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Page 241
George Herbert and the New Divine Lyric
Herbert situated his poetic project at the center of Reformation theology, at the doctrine that Donne found so difficult: salvation by faith. Faith, in this view, is a gift, not an achievement. To trust in Godto believe in one's salvation by Godcan only be bestowed by God. The human will can only go wrong because it is fundamentally self-asserting; ultimately, it wants to trust not God but itself. This would seem to be a very bleak and negative doctrineno role for will at all; no agency; no meritbut to see it as bleak is entirely to misunderstand its fundamental psychological dynamic.
The essential idea was that the conception of contributing to one's salvation was both blasphemoushow could one do something worthy of such a reward?and terrifyinghow did one know one had done enough, had done whatever was required properlyhard enough, fully enough, long enough, consistently enough, wholeheartedly enough? The aim of the doctrine was freedom from anxiety and self-concern. Everything that could have been done has already been done by another (Christ); grace consists of God counting ("imputing") Christ's sacrificial act as yours. And to guarantee the stability of the systemits freedom from human tampering, responsibility, and worryit must be impossible to lose God's grace once one has it. Otherwise, we are back to anxiety.
The doctrine of predestination existed to explain salvation and to make clear its independence from human behavior. It was not needed to explain damnation, since sin (human nature) did that well enough. One can only make sense of the success of the Reformation by seeing its central assertion as, in the words of the Church of England Articles of Religion, "a most wholesome Doctrine, and very full of comfort" (Article XI, "Of the Justification of Man"). "Comfort" is the key word. Article XVII presents predestination as "full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort.''
Herbert constantly dramatized the psychological structure and impact of this doctrine. He devised and mastered a new kind of lyric, the comic religious poem. In "The Holdfast" Herbert uses every structural pause in the "Shakespearean" sonnet form to trace out the shape of a human encounter with the absoluteness and strangeness of "faith alone." The poem is a comic narrative of what was, at the "moment" narrated, a puzzling experience. The speaker pokes fun at himself, see-
 
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ing his resolution to be perfect in the religious life as a form of aggression"I threatned to observe the strict decree / Of my deare God with all my power and might." Through dialogue with an unnamed "one," the speaker is then brought to a moment of puzzlement. He can do nothing, not even bravely concede that he can do nothing"to have nought is ours, not to confesse / That we have nought.'' The poem ends, however, not on the speaker's puzzlement, but on his illumination. He realizes through the words of "a friend" (previously "one") that "all things are more ours" by being held fast by someone else, "who cannot fail or fall."
Herbert loves to make fun of "common sense." In "Redemption," another extraordinary sonnet, a speaker seeking "redemption" from a lease seeks his Lord in all the obvious places"in heaven at his manour" and on earth "in great resorts"but is distracted by "a ragged noise / Of theeves and murderers." There he sees his Lord, who "straight,
Your suit is granted
, said, and died." The mysteriousness of grace is the point, its distance from normal assumptions (a great Lord will be in great places, and so on). In "Artillerie" Herbert creates another commonsensical speaker, who when "a star shot in [his] lap" reacted normally"I rose, and shook my clothes." He is rebuked for this, for rejecting pain that might have helped him. He attempts to set up a treaty with God"I have also starres and shooters too. . . . Then we are shooters both." Suddenly, however, he comes to a realization borrowed from "Loves Exchange," one of Donne's love poems: "There is no articling with thee."
Perhaps the deepest and most subtle of the comic poems in
The Temple
is the third poem entitled "Love," the final lyric of the volume through all Herbert's revisions. This poem is comedy of manners, and the human speaker in it is not mocked. His problem is excessive humility, but Herbert is shrewd enough to see that the assertion of humility can itself be a form of aggression. The framework is the host-guest one so dear to Jonson. As the poem proceeds, increasingly in dialogue, the guest is finally forced to accept his role"You must sit down," says the Host, "and taste my meat." The human speaker does "sit and eat," allowing us to see what irresistible grace is for a poet who sees God as a person rather than, as in Donne's Holy Sonnets, a force.
The Reformation critique of "works" and of egotism made the writing of poetry problematic. Herbert dealt with this problem by dramatizing it. He wrote as many poems about poetry as Jonson did, but
 
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where Jonson was always sure of the value of poetry, Herbert was always suspicious of it. In the second of the two poems entitled "Jordan"the stream which, for Herbert, replaces the HeliconHerbert dramatizes (as he does in "Sinnes Round") the process of creation: "My thoughts began to burnish, sprout, and swell, / Curling with metaphors a plain intention." As the poem became more elaborate, the creator found himself more invested in it, it became more his"So did I weave my self into the sense." The poet found himself again rebuked by ''a friend" for all this unnecessary and misguided "expense." Art is ultimately not the point. The God that Herbert worshipped values sincerity over art, even inarticulate sincerity"All Solomons sea of brasse and world of stone / Is not so deare to thee as one good grone." So why did Herbert polish and improve his poems? Clearly he saw them as rebuking their own pride and dramatizing that rebuke. It is obvious why he did not publish his volume, but why arrange and revise it so meticulously?
His seventeenthcentury biographer provides a useful story: the dying Herbert sent the volume to a friend who was only to publish it if he thought that any "dejected poor Soul" might find comfort in it. This reminds us that the volume contains anguish as well as comedy. There are five poems entitled "Affliction" (making it the most-used title), and the first of these is filled with very raw anguish. A "dejected poor soul" could see from poems like those and like "Longing" and "The Crosse" that sufferings, lapses, and conflicts were part of the life of the regenerate. Moreover, Protestant introspectionlike "imitating the ancients"was something that had to be learned. In a poem like "The Flower" Herbert provided a model for simultaneously evoking and interrogating emotion that was comparable to that which Donne provided in his greatest love poems, and that was perhaps even more culturally significant.
Carew, Herrick, and the "Cavaliers"
Thomas Carew and Robert Herrick were exact contemporaries of George Herbert, although Herrick alone lived past 1640. Carew and Herrick are the best of the so-called Cavaliersthe group of poets associated with the court or the ideology of Charles I, the King who was ultimately executed by Parliament in 1649 in the name of the laws and "the people" of England. Carew died just before civil war broke out, but he was very much a figure of the Caroline courtalthough not nec-
 
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essarily an uncritical admirer. Many of his lyrics combine Donnean wit and impudence with Jonsonian polish (and impudence).
In "Ingratefull beauty threatned" Carew uses Donnean candor and Jonsonian awareness of the power of poetry to chastise a woman who has been (in the fiction) taking seriously the hyperbolical praise that the poet has previously bestowed on her. This tone of undeceived negotiationwith poetic hyperbole as one counter in the bargainis new to English poetry. Carew's love lyrics show how easily the influence of the two masters can blend, though the nature of the blend remains his own. Neither Donne nor Jonson could have written to a woman that in her beauty departed flowers "as in their causes, sleep"though Carew could not have written so without them.
At times, Carew fully adopts the Jonsonian mode. He wrote two fine country house poems, one of which, "To my friend G. N. from Wrest," truly bears comparison with "To Penshurst"not just as an intelligent adaptation (like Carew's ''To Saxham") but as a poem of equal "weight." Just as "A Rapture"Carew's version of Donne's "Going to Bed" elegydevelops an ideology of pleasure, "To G. N." develops an ideology of use. It secularizes and then resacramentalizes religious language. The biblical and Protestant contrast between idols and life becomes: "In stead of Statues to adorne their wall / They throng with living men, their merry Hall." Bacchus and Ceres are presentoffered not to the eye (as statues) but "to the taste": "We presse the juycie God, and quaff his blood, / And grinde the Yeallow Goddesse into food." This the Real Presence indeed. This poem alerts us, as does the elegy for Donne, which is devoted to the preacher as well as the poet, that Carew, though a "Cavalier," is concerned about religion. Carew's poem to George Sandys "on his translation of the Psalmes" ends on a powerful vision of substituting "the dry leavelesse trunk on Golgotha" for the classical poet's "verdant Bay."
Robert Herrick does not seem to have felt much tension between the paganism of his secular lyrics (
Hesperides
) and his religious
Noble Numbers
. This is due partly to his own sensibility and partly to his politicsthese reinforced each other nicely. Herrick's constitutional anti-Puritanism becomes a genuine political position in a world in which traditional village holidays"Maypoles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes," as Herrick puts it in "The Argument of his Book"were matters of intense cultural, political, and religious conflict. The king (Charles I) and his most prominent bishops supported the traditional "sports,"
 
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while the "Puritans," of course, did not. This helps us see why Herrick, a minister in the Church of England, could sing of Maypoles and of "cleanly wantonness," and yet say of heaven, at the end of "The Argument," that he ''hope[s] to have it after all." Herrick is a pure Jonsonian. Donne does not exist for him. Where Carew saw Donne as "worth all that went before," Herrick says of Jonson (in one of the many poems that he wrote to and about the master), "Here lies Jonson with the rest / Of the poets; but the best."
One can see in these short lines much of what Herrick "worshipped" in "Saint Ben"absolute prosodic skill combined with a mastery of tone and stance. Herrick developed the Jonson of some of the songs ("Still to be neat" and "Come my Celia") into a large gathering of consciously artful erotic poemspoems that play at various erotic speech acts and that celebrate beauty (including their own) but have no specifically sexual urgency. Herrick's "many dainty mistresses" are ideas of mortal beauty in the poetry; they are in many ways equivalent to his daffodils and blossoms.
"Corinna's Going a-Maying," Herrick's greatest poem on the "carpe diem" theme ("seize the day"Horace,
Odes
I.xi), encompasses much of his special range. "Corinna," whose name is from Ovid's elegies, is enjoined to rise and put on her "foliage" for May Day. It is "profanation" to disobey "the Proclamation made for May" by nature (and the King in the reissued
Book of Sports
). Corinna is urged to "take the harmless follie of the time." Sex is not an issue, but transitoriness is"Our life is short; and our days run / As fast away as do's the sun" (Ptolemaic astronomy helps the conceit here). It is crucial for Herrick that the "follie of the time" be "harmlesse."
As one would expect from this moral concern, there are continuities as well as discontinuities between
Hesperides
and
His Noble Numbers
. One of the finest of the "pious pieces," "The white Island: or the place of the Blest," blends Herrick's worlds beautifully without confusing them. The pagan idea of sleeping in the grave"calm and cooling sleep"gives way (with some resistance) to "Pleasures, such as shall pursue / Me immortaliz'd, and you." Jonsonian craftsmanship makes this triumph possible.
Many other wonderful lyrics were written by the "Cavalier" poets under the separate aegis of Jonson or under the combined aegis of Donne and Jonson. Two kinds of poems may be singled out and taken to represent the achievements of this group. The first is the "Against
 
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Fruition" lyric, a poem in which the poet warns either another lover or his own mistress against sexual consummation. This would seem to be an odd ploy in a world where "beauties" are constantly being demystified (as in Sir John Suckling's songs); where "Platonic" love is constantly mocked (see William Cartwright on ''this thin love" in "No Platonic Love"); and where a woman's scruples (conscience or honor) are constantly seen as monstrous, misguided, or unnatural (see, for instance, Thomas Randolph's "Upon Love Fondly Refused for Conscience's Sake"). But the attack on consummation follows from all this. Donne's "Farewell to Love" and "Love's Alchymie" are the foundation texts. Since consummated sex is paltry and plebeian ("my man," as Donne puts it, "Can be as happy as I can"), the answer must be, as Suckling advises a "fond youth," to "ask no more" than the opportunity for courtship since "fruition's dull" and "while it pleases much the palate, cloys." Abraham Cowley, in his "Against Fruition," explains that knowledge kills worship"a learn'd age is always least devout."
The other type of "Cavalier" poem that should be mentioned is the Epicurean political poem. These are often modeled on Anacreon, the great Greek poet of the drinking song, or on Horace. Herrick's "The Bad Season Makes the Poet Sad" is a piece of this sortimagining how wonderful things would be if the "golden age" before Parliament's triumph over the king were to return. The greatest poem of this sort is "The Grasshopper" by Richard Lovelace. Lovelace transforms Anacreon's happy grasshopper"Voluptuous, and wise withal, / Epicurean animal," as Cowley puts itinto an emblem of poignant ignorance of future sorrow: "But ah, the sickle!" The poem turns from the emblem of ignorant summer to a wintry celebration of private friendship, in which festivity, the "crown" of winter, Saturnalia and Christmas (banned by Parliament in 1644), can be restored.
"Cavaliers" Turned Divine: Crashaw and Vaughan
Crashaw's editor proclaimed the poet "Herbert's second but equal" in 1646; Vaughan attributed his conversion (before 1650) to "the blessed man, Mr. George Herbert." By the mid-seventeenth century Herbert was as powerful a cultural presence as Donne or Jonson, but his influence worked in different ways on his two major "followers." Both Crashaw and Vaughan began as "Cavalier" poets, both turned to divine poetry, but Crashaw retained a deep continuity with his "Cavalier" self,

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