“Mend My Ryme”: Resolutions in Psalms, Sonnets, and Herbert’s “The Church”

How do sonnet sequences resolve? The readiest answer is: They don’t. That is the nature of the beast. The desiring speaker does not in the end get what he (or she) is after, at least not in the form initially sought. As Heather Dubrow observes, “if romance is the genre of finding what is lost, the sonnet is the genre of seeking what is lost, forever lost, forever irretrievable.”¹ This suspended resolution energizes the drama and contributes significantly to the pleasure of the sonnet sequence.

Set this model of non-resolution, then, against that other influential lyric sequence of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: the Psalms. As with sonnet sequences, the Psalms offer a curious interplay between the dynamics of single lyric poems and the linear interactions of a sequence: each poem operates perfectly well on its own, yet when grouped together, the poems speak to each other, and linear direction gets tangled in cyclical forces. However, rather than playing on various forms of non-resolution as sonnet sequences do, the Psalms lean toward resolution. That is, while the sequence as a whole moves through various interior landscapes of what Walter Brueggemann terms “disorientation,” this state is represented in conversation with states of “orientation” and “reorientation.”² Even within the psalms of greatest distress, the pleading speaker typically shifts into praise or declaration of trust, or both. Communion with God is presented as the steady-state, as it were, and is dramatized lyrically throughout the sequence. Indeed, the enduring, underlying reality of this communion is asserted even within the distress. Sonnet sequences and the Psalms as a whole, then, might be thought of as presenting two contrasting approaches to the aesthetic problem of resolution.

These two intertwined traditions resonate with each other in this period in ways we have only begun to explore. George Herbert is a primary illustration of the contention that poets could not work in one without echoes of the other in their heads, especially from the 1580s onward. Herbert’s roots in each tradition are well established,³ so in this essay, I would like to explore further what Herbert might have learned from the decades-long conversation between these two kinds of lyric sequences.⁴ With regard to the tricky question of resolution, I propose that the conclusion of “The Church,” most especially “Love” (III) as a final poem, refers even more directly to the sonnet tradition than has been previously noted, while operating as an emphatic revision of both the sonnet and Psalm traditions.

Endings pose a fundamental aesthetic dilemma: resolution can feel less interesting than tension. Petrarch understood this and reveled in it by figuring unfulfilled desire throughout the Rime sparse; his many imitators followed his lead.⁵ Considering the problem of resolution first at the level of the single poem, we note that in some of the most dramatic poems, Petrarchan sonnet writers create speakers in the midst of what we might call lyrical dissolution, juxtaposing this with the varying degrees of closure available in the sonnet form itself. Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet 40, “As good to write, as for to lie and groan,” is one example among many. The speaker has been reduced to groans in l. 1, to moans by l. 4; by the end of the octave he is “overthrown.” The sestet is a plea for mercy, the speaker still on the verge of destruction: “O, do not let thy temple be destroyed” the poem concludes.⁶ The dissolution, artistically speaking, is only a dramatized illusion, since the sonnet itself is a polished and complete artifact. In fact, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith observes, “the fulfilling of formal expectations is never a sufficient condition for the experience of closure.”⁷ As if to acknowledge this, Sidney dampens the sonnet’s formal closure by spreading the final rhyme sound across a cde-cde sestet. The general policy toward resolution in a sonnet sequence, it seems, is to keep resolution as ephemeral as possible, like a musical piece that never quite returns to the tonic.

By contrast, in the case...