Verse and Poetics in George Herbert and John Donne

Frances Cruickshank

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317002437
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Innovative and highly readable, this study traces George Herbert's and John Donne's development of a distinct poetics through close readings of their poems, references to their letters, sermons, and prose treatises, and to other contemporary poets and theorists. In demonstrating a relationship between poetics and religious consciousness in Donne's and Herbert's verse, Frances Cruickshank explores their attitudes to the cultural, theological, and aesthetic enterprise of writing and reading verse. Cruickshank shows that Donne and Herbert regarded poetry as a mode not determined by its social and political contexts, but as operating in and on them with its own distinct set of aesthetic and intellectual values, and that ultimately, verse mattered as a privileged mode of religious discourse. This book is an important contribution to the ongoing scholarly dialogue about the nature of literary and cultural study of early modern England, and about the relationship between the writer and the world. Cruickshank confirms Donne's reputation as a fascinating and brilliant poetic figure while simultaneously rousing interest in Herbert by noting his unique merging of rusticity and urbanity and tranquility and uncertainty, allowing the reader to enter into these poets' imaginative worlds and to understand the literary genre they embraced and then transformed.

Chapter 1 The Soul in Paraphrase: Writing and Reading the Religious Lyric

DOI: 10.4324/9781315548371-2

Velasquez’s portrait of the Infanta Doña Margarita’s maids of honour (Las Meninas, 1656) has prompted endless speculation about the significance of its unusual perspectives. The Infanta herself is the focal point, but she is surrounded by other figures and objects, most notably the dwarf and the mastiff in the lower right, the courtier slipping in (or out) through the back door, the minute reflection of her parents, Philip IV and his Queen, in the mirror on the back wall (placing the regal couple where the viewer would be standing), and, of course, the artist himself, poised in front of his giant canvas, the scaffolding of which intrudes into the visual plane of the larger painting, creating a confusion of frames and an optical ambiguity as to which painting we are, in fact, looking at. This painting, rich and tantalizing in its embodiment of a new kind of representation, seems to me an apt visual allegory of the new kind of poetry coinciding with the invention of baroque self-consciousness and complicating the earlier forms with layers of identity.

The first thing to note about Donne’s and Herbert’s verse is its blush of self-awareness. In critical tradition, the foremost quality of all the early-seventeenth-century lyrics is their exquisite consciousness of their own poetic forms, and the frequent intrusion of conflicted writerly self-portraits within the poetic frame. Often the writer’s own image looms in the foreground while the reflected image of divinity (mirroring the position of God as the viewer/recipient of the poem) is only dimly present in the background. Yet while Velasquez’s painting is a bold assertion of the painter’s presence at court, executed with an unflinching realism about his materials as a painter, the poems of a generation earlier are constantly trying to erase their self-conscious intrusions and hide the tools of their somewhat besmirched rhetorical trade. Like the figure in the background of Velasquez’s painting, they hover in the frame of the back door in a fusion of ingress and egress. The poems contain an image of the exposed frame and the materials that shape it, as well as self-portraits of the poet at work. Just as Las Meninas is as much about painting as it is about the Infanta, the finished product is often a poem about poetry, and the poet’s self-portrait cannot help but intrude.

Whether or not we take their anxieties at face value, these poems are positively squirming with contradictory perspectives and ambivalent identities, with hesitations, implosions and dramatic renunciations that never quite stick. Our experience of reading them is curiously vertiginous. They reveal rhetorical depths and logical circuits that defy analysis, and frequently end in prayers or proverbs rather than in resolutions of the artistic difficulties they construct. They entangle themselves and their readers in poetic casuistry, what Ceri Sullivan calls the ‘rhetoric of conscience’ in her recent book of that title, and seem to reject the very stage on which their rejections are enacted – rejections which would not have been necessary had they preserved the fiction of dramatic invisibility that their predecessors seemed to take for granted. The chief difficulty of interpretation is that we can never quite be sure if this desire to forsake art is a revulsion against the early modern culture of concealed artistry or simply a function of it. Do they sincerely regret the manipulations of rhetoric, or are they manipulating a rhetoric of regretful sincerity? We know enough of their wit and verbal agility to be at least suspicious. Yet however cynical we might be about the actuality of these dilemmas, in order to appreciate these poems in the richness of their cultural context we must acknowledge the gravity of the issues at stake, and the possibility that these writers had a hefty investment in the theological economy of poetry.

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Fig. 1 Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas (1656). Reproduced by permission of the Museo Nacional Del Prado.

In the early 1600s, when reform, renegotiation, translation and authorization were matters of national and spiritual consequence, the arrangement of words and ideas and the imagining of religious truth and experience were delicate, even volatile processes. No one whose life was conditioned absolutely by a collective and exacting faith, for which many were prepared to kill or to die, would flippantly invoke God’s presence at literary construction sites, nor derange and misappropriate his Word in the building of literary edifices. Where writers really believe, prayers and invocations are not merely devices. Nor would they underestimate the power of images and verbal subtleties to impinge seriously upon spiritual realities. For these writers, poetry carried a heavy devotional equivalence and had real implications for the value of truth and the practise of virtue. It also had an afterlife of judgment and possible redemption, a confusion of salvation and patronage, the shadow of which hung over every attempt to create something sincere and enduring yet noticeably self-effacing. Religious poems caught ‘the soul in paraphrase’, as Herbert describes prayer (51). Written under these pressures, poems risked both mistranslation and misguided individuation, but they were the necessary corollary of a new linguistic consciousness and a new devotional interiority.

The ground of their existence, then, is ambivalence and tension, and the root of this tension is theological. It is the divide between a Puritan, Calvinist negation of human tradition and works arising from the doctrine of ‘total depravity’, and the alternative Anglo-Catholic inheritance that wanted to affirm human tradition and make room for aesthetic flourishes within the practise of spirituality. The Anglo-Catholic tradition, exemplified in Donne’s and Herbert’s lifetimes by the preaching of Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626) and Richard Hooker (1554–1600), arises from an emphasis on the doctrine of the Incarnation, which had itself been central and contentious since the earliest Christian church. In Andrewes and Hooker, informed by Augustine, the Incarnation is not merely an episode in which God descends to human flesh, but a theology by which flesh is taken up into the Godhead and thus transformed. By extension, the material and the continuity of human life are justified and sanctified, and matter which would be rejected by austere Puritanism becomes imbued with spiritual significance. Having once taken a body, God authorizes every body as a potential vehicle of divinity. Nevertheless, the poets’ sense of authorization is leavened by unease. This chapter will follow the faultlines in their poetic self-consciousness, tracing apparently Calvinist renunciations of verse alongside humanist affirmations in order to determine where, finally, authorization rests.

Elizabeth Clarke recounts that many Puritans were opposed to poetry altogether, but that some allowed certain kinds of poetry to be written as long as its aims were godly and its style appropriately simple. She cites as an example George Wither, better known for his Emblems than his poetry, who ‘distinguished three types of poetry, the first including “such Conceits as delight Schoolboyes and Pedanticall wits”, which is clearly unsuitable for sacred poetry, the second “necessary Truths … couched in significant Parables”. He has chosen to write in the third kind, “which delivers commodious Truths, and things Really necessary, in as plain, and in as universall termes, as it can possibly devise”’ (1–2). We might wonder whether beauty or delight, or indeed the exquisite doubt which gives zest to Donne and Herbert, have a place here. Fortunately for us, none of the great poets of that or any other age seem to have observed these guidelines.¹ Wither is concerned with plain truth rather than skilful verisimilitude, and there is no middle ground between an austere and regally personified Truth and the verbal tricks and frivolities that characterized the worst kind of court poet. There is no room for the sincere questioning of sincerity, nor for the solemn meeting of truth and wit. There is no room for art, the serious play with reality in which its deeper, subtler truths are polished to a shining penetration by the rough friction of pretence. It is no coincidence that this poetry, which eschews the self-evidence of religious truth, has survived as the celebrated high point of devotional verse. What makes it consistently compelling is its acute consciousness of the perilous divide between truth and fiction.

¹ Wither’s contemporary Sir John Denham called him ‘the worst poet in England’ (Sutherland 26).

Donne’s unease takes the form of seeming diffidence and even, at times, disdain. Late in his career, in a 1623 letter to the Marquis of Buckingham, Donne compares ‘the mistress of my youth, poetry, to the wife of mine age, divinity’, and in a 1625 letter to Sir Robert Ker, claims that his poetry always ‘did best when [he] had least truth for [his] subjects’; that he would rather write a sermon than a poem to commemorate the death of James Hamilton (Selected Letters 98, 103). He makes other disparaging remarks about poetry in his secular poems, for example in ‘The Triple Foole’ (Poetical Works 15), where he writes

I am two fooles, I know,

For loving, and for saying so

In whining Poëtry;

[…]

I thought, if I could draw my paines,

Through Rimes vexation, I should them allay,

Griefe brought to numbers cannot be so fierce,

For, he tames it, that fetters it in verse.

This disdain recalls Samuel Johnson’s comment on Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ that ‘where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief’ (409), and the whole realist tradition that baulks at rhetoric. Donne, though, is hard to credit as a critic of rhetorical power, and he elsewhere refers to poetry as ‘the highest matter in the noblest forme’ (‘Upon the Translation of the Psalms’, Poetical Works 318). Herbert is not, like Donne, skeptical about the power of poetry: In ‘The Quidditie’, verse is ‘that which while I use / I am with Thee, and most take all’ (Herbert 69). Yet he is likewise wary of the ‘vexation’ and ‘fetters’ of versifying. The ‘Jordan’ poems, ‘The Forerunners’ and ‘A True Hymne’ are his most explicit problematizations of poetry. There the renunciation of poetic artistry becomes a kind of mantra or repeated oblation, which most critics have assigned to the temperament of what Barbara Lewalski called ‘protestant poetics’. This term covers both the aesthetic of simplicity or plainness, and the sources of the poetry in specifically Protestant hermeneutic traditions.

The watchword of this poetics, and the quality Donne misses in ‘The Triple Foole’, is sincerity. In The Country Parson, Herbert’s advice to the rural Protestant divine is that sermons should not be witty or learned or eloquent but holy, and this is achieved by ‘dipping, and seasoning all our words and sentences in our hearts, before they come into our mouths, truly affecting, and cordially expressing all that we say; so that the auditors may plainly perceive that every word is hart-deep’ (233). I won’t labour a point made so eloquently by Arnold Stein, Joseph Summers and other influential critics of the last century, but it is necessary to rehearse the dilemma of sincerity in these poets since it is a moral problem endemic to that culture and somewhat alien to ours, and it connects explicitly to incarnationist theology. In poetry, conflict arose between the sincerity or ‘hart-depth’ of religious feeling and the potential insincerity of the rhetorical vehicle. If this conflict was the toy of the Elizabethan sonneteers, it became the thorn in the side of the religious lyricists. Sincerity is demanded by the religious ideals that the poet seeks rhetorically to represent or to respond to, but that sincerity is jeopardized by its passage through the very rhetorical ‘vexations’ or ‘fetters’ which give it shape and expression. The very fact of re-presentation (as opposed to presentation) implies a stage of removal from the originating impulses and thus an opportunity for the white heat of devotional ardour to cool on the anvil of the poet’s rhetorical craft. This opportunity places an extra strain on the poetic form and language in that these are expected to preserve, either by sheer power of expression or utter fidelity of representation, the feeling that motivated the poetic account. This strain, in turn, creates an opportunity for feigned or insincere assurances of sincerity, rendering the poetic vehicle doubly suspect. If the poet takes no pains to affirm his sincerity, he is merely a skilled player on the rhetorical instrument. If, on the other hand, he protests too much about the truth of his rendering, the logic of sincerity is compromised as the rhetorical voice turns reflexively in upon itself. Such quandaries may seem quaint or overly precious to a twenty-first-century reader, but they lie at the heart of the religious lyric as an existential question about whether such poems are possible at all. They constitute its complex architecture, and, four centuries later, its abiding charisma.

In an essay on ‘Rhetoric’, Stanley Fish uses Richard Lanham’s distinction between ‘serious man’ and ‘rhetorical man’ to outline a history of the quarrel between rhetorical and foundational thought. While the ‘serious’ orator tries desperately to avoid the circularities and inexactitudes of language, the rhetorician embraces and exploits their opportunities (Lentricchia and McLaughlin 208). Donne and Herbert are caught in the middle of this tension. On the one hand they are both skilled in the arts of language and both display a learned rhetorical facility. Though he never practised, Donne was trained in Law – in between his visits to theatres and ladies’ dressing rooms – at Lincolns Inn. Herbert, after a distinguished and unblemished undergraduate career, was made Praelector of Rhetoric at Cambridge in 1618, and University Orator in 1620 (Oxford DNB 26:678). On the other hand, their religious subject matter exposes poetic language as either ‘too narrow, and too weake’ or ‘too rich to clothe the sunne’ (‘Jordan [II]’, Herbert 102). As religious men, both of them find their rhetorical abilities compromising.

This conflict has a long critical history. Henri Peyre’s Literature and Sincerity (1963) provided a long-range account of the relationship, observing its currents and complexities across centuries of western literature. Peyre identifies the Renaissance as a period when sincerity had a particular value as a literary criterion, and he nominates three contributing features: ‘the closer link between art and life and the new merit granted to a creator’s lived experience; the eagerness to make a clean sweep of conventions and of medieval allegories and a sudden and joyful concern with the future; and the worship by the individual of his own individuality, his greed for the unbridled expansion of his age and for his personal glory’ (20). These features are present in the religious lyric, but modified, often explicitly and self-consciously, to accommodate the proper humility of the devout poet. Towards their own individuality these poets display not so much worship as a conflicted fascination and a continuous effort to suppress and curtail rampant egotism. Their poetry partakes of the spirit of concealed self-advertisement that characterized the earlier sonnets, but it also draws attention to its own propensity to advertise, and therein lies its claim to a confessional sincerity. Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity (1972) identified the movement of modernity towards a value for authenticity over sincerity, privileging in all areas of art an uncompromising realism over the now discredited notion of intention. In a way, this revolution coincides with the movement from Protestant interiority to empiricist observation. In the first phase, interior reflection and intention are under the constant gaze of both subjective and divine scrutiny, and reality is problematic and duplicitous. In the second, interiority dissolves under the scientific gaze and the only fidelity that counts is truth to what is externally observable. The religious poets find themselves caught in the midst of that transition: Their quest for the truth of feeling lies somewhere between the enlarged Protestant ego and the deflating scientific impulse, between the legitimate counterfeits of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Text
• Introduction: Poetry Versus Materialism
• 1 The Soul in Paraphrase: Writing and Reading the Religious Lyric
• 2 Taking Figures: Metaphor and Theology in Religious Poetics
• 3 Green Matter and the Figure of the Garden
• 4 The Poetics of the Eucharist: Poetry that Matters
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index