Herbert and Monteverdi: Sacred Echo and the Italian Baroque

Biographers both early and modern have unanimously attested to George Herbert's love for music, and during the last half-century, studies have emerged to demonstrate particularly how "the traditions of vocal music help us to understand the rhythms, the sound patterns, the tone, and the form of many of the poems in The Temple."¹ It is now generally recognized that Herbert's use of such terms as "tuning," "strain," and "accord" may have technical implications;² that Herbert crafted one of his poems as a musical answer to a song of Lord Pembroke's, and wrote many more in forms that resemble contemporary song arrangements;³ that Herbert "had a very good hand on the Lute, and that he sett his own Lyricks" to music.⁴ I would like to add to these lines of inquiry a few curious details that seem to connect Herbert's literary art with movements in sacred music from seventeenth-century Italy. Specifically, I shall argue that Herbert's celebrated echo lyric, "Heaven," responds to Italian sacred uses of the echo form. I will then provide a reading of "Heaven" within this context, and advance some thoughts on how this connection with the Italian baroque might add to our understanding of Herbert's artistry in the rest of The Temple.

Amy Charles touches on a rarely-mentioned aspect of Herbert's musical interests when she notes that "some impression of the extent of [Herbert's] musical knowledge may be drawn from his brother Edward's lute book."⁵ Although George and Edward Herbert were ten years apart in age and differed significantly in their religious priorities, their talents, training, and interests were quite similar; and as Mary Ellen Rickey has shown, specific parallels can be adduced to connect the verse-form experimentation of Edward Herbert with George Herbert's much-noted formal originality in The Temple.⁶ Edward Herbert returned to England from his final service abroad in April of 1624, just as George Herbert's service in Parliament was underway;⁷ and the literary evidence strongly implies "that George Herbert read at least a part of his brother's verse in manuscript and appropriated some of its formal qualities for his own use."⁸ Moreover, there can be little doubt that Edward Herbert's unusual experiments in rhyme scheme and stanza were driven by musical models, especially by models taken from the Italian.⁹ His poems include "A Ditty to the tune of Cose ferite, made by Lorenzo Allegre to one sleeping to be sung" and a "Ditty to the tune of A che del Quantomio of Pesarino," and several other "ditties" and poems geared toward musical performance. George Herbert showed similar inclinations when he took Lord Pembroke's "Soules joy" as an emulative starting point for "A Parodie."

Edward Herbert's status as a figurehead for Deism – a status that modulated in the nineteenth century to figurehead for secularism¹⁰ – has probably given him a reputation for being less interested in the religious aesthetic than he actually was. Although we know from his poems that Italy's secular madrigal especially spurred him to emulation, the two Italian musical performances he chose to include in his Autobiography seem to have been sacred in nature. He recounts during his 1614 visit with Sir Dudley Carleton, English ambassador to Venice, being

brought to see a nun in Murano, who being an admirable beauty, and together singing extremely well, was thought one of the rarities not only of that place but of the time; we came to a room opposite unto the cloister, whence she coming on the other side of the grate betwixt us, sung so extremely well, that when she departed, neither my lord ambassador nor his lady, who were then present, could find as much as a word of fitting language to return her, for the extraordinary music she gave us; when I, being ashamed that she should go back without some testimony of the sense we had both of the harmony of her beauty and her voice, said in Italian, "Moria pur quando vuol, non bisogna mutar...