Refiguring Pastoral Love in George Herbert's "The 23 Psalme"

In his poetry George Herbert deliberately responds to two major literary traditions: to English Renaissance love poetry and to the Psalms and metrical psalm paraphrases. In The Temple Herbert imitates, adapts, and replies to these traditions, sometimes to common tropes and poetic forms and at other times to specific poems and psalms.¹ One poem in which Herbert clearly imitates and responds to these traditions is "The 23 Psalme," a poem toward the end of "The Church" section of The Temple. Scholars have long interpreted this poem as primarily a metrical paraphrase of Psalm 23, in which Herbert borrows heavily from English prose translations and from the two metrical versions in Sternhold and Hopkins' The Whole Booke of Psalmes collected into Englishe Metre.² What has not been noted is how, in this poem, Herbert also responds to the tradition of pastoral love poetry and, in particular, to Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love."³ I argue that in "The 23 Psalme," Herbert uses Psalm 23 as a scaffold to create an answer-poem to Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd," an argument that I will support through analyzing the moments in which "The 23 Psalme" deviates from English translations and paraphrases of Psalm 23 and the ways in which Herbert's poem parallels, reappropriates, and counters "The Passionate Shepherd."

This approach adds to scholarly understanding of the breadth and complexity of Herbert's intertextual engagement as he borrows from and responds to not only contemporary secular and religious poetic traditions but also biblical and classical sources. Through its engagement with these sources and traditions, "The 23 Psalme" portrays the love between Christ and the speaker as both agapeic and erotic, and challenges us, thereby, to reconsider how Herbert conceives of divine-human love in The Temple. Reading "The 23 Psalme" as an answer-poem to "The Passionate Shepherd" enables us to perceive this poem, and The Temple as a whole, as a response to an invitation by the "God of love," whose love reveals itself to be both a pastoral ideal and a real intervention in the anti-pastoral problems inherent in a fallen world. As I will demonstrate, recognizing Herbert's poem as a pastoral response poem also invites us to reconsider how scholars have interpreted the debate between the pastoral and anti-pastoral in Renaissance lyric poetry and to expand our understanding of how other early modern religious poetry responds to the secular love lyric and pastoral love traditions.

"The Passionate Shepherd" is the Renaissance pastoral poem that inspired the greatest number of answer-poems, and "The 23 Psalme" participates in the seventeenth-century vogue for poetic responses to Marlowe's poem.⁴ This trend of answer-poems began in print with the 1600 publication of the anthology England's Helicon, which contains what is considered the authoritative version of "The Passionate Shepherd" followed by two response poems: Sir Walter Raleigh's "The Nymph's Reply" and the anonymous poem "Another of the same nature, made since."⁵ These two poems initiate and exemplify the two predominant modes of poetic response to "The Passionate Shepherd." "Another of the same nature, made since" models the first common mode of response: poems that imitate or adapt the invitation structure and language of "The Passionate Shepherd," petitioning the addressee to enter into a romantic relationship with the speaker and promising sensory, even amatory pleasures if the speaker accepts this invitation. These imitative invitation poems often elaborate on Marlowe's original by heightening the pleasures promised to the addressee.⁶ On the other hand, Sir Walter Raleigh's "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" initiates the other common mode of poetic response: answer-poems that depict the addressee's reply to Marlowe's shepherd or to a similar kind of invitation, following Raleigh's example of creating a dialogue with Marlowe's shepherd. Often these poems express the speaker's reservations toward and rejection of the invitation, and they explain the speaker's reasons for declining.⁷ Given Herbert's education, social milieu, and familial connections, it is highly likely that he had...