George Herbert's "Grief": The Poem, Its Placement, and Its Subject

Grief is a subject that arises many times in Herbert's poetry but he uses it as a title only once. The poem, "Grief," therefore, should be discussed in terms of its subject, but that subject in turn must be defined both by the other poems in which it is used and by Herbert's purpose in using it in different ways in different places. To accomplish this, my essay will first emphasize Herbert's desire to make his poems be what we today call "teaching moments," then his wish to vary those teaching moments to make them, as it were, more teachable. I will follow with a discussion of his views on the true nature of grief. That done, the final part of the essay will analyze the poem itself, emphasizing its need to be seen as one poem among four that deal with Herbert's subject.

Many critics writing in recent years use "the speaker" rather than "Herbert" when discussing his poems in order to underscore the many instances in which Herbert's speakers make wrong assumptions, fail to see what they should see, or are obstinate and obdurate in insisting upon their characteristic self-absorption. While Herbert himself no doubt experienced confusion, doubt, fear, and even despair in his spiritual life, a great many of his poems are set up not just to rehearse these emotions, but to show his readers how to deal with them. In other words, more of his poems are exemplary and didactic than has usually been emphasized in our interpretive foreground. The poems teach lessons, and those lessons should be articulated in our commentaries.

Herbert says plainly enough that his purpose in The Temple is exemplary: "A verse may finde him, who a sermon flies" ("The Church-porch," l. 5).¹ While one could argue that Herbert's statement about verse applies only to the clearly exemplary "Church-porch" section of The Temple, it would be a mistake to do so. There are many overtly didactic poems in Herbert's collection and they teach in varying ways: from the straightforward admonitions of "The Church-porch" to the extreme indirection of a poem like "Grief." They vary both because Herbert believed in the effectiveness of different approaches for different audiences, and because in Herbert's day variation itself was admired for its classical elegance.

In The Country Parson Herbert advises preachers to address various members of the congregation "with particularizing of his speech now to the younger sort, then to the elder, now to the poor; and now to the rich. This is for you, and This is for you" (p. 233). However, Herbert the poet was quite unlike Herbert the country parson. The poet's audience, insofar as we can know, was made up largely of people much like himself: mostly male, mostly well-educated, and sharing a similar cultural background. In fact, Cristina Malcolmson has argued persuasively that Herbert was a "coterie poet."² As such, he knew who would read his poems, and he knew what knowledge his readers brought to his poems that he could make use of. When we come to "Grief," it will be very helpful for us to bear all that in mind.

The classical education of many of the people whom Herbert had in mind as his readers emphasized variation for its own sake. When Herbert wrote his Memoriae Matris Sacrum, he chose to write fourteen poems in Latin and five in Greek. The first and last poems use elegaic couplets and are linked thematically as well, while both the Latin and Greek poems are written in a range of meters.³ Herbert could be confident about his audience. He knew they admired variation so he changes his exemplary admonitions from direct instruction like "Stay at the third glasse" in the "The Church-porch" (l. 41) to several poems that appeal to a fondness for intellectual play. Perhaps the most elaborate of the latter is "Coloss.3.3," in which the poet uses the daily and annual motions of the sun to teach a lesson about the hiddeness of...