Morning Prayer, and in occasional services such as the Burial of the Dead – events in human life are metaphorically compared to processes in nature or are contemplated in relation to them. Many images of nature in Herbert's poetry derive from BCP services that he would have had daily contact with as a clergyman. In lyrics such as "The Sacrifice," "Aaron," "H. Baptisme" (I), and "H. Baptisme" (II), Herbert borrows specific language and imagery from the BCP baptism service; in "Grief" and "The Storm," sometimes referred to as the "poetry of...