“Speak Plainly and Home”: Herbert’s Plain Style and the Architecture of Character

It has often been said that George Herbert adopted the plain style, a mode of elocution that minimizes connotative ambiguity and maximizes clarity of argument, reasoning, and intention.¹ If this is the case, it is arresting that his poems so often utilize figurative comparisons, exploit the rich ambiguity of language, and develop multifaceted and contradictory meanings. While lyrics like “Jordan” (I) propose to “plainly say, My God, My King” (l. 15),² Herbert frequently finds himself “catching the sense at two removes” (l. 10) by introducing into his poetry what various critics have described as formal and conceptual complexity (Rickey), obscurity (Stein), equivocation (Asals and Shullenberger), paradox (Manley), and even a calculated manipulation of social position (Schoenfeldt).³ Such departures from stylistic plainness would seem to cause Herbert considerable spiritual trouble. In “Jordan” (II), for example, the embellishment of a “plain intention” (l. 5) cannot be extricated from the problem of pride – of weaving too much of the “self into the sense” (l. 14). According to this poem, elocutionary choices impinge directly on the spiritual standing of Herbert’s character. The more ornamented the lyric, the more the poet stresses his individuality, and thus the less trustworthy he appears. Any departure from stylistic plainness, it would seem, entails a damaging surplus of self.

From a certain perspective, this strong sense of self appears as a problem to be remedied. To Stanley Fish, for example, the entirety of The Temple is devoted to posing and resolving this difficulty. In his view, Herbert “avoids saying amiss in an ultimate context by deliberately saying amiss in the context of a perspective he would have us transcend,” thus rendering disposable (or “self-consuming”) both the speaker’s persona and the language he uses to articulate it.⁴ While plausible in certain lyrics, such a view radically undervalues the emphasis on rhetorical style and character that, as more recent studies have demonstrated, everywhere inflects Herbert’s spiritual thought.⁵ The Country Parson, for example, programmatically depicts the model persona of a country parson – the “Form and Character of a true Pastour” (p. 224) – in the same way that contemporary courtesy manuals had built a rhetorical theory around the figure of the ideal courtier.⁶ As in such manuals, Cristina Malcolmson explains, the character at stake here is not just moral but fundamentally social and communicative: “For Herbert, social identity was an art … because he understood it as a process of representation: the theory of identity implicit in The Country Parson is largely a theory of style.”⁷ Such a theory of stylistic identity marks his poetry as well as his prose. Scholars have long emphasized the importance of the persona Herbert constructs in his poetry, arguing that The Temple coordinates the private inwardness of that persona with its social and communicative function.⁸ Style is intrinsically related to self in Herbert’s writings. Both inform, rather than hinder, his poetic and spiritual vocation.

It is thus too simplistic to frame either Herbert’s poetic persona or his stylistic choices as problems to be transcended. The investment in style and character that Herbert scholars have been tracing, in fact, poses new questions about his ostensible allegiance to plain speech. Is a plain style truly antithetical to a strong sense of individuality, complexity, and ingenuity? If not, how did Herbert understand the relationships between figurative speech, elocutionary plainness, and selfhood? And how do these relationships inform the personal, social, and spiritual dimensions of the character projected through his poetry?

To assess these questions, it is worth reexamining the traditions of rhetoric that underpin Herbert’s thought.⁹ In doing so, one will not find rhetoricians eschewing the close relationship between elocutionary excess and prideful individuality suggested by the “Jordan” poems. In fact, classical – and specifically Greek – rhetorical manuals tie stylistic plainness closely to a strong sense of character. The plain style in these traditions directly facilitates persuasion through ethos (character), rather than logos or pathos (reason or emotions). Put briefly, plainness in speech was thought to draw on the suasive power of a socially connected and intimately...