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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Modern critics have stressed the element of paradox in Herbert's work. Herbert is homely, as has commonly been remarked, yet he is sophisticated. He appears spontaneous, yet his poems are scrupulously well-constructed. He is unsure of his union with God, yet he is sure. He doubts himself and he does not doubt. He seems to sing, and he seems to speak. Any new technical analysis of Herbert's verse should take these paradoxes, and the syntheses forged from them, into account. The present paper attempts to do so by isolating, in metrical terms, the apparently irreconcilable modes of “song” and “speech” which have been observed in Herbert by several critics, notably Joseph H. Summers; by discovering what conventions they derive from and how Herbert used and changed what he learned from others; and by showing how the prosodic causes serve as instruments of an overall poetic vision in The Temple. It will follow the division of theory, between the poet's song and his speech, although it should be remembered that Herbert himself made no such division. His most typical work contains both elements. Together they form his style.
1 A somewhat outdated, but otherwise very fine, essay is G. H. Palmer's chapter on “Style and Technique” in his edition of the poet's English Works (Boston and New York, 1905), i, 123–167. Palmer gives both a nearly-definitive formal analysis of the prosody and a valuable study of how the prosodic means served poetic ends. He errs, however, by stressing Herbert's intellectuality, seeing him as a modified and sweetened Donne, and oversimplifying his poetic temperament. The result for his prosodic analysis is that he fails to show how Herbert often used a complex of conflicting techniques in a single poem, to achieve complex emotional and intellectual effects.
2 Joseph H. Summers, George Herbert, his Religion and Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), p. 169.
3 Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 263.
4 J. Pattison, “Literature and Music,” in The English Renaissance, Vivian de Sola Pinto (New York, 1950), p. 135.
5 Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. G. Smith (Oxford, 1904), ii, 89.
6 John C. A. Rathmell, ed., The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke (Garden City, N.Y.: Double-day-Anchor, 1963) points out their concern with variety and with suiting form to meaning (pp. xiv-xix).
7 Passages from Herbert's works are taken from the Hutchinson edition (Oxford, 1940).
8 Helen White, The Metaphysical Poets (New York, 1956), pp. 192–194, analyzing the three versions of “The Elixir,” establishes the nature of Herbert's insistence upon economy, coherence, and precision of thought, and his “passion for the essential.”
9 Palmer, p. 136.
10 Albert McHarg Hayes, “Counterpoint in Herbert,” SP, xxxv, 43. In the matter of variety, the Sidneys may well have been the decisive influence. Rathmell errs in his statement (p. xvii) that only four pairs of their 172 psalms are metrically identical: 8 and 118, 60 and 119S, 32 and 71, 70 and 144. The latter two pairs are not identical; but 1 and 138; 18 and 71; 21 and 112; 42 and 149; 44 and 93; 45, 80 and 89; 51 and 63; 58 and 68; 78 and 105; 116 and 144, are, except for disparities in the use of feminine rhyme, identically patterned. This still leaves the Sidneys with a higher degree of diversity than Herbert. However, only about one-fifth of their poems, against one-half of Herbert's, use counterpointed rhyme.
11 Hayes, p. 47.
12 Florence Bottrall, George Herbert (London, 1954), p. 106.
13 André Malraux, Les Voix du silence (Paris, 1951), p. 459.
14 Pierre Legouis, Donne the Craftsman (Paris, 1928), p. 16.
15 Legouis, pp. 19, 20.
16 It is impossible to quarrel with the thesis of Wesley Trimpi, Ben Jonson's Poems: A Study of the Plain Style (Stanford, 1962), that Jonson derived the critical rationale for his plain style from his study of Latin authors. However, nobody was more aware than Jonson of the disparity between classical and English prosodic principles. When it came to putting his theories into practice, it is quite unlikely that Jonson would have sought for guidance in classical texts; especially since (although Trimpi fails to mention this) the techniques he needed were already at hand in English dramatic blank verse, of which he was a master.
17 Summers, p. 104.
18 Works, ed. Hutchinson, pp. 231–232.