The "Season'd Timber" of Herbert's "Vertue"

The "Season'd Timber" of Herbert's "Vertue" by Kathleen M. Swaim George Herbert's much anthologized and annotated "Vertue" has been generally recognized as what Arnold Stein labels it, "one of the purest lyrics in the language," and as "Herbert's poetry at its best" in the words of Louis L. Martz. Its deliberate architecture has been much praised. For M.M. Mahood its form of three statements plus a counter-statement makes it "essentially a poem in which anticipation dominates over discovery, in which our pleasure is to Una all so well expressed"; for M.L. Rosenthal and A.J.M. Smith "its four tiny prophecies" are founded upon a "process of elimination"; and more recently Barbara H. Smith has called attention to the poem's architecture as modifying the norms of closure in favor of a fourth stanza which "has the effect, entirely appropriate to its theme, of a revelation — that which is known beyond what can be demonstrated logically."1 There is an exquisite shapeliness to the art and thought of this lyric, in its progression from "thou" to "all" and from "die" to "lives"; in its shift from the diurnal rhythm of stanza 1 — day/night — to the eternity of its conclusion; in the major imagery development of vegetative context (earth, sun, dew), to rose (singular) and root, to roses (plural), both sweetly growing and sweetly compacted or preserved for later seasons, and to the larger vegetative category of trees, this too plural and this too preserved in the form of usable timber; and in the secondary imagery of the third lines of the stanzas, especially the "weep" and "fall" of stanza 1, the "root" and "grave" of stanza 2, the "closes" both musical and mortal of stanza 3, and the apocalyptic transformation and reversal of stanza 4. The development of size and range and the reversal of stanza 4 fill out the poem's shape. My purpose in this note is to enhance our appreciation of both Herbert's metaphysics and his graceful artistry by closely attending to the concluding conceit. The climactic stanza of "Vertue" reads thus: 21 Kathleen M. Swaim Onely a sweet and vertuous soul, Like season'd timber, never gives; But though the whole world turn to coal, Then chiefly lives. F.E. Hutchinson paraphrases the meaning thus: "While the day and the rose and the spring come to a natural end, virtue alone survives the general conflagration at the end of the world, which reduces all else to 'coal' (i.e. cinder, ashes)."2 Several anthologists supplement this usual gloss of "coal" with a citation of 1 1 Peter 3:10, which reads in the King James Version: But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. "Coal" is sometimes amplified to "glowing coal" or "red-hot coal" or attention is called to man as "a quick coal / Of mortali fire" in Herbert's "Employment" (II).3 "Season'd timber" too has come in for a share of special attention, most frequently as a unit in the artistic structure, as for example a confined resemblance that becomes a wideranging metaphor or as "an arbitrary symbol" in contrast to the images of the other stanzas. In the most fully developed study of the poem, Arnold Stein reads "season'd timber" as a natural object that "ach¡eves its purpose after death — not as a tree but as wood"; for him it is a deliberate illustrative comparison, a simile, a product of human creation, in contrast to the symbols of the earlier stanzas, but a notably limited comparison which will barely allow us to stretch our imaginations to include the possibility that "seasoned timber burns well and has a kind of second life in its coals."4 Such glosses on the final stanza do not allow the full meaning and thus the full shape of the poem to emerge. In the words of Helen Vendler, "The real question is not what accommodations we...