“Patterns of Thought and Feeling” in Herbert’s Easter Poems

In John Drury’s biography of George Herbert he describes his interpretive strategy in terms of his subject’s inward and outward worlds:

The circumstances of a poet’s life and times are the soil in which the work is rooted – not just the outward and material circumstances but also, and still more, the inward patterns of thought and feeling prevailing in the poet’s world. (emphasis added)¹

This essay proposes a reading of Herbert’s Easter poems that will emphasize Herbert’s relationship with other contemporary poets; the ways in which his Easter poems reflect his consciousness both of what he picks up from these other poets, and what he gives back. While Herbert undoubtedly hoped his poems would reach a wider audience, nevertheless it is illuminating to look closely at both his awareness and appreciation of the fashionable poetic activity of his day. “The poet’s world,” for Herbert, was both spiritual and secular; both rooted in faith yet responsive to poetic fashion.

In 1609/10, when the youthful George Herbert wrote his New Year’s Day sonnets to his mother, he made use of the fashionable, secular sonnet form to turn that form against its fashion. Using the sonnet form to argue against its widespread usage for romantic love poems is an unmistakable gesture, turning his opponents’ poetic strength against them, which is part of Herbert’s assertiveness about his purpose: to turn poetry in praise of earthly matters into poetry in praise of things divine. When his speaker asks God “Why are not Sonnets made of thee? And layes / Upon thine altar burnt?” (ll. 5-6).² Herbert embeds the question in a sonnet addressed to God – the very kind of poem the absence of which he bemoans. By so doing he metaphorically lays his own poem on God’s altar, thereby accomplishing what he announced should be accomplished. It is all quite effective and admirably witty. The sixteen-year old boy at once announces and demonstrates his intention to write poetry about God’s love, not human love, and does so in two quite competent sonnets. While the sentiment was scarcely new, the young man’s expression of it not only declared his position to his mother, but may have been intended to establish his poetic coming of age to his family, their friends, and perhaps to a wider literary circle. Even in that age of precocious literary development these poems are quite remarkable. Herbert set out to use this fashionable secular poetic form for what he here alleges are less fashionable divine subjects, and he goes on to pursue and to widen this goal in full measure throughout his life.

In The Temple Herbert more than fulfills his promise to transform the popular love sonnet into sonnets with a divine orientation; there are fifteen of them in The Temple. Cristina Malcolmson has noted that Herbert’s New Year’s Day sonnets were written immediately after the publication of Shakespeare’s sonnets in 1609, and she shrewdly observes that the young Herbert was also very much aware of the sonnets of his kinsman, Sir Philip Sidney. Even more importantly she follows up Arthur Marotti’s characterization of John Donne as a coterie poet to emphasize that Herbert, too, wrote with a coterie group very much on his mind. In George Herbert: A Literary Life she devotes the entire first chapter to “The Sidney-Herbert Coterie” – a coterie that of course included John Donne.³ When Herbert writes he may not write directly to a coterie, but he is very much aware who some of his readers will be, and he is equally aware of what those readers have been writing.

Before attempting an analysis of Herbert’s Easter poems we may profitably study some of the kinds of things the mature Herbert does with the conventional love sonnet in order to prepare for his dealing with other fashionable poetic forms and practices. The first sonnet in The Temple is “The Sinner,” in which Herbert upends several commonplaces of the love sonnet in order to change the commonplace Lover of...