George Herbert, Sin, and the Ague

In the introduction to A Reading of George Herbert, Rosemond Tuve summarizes her approach to the study of Herbert's poetry: "Conceding the fact that there are cases in which a poet could not bridge a gap [of history or information] he did not envisage, I have tried the experiment of making myself responsible as a reader for learning what the poet seems to have expected I would know as part of a common language."¹ The particular gap that Tuve speaks of here concerns religious symbolism and imagery, but to read seventeenth- century literature from the vantage point of the twenty-first century is to experience scores of such gaps, and one of the most helpful tasks a critic can engage in is drawing attention to these gaps and finding ways to reach across them.

Information and attitudes about illness and medicine comprise one of these great gaps, and we can benefit both as scholars and as lovers of literature from working to bridge it. Herbert's trio of "ague poems" from The Temple provides an admirable starting place for such an exercise in taking responsibility for "learning what the poet seems to have expected we would know." When Herbert's ague poems are approached with information about the early modern denotation and connotation of the word "ague," we find ourselves suddenly able to attend to details in the poems that have previously gone unremarked. We discover that Herbert is more aware of the conflicts and unease in these poems than has previously been suggested. We are able to highlight the key connections among some significant poems in The Temple. And we realize with new intensity the precision of Herbert's diction and the exactitude with which he carries each poem's greater motion through to its smallest details.

While many poems in The Temple refer to weakness, physical debility, or a generalized type of affliction, there are ten that explicitly mention physical illness. Of these, only six are at all specific about the type of illness under discussion; three of these specifically mention ague. Ague, known to modern medicine as malaria, is the only disease mentioned more than once in The Temple.² Some of Herbert's interest in the disease may arise from the fact that as a university student he suffered from an ague that he experienced as a threat to his literary and academic abilities. On New Year's Day, 1609/10, Herbert wrote to his mother, "I fear the heat of my late Ague hath dryed up those springs, by which Scholars say, the Muses use to take their habitations" (p. 363). The loss of intellectual ability through disease is a terrifying notion for a new Cambridge student and a young writer, but Herbert insists that although ague has apparently destroyed his inspiration, it has not destroyed his ability to distinguish between the value of devotional verse and the frivolity of secular verse. Indeed, Herbert encloses two devotional sonnets with this letter. Ague can destroy his former ease of creation, but it cannot make him stop writing. Later, according to Izaak Walton's somewhat unreliable account of his life, Herbert suffered from another attack of ague:

About the year 1629, and the thirty-fourth of his age, Mr. Herbert was seized with a sharp quotidian ague, and thought to remove it by the change of air . . . In his house he remained about twelve months, and there became his own physician, and cured himself of his ague, by forbearing to drink, and not eating any meat, no not mutton, nor a hen, or pigeon, unless they were salted; and by such a constant diet he removed his ague, but with inconveniences that were worse; for he brought upon himself a disposition to rheums, and other weaknesses, and a supposed consumption.³

Whether because of his personal struggles with the disease, ague's prevalence in the seventeenth century, or for some other reason, something about ague repeatedly attracts Herbert's attention.⁴ Serious readers of Herbert must learn about ague. Such knowledge is a key component of what Herbert would expect to share with...