Sir Calidore and the Country Parson

Sir Calidore and the Country Parson In the late 1970s, Claude Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth invited me to give a paper at one oftheir seventeenth-century conferences at the University ofMichigan at Dearborn which was to be devoted to Herbert. Igave the paper on Herbert and Sidney and very much enjoyed the conference. Edmund Miller provided the present title when he and Robert DiYanni published the essay. Since Grierson's anthology of 1921, at least, George Herbert's poetry has usually been associated with the poetry ofthe "metaphysicals," particularly that of Donne. I believe it may be helpful to view it in relation to the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney. Sidney was the famous uncle of Herbert's patrons and distant cousins, William and Philip Herbert, Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, and it is unlikely that the vicar of Bemerton and Fuggleston St. Peter (which served as a chapel for Wilton House) could escape an intimate knowledge of Sidney's work. Even earlier, as Reader in Rhetoric and Latin Orator at Cambridge, Herbert must have been interested in the one sixteenth-century writer whose work had been demonstrated (by Abraham Fraunce) to contain English examples of every figure, trope, and device of classical and Renaissance rhetoric.1 Moreover, Sidney is one of the few English poets whom Herbert echoed in his poems, and I believe he echoed him more frequently than any other. Herbert and Sidney were in a number of respects similar kinds of poets. The success of those who learned from Sidney may obscure his achievement: looking back across the glorious outpouring of poetry in the 1590s and 1600s, we may tend to assume that in the Renaissance it was almost possible for anyone to write decent English verse. But Sidney seems to have found poetic standards in the first seventy years of the Sir Calidore and the Country Parson41 sixteenth century unsatisfactory: when earlier poets achieved excellence, they often did so spasmodically, as if by chance. So Sidney, who earlier was most interested in religion, diplomacy, and humanistic learning, frustrated in his political and military career, in his "idlest times . . . slipped into the title of a poet,"2 and between 1578 and 1582 undertook a systematic program for the reformation of English verse. He found English poetry often shapeless, varying between the anarchistic and the mechanical in its movements. He explored and naturalized (largely from French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin sources) methods of poetic structure, from the smallest (foot, line, stanza, various forms of songs and sonnets) to the largest (a tragicomic pastoral in prose and verse with some heroic pretensions and an extended poetic sequence which possessed a significant narrative as well as psychological development), including along the way the various rhetorical tropes and schemes which could help achieve order and emphasis. He wrote the first comprehensive "Defense" of the new poetry (the most charming if not the most profound critical treatise in English), in which he described the various genres, and he introduced into English a number of the terms which enable us to talk about poetry critically: "couplet," "lyric," "madrigal," "masculine rhyme," "octave," "stanza." William Ringler's statistics concerning his experimentation in verse forms are astonishing: "His 286 poems contain 143 different line and stanza patterns . . . , 109 of which he used only once. Most of these were entirely new to English — fewer than 20 appear in Tottel's Songes and Sonettes."3 The only other poet of the English Renaissance who demonstrated an interest in technical experimentation and invention in the lyric at all comparable to Sidney's was George Herbert, who used about 120 line and stanza patterns in the more than 165 poems of The Temple. Not all of Sidney's experiments resulted in good poems, but in a surprising number of them he achieved new and impressive effects of rhythm and sound. Sidney, like Herbert, possessed the gift most essential for a lyric poet: a fine ear. When he translated a poem from Horace, for example, Sidney demonstrated a discovery that later seventeenth-century poets were to turn almost into a cliché: that a reversed first foot can give a sense of urgency, of physical vitality, to an ordinary iambic...