This chapter focuses on how Herbert and Vaughan depict the natural world as capable of revealing theological truth--and humans as capable of receiving that truth--in their widely read devotional lyrics. Ultimately, Herbert and Vaughan do not just hint at what kind of natural theology might be possible or edifying given their respective understandings of science and nature; both authors practice natural theology in their devotional poetry. Because the two poets differ on the value of human science and the theological status of nature, however, they differ markedly on how and when natural theology may usefully be practiced. Herbert views natural theology along the lines Bacon laid down in his Essays and Advancement of Learning, anticipating—and perhaps even influencing—the physico-theology of John Ray later in the century. Vaughan, by contrast, retains the older view that more theological insight is available in nature than just the facts of God’s existence and providence, making less of a distinction than Herbert between nature and scripture.

This chapter considers Herbert and Vaughan’s foundational views of science and nature, toward exploring their views of natural theology more specifically in Chapter 4. How does each poet conceive of the relationships between God, humans and nature, and does he see human inquiry into nature as leading to theological insight? Both Herbert and Vaughan engage these questions, though they differ starkly on the answers. Vaughan is less dismissive of human science than is Herbert, for instance. And although both poets share a conviction that the natural world is not as it should be, Herbert sees the world as destined for conflagration while Vaughan’s hope—repeated throughout Silex Scintillans—is instead for regeneration.

Chapter 2 turns to examine early modern song culture at Wilton House. The work of Herbert’s aristocratic cousin William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke (1580–1630), provides a focal point for ideas about the collaborative enterprise of poets and musicians in the early seventeenth century. Pembroke was a patron of poets and musicians, and much of his verse survived in songbooks and musical settings by some of the leading composers of his day. In Pembroke’s collected Poems (London, 1660) we have a volume in which the voices of poets and musicians – those who compose and sing and preserve these poems – meet and combine and compete with one another. Noting George Herbert’s involvement in this literary and musical coterie, the chapter examines the implications of Pembroke’s patronage on Herbert’s verse, and demonstrates how Herbert’s verse critiques and transforms the worldly dynamics of patronage operating within the Wilton coterie.

This chapter offers the Book of Psalms as the archetype for Herbert’s devotional song. Seventeenth-century psalm culture presents a model for Herbert’s interdisciplinary devotional poetic. In the psalms, and the widespread practice of psalm translation, the voices of poets and musicians engage with each other in collaborative devotional song. The psalms, too, offer a model for the kind of ‘visual music’ explored in Chapter 3, considered here in terms of the musically and spatially aware sequence of psalms known as the ‘Songs of Degrees’ (Psalms 120–34), a feature developed in Mary Sidney’s translation of Psalm 134. The singing of psalms also played an integral role in both public and private acts of devotion. Above all, this chapter sees in psalmody a spiritual enquiry which contests a merely human understanding of time and space to gain perspective on the nature of the divine. In the constructed first-person singular of the psalmist’s ‘I’, Herbert finds his words combining with those of other poets, musicians, and Christians.

The Introduction establishes Herbert’s reputation as a musical poet. It lays out contemporary evidence for Herbert’s practical interest in music-making, and draws attention to a wider engagement with music among members of the extended Herbert and Sidney families. Remembered by early biographers for his musical skill, George Herbert is celebrated for his musical verse, much of which is still regularly performed today in musical settings as hymns, songs, and anthems. This chapter argues for the importance of attending to the aural and oral characteristics of Herbert’s verse, and – drawing on critical discussions about the nature of early modern lyric verse and the lyric mode – it establishes the need to develop a cultural poetics of listening.

Chapter 5 examines Herbert’s attendance at the public choral liturgies of the church. Herbert was associated throughout his life with religious institutions that supported choral foundations: Westminster Abbey, Trinity College, Cambridge, Lincoln Cathedral, and, most famously, Salisbury Cathedral. Herbert’s practical interest in making music is well known; yet he was never a member of these choirs, and the music performed during public worship at these foundations is a repertoire that he would have experienced passively and aurally. This chapter reads Herbert’s poetic alongside contemporary developments in the composition and aesthetics of seventeenth-century liturgical choral music. In revealing striking analogues between Herbert’s verse and contemporary polyphonic church music, this chapter considers Herbert and his work in more receptive, attentive terms, affording significant new perspectives on the nature of devotional attention and early modern debates about the ‘beauty of holiness’ and the aesthetics of worship.

Chapter 1 turns to Augustine’s musico-poetic treatise De musica to elucidate the theoretical ideas about music and poetry that lie behind Herbert’s musical practices. Herbert is known to have greatly valued Augustine’s works, yet few critics have engaged the implications of Augustine’s musico-poetic treatise on Herbert’s work. For both Augustine and Herbert, music and poetry were arts of ‘moving and measuring well’. Expressive musical and poetic performance was both an aesthetic and an ethical act, with implications for the health of body and soul. For both writers, this metaphysical understanding of the nature of music was derived from practical experiences of music-making. Reading The Temple in light of De musica reframes our understanding of Herbert’s poetry of affliction as a tuning of the individual and provides the reader with an overview of the theological ramifications of music that this book explores.

In Chapter 3, Herbert’s verse is read in the context of another collaborative enterprise, the Stuart court masque. These playful and extravagant secular entertainments are an unusual context against which to set Herbert’s often modest devotional poetic, though Herbert can hardly have been ignorant of the genre: members of Herbert’s family – including the Earls of Pembroke, their wives and children, and Herbert’s own brother Sir Henry Herbert (c.1594–1673), sometime Master of the Revels – were involved in their performance and production. This chapter offers the court masque as a particularly vivid contemporary genre that engages with the possibilities of interdisciplinary expression. These entertainments alert us not only to the interplay between words and music, but also to the ways in which musical ideas of harmonious proportion might be expressed visually through the stage’s elaborate perspectival sets, and through the moving human medium of dance.

Chapter 4 examines the musical activities of Herbert’s elder brothe, Edward, first Lord Herbert of Cherbury (c.1582–1648). Cherbury’s musical activities are regularly overlooked by scholars interested in his work as a philosopher, historian, or diplomat. Yet music played an important role in his self-fashioning as a ‘Citizen of the world’, and these Stoic cosmopolitan ideals shaped his work as a diplomat and as a philosopher. In his philosophical work, Cherbury repeatedly turns to musical ideas to understand the nature of truth as a ‘harmonising’ of our faculties with the world. Most remarkably, evidence suggests that his philosophical ideas influenced his work as a composer: founded on the mathematical and astrological principles of harmony, his lute compositions attempted to express in a deeply personal and private music his relationship to the wider cosmos. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the echo poems composed by both brothers, demonstrating how the musical idea of resonance between the microcosm and the macrocosm informs their poetry.

The importance of Herbert’s musico-poetic activities for an understanding of his devotional verse is summarised, transforming our reading of his verse and challenging us to think beyond a silent encounter with the written page. At the heart of Herbert’s music lies the tension of paradox: between abstract ideal and the imperfect reality of the world; between simple expression and more elaborate, ornamented modes; between the evanescent temporality of earthly existence and the eternity of God’s time. In conclusion, the Epilogue turns to the work of Herbert’s twentieth-century reader Simone Weil, who like Herbert recognises the paradoxical tension of music, what she calls ‘Harmony in the Pythagorean sense; the just balance of contraries’.

The ‘Sidney psalter’ has attracted critical attention for the extraordinary metrical versatility displayed by Philip and (mostly) Mary Sidney in their complete set of psalm paraphrases in English. Ithas not however been discussed in the context of the neo-Latin metrical usage and experiment of the latter sixteenth century described in Chapter 2, although the Sidney psalter precisely reproduces in English the literary achievement in Latin of the major Protestant psalm paraphrases by George Buchanan and Theodore de Bèze (Beza). Of great devotional and literary importance for Protestants throughout Europe, these two collections were recognized immediately by contemporaries for their literary achievement, and Buchanan’s, in particular, was routinely cited until well into the eighteenth century. Taken together, they are crucial landmarks in the development of a Protestant Latin poetics, combining the literary achievement of humanism with a distinctively Protestant emphasis upon the literal meaning of the Hebrew Bible. This chapter describes theachievement and influence of these Latin works and sets out the evidence for their direct influence upon Mary Sidney in particular.

The rise of the epigram, that most distinctively early modern genre, emerged from the confluence of several elements of literary culture, including humanist Latin epigrams; the distinct (though related) tradition of moralizing and didactic distichs and other short poems; the role of verse composition in schools and universities; and the increasingly important role of translation and bilingual circulation. This chapter outlines the relationship between Latin and English epigram in England between the mid-sixteenth and the later seventeenth century: in doing so, it builds upon previous work which has concentrated on the English-language tradition, and extends the chronological range of the existing studies, none of which ranges beyond 1640. By focusing in particular upon the ways in which epigrams circulated in the manuscript record, it treats epigram culture as a bilingual phenomenon, the bilingualism of which evolved over the course of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and demonstrates how thekind of‘witty’, topical and frequently satiric epigram, which most critical work has prioritized, sits within a broader and on average more serious and more generalizing literary phenomenon.

Seventeenth-century English poetry is renowned for its religious lyric, especially that of Herbert, Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan and Traherne. In Chapters 2 and 3 we saw how the interest in metrical and formal variety, which is such a marked feature of Herbert’s 'Temple' (1633), can be traced back to the Latin poetic experiments and innovations of the latter sixteenth century, and specifically to the technical and tonal variety of the most influential of the psalm paraphrase collections. This chapter deals in large part with another of the influences upon Herbert’s distinctive style – namely the largely (though not exclusively) Jesuit poetics of Latin devotional verse, which combined with the tradition of formal variety, scriptural paraphrase and religious epigram to revolutionary effect in seventeenth-century England. It traces the development of religious verse in England from the mid-sixteenth through to the early eighteenth century, and describes how the new kind of devotional lyric was read and written alongside older types of religious verse, especially scriptural and devotional epigram and paraphrase.