Herbert’s “Avarice” in Context

In her edition of George Herbert’s poetry, Helen Wilcox notes that “Avarice” has generated little critical response and that few have tried to address questions about the poem posed by Helen Vendler.¹ In The Poetry of George Herbert, the source to which Wilcox refers, Vendler had asked, “Why did Herbert feel moved to write Avarice? And in sonnet form?”² Given the spiritual realities of virtue and vice that Herbert treats in his poetry, the subject matter of “Avarice” should not be surprising. Like the other Seven Deadly Sins, Avarice received notable literary treatment during the early modern period. Embodied by Goods in the morality play Everyman, serving as one of Lucifera’s counselors in Spenser’s House of Pride, and figured forth by Richard Barnfield’s Lady Pecunia (“The Encomion of Lady Pecunia: or the Praise of Money”), Avaricia (“The Complaint of Poetrie, for the Death of Liberalitie”), and Covetousness (“The Combat betweene Conscience and Covetousness”), Avarice was perceived as a sin of misdirected devotion. Devotion, correctly and incorrectly directed, is certainly a major concern in Herbert’s poetry. Following “The Sacrifice,” Herbert’s poems in “The Church” are about how the Christian should respond to Christ’s great redemptive act of love. The poems question and explore the appropriate ways to love God and God’s creation as well as how best to use one’s time in the world. Many of the poems specifically question how the minister and the poet should serve God. Given the human penchant for loving pleasure and shunning affliction and adversity, how does one learn to walk in the footsteps of Christ, the via purgativa? Far from being one of Herbert’s “least interesting sonnets,” “Avarice” takes on strikingly new significance when considered in its sequential and generic context.³ Both through its subject matter and its genre Herbert’s placement of “Avarice” within “The Church” underscores major themes in The Temple and follows up on an important concept introduced in “The Church-porch.”

“Avarice” is preceded by “The Starre” and “Sunday” and followed by “Anagram of the Virgin Marie” and “To All Angels and Saints.” These five poems stress the dichotomy between the mundane and the divine, between concupiscence and caritas, as they contrast human culpability with the love demonstrable in Christ’s redemptive act. Cumulatively they suggest the importance of distinguishing between true and false, between the radiant light of the Son and the glitter of worldly wealth, between true and false kings (God and Mammon), between kings divine and mundane, and between stamped images – God’s on the soul and the monarch’s on metal. Asserting that the love of the Lord of hosts who pitched his tent in Mary’s womb is the highest value, the poems characterize the appropriately directed and ascending love for the immutable of members of the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant and the inappropriately directed and descending love of the wordly for the transient.

The first poem in the series initiates the emphasis on God’s light and love. The star in the poem of that title exemplifies proper devotion in its service to and glorification of God. The speaker calls upon this “Bright spark” (l. 1) that illuminates its “Saviours face” (l. 2) to serve as a shooting star, leaving its divine residence to take up “a bad lodging” (l. 6) in his heart that it may refine him through its fire and light. Christ-like, the star would descend to a human habitation as a loving service to the Father. He asks the star to “burn to dust / Folly, and worse then folly, lust” (ll. 9-10) so that he may be “disengag’d from sinne and sicknesse” (l. 13). Purified, healed of the dis-ease of sin, the speaker then would soar with the star to its divine home, and with the star find a

            … placeAmong the beams, which crown the face    Of him, who dy’d to part      Sinne and my heart.

(ll. 21-24)

Recognizing the foolishness of this worldly lust, the speaker realizes that the bright and redemptive grace of Christ, once...