Secretary of Praise: The Poetic Vocation of George Herbert (review)

Diana Benet, Secretary of Praise: The Poetic Vocation of George Herbert. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1984. 207 pp. $22.50 by Robert B. Shaw Diana Benet is a sensitive reader and a graceful writer; her book on Herbert is instructive and pleasurable even if one demurs at some of its major premises. Some aspects of Benet's argument do raise doubts in my mind, but as a firm believer in pleasure before business I will pause over the virtues of the work before detailing what seem to be its flaws. To begin with, there is a straightforwardness to Benet's aims and methods which seems appealing and apt. The painstakingly achieved transparency of Herbert's poems has in recent years provoked some desperately convoluted paraphrases . Benet, however, is not intimidated by her subject's clarity, and in fact pays tribute to it with her own forthrightness. "The purpose of this study," she writes, "is to elucidate Herbert's poetry by reference to grace and charity as two of the major themes of The Temple" (p. 2). These concerns, in no way tangential, give Benet occasion to examine numerous poems, both famous and less well known, and their interrelations within The Temple. The chief value of the book for students of Herbert is in Benet's deft explications of individual poems. Her way of reading is by and large that of the New Criticism: she follows a poem's line of argument tenaciously as it advances, ramifies and doubles back, and she is alert to the nuances of tone which register fluctuations of thought. In keeping with New Critical tradition, Benet maintains a distinction between the poet's personal experience and his poetic utterances. The Templo is in part a spiritual autobiography, but it is one "designed and depersonalized by the values and demands of his instructive art" (pp. 1 02-03). The "I" in the poems is that of a persona; his ruminations, at times presented deliberately as naive, depict stages in the spiritual progress not of George Herbert (1593-1633) but of "the typical Christian." Although this approach is by no means startling, it allows Benet in the case of certain poems to offer intriguing readings. "Longing," 64 BOOK REVIEWS for instance, is characterized as the "whining prayer" (p. 80) of a speaker with whom we are not to sympathize; the humanist optimism of "Man" is by the end of the poem revealed as "self-satisfied" (p. 91), and is, in effect, a target of parody for the poet (p. 143). One is bound to be interested especially in a critic's remarks on poems not frequently discussed. Benet's interpretations of "Sepulchre" and "Providence," two very different poems, are to me particularly telling ones, and there are many other poems among those she discusses which fully engage her gifts as a critic. While this is not designed as a "Reader's Guide to Herbert," its index would allow a student to locate responsible, acute readings of a great number of Herbert's poems, and the first chapter provides a convenient summary of the biographical and theological backgrounds of Herbert's poetry. Throughout, the view of Herbert and his art is a conservative one: Benet is more concerned with being plausible than with being controversial. Yet she manages while being balanced not to be bland. Her discussion of Herbert's life and religious convictions in the opening chapter demonstrates a judicious, independent view of the issues in question. A salient example is her treatment of Herbert's delay in pursuing ordination. Benet offers an analysis of Herbert's career and motives which is coherent without being rigidly schematic. She sees him as determined from the first to devote himself to God's service, but for a time dubious whether the Church or state was to furnish his particular calling. She reviews his early approaches to a religious vocation, the apparent digression of his brief service in Parliament, and his return to the path that led him to Bemerton; she judges the entire course of these events to have been governed by religious purpose. According to this view: Initially, he intended to go into orders, but he came to...