Herbert's Sonnets

Herberts Sonnets by John H. Ottenhoff The multifaceted architecture of George Herbert's The Temple is built in part upon fascinating and functional experiments with rhyme- patterns and stanza forms. Rarely using the same verse form more than once in 77»· Temple, Herbert, like Donne, punctuates his verse with a proliferation of varying line lengths and rhyme patterns. ' Thus, the fifteen sonnets scattered through Th* Templo would represent, on the surface, a certain conservatism, a reversion to a well-worn and highly conventionalized form. But Herbert's sonnets show great vitality and wide variety; Herbert the sonneteer is hardly conventional, and his sonnets show a balanced exploitation of the freedoms of a strict verse form just as they admirably express the freedom he found in religious devotion. Although they are not grouped together in The Templo, Herbert s sonnets might be profitably considered collectively, for they both reflect the concerns of Herbert's entire corpus and illuminate the possibilities of the verse form. However, these poems have rarely been treated as a group and have been under-estimated when so considered Most commentators on the sonnets, while acknowledging that Herbert is not a conservative sonneteer, have been largely preoccupied with Herbert's variations on the conventional "Shakespearean" rhyme scheme. 2 Because Herbert's sonnets depart from expected sonnet form in diverse and often complex ways, they raise some interesting metrical questions about the sonnet as a "verse design" and are perhaps best illuminated bysucha framework. Roman Jakobson has used the term "verse design" specifically to describe the meterthat'underliesthestructureofanysingle line, or verse lnstence The verso design determines the invariant features of the verse instances and sets up the limits of variation." 3We might extend Jakobson's notion, then, and speak of the "invariant features" of the Shakespearean sonnet in contrast to the individual and often very different manifestations of Herbert's sonnet "instances." Just what the sonnet John H. Ottenhoff design entails, of course, is not so easily agreed upon as the design of iambic pentameter; a full "grammar" of the sonnet would be useful in describing the concept. But to George Gascoigne , in his Certeyne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Meklng of Verse or Rymo In English (1575), the issue was quite clear: "I can beste allowe to call those Sonnets whiche are of fourtene lynes, every line conteyning tenne syllables. The firste twelve do ryme in staves of foure lines by crosse meetre, and the last two ryming togither do conclude the whole." 4 Most descriptions of the English sonnet havealso included some specification that the couplet be "summarizing" or "epigrammatic" and that the three quatrains delineated by the rhyme correspond to each other logically or developa concept in logical steps. A rather inflexible statement of this conception of the English sonnet comes from John Crowe Ransom, who claims that "the metrical pattern of any sonnet is directive. If the English sonnet exhibits the rhyme scheme ebebcdcdefet gg. it imposes upon the poet the following requirement: that he write three coordinate quatrains and then a couplet which will relate to the series collectively." 5Ransom thus judges about half of Shakespeare's sonnets as "seriously defective" because they do not conform to that abstract pattern; Herbert's sonnets would surely fall into the same category when judged by this standard But I feel that Ransom errs on at least twocounts. First, the rhyme scheme of the English sonnet can be said to be directive of the logic only in the sense that the completion of theo, d, and f rhymes will signal a strong sense of closure; in taking up the new c and · rhymes, the poet would naturally be inclined to take up a new pattern of images and meanings. 6Certainly the verse design strongly encourages — as accumulated sonnet "tradition" testifies — the interrelating of the various patterns of logic, theme, and syntax into the frame of the rhyme scheme. But such choices are clearly variant features of the verse instance: just as a trochaic foot in an instance of iambic verse design does not signal bad or defective meter, the non-correspondence of these larger patterns would not indicate a defective sonnet. Indeed, it is clear that interesting...