Herbert's Prayerful Art by Terry G. Sherwood (review)

HUMANITIES 115 this is of little importance to the library browser; but it is a genu drawback for anyone who, attracted to Googe by Kennedy's own labm.. reads and rereads the text. Nevertheless, the EEs is a good book to possess. It is, by modem standards, very handsomely produced; it offers even the relatively inexperienced reader most of what he or she needs to understand and enjoy the poems; and in its cheerful disregard for any sort of modernism, as in its air of straightforward quality, there is much of the author himself. It is high time (one is left feeling) that volume I of the Barnabe Googe Encyclopedia did appear; or has it, perhaps, just done so? (ROGER KUIN) Terry G. Sherwood. Herbert's Prayerful Art University of Toronto Press. 190. $45.00 The author of an earlier book on John Donne, Fulfilling the Circle, Terry Sherwood has now turned his attention to George Herbert. His new book is a study of Herbert's spirituality, which has as its starting point the fact that more than half of the lyrics of The Temple can be classified as prayers. His aim is to correct and move beyond other studies of Herbert, for he holds that recent criticism has told us more of Herbert's theology than of his spirituality. He accepts that as a result of the religious wars that have been refought among the critics the 'Protestant' view of Herbert is now dominant, but he considers that commentators in stressing Reformation elements in Herbert and emphasizing the importance of faith have slighted the place of love in The Temple. He examines Herbert's emphasis on love in a context provided partlyby discussions of the relation between faith and love in the work of divines who were the poet's Cambridge contemporaries, John Preston and Richard Sibbes. He finds that the essential qualities in Herbert's spirituality, the prayerful communication between man and God, are sweetness, fitness, delight, and quickness, and he gives chapters to analysing each of these in turn. This study does much to help us understand the meaning of prayer for Herbert, and the links in his work, for example, between prayer as sacrifice, the sacrifice of Christ, and the eucharist. Among other topics it helps define Herbert's views of pleasure and responses to suffering. Sherwood is very much concerned with language and imagery as well as with themes and attitudes, and examination of the relation betwen Herbert's spirituality and his art is at the heart of his study. He provides fine analyses of Herbert's imagery in such areas as tasting, eating, drinking, architecture, and botany. He has not attempted comprehensiveness , and his emphasis falls much more, for example, on spatial imagery than on temporal elements in The Temple, important though the latter are for prayer and for the ordering ofHerbert's poems; but he draws 116 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 attention to much that has been neglected by others, and in all he has produced an admirably close, lucid, and perceptive reading of Herbert. Sherwood's examination of the poetry as an expression of spirituality does not fully explain why there has been so much more striking a modem growth in the appreciation of Herbert than of any other very gifted seventeenth-century writers who were his equals in spirituality, such as Jeremy Taylor or Richard Baxter. The study of Herbert's language and imagery provides part of the answer, but, though Sherwood is well aware of the peculiarly close relations between theme and form in Herbert, he has in practice relatively little to say about form and versification: he does not analyse in much detail the formal experimentation , variety, and mastery for which The Temple is so notable. As he has helped move us from an understanding of Herbert's theology to an understanding of his spirituality, perhaps the next stage should be the rediscovery of what those great pioneers in the modem appreciation of Herbert, Joseph Summers, Rosemond Tuve, and Louis Martz, were never in any danger of forgetting, that Herbert is a Renaissance poet, and that Sidney is as important a part of the context as Sibbes. This would...