Writing Wisdom: George Herbert’s Synesthetic Poetics

Using synesthesia as an organizing principle, the present study analyzes George Herbert’s representations of wisdom, particularly in the poems “Submission,” “The Agonie,” “Divinitie,” and “Charms and Knots.” The trope of synesthesia reflects Herbert’s participation in both Hellenic and Hebraic traditions, for it brings together the rhetorical dexterity celebrated in Hellenic models of oration and the physical dexterity integral to Hebraic ideas of wisdom. Herbert’s synesthetic poetics, then, works not only to gather that which is Hellenic and Hebraic or classical and Christian but also to bridge word and world, spirit and flesh.