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  • From “Employment” (I) to “Grace”: George Herbert’s Restructuring of Work
  • Robert Kilgore

George Herbert’s poems “Employment” (I), “The H. Scriptures” (I) and (II), “Whitsunday,” and “Grace” form a coherent sequence, a sequence that is structured by his speaker’s evolving conception of the relationship between work and grace. At the beginning of the sequence the speaker complains that he is not as busy as a bee, that he has no work to do. At the end, he seems to think that whether or not he has work to do is beside the point: he merely calls upon grace itself to work. In other words, the speaker’s theory of work is restructured by an acceptance of the work of grace. I believe if we better understand this grace-at-work dynamic in this sequence of poems, we gain insight into Herbert’s thoughts about vocation.

Joseph Summers saw something in the five poem sequence I have isolated. He actually goes further. He identifies a twenty poem sequence (present in the Bodleian manuscript and the first printed edition of 1633) that stretches from “Easter” to “Grace.” His argument is that The Temple is the “symbolic record, written by a poet, of a ‘typical’ Christian life within the Church.”1 The last five poems of his sequence are the poems of mine – in that order in both the Bodleian manuscript and the 1633 printed edition, but admittedly not in the Williams manuscript.2 Summers writes about the sequence, “The Christian unsure of his calling [in “Employment” (I)] turns to ‘The H. Scriptures,’ is moved by the account of the descent of the Holy Spirit on ‘Whitsunday,’ and prays that similar ‘Grace’ may “Drop from above.’ ” Summers concedes that “not all the sequences are so easily followed, but the central plan is clear,” which for him is the “life of man within” the church.3

I also write with Diana Benet’s book Secretary of Praise in mind because she is interested in both the idea of vocation and with the logic of calling something in The Temple a sequence. Benet spends nearly half her book analyzing an “Employment sequence” of twenty-three poems she has collected from throughout The Temple. She thoughtfully articulates a theory of “dispersed sequences,”4 which uses the logic of [End Page 72] “The H. Scriptures” (II) – “This verse marks that, and both do make a motion / Unto a third, that ten leaves off doth lie: / Then as dispersed herbs do watch a potion, / These three make up some Christian’s destinie” (ll. 5–8).5 Benet’s sequence begins with “The Thanksgiving,” includes “Employment” (I) and “Grace” (the beginning and ending poems of my sequence), and ends with “The Elixir.” She describes this sequence as Herbert’s “partial and depersonalized autobiography,” which supports her larger claim that “grace and charity” are “two of the major themes of The Temple.”6

Benet’s book is part of a growing body of scholarship that is concerned with how Herbert writes about vocation.7 I have found most revelatory a recent essay by Gene Edward Veith.8 Veith draws a helpful, albeit rough, distinction between “Protestant sacramentalism” (which he finds in Luther and early Calvin, Charles Porterfield Krauth’s “conservative Reformation”) and a form of Protestant rationalism (which he finds in Arminian, later Calvinist, and Anglican thought). Whereas sacramentalism emphasized God’s presence and God’s work, rationalism emphasized human responsibility and “human work,” expressed by Arminians as “acts of will that contribute to one’s salvation or, [by] later Calvinists and Anglicans as the cultivation of moral effort understood as the sign of salvation.”9 Veith explores the implications of this theological orientation for how each thought of vocation: for the sacramentalists, the work was God’s, accomplished through people in order to serve one’s neighbor, and for the rationalists, work was a “burden” (a curse of the Fall) that people suffered through in order to please and serve God. Veith applies this analysis to Herbert’s Country Parson and a number of poems – including “Employment” (I) – and argues that Herbert in his writings is of two minds. Herbert is mostly rationalist, that is, he strives...

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