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Ghent University
Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
Inwardness in the Religious Poetry of John Donne and George Herbert
Supervisor:
Prof. Dr. Ingo Berensmeyer
Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the
requirements for the degree of “Master in
de Taal- en Letterkunde: Engels –
Nederlands”
by Liesbet Wauters
June 2008
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Inwardness in the Religious Poetry of John Donne and George Herbert
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank professor Ingo Berensmeyer for being my supervisor for this paper. He
was always ready to assist me by word and deed. I would also like to thank the people of the
department and the library of English Literature because they were always willing to help.
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Table of Contents
I. Introduction.
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II. Inwardness in the Early Modern Period.
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III. Inwardness in the Religious Poetry of Donne and Herbert.
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A. Formal Aspects and Poetics in Relation to Inwardness.
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B. The Creation of a Persona
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C. Death, Sin and Suffering
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D. Relationship of Donne and Herbert to God
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IV. Conclusion
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Works Cited
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I. Introduction.
John Donne and George Herbert were two English poets who lived and wrote in the
first half of the seventeenth century. Although the term was not yet coined at the time, they
can both be considered as representatives of the Metaphysical poets. The Metaphysicals did
not consciously form a group, but were brought together under that name by Samuel Johnson
in the eighteenth century. The reason for their grouping was that they had some qualities in
common, such as the use of philosophical and theological subjects for their poems, a rigorous
style, the characteristics of wit and inventiveness, and „strong lines,‟ which are “expressions
made arresting and difficult through abrupt or riddling syntax or of course through paradox or
conceit” (Reid 4). However, there were numerous differences among their writings, so
sometimes a Metaphysical could also run into another grouping as well. According to David
Reid, “[a] conventional map of poetry in the earlier seventeenth century divides it into three
lines of descent: the schools of Spenser, of Jonson (the Tribe of Ben, the Cavalier poets) and
of Donne (the Metaphysicals)” (3). In practice, though, the boundaries between these
groupings were difficult to draw. The main differences were that the Cavalier poets were
“courtly and social in their concerns, more polished” than the Metaphysicals, and the
Spenserians less learned and far-fetched (Reid 3). Nevertheless, Metaphysicals could
sometimes also be called Spenserians or Cavalier poets, and the other way around.
In addition to the fact that Donne and Herbert were both Metaphysicals, they also
knew each other. Donne was twenty-one years older than Herbert, and was initially a friend of
Herbert‟s mother, Magdalen Herbert. She was admired for her wit and beauty, but especially
for her Christian virtues, which strongly influenced the young Herbert. Magdalen met John
Donne while she was staying in Oxford because her eldest son, Edward, studied at Queen‟s
College. As Isaak Walton maintains in his notoriously unreliable Life of Mr. George Herbert,
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“[their] amity, begun at this time and place, was not an amity that polluted their souls, but an
amity made up of a chain of suitable inclinations and virtues” (342). This friendship came at a
very good time for Donne, because Magdalen proved to be one of his most bountiful
benefactors while he needed an income to support his wife, Anne More, and their seven
children. Because of Donne‟s acquaintance with her, he naturally became acquainted with her
son, George Herbert, as well. Isaak Walton mentions a good symbol of their friendship in his
Life of Mr. George Herbert, namely the seal that was found in Herbert‟s belongings after his
death. It appeared to be a present from Donne, because “a little before his death he caused
many seals to be made, and in them to be engraven the figure of Christ crucified on an anchor
(the emblem of hope) . . . . These seals he gave or sent to most of those friends on which he
put a value” (Walton 349).
The fact that they were both Metaphysicals and that they were acquaintances does not
imply that their poetry can be considered as similar. As stated above, Herbert was bound by
ties of friendship to Donne and was perhaps even inspired by his example as a devotional
poet, but he resembles him in his writings only in very general ways. Some examples of their
differences are the following: Donne wrote devotional as well as love poetry while Herbert
only wrote religious poetry, Donne is often more violent and worldly while Herbert is more
temperate and often has didactic purposes in mind, and, as will become clear later on, they
both have their own way of dealing with inwardness.
In this paper, the focus will be on the devotional poetry of Donne and Herbert. It is
therefore important to mention their different religious backgrounds. Donne started out as a
Catholic aristocrat, living under the Protestant reign of Queen Elizabeth I. He had to live with
a family history of persecution, because his mother, Elizabeth, was descended from Sir
Thomas More, the martyred Lord Chancellor who was executed in 1534 for refusing to
subscribe to the Act of Supremacy declaring Henry VIII to be the true spiritual head of the
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Church of England (Post 2). This family history had a great impact on him, which becomes
clear in this quote from “An Advertisement to the Reader” to Pseudo-Martyr: “so, as I am a
Christian, I have beene ever kept awake in a meditation of Martyrdome, by being derived
from such a stocke and race, as, I beleeve, no family, (which is not of farre larger extent, and
greater branches,) hath endured and suffered more in their persons and fortunes, for obeying
the Teachers of Romane Doctrine, than it hath done” (325). Donne here informs the reader
that his preoccupation with martyrdom springs from his ancestors. Later on in his life, Donne
appears to be converted to Anglicanism, but there is a lot of speculation about the precise
moment of this shift in belief. It had to be somewhere in the 1590‟s, though, because Donne
could not have been in the service of Sir Thomas Egerton by the end of the decade if he had
not, even if it were only in outward appearance, declared his loyalty to the Church of England.
Egerton was the Protestant Lord Chancellor and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal at the time. He
was known not to be soft on Catholics and would hardly have employed Donne as his
secretary if he had had any reason to question his religious position. In any case, whenever
Donne‟s shift in belief took place, it did not happen overnight. “[He] declared in 1610 that his
decision to join the Church of England had not been a sudden or precipitate one, but was the
result of a long period of study” (Shell and Hunt 73). In Pseudo-Martyr, he wrote that during
this period, he “surveyed and digested the whole body of Divinity, controverted between ours
and the Romane Church” (328). Donne‟s mixed religious background has definitely had a
great influence on his writings, and later on it will become clear that it lies at the base of some
of the differences between his poetry and that of George Herbert.
Herbert was born into a Protestant family and spent much of his happy childhood
under the prudent care of his mother who had a great influence on him. He enjoyed a life full
of charity, humility and Christian virtues. On the one hand, Herbert probably aspired to a
career in the secular world for a long time, which would have been appropriate for a man with
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his descent and talents. The function he held as a public orator from 1620 until 1624 was
generally considered as a stepping stone to a higher public function. On the other hand,
Herbert was ordained deacon in 1624, and this could be considered as a stepping stone to
becoming a priest. Considering the fact that Herbert had been greatly influenced by the
devoutness of his mother and had always been a very religious person himself, it is not
surprising that he eventually chose the path of priesthood. In 1630 he was made Rector of the
parsonage of Bemerton. His extraordinary preoccupation with God is one of the reasons why
all his poems have a religious subject, unlike those of John Donne. These different religious
backgrounds of Herbert and Donne had a great effect on how they dealt with God, and
therefore also had a great effect on their religious poetry, which will become clear later on.
In this paper, a historical approach will be adopted to attempt to show what
inwardness and interiority could mean to people in the early modern period. As stated before,
the focus will be on the devotional poetry of John Donne and George Herbert. The poems that
will be used as examples to demonstrate the major points will be taken from Herbert‟s The
Temple and from Donne‟s Divine Poems, including the Holy Sonnets. How did seventeenth
century people feel about inwardness in general? What can we learn about inwardness by
Donne and Herbert‟s writings? How did they depict it in them? These questions will help us
to understand their poems better. The difference between the devotional poetry of Donne and
Herbert, as will become clear in the discussion, lies in the way in which they portray the
inwardness of their personae. Herbert always tends to place his speaker in the social world
while Donne‟s personae tend to be more isolated. Both poets let their speakers engage in
conversations with God, but Herbert creates personae that are recognisable, passably
accessible, and gives advice, while Donne tends to endow his speakers with a strong,
independent and sometimes even sceptical mind. This way, Donne and Herbert create
different kinds of persons, who each have their own way of dealing with their inward selves.
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The reason why this paper will only focus on their religious poetry is that it is ideal for the
study of inwardness. This idea originates from one of Saint Augustine‟s writings, namely
from On the Faith in Things Unseen. As Katharine Eisaman Maus verbalises it, Augustine
asks in this work why “[we should] flinch from acknowledging the veiled truths of
Christianity, when our intercourse with even our most intimate acquaintances is premised
upon invisibility” (9). It is impossible for us to grasp who God is because he is invisible to us.
We can only judge him by his visible works and by what is written down in the Bible. Being a
Christian is therefore a matter of faith and trust. One of the main reasons why we, mere
humans, look up to God is “[his] immediate, superhuman knowledge of the hidden interior of
persons” (Maus 10). That knowledge is one we can never obtain. Nobody can be sure what
another person thinks or feels. Even when a person says that he or she feels in a particular
way or that he or she is thinking about something, you can never be sure if they are speaking
the truth. Thus you can only judge somebody by what you see or hear and determine if you
are going to believe them. Because the mystery of God and the unknowable interior of others
can be considered as similar in structure, it is suitable to look at religious poetry for the study
of inwardness. A general introduction to inwardness in the early modern period will be given
in part II, followed by a discussion of inwardness in the religious poetry of John Donne and
George Herbert in part III.
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II. Inwardness in the Early Modern Period.
As has already become clear, the subject of this paper is the meaning of inwardness or
interiority in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, and also the way in which
people dealt with it back then. The words „inwardness‟ and „interiority‟ will be used
interchangeably in this paper, because they almost have the same meaning. Both words can be
considered as archaic, because some contemporary dictionaries, for instance, the Longman
Dictionary of Contemporary English, do not include them anymore. However, both words are
still known in English. „Inwardness‟ is described in the OED as “preoccupation with one‟s
inner self; concern with spiritual or philosophical matters rather than externalities” (2003).
„Interiority‟ is defined in it as “quality of being interior or inward; inner character or nature;
subjectivity” (2003). Both terms should be kept strictly separate from anything that is
„outward‟ or „exterior,‟ because those words relate to the external appearance of things rather
than to their inner nature. „Inwardness‟ is an older word than „interiority,‟ because the Oxford
English Dictionary Online (hereafter OED Online) states that it already occurred in 1388, in
John Wycliffe‟s English translation of the Bible. It appeared in Luke 1:78, namely “[b]y the
inwardness of the mercy of our God, in which he springing up from on high hath visited us.”
In the King James Bible, Luke 1:78 is translated as follows: “[t]hrough the tender mercy of
our God whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us.” What Wycliffe translated as
“inwardness” is translated in the King James Bible as “tender.” It is possible to see a
connection between these two words. “Tender” is always positively connotated, and because
both words occur in relation to “mercy,” “inwardness” also obtains a positive connotation.
This way, the “mercy of our God” can be understood as „well considered, careful and gentle‟
in both versions of the Bible mentioned above. The word „interiority‟ has its origin in the
early eighteenth century. According to the OED Online, it was for example used in 1701 in
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John Norris‟ Essay toward the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World. The word occurred in
the part in which he discussed Saint Augustine. This not really surprising considering the fact
that it was his language of inwardness that has often been seen as a great contribution to
modern identity (Reiss 5).
When we hear the term „inwardness‟ today, we immediately think about it as
something mental or psychological. It brings to mind ideas of people full of emotion, parents
dealing with struggles of different kinds, twenty-year-olds contemplating their future or their
life, depressed people, happy newlyweds, etc. In any case, hearing the word „inwardness‟
makes us think of people dealing with themselves, how they feel, and what they are
preoccupied with. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, however, the meaning
of the word differed somewhat from ours. In the OED Online, there are some significations of
„inwardness‟ that can together be seen as similar to the general definition that was quoted
above, namely “preoccupation with one‟s inner self; concern with spiritual or philosophical
matters rather than externalities.” However, it also includes three definitions that do not match
the general one, namely “the inner part or region; plural inward parts, entrails,” “the inward
or intrinsic character or quality of a thing; the inner nature, essence, or meaning,” and “the
fact of being intimately acquainted; intimacy, familiarity; close friendship.” Looking at the
years of the quotes that accompany these extra definitions, it becomes clear that all three of
them were in common use in the early modern period. For the poetry that will be discussed in
this paper, the first special definition is especially important, together with the general one.
The other two can definitely also get a chance in poetry, but not as much as the psychological
and the physiological one. With the psychological definition I mean the “preoccupation with
one‟s inner self; concern with spiritual or philosophical matters rather than externalities,” and
with the physiological one I mean “the inner part or region; plural inward parts, entrails.”
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The reason why these two definitions are relevant for the subject of this paper, is that
the people in the early modern period, including John Donne and George Herbert, lived in two
closely intertwined worlds: “the world of change or alteration, of the body of man; and the
world of the unchanging or constant, of the soul of man” (Williamson 28). Thus Donne and
Herbert depicted these two worlds in their poetry, because these were the worlds they lived in,
these were all they knew from experience. The world of the body was controlled by the
application of Galenic medicine, more specifically of the humoral theory. This theory posits
that there are four humoral fluids in the body (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm)
which have to be kept in balance in order to be a healthy person. “Under this regime, illness is
not the product of an infection from without but rather is the result from an internal imbalance
of humoral fluid. Although this account of behavior appears at once deeply materialist and
incorrigibly determinist, in actual practice it was possible to manipulate the humoral fluids
and their concomitant behaviors through diet and evacuation” (Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves
2). A person could keep the humoral fluids in his body in balance by what he took in and what
he let out. Thus the individual constantly had to examine him- or herself in order to find the
way of living which suited him or her best. However, this also means that a person was in
control of his or her own body and was therefore fully to blame when he or she fell ill.
Embedded in the world of the body, there was the world of the soul. It can be seen as
the seat of the mental faculties of man, like thought and reason, but also of the emotional and
spiritual part of man‟s nature. In the early modern period, the soul was considered to be
something that was connected to the body and made an individual what it was. “In each living
thing, a soul inhering in prime matter [was] the one substantial form that determine[d] the
nature of a living body, and this soul ha[d] powers that activate[d] the body” (Michael 149).
This “prime matter” is “pure potentiality, not really anything at all apart from form.” During
the Renaissance, people thought a lot about the connection between body and soul. Some
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posited the Thomistic view that there was only one soul in one man, for example Lambertus
de Monte. Others, like Alessandro Achillini, defended the Averroistic one that there were two
human souls (Michael 149). Shortly after the period discussed in this paper, Descartes
claimed that body and soul were completely separate entities. In the period in which Donne
and Herbert lived, people generally believed in one soul which was embedded in the body. In
the eleventh of Donne‟s Paradoxes, namely That the Gifts of the Body Are Better Than Those
of the Minde, he discusses the relationship between body and soul: “I say again, that the body
makes the minde, not that it created a minde, but forms it a good or a bad minde, and this
minde may be confounded with soul without any violence or injustice to Reason or
Philosophy: then the soul it seems is enabled by our Body, not this by it. . . . [H]ealth is the
gift of the body, and patience in sicknesse the gift of the minde” (302-303). Because body and
soul were connected, mental health was often seen as a consequence of physical health. Thus
a good diet and a consequent purgation of the body did not only keep your body in shape but
also protected your emotional and psychological health (Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves 23).
This is why passions or emotions were often seen as diseases, and why humors were
combined with personality types, for example, if you had too much black bile you were a
melancholic person.
By now, it should not come as a surprise that inwardness in the early modern period
could refer to both worlds mentioned above. Psychological and emotional states were often
expressed in physical terms. Humoral theory made it possible to make invisible things visible.
Michael Schoenfeldt says that “[a]lthough [Galenic medicine] may have offered little actual
help (and a significant amount of harm) to those who sought its physiological and
psychological remedies, [it] provided a range of writers with a rich and malleable discourse
able to articulate and explain the vagaries of human emotion in corporeal terms” (Bodies and
Selves 6). Timothy J. Reiss adds to this that body and soul always have to be combined in
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order to be able to speak of an individual person: “[t]hought and experience, understanding
and being may be separable for some purposes. They cannot be in the case of what it is to be a
person” (Reiss 24).
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, body and soul should thus not be
seen as separate entities. In practice, however, it was often the opposite that was true. What
someone inwardly felt was not always what he or she outwardly showed. Nevertheless, if we
take the context of the period into consideration, this is not really surprising. Several factors
contributed to the fact that people did not always show themselves as they were and often
played a role when they appeared in public. Firstly, they lived in the period in which the
Protestant Queen Elizabeth I ruled England. Most English subjects were Protestant, but there
was a considerable number of Catholics left from the previous reign of Queen Mary.
However, the Protestants were in the majority, thus they felt like they were the strongest
party. The defeat of the Spanish Armada in the 1580‟s even seemed to justify the cause of the
Protestants and encouraged them even more. People who openly showed that they did not
share the Protestant belief, especially the ones who made clear that they were Catholic, were
rejected because they were seen as dangerous people who were in the wrong. It is therefore
not astonishing that many Catholics were afraid to admit who they really were. However,
some of them found a solution for this problem. They were called “church-papists” and
“attended Church of England services while also engaging in Catholic worship or retaining
Catholic sympathies” (Shell and Hunt 69). They form a good example of people whose inner
self was very different from their outward appearance. The fact that these church-papists
existed and even got a name as a grouping shows that there must have been a considerable
number of them. It is also a sign that Catholicism still had a hold on many people. There were
of course also Catholics who saw this church-papistry as a form of weakness and who were
willing to risk being excluded from everyday life, being labeled as dangerous, and being
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tortured and executed. However, it must be mentioned that “[s]ince it was only Catholic
priests whose activities were treasonable, the authorities were more interested in hunting
down priests than Catholic laymen, and lay Catholics at different periods or in different parts
of the country would have had very discrepant experiences” (Shell and Hunt 70). Some of
these lay Catholics were tortured or killed if they publicly showed their religious position,
others enjoyed some level of tolerance, and church-papists mostly even went unnoticed.
Katharine Eisaman Maus adds the following to this: “Protestants typically describe
themselves as cultivating internal truths while accusing Catholics of attending only to outward
„shows‟” (15). This assumption is consistent with what is commonly known about Protestants
and Catholics, namely that Protestants are more austere in the profession of their religion than
Catholics. A good example of this are the statues of saints that fill Catholic churches, while
they remain absent in Protestant ones. Protestants prefer to concentrate on God and Christ
alone, not on the Virgin Mary or on other saints. However, it must be mentioned that this does
not mean that Catholics “[only attend] to outward „shows.‟” Maus also says that “[s]ixteenthand early seventeenth- century Catholics themselves . . . hardly perceive their devotional lives
as empty formalities” (15). They also “cultivat[e] internal truths.” I believe that this is true for
everyone who is religious, it does not matter which particular religion it is that they profess.
What is true, though, is that under the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Catholics exceptionally had
to turn to “outward shows” to be able to keep their normal lives. They could feel or think
things but be afraid to show them. Maus formulated this issue the following way: “[p]ersons
and things inwardly are, . . . persons and things outwardly only seem” (5). Considering the
fact that John Donne was first a Catholic before he converted to Anglicanism, this problem
was especially relevant to him. How Donne dealt with this issue will be discussed in more
detail further on.
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A second factor that made sure that people‟s inward being was not necessarily the
same as their outward appearance is the following. The population in the cities was increasing
very rapidly, and this was especially the case in London. “From the accession of Henry VIII
in 1509 to the restoration of Charles II in 1660, the population increased ten-fold in number:
from about 50,000 people to half a million” (Post 3). In other words, it was very crowded
there and then, and naturally, it could not have been easy to find some privacy. Timothy J.
Reiss seems to confirm this idea. “The private, as an arena of the individual closed from the
public and communal, seems to have been literally unthinkable until the first or second
century A.D. at the earliest; even then thought of as aberrant perhaps still well into the
European seventeenth century” (3). In addition to this, you could never really know a person,
because you were never sure if they told the truth about what they were thinking or feeling.
They could just as well be playing a role to protect themselves. George Herbert seems to
agree with this, because in „Giddiness,‟ he writes the following:
Surely if each one saw another‟s heart,
There would be no commerce,
No sale or bargain pass: all would disperse,
And live apart (21-24).
Herbert says here that you cannot really know the interior of another person, and if you would
know it, you would reject him or her. In relation to this, Maus refers to the process of
“induction” (5). She states that “[s]ocial life demands the constant practice of induction, or
what the physician John Cotta calls „artificial conjecture‟: reasoning from the superficial to
the deep, from the effect to the cause, from seeming to being” (5). The consequence of this
was, I believe, that you had to turn to yourself and your inner being to be truly able to depend
on someone. This is why inwardness could become so important to people. It could provide a
means of escape from the crowded, hypocritical outside world, and I believe this is when the
“private, as an arena of the individual closed from the public and communal” that Reiss
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mentioned came into existence. The only one that you could trust completely was yourself,
because what you felt and thought were the only things you knew to be definitely true.
This need to turn to the inner self was enhanced by the fact that these people lived in
the age of exploration which took place in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth century.
Especially “during Elizabeth‟s reign, the nation began to utilize the navigational technologies
associated with exploration and to compete against Portugal and Spain for new world booty”
(Post 5). People found out about these discoveries from the flourishing art of cartography, or
read about them in books, which had become more easily accessible through the invention of
print from moveable type. “The post-Gutenberg explosion of print, moreover, allowed readers
to stay current with these events, whether through the burgeoning travel literature of the day
or the ever-increasing production of sophisticated maps by continental cartographers like
Gerard Mercator and Abraham Ortelius” (Post 5). People who had always lived in the small
world of their village or city, now heard of new territories that were far away. Most of them
had never traveled past the boundaries of their little world, and now they were confronted
with the fact that the world outside of it was larger than they thought. Because of the fact that,
in their knowledge, the outside world grew bigger and bigger, their own place in it became
smaller and smaller. The consequence was that the crowd of people that they had to confront
everyday was also larger than they thought, and this made them long even more for a place of
their own. Again, turning to their inner self provided the solution. However, if more and more
people did this, and if they did it more frequently, this again made it more difficult really to
know another person and discover what preoccupied him or her.
As mentioned above, God in the early modern period was seen as a being with an
“immediate, superhuman knowledge of the hidden interior of persons” (Maus 10). After what
was just explained, it is not surprising that this ability of God could be one of the main
reasons why mere humans worshipped him. God knew his subjects better than they knew
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themselves, because they kept lying to themselves and kept passing themselves off as
different or even better than they really were. For these reasons, private matters could only be
sensed through what was visible in public. Nevertheless, there was a way to make this divine
ability a little less hard to reach. If people wrote down what preoccupied them spiritually,
philosophically, or emotionally, this could be a first step to make them acquainted with their
own “hidden interior,” and maybe even to make it accessible to other people. What someone
wrote down in a poem or in prose could help him or her understand his or her own feelings or
thoughts better, but it could also be of great help to other people. These other people could
learn by those writings that they were not alone in having a particular feeling or thought, that
they were not abnormal, or that they could approach issues in a different and maybe even
better way. These different purposes of writing about inwardness already show the difference
between the poetry of Donne and Herbert that is important here. They both devoted their
poetry to God, but Donne‟s poems are more directed at self-knowledge, while Herbert‟s are
more directed at communal integration. This is why they, for example, created different kinds
of personae, and why they adopted a different style, but this will all became clear later on.
Thus, the conversations with God that took place in the religious poems of Donne and
Herbert had a different purpose. Whether their poetry was meant to learn more about the self
or to instruct others, it always involved God‟s presence. Writing was a kind of training to get
in touch with your inner self. As can be witnessed in the poetry of Donne and Herbert, inward
truths are unveiled while writing to God. In addition to his religious poetry, Donne also wrote
profane verse. Herbert, however, only wrote devotional poetry. He even wrote a letter to his
mother when he was only seventeen years old in which he declared that all the poetry he was
ever going to write would be devotional: “my meaning, dear mother, is in these sonnets to
declare my resolution to be that my poor abilities in poetry shall be all and ever consecrated to
God‟s glory” (344). Herbert here comes across as very certain about his chosen path, but
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being a religious person was not always easy, let alone being a clergyman. “For Debora
Shuger, . . . Christian selfhood [was] a divided selfhood gripped by intense, contradictory
emotions and an ineradicable tension between its natural inclinations and religious
obligations” (Schoenfeldt, „That spectacle of too much weight‟ 563). An example of such a
“tension” between “natural inclinations and religious obligations” is that Christians
sometimes felt the urge to eat, but could not because it was Lent. For Donne and Herbert, this
divided selfhood also had an advantage, because it provided them with plenty of subjectmatter to think and write about, of which much was related to inwardness and interiority.
Writing and reading poetry could this way become a kind of training for communication
about inwardness and for dealing with inward tensions. As a writer, the self-scrutiny that
came with writing about inwardness could help you understand yourself better. As a reader,
learning about the inwardness of others could do the same, but it could also provide you with
the means of expression to communicate about your own inwardness. For these reasons, the
religious poetry of Donne and Herbert will be the subject of what follows.
III. Inwardness in the Religious Poetry of Donne and Herbert.
A. Formal Aspects and Poetics in Relation to Inwardness.
Taking into consideration that John Donne and George Herbert were both
Metaphysical poets, it is not astonishing that they have a number of formal qualities in
common. For instance, they both organized the argument of their work in ingenious ways by
using conceits. Conceits are comparisons of which we are made to admit that the two things
that are being compared are alike, while being strongly aware of the fact that they are not.
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Herbert‟s „The Bag‟ and Donne‟s „The Crosse‟ are examples of highly elaborate conceits. In
„The Bag,‟ Jesus is wounded in his side by the spear of a Roman soldier. Instead of
complaining about the pain he cries out that the wound is a mailbag in which people can drop
anything that they want to send to God. Because the “bag” is very near to his heart, he will
guard the messages of the people with care. This way, the “bag” actually becomes “a symbol
or emblem for the very significance of the crucifixion” (Austin 33). In Donne‟s „The Crosse,‟
the image of the cross first represents the body of the Crucified Christ. Then, the speaker
“spies out Crosses in small things” (21). He sees crosses in flying birds, spheres, meridians,
and compares the cross to the abstract form of the human body, to the heart, and to the brain.
By making his speaker discover the image of the cross in all those things, Donne tries to
underline the omnipresence of the Crucified Christ in the microcosm and the macrocosm.
Next to the use of conceits, Donne and Herbert also have the common quality of using
concentrated expressions in their poetry. Donne often makes use of strong lines, which are
“expressions made arresting and difficult through abrupt or riddling syntax or of course
through paradox or conceit” (Reid 4). Helen Gardner describes the motto of the writers of
strong lines as follows: “more matter and less words” (16). Thus, strong lines are usually
rather short, but are nevertheless charged with meaning. They can be seen as a device to draw
the reader into the poem and to make him participate. Donne‟s poetry is full of strong lines,
for example, “the losse / Of this Crosse, were to mee another Crosse” („The Crosse‟ 11-2).
This means that if the speaker were to lose the image of the Crucified Christ, he would be in a
bad situation because “[b]etter were worse, for, no affliction, / No Crosse is so extreme, as to
have none” (13-4). Another example is “wash thee in Christ‟s blood, which hath this might /
that being red, it dyes red soules to white („Holy Sonnet IV‟ 13-4). These lines mean that “red
soules,” the ones who have sinned, can be cleared from their sins by being washed in Christ‟s
blood. Herbert‟s poetry does not contain as much strong lines as Donne‟s, but it does often
22
include aphorisms, which are short phrases that contain a wise idea. Unlike strong lines,
aphorisms are not necessarily difficult or obscure. The following lines are good examples of
this: “He that is weary, let him sit” („Employment (2)‟ 1) and “Is there in truth no beauty?”
(„Jordan (1)‟ 2). The reason why Herbert did not write as much strong lines as Donne is
probably that he believed in a plain style. He wanted to avoid the fanciful ornamental style of
his predecessors. “Herbert . . . follows Augustine‟s example in rejecting empty rhetoric for a
language whose beauty derives from its fidelity to divine truth – in this case the knowledge of
God‟s felt presence” (Oram 587). In „Jordan (II),‟ Herbert states his belief in a plain style, and
his rejection of ornamental poetic language. The poems begins as follows: “When first my
lines of heav‟nly joys made mention, / Such was their lustre, they did so excel, / That I sought
out quaint words, and trim invention” (1-3). Herbert reacts here against his own earlier verse,
which he did not include in The Temple (Reid 106). He eventually wanted to avoid these
“quaint words” and the “trim invention” of the Elizabethan tradition. In his poetry, he
conveyed a sense of a speaking voice because of the plain style that he adopted. There is an
economy of expression in his way of writing, and the vocabulary he uses is fairly simple and
often full of colloquialisms. “He had a patriotic as well as writer‟s feeling for his native
tongue . . . [and] was attuned, as Donne was not, to the expressive potential of ordinary
speech” (Reid 135). With this sense of a speaking voice, Herbert very simply suggests a
divine intrusion into his life, while Donne often makes things more complicated.
The combination of these conceits and strong lines in the poetry of Donne and Herbert
made sure that it often brought reason and emotion together. Emotions, feelings, and thoughts
were expressed by these poets in ingenious ways. They used formal devices, like strong lines,
in combination with well-organized arguments, like conceits, to conceal their own interiority,
or that of their speaker. Both of them had their own way of showing that they were witty,
intelligent and well abreast of the times, which provided them with their own means of
23
expression to verbalize what they wanted to convey. As T.S. Eliot described it, we find in
Metaphysical poetry, “instead of the mere explication of the content of a comparison, a
development by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of
the reader” (The Metaphysical Poets 282). Even though this assumption dates from 1921, I
believe it describes very well what the style of Donne and Herbert was and also what they
expected of their readers. Considering the fact that they were chamber poets, and that their
poetry passed from hand to hand in manuscript, they were not expecting too much of their
readership, because it came from the higher classes and was often trained in reading witty
poetry. While Donne liked to work out conceits and strong lines that were very ingenious,
Herbert made them somewhat easier and also liked to include an element of riddling in his
poetry. An example is the letter-dropping that can be found in his poem „Paradise‟: “I blesse
Thee, Lord, because I GROW / Among Thy trees, which in a ROW / To Thee both fruit and
order OW” (1-3), or the anagram in „Jesu‟: “And first I found the corner where was J, / After
where ES, and next where U was graved” (67). Herbert wanted these riddles or verbal
exercises in ingenuity to function as “verbal bait” to draw his readers in, but at the same time,
they also show his delight in technical virtuosity (Williamson 101). This delight was shared
by John Donne, but his style nevertheless differed from that of Herbert:
Donne characteristically argues by analogy, and his conceits give scope to his
ingenuity and to his urge to impose his designs on the world. Even in his more
sprightly sallies, Herbert‟s mind is more passive to the way things are, more a
discoverer than a contriver. Even in those poems that imitate the shape of their
topic, „The Altar‟ and „Easter Wings‟, Herbert seems to be finding a way to
make his words say what he wants rather than twisting „iron pokers into truelove-knots‟. This is partly because of Herbert‟s modest, or at least quiet,
persona and partly because the ingenuity of the forms is equalled by a skilful
tact in fitting his phrasing inside the form he has chosen, something that
contrasts sharply with Donne‟s maniera, his stylish and masterful treatment of
his forms. (Reid 132-3)
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This curiousness of style of Donne and Herbert makes sure that the interiority in their poetry
is not simple. Emotions, affections, fears, ailments, thoughts, and ideas are often expressed in
enigmatic terms. If the reader wants to understand a poem by their hand, he or she has to think
actively about what the speaker is trying to say. However, because of this participation on the
part of the reader, the meaning of the poem will have more effect on him or her, and the poem
itself will stick longer in the mind.
Herbert found a way to make the meaning of his poetry clear in another way than by
expressing it in words. He often made the verse form participate actively in the meaning. A
very good example is the pattern poem „Easter Wings‟:
Lord, Who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poor:
With Thee
O let me rise,
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.
My tender age in sorrow did begin:
And still with sicknesses and shame
Thou didst so punish sin,
That I became
Most thin.
With Thee
Let me combine,
And feel this day thy victory;
For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.
In this poem, the lines become shorter and longer to portray the movement of the wings of a
bird. When the lines become shorter, the meaning of the words becomes more negative, and
when the lines become longer, their meaning becomes more positive. This way, the form of
the poem already partly portrays the meaning of it. In The Temple, it becomes clear that form
was very important for Herbert. There is a variety of different forms in this volume of verse,
and many of them are not even fixed forms, like a sonnet. In spite of this variety of form,
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Herbert was very consequent in sticking to a particular form when he had chosen one for a
poem. Otherwise he could never have written, for example, his pattern poems. He comes
across as a crafty perfectionist, who fitted the words exactly into the moulds that he had
chosen for his poems. There is almost always a nice alteration of longer and shorter lines in
his poetry, and sometimes there is even a kind of symmetry in the form of the poems because
of this, for instance in „Mattins,‟ and in „The Star.‟ In other poems, every stanza has an
indentation of the same lines, for example, in „The Method,‟ and in „Grace.‟ These are two
kinds of poems that show how important form was for Herbert, but of course there are more.
What is also important, however, is that when a writer has a rush of emotions that he wants to
write down, it is not always easy to fit them into the mould that he has in mind for the poem.
Next to Herbert‟s predilection for form, he was also partial to dramatic poetry, full of
emotion. This made him particularly susceptible to this problem of fitting what you want to
say into the mould that you have chosen. “Herbert‟s privileging of emotion remains in
perpetual tension throughout The Temple with his rage for order. He can express beautifully
the salutary effect that uttering fervent and frequently indecorous emotion might have upon
God, but when he examines his interior spaces, Herbert seems to long for the imposition of
order and control” (Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves 113). This is why the poem called „The
Collar‟ is written in a verse form that comes very close to free verse. He even says this
literally in line 4: “My lines and life are free; free as the road.” The form here represents a self
that cannot keep his body and his passions under control. The complete opposite is visible in
„The Call.‟ In this poem, the meter and syntax are regular, which is caused by the fact that it
does not really deal with passions, but is about a call for God to come to the speaker and bring
him joy, light, happiness, etc.
Unlike Herbert, Donne did not have as much variety of form in his poetry. There is
variety of course, but not as much as in Herbert‟s poems. A great deal of Donne‟s poems are
26
songs and sonnets, but there are also elegies, epigrams, verse letters and epitaphs. These are
all fixed, or partly fixed, forms that were known in literary circles, which was not the case
with many of Herbert‟s verse forms. In Donne‟s religious poetry, most poems are sonnets, for
example the Holy Sonnets. According to Anne Ferry, sonnets are the ideal form for the
expression of inwardness. “[Ferry] argues that the sonnet‟s apparent sincerity often results
from its author‟s ability to manipulate language in a way that seems to endow his speaker
with a certain inward existence, one akin to modern literary representations of consciousness”
(Daigle 103). Writers of sonnets often create a persona that represents their outward
appearance, while their inward reality remains fully concealed. Ferry says that this
discrepancy between outward appearance and inward reality is central to the sonnet tradition
that embraces the poetry of, among other poets, John Donne (Daigle 103). However, I believe
that it does not necessarily have to be central to a “sonnet tradition.” Many of Herbert‟s
poems are not sonnets, and they also make his readership suspect a discrepancy between what
is outward and what is inward. Both Donne and Herbert create personae that represent
someone‟s inner workings. However, it is impossible to know if it was the hidden interior of
Donne and Herbert themselves that was made public in their poems, if it was their own
inward reality at an earlier or later time, if it was their own possible interior at a certain
moment, or if it was that of someone else. Considering all the factors mentioned in chapter II
that hindered the expression of inwardness in the early modern period, it would not be
astonishing that Donne and Herbert did not portray their own interiority in their poems, or at
least not their own inward reality at the time of writing them. How they created their personae
will be dealt with in more detail further on.
Poetically, Herbert‟s verse mostly has a practical subject or purpose. He, for example,
wrote poems about what poetry should, or should not, be like in order to be appreciated by
him. In „Jordan (I),‟ the speaker refers to the Elizabethan pastoral tradition, which was
27
completely different from the Metaphysical poetry that Herbert was writing. The first stanza
describes this very well:
Who says that fictions only and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
May no lines pass, except they do their duty
Not to a true, but painted chair? (1-5)
Herbert here argues against the “fictions and false hair” that are praised in the Elizabethan
pastoral tradition, and says that there is also beauty in things that are true. He shows his
disagreement with the fact that his predecessors only regarded a line of verse as a good one if
it celebrated illusions. In addition to his poems about poetry, Herbert wrote many poems with
a didactic purpose in mind. He then comes across as a teacher who gives advice to his fellow
Christians about how to live, about the duties that they have to perform to themselves and to
God, etc. He gives this advice directly, by addressing his fellow Christians, or indirectly, by
speaking, or writing, to God, or by addressing a holy-day or a church-building or one of its
parts. An example of this can be found in „The Church-floor.‟ In this poem, Herbert suggests
what qualities a good Christian should have by linking them to the parts of a church. If you
honor “Patience” (3), “Humility” (6), “Confidence” (9), “Love” (11), and “Charity” (12),
“Sin” (13) and “Death” (16) cannot harm your soul or your body. “Love” and “Charity”
together form the cement which keeps all the other parts in place. In „The Church-porch,‟
Herbert is not only a teacher, but also a moralist. He says that you should control yourself and
your passions in order to become a healthy, happy person. An example of one of these moral
lessons can be found in the second stanza:
Beware of lust: it doth pollute and foul
Whom God in Baptism washt with his own blood.
It blots thy lesson written in thy soul;
The holy lines cannot be understood.
How dare those eyes upon a Bible look,
Much less towards God, whose lust is all their book? (7-12)
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The speaker says here that you have to keep your passions, in this case “lust,” under
control, because if you do not, you will become “polluted.” You will be blinded by lust in
such a way that you will not even understand the Bible anymore. Herbert means by this that,
at that point, you are not aware of what you are doing, because your lust is consuming you,
and then you are not worthy anymore to read the Bible or raise your eyes towards God. In
another stanza from „The Church-porch,‟ Herbert‟s lesson is explicitly expressed in inward
terms:
Who keeps no guard upon himself, is slack,
And rots to nothing at the next great thaw.
Man is a shop of rules, a well-truss‟d pack,
Whose every parcel under-writes a law.
Lose not thy self, nor give thy humours way:
God gave them to thee under lock and key. (139-44)
The speaker here encourages you to scrutinize yourself and keep your body under
control. If you do not do this, your body will decay and your soul will become troubled.
Order, self-scrutiny and following the rules of Galenic medicine can save you, because that is
the way to keep your humours balanced. This is why Herbert‟s poetry, in addition to spiritual
struggles, also often contains elements of self-scrutiny and even of self-criticism. In „The
Church-porch‟ he writes: “Dare to look in thy chest; for „tis thine own” (147). This means
that, by looking inward, you will see what you need because, except from God, you are the
one who knows yourself best. Your body and soul are gifts from God, thus you should honor
them by taking good care of them. According to Michael Schoenfeldt, corporeality and
spirituality are for Herbert not separate realms but closely related arenas with mysterious yet
necessary communication between them (Bodies and Selves 101). This is why, in the stanza
that was quoted above, the lesson given by Herbert about taking care of yourself and your
body is presented with a religious undertone: “God gave [thy humours] to thee under lock and
key.” Next to the didactic and moral purposes of Herbert‟s poetry that have already been
mentioned, some of his poems also include lessons in intimacy and friendship. According to
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Helen Vendler, the reason for this is that Herbert‟s poems are often directed to an “invisible
listener,” namely God (1). Seeing God as a friend gives Herbert the possibility to confide in
him, more than in conventional prayer, because then there is more distance between God and
the speaker. The ending of „The Temper (1)‟ shows that you can always rely on God, because
he is always with you:
Whether I fly with angels, fall with dust,
Thy hands made both, and I am there:
Thy power and love, my love and trust
Make one place ev‟ry where. (25-28)
Human friends may not have the abilities God has, but, in a way, they are also always with
you. They may not be in the same place as you are, but you can speak to them in your
thoughts and think what they would say in return. However, this is not the same as being in
the same room with that friend. Having an invisible listener as a friend has thus one big
advantage, because there are no obstacles to intimacy, while these do exist in real life: age,
circumstance, illness, and overwork (Vendler 26). There are only pure relations with pure
problems. As became clear in „The Temper (1),‟ God is always with you, no matter where you
are or what you are doing. For Herbert, the way to get closest to God was to write. In „The
Quiddity,‟ Herbert says about “a verse” (1) that “it is that which while I use / I am with thee,
and Most take all (11-2).
The fact that Herbert often addresses his poems to God, or has a conversation with him
in his poems, is something that is also visible in John Donne‟s devotional poetry. For Herbert,
as for Donne, God is both the recipient and the inspirer of their poems. The difference is,
however, that Herbert always places himself in the social world, while Donne does not.
Herbert, for instance, speaks of “we” instead of “I” in the poem „Death,‟ he places his
relationship to God in a social context in „Redemption,‟ where he speaks of a “tenant” and a
“rich Lord” (1), and he addresses his fellow Christians in „The Church-porch.‟ In Donne‟s
religious poems, however, the speaker is usually more isolated. There is simply one man,
30
talking to God. His poems often “reveal a scepticism about social conventions and
institutions, a sense that received opinions and beliefs may not fully accord with „Truth‟ and
must be tested against experience, and a conviction that the individual must seek truth for
him- or herself” (Guibbory 129). Another cause of the isolation of Donne‟s persona could be
Donne‟s incessant fear of death. It made all relations impossible, except the one between
himself and God, because God was the only one who he could turn to when he was worried
about sickness, sin, suffering, death, or the afterlife. Others were as clueless as he was about
those subjects. How Donne‟s fear of death affected his poetry, and especially the inwardness
in his poetry, will be discussed in more detail further on. To bring the subject back to Donne‟s
poetics of addressing God, the following poem, „Holy Sonnet XIV,‟ provides a good example
of this. Donne‟s persona here engages in a conversation with God:
Batter my heart, three person‟d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o‟erthrow mee,‟and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to‟another due,
Labour to‟admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv‟d, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely‟I love you,‟and would be loved faine,
But am betroth‟d unto your enemie:
Divorce mee,‟untie, or breake that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you‟enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.
In this „Holy Sonnet,‟ Donne‟s persona describes himself as “a woman who loves one man
(God) but is betrothed to another (Satan), and wants to be rescued” (Guibbory 141). In
addition to this, the speaker compares his body to a fortified town, and sees his reason as
God‟s viceroy in him. This town, however, is usurped by passion, the enemy of God, and the
viceroy has been taken captive. Although the situation seems hopeless, the speaker labors to
admit God into his town, because he loves him, and hopes to be loved in return. He wants
God to save him, and to break the knot between him and the enemy, for he “shall never be
31
free” unless God imprisons him, “nor ever chast,” unless he seizes him by force. The word
“chast” makes the reader think of “ravish” as “violate.” This way, the speaker can be seen as a
sexually sadomasochistic person, because he expresses the desire for God to violate him.
Donne here uses images of profane love to describe his sacred love for God, which is
something that occurs frequently in his devotional poetry. The other images in this sonnet are
rather violent, and show how badly the speaker wants to get back on God‟s side, in order to be
able to be with him. The difference with Herbert is that he felt that he could be with God
through the act of writing, while it appears here that Donne felt that he could be with him
through the act of reasoning. It often occurs in his poems that his reasoning by analogy helps
him to prove, or even justify, the point that he is trying to make. According to George
Williamson, Donne was concerned with a reasoning soul to inform his verse and speak his
pain and pleasure (37). He was well-aware of this, because in the following lines from “The
Prophets,” part VIII of „The Litanie,‟ he describes his “excesse / In seeking secrets” (71-2),
as a sin of his inquiring mind:
Those heavenly Poëts which did see
Thy will, and it expresse
In rythmique feet, in common pray for mee,
That I by them excuse not my excesse
In seeking secrets, or Poëtiquenesse (68-72).
With these lines, the speaker wants to make sure that God knows that he does not blame the
prophets for his inquiring mind, but knows that it is something that springs from his own
character. Because of the fact that Donne let his reasoning soul inform his verse, his readers
were also required to engage in mental activity to understand his poems. According to A.S.
Byatt, Donne describes “not images, but image-making, not sensations but the process of
sensing, not concepts but the idea of the relations of concepts. [Byatt likes] glass because, as
Herbert said, you can look at it and through it simultaneously” (249). She always thinks of
Donne as a “glassy” poet who made “skeletons of poems” (Byatt 249). This is, I believe, a
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very good description of what kind of poet Donne is. He only gives his readers part of the clue
to his poems, and leaves the rest up to them. Examples of this are his strong lines, which
cannot always be immediately be understood. In part XXI of „The Litanie,‟ Donne makes
another important statement about his poetry. He wants to let God and his readers know that
his religious poems are not a means to show how witty and ingenious he is, but that they are
real utterances of religious feelings, ideas and beliefs: “When wee are mov‟d to seeme
religious / Only to vent wit, Lord deliver us” (188-9). In these lines, he reacts against his own
earlier work, of which he says that it was only meant “to vent wit.” However, the reason that
he speaks of “wee” instead of “I” here, is probably that he realizes that there are still many
other authors who only write for this reason. These lines would then be meant to react against
this practice in general and at the same time distance himself from those writers, and from
himself, in his earlier days. He speaks of “wee” because this way he can make a general
statement without accusing anyone or any group in particular.
In addition to the poetical purposes of Donne and Herbert‟s poetry that have already
been mentioned, there is a last one that also deserves some attention. Some of their poems are
expressions of the difficulty of understanding some of the pillars of the Christian belief,
especially the Passion of Jesus Christ. This dramatical sacrifice was for Donne and Herbert
something that was not easily grasped. In relation to this, Michael Schoenfeldt speaks of “the
poetics of sacrifice” („That spectacle of too much weight‟ 561). He says that these writers ask
“how the immense suffering of the Christian sacrifice can be represented in poetry, free of the
inevitable anaesthesia of memory and the distorting fictions of the imagination. They record
not just the immense spiritual benefits that ensue from the sacrifice of the suffering Jesus but
also the prodigious psychological cost of that beneficent sacrifice for the mortal worshipper”
(„That spectacle of too much weight‟ 562). These poetics bring about the expression of
inwardness very easily, because the Christian sacrifice has to do with mental and corporeal
33
suffering and has a great emotional, spiritual and psychological effect on people. Even today,
people are moved by the story and find it difficult to grasp the sacrifice that Christ made. In
his article, Schoenfeldt focuses on poems that give accounts of the Passion, namely Donne‟s
„Goodfriday, 1613, Riding Westward,‟ in which “[he] could not bear to look at his suffering
Savior,” and Herbert‟s „The Sacrifice,‟ in which “[he] assumes the voice of his” („That
spectacle of too much weight‟ 572). Now the focus will be on poems that highlight only part
of the story of the Passion in order to discuss the speaker‟s inwardness as well as Christ‟s.
Focusing only on one element of the Passion, the speakers give an indication of what they
remember the story by. An example of this can be found in „Good Friday,‟ a poem by George
Herbert. In this poem, the focus is on Christ‟s distress after he has suffered so much, not on
the Passion itself. The speaker starts off by wondering how he could possibly describe all the
grief that befell Christ:
O my chief good,
How shall I measure out thy blood?
How shall I count what thee befell,
And each grief tell? (1-4)
He realises that he has to undertake a number of tasks in order to be able to understand
Christ‟s grief, but he does not know how to fulfil them. By trying to “measure out” Christ‟s
woe he is hoping to come closer to him, which also becomes clear in the way in which he
constantly links himself to Christ by aligning “I” and “thou.” This suggests an imitatio Christi
or at least a need to identify with Christ. If the speaker understands Christ‟s life and his
suffering, he will be able to try to follow his example, and he believes that that way of life
will bring him salvation. However, this has consequences for the speaker‟s sense of self and
individuality. By trying to live like Christ did, he erases part of his own selfhood. Firstly, he
engages in carrying some of the weight of Christ‟s suffering with him. Secondly, all the
choices that he makes in life are based on what is right and wrong according to Christianity,
but not according to what he himself feels. Here again, a speaker becomes visible who is not
34
always honest about his own inner self, because he wants to occupy himself with someone
else‟s suffering, and because he wants to think or feel things that he does not actually think or
feel.
In the three stanzas that follow, the speaker continues to ask how he should describe
Christ‟s woes and distress, but in each stanza he uses a different metaphor for the
measurement of this grief. Then, he goes on to say that his own sins should get the sorrows
they deserve, and in this case, Christ‟s sorrows provide the solution:
Or rather let
My several sins their sorrows get;
That each beast his cure doth know,
Each sin may so. (17-20)
The speaker knows that his sins need sorrow in order to be cured, just like animals know
which is the right herb to cure them. This belief was one that was generally accepted in the
early modern period. Donne even mentioned it in his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,
namely in his fourth “Meditation”: “The dog that pursues it, though hee bee subject to
sicknes, even proverbially, knowes his grasse that recovers him” (426). In the following
stanza, the speaker makes his own sacrifice. He gives up his heart to Christ, so that he can
write his sorrows down in it with the speaker‟s blood. The speaker hopes this will relieve
some of Christ‟s grief. And as became clear in the previous stanza, sorrows cure sins:
Since blood is fittest, Lord, to write
Thy sorrows in, and bloody fight;
My heart hath store, write there, where in
One box doth lie both ink and sin: (21-24)
Finally, the speaker describes some of Christ‟s sorrows, and says that they will make his sins
disappear when they enter his heart. When this has happened, there is room for Christ to enter
it and fill it up with his presence:
That when sin spies so many foes,
Thy whips, thy nails, thy wounds, thy woes
All come to lodge there, sin may say,
No room for me, and fly away.
35
Sin being gone, oh fill the place,
And keep possession with thy grace;
Lest sin take courage and return,
And all the writings blot or burn. (25-32)
In this poem, Herbert‟s speaker has made a sacrifice in order to help Christ relieve some of
the grief that sprung from his at the cross. The imitatio Christi is clear. Herbert did not give an
account of the Passion, he only mentioned the distress that Christ felt afterwards, and
described in one line what this distress was about: “Thy whips, thy nails, thy wounds, thy
woes” (26). In the end, the speaker hopes that he has relieved some of Christ‟s grief, and that
Christ will be thankful and will enter his heart. Again, like in „The Quiddity,‟ the wish to be
together with God, or in this case, his son, becomes visible in this poem by Herbert. Another
example of a poem which deals with an element of the Passion is „The Crosse,‟ by John
Donne. The title already gives away that the focus in this poem is on the image of the cross.
As was mentioned earlier, the purpose of this poem is to underline the omnipresence of the
Crucified Christ in the microcosm and the macrocosm. The image of the cross first represents
the body of the Crucified Christ, and then he replaces it by his own body, echoing Christ‟s:
“Who can deny mee power, and liberty / To stretch mine armes, and mine owne Crosse to
be?” (17-8) He feels that the image of the cross and, related to it, Christ‟s sacrifice, may not
be forgotten or denied: “Who from the picture would avert his eye, / How would he flye his
paines, who there did dye?” (7-8) Later in the poem, the speaker “spiest out Crosses in small
things” (21). He sees crosses in everything, which means that the image of the crucified Christ
can consume you so much that you carry it with you all the time in your everyday life.
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B. The Creation of a Persona.
Now that the relation between inwardness and the formal aspects and poetics of the
religious poetry of Donne and Herbert has been discussed, there will be a shift in focus to the
contents of their poetry. This chapter will deal with the question how Donne and Herbert
created their personae. They had to speak through one of those in order to protect their own
hidden interior, but this does not mean that their personae could not partly be based on their
own personality or experience. Their speaker could reflect something that happened in their
own life, at the time of writing or before, he could express how they had felt at a particular
time in their life, he could discuss the feelings or experiences of one of their intimate
acquaintances, etc. However, the persona could also reveal the hidden interior of Donne or
Herbert, because they were not able to show it in real life. There is no way of knowing if what
was depicted by the speaker of a poem was real or not. For Donne, for example, it was
especially important to be able to hide behind a persona. He was a figure who had an
exceptional way with words, because, as Lynne Magnusson points out, “[his linguistic capital]
is what enabled his poetry, his sexual conquests, his literary friendships, his relative success
as a secretary, his access to patrons like the Countess of Bedford, his notice by King James,
and his power to preach sermons with the golden tongue of St. Chrysostom” (183). However,
what is important for this discussion is that “[h]is tongue probably also got him into lots of
trouble – witness the cockiness of his first letter to Sir George More after eloping with his
daughter, which helped to land him in prison; . . . Donne‟s concern about potential political
danger if his Satires were to be published and the actual brief scare when a sermon preached
in 1627 offended Charles I” (Magnusson 183). If all this is combined with the fact that his
poetry often created doubts about his religious beliefs, in a country that was explicitly
Protestant, a persona could not have done him any harm. It is known that Donne was a
chamber poet, thus the fact that most of his writings did not get into print before his death but
37
circulated in manuscript in his coterie community, probably protected him from being
persecuted. However, it was still better to play safe.
George Herbert was known to be a less provocating person than Donne. However, this
does not mean that a persona was not important to him as well. He was a very devout person,
but his persona sometimes was so tenacious of the Christian doctrine and values that it is
doubtful that Herbert honored all of them in real life. Unless he was superhuman, this was
impossible. He, for example, “repudiat[ed] . . . earthly love with an asceticism that he could
not maintain in life (at least one hopes not) since he took a wife” (Reid 106). Perhaps
Herbert‟s persona gave him the possibility to think and write about the person that he wanted
to be, but could not, because of his everyday obligations and duties.
The fact that Donne and Herbert each put part of their own temperament into their
speakers formed the basis of the creation of these personae. As was mentioned earlier,
Donne‟s style was rather extravagant and expressed an individual self-consciousness. His
speakers were therefore usually strong and independent persons. Helen Gardner says about
Donne that he managed to write down “extraordinary thoughts in ordinary situations” (24).
„Holy Sonnet XIV,‟ which was quoted above (“Batter my heart . . .”), is a nice example of
Donne‟s temperament. He makes use of violent and profane imagery in it, and uses his reason
to build up an ingenious argument. Even in the sonnets in which his imagery is not violent, he
comes across as a combative and defiant person. This was partly because of his inquiring
mind. He not only always sought to know things himself, but also expected this of his readers.
Because of his own inquiring nature, he liked to defy them by composing a difficult conceit or
another ingenious argument. What is also easy to notice in all of Donne‟s writings is the
dominance of bodily and sensory images. They are often used to express physical as well as
psychological inwardness. Even his way of making it hard for his readers to understand his
poetry has often been seen in corporeal terms. A.S. Byatt, for example, says the following
38
about this: “[t]he pleasure Donne offers our bodies is the pleasure of extreme activity of the
brain. He is characteristically concerned with the schemas we have constructed to map our
mental activities – geometry, complex grammatical constructions, physiology, definitions. He
is thinking about thinking” (Byatt 248). Byatt realizes that Donne does not only make his
readers react mentally on his poetry, but also physically, by causing their brain to work very
actively. For this reason, the effect of his poetry is more extensive. In addition to this, the
visible body is something that all his readers understand, even today, because they all have
one. It does not matter that the knowledge of the body today has advanced since the early
modern period, they will still understand most of the period‟s bodily images, definitely the
ones that concern outer body parts. This bodily imagery is thus fairly straightforward, but it
are the relations between those images that make up the difficulty of Donne‟s poetry. He also
describes many feelings, ideas, or thoughts in physical terms, and this makes them almost
tangible for his readers. An example of this corporeal expression of inwardness can be found
in „Holy Sonnet III,‟ in the following lines: “O might those sighes and teares returne againe /
Into my breast and eyes, which I have spent” (1-2). These lines can be understood by every
human being, because everybody knows how it feels to sigh or cry. Nevertheless, Donne
plays around with these images that are familiar to his readers until they form difficult
conceits, ingenious arguments, etc. His readers thus have to think actively if they want to
understand the point that he is trying to make. In addition to this, they cannot understand all
bodily images, because the medical knowledge of the inner workings of the body has much
developed since the early modern period. They need knowledge of humoral theory and
Galenic medicine for some images to be able to understand them. The fact that Donne
describes so many things in physical terms which are actually not physical, is one of the
reasons why A.S. Byatt speaks of an “embodied soul” in relation to him (251). Even mental
concepts and concepts that have to do with the soul are explained in physical terms by Donne.
39
An example is that the persona of his religious poetry often engages in self-scrutiny, and even
self-criticism, and explains this in corporeal terms. „The Litanie‟ contains several examples.
Part III („The Holy Ghost‟), for instance, shows the speaker‟s regret about his past sins of
“pride and lust”:
O Holy Ghost, whose temple I
Am, but of mudde walls, and condensed dust,
And being sacrilegiously
Half wasted with youths fires, of pride and lust,
Must with new stormes be weatherbeat (19-23).
Lust is partly a physical sin, but pride is not. However, here also, it is seen in corporeal terms,
as something that helps to destroy the body. In part XXI of „The Litanie,‟ the speaker regrets
that he sometimes let his senses and his natural desires conquer his responsibilities to himself
and to God:
When sense, which thy souldiers are,
Wee arme against thee, and they fight for sinne,
When want, sent but to tame, doth warre
And worke despaire a breach to enter in,
When plenty, Gods image, and seale
Makes us Idolatrous,
And love it, not him, whom it should reveale,
When wee are mov‟d to seeme religious
Only to vent wit, Lord deliver us. (181-9)
Considering the fact that the focus here is on Donne‟s religious poetry, it is logical that his
speaker‟s self-scrutiny can be linked to religion. After all, Donne called religion “[t]he
supernaturall food” (188) in his first Anniversary, „An Anatomie of the World.‟ It is thus
something a human being needs, because he compares it to food. However, the fact that
religion was seen as one of the basic needs of human beings does not mean that it is easy to
speak or write about it, and definitely not about religious feelings, ideas or thoughts. Donne‟s
persona can thus be an expedient for him to have a conversation with God, or to speak or
write about him. As mentioned in the introduction, God had an “immediate, superhuman
knowledge of the hidden interior of persons” (Maus 10). Self-scrutiny on the part of the
40
speaker can therefore seem in vain, but it is not. God may know the hidden interior of
persons, but that does not mean that those persons really know their own, let alone that of
others. A writer like Donne could therefore examine himself in his poetry through a persona,
without anyone knowing for sure if it is he who is revealing his own interiority, or his speaker
revealing someone else‟s or an invented one.
As mentioned earlier, Herbert was less instigating as a person than Donne. Cedric
Watts says about him that “though [his] temperament seems generally less pugnacious and
combative than Donne‟s, the persuasiveness of the poems lies largely in their tonal control
and flexibility, so that we can readily imagine the sounds of emotionally engaged
conversation, dispute or dialogue” (16). This way, his poetry could also contain passionate
utterances, but they were never as instigating, defying, or aggressive as Donne‟s. Examples
can be found in „The Collar.‟ In the notes to this poem, Ann Pasternak Slater mentioned that
“[c]ollar puns on choler (anger) and the collar used for restraint and discipline (e.g. of a dog);
„to slip the collar‟ was often used figuratively for evasion of restraint” (467). This poem is a
cry for liberty, and an utterance of rage against the constraints of the speaker‟s life:
I struck the board, and cry‟d, No more.
I will abroad.
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store. (1-5)
Here, Herbert‟s persona thus comes across as angry and passionate. In general, however, his
speaker creates a more intimate sphere. Herbert‟s inwardness, whether it is peaceful or
tormented, is usually related to a concern with the self and its surrender to God. His persona
thus has conversations with God, but still pays attention to the world around him while having
them. He wants his behaviour to be an example to his fellow Christians, and that is why he
uses so much imagery that comes from everyday life, including the social world. Whereas “in
Donne thought seems in control over feeling, [in] Herbert feeling seems in control over
41
thought” (Eliot, George Herbert 17). He cares more about the message that he wants to
convey than about how he puts it. As was explained above, he cares about form too, but less
about the ingenuity of his argument. His conceits will usually be less difficult than Donne‟s,
and his imagery is mostly more recognizable. In relation to their imagery, however, there is
one thing that Donne and Herbert especially have in common. As stated above, Donne used
many bodily images, and this was also the case with Herbert. For Donne, these images were
important because they were part of his world, and this is characteristic of writers in the early
modern period, and also partly because of his fear of death, but this will be explained later on.
For Herbert, they were important because of “his abiding concern with health” (Schoenfeldt,
Bodies and Selves 105). He had always had a poor health himself, and this caused his
incessant concern for health, diet, and the body in general.
Next to the temperament and nature of Donne and Herbert, imagery is thus also
important for the creation of their personae. By linking their speaker with different sets of
images, the reader gets an idea of what kind of person the persona is. This way, Donne and
Herbert can steer the judgement of their readers about their speakers. According to Frances
Austin, they both set their poems in the world of affairs in which they lived (8). They thus set
their poems in the real world, not some painted one, like the pastoral in the Elizabethan
tradition. As was mentioned several times before, Donne and Herbert both paid attention to
the body, the senses, the humours, and the passions of the mind in their religious poetry.
Donne‟s „Holy Sonnet V‟ is a good example of this. It portrays nicely Donne‟s “concern with
his dual parts of body and soul” (Williamson 29-30):
I am a little world made cunningly
Of Elements, and an Angelike spright,
But black sinne hath betraid to endlesse night
My worlds both parts, and (oh) both parts must die.
You which beyond that heaven which was most high
Have found new sphears, and of new lands can write,
Powre new seas in mine eyes, that so I might
Drowne my world with my weeping earnestly,
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Or wash it if it must be drown‟d no more:
But oh it must be burnt! alas the fire
Of lust and envie have burnt it heretofore,
And made it fouler; Let their flames retire,
And burne me o Lord, with a fiery zeale
Of thee and thy house, which doth in eating heale.
In the first line already, one of the views that dominated the early modern period becomes
visible. People believed then that the macrocosm was represented in the microcosm, or that
the world was represented in the body of man. This meant that everything that existed in the
world corresponded to something in the human body. This is also the case in the sonnet,
because the speaker says that “[he is] a little world made cunningly / Of Elements,” which are
earth, water, air and fire. In Galenic medicine, these four elements corresponded to the four
humours in man. Earth corresponded to black bile, which was also called melancholy, water
corresponded to phlegm, air to blood, and fire to yellow bile or choler. In addition to the
elements of which his little world is made, the speaker also possesses “an Angelike spright,”
which is an angelic spirit. The spirit is normally a medium between the soul and the body in
Galenic medicine, but in this sonnet it can be interpreted as „soul,‟ because in the fourth line
he speaks of “both parts” of his world. Most likely, those two parts are body and soul, not
body and something which links body and soul. The speaker says that “black sinne,” which
refers to melancholy, has betrayed both parts of his world “to endlesse night,” and now both
parts must die. This is an indication that the speaker is someone who cannot keep his passions
under control. It is also a good example of the fact that diseases of the mind, in this case
melancholy, can also affect the body, because both parts of his world are destroyed by black
sin. To resolve this situation, he asks someone who has discovered a new world far away to
pour water from the seas of that new world into his eyes. This way, he can drown his world
with sincere weeping, or at least wash it. Finally, he realizes that it must be burnt. Until now,
his world has been burnt by “lust and envie,” which again are passions of the mind, and has
been made foul by them, but now he wants God to burn it, because divine fire is the only fire
43
that may cleanse him. The reason for this is that this divine fire does “in eating heale,” or is
destructive only to restore again.
An example of Herbert‟s attention for the body is his poem „The Collar.‟ This poem
does not contain an unusual amount of bodily imagery, but the speaker is a good example of a
person with an imbalance of humoral fluids, of someone who cannot keep his passions under
control. This is also visible in the near free verse form, which was already mentioned.
Michael Schoenfeldt says about this poem that it is “a kind of comedy of humours” (Bodies
and Selves 110). As stated above, it is a cry for liberty, and an utterance of rage against the
constraints of the speaker‟s life. The humoral imagery already starts in the title, because
“[c]ollar puns on choler (anger),” which is also another name for one of the four humours,
namely yellow bile (Slater 467). The anger of the speaker becomes clear from the very
beginning:
I struck the board, and cry‟d, No more.
I will abroad.
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store. (1-5)
It thus becomes clear that he wants to be free from all the constraints in his life. He also
comes across as somebody who does not deal well with passions of the mind, because he
“cry‟d,” “sighed,” and “pined.” Then he continues:
Shall I be still in suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit?
Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did dry it: there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the year only lost to me? (6-13)
In relation to lines 7 and 8, it should be mentioned that bloodletting, which was also called
phlebotomy, was believed to solve humoral imbalances. According to Michael Schoenfeldt,
“bloodletting was a common treatment for choleric dispositions” (Bodies and Selves 110). A
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bit further he even says that “Edward Herbert remembers his brother George as susceptible to
the choleric temperament,” so in this light, the speaker here has a trait in common with the
writer of the poem. What is also noticeable, is that some words in the lines that were quoted
above have Christian connotations, for instance, the “thorn[s]” of Christ‟s crown, the “wine”
that was often seen as Christ‟s “blood,” the “corn” that was in the bread that signified Christ‟s
body, and the “cordial fruit” that made Adam and Eve commit the first human sin. The “road”
in the fourth line was “spelt rode in 1633, possibly also evoking the rood, or cross, which is of
course what brings spiritual freedom” (Slater 468). After this, the poem becomes a dialogue
between Herbert‟s speaker and his conscience, which proves a point without uttering a word.
The reader understands that the speaker makes mistakes by reading between the lines what his
conscience would be saying. Now that the speaker has finished showing how angry he is, he
makes another mistake by suggesting that he should engage in “double pleasures” and stop
caring about what is right or wrong: “Recover all thy sigh-blown age / O double pleasures:
leave thy cold dispute / Of what is fit, and not: forsake thy cage” (19-21). He wants to get
away from the “cage” that his conscience put him in. He addresses his conscience in the
following way:
Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see. (22-26)
He says that his conscience held on to “petty thoughts” which blinded him. Towards the end
of the poem, the speaker gets so presumptuous that he defies death and defends himself
rebelliously:
Call in thy death‟s head there: tie up thy fears.
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need,
Deserves his load. (29-32).
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Finally, he realizes that, in his rage, he forgot to have faith. This abrupt switch is a reaction to
all the silent arguments that came from the speaker‟s conscience. He was so busy being angry
that he could not hear God‟s call:
But as I rav‟d and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child:
And I reply‟d, My Lord (33-36).
I believe that the message of this poem is that one should always listen to his conscience. It
does not form a cage by setting rules, but helps you to gain control over your body and soul,
so that you can lead a healthy life.
This bodily and humoral imagery is closely intertwined with self-control and selfscrutiny. If a person in the early modern period did not keep himself, his body, and his
passions under control, he decayed. Here again, there is a correspondence between the
macrocosm and the microcosm. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the world view
was changing rapidly, because new learning was facilitated by the availability of printed
books. There was a rise of what was called the New philosophy. This was a very pessimistic
theory that came into conflict with traditional learning. It advised to ignore the Great Chain of
Being, it showed that the earth revolves around the sun instead of the other way around, etc.
Donne‟s much-quoted lines from his first Anniversary, „An Anatomie of the World,‟ illustrate
this pessimism of the New Philosophy very well: “new Philosophy calls all in doubt” (205),
and “‟Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone; / All just supply, and all Relation” (213-4). Both
man and his world were thus decayed, or at least, were in decay. However, many people
shared the opinion that “[i]n a world of change the rule at best was constancy, not progress”
(Williamson 41). Donne, and especially Herbert, followed this lead in most of their work.
Herbert was an advocate of self-control, which became clear earlier, in the discussion of „The
Church-porch‟ and „The Collar.‟ Keeping his own poor health in mind, it is understandable
that he examined himself very closely too. He believed that a good diet provided the cure for
46
most diseases of body and mind. In relation to this, Michael Schoenfeldt says that “[o]nly
through scrupulous attention to one‟s humoral temperament [one can] discover the „hidden
properties‟ of the self, and respond with the proper diet. In this way, the dietary regimes that
Herbert explored throughout his life were continuous with the spiritual inwardness Herbert
mapped so brilliantly in his poetry. Both demand scrupulous self-examination” (Bodies and
Selves 116). A good example of food in relation to self-scrutiny is the last poem of The
Temple: „Love (3).‟ In this poem, the speaker is welcomed to a heavenly banquet by God,
personified as “Love.” Initially, he is hesitant to accept Love‟s offer, because he feels “guilty
of dust and sin” (2). Then Love comforts him and says he will take the blame for all of his
sins. The speaker finally realizes that he cannot do anything but submit to God: “You must sit
down, says Love, and taste my meat: / So I did sit and eat” (17-8). This poem illustrates a
speaker that engaged in self-examination and found himself unworthy to dine in heaven. God,
however, makes him realize that he should accept himself and his sins, and makes him sit
down and eat the body of Christ. This shows that a combination of faith in God and the right
diet can make your sins disappear. For Donne, self-control was also important, as became
clear in the discussion of „Holy Sonnet V.‟ However, he did not link it to diet and food as
explicitly as Herbert did. This is probably because, in real life, Herbert constantly had to
worry about his own diet because of his poor health, and Donne did not, or at least, not as
much as Herbert. “Herbert [found] in the regimens of temperance a blueprint for constructing
a self,” while Donne did not really need those to construct one (Schoenfeldt, Bodies and
Selves 96). He mostly used other imagery to create a persona.
In writing, Donne and Herbert tried to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and
feeling. This is why they often described things that were not tangible or visible, like
emotions, thoughts, and ideas, or in short, interiority, by things that were tangible or visible.
The bodily imagery that was discussed above is an example of this, but of course, they used
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other sorts of imagery too. “Donne especially, and Herbert, too, set their poems in the world
of affairs in which they lived” (Austin 8). However, the fact that Herbert always placed
himself, or his persona, in the social world and Donne did not is something that is also visible
in their choice of imagery. Many of Donne‟s images came from unusual spheres that were not
accessible to everyone, while those of Herbert were more recognizable. This does not mean
that Donne‟s imagery was not extracted from “the world of affairs in which [he] lived,” or
from domains that were typical for his time, but that it came from sources that were not part
of the everyday life of every man or woman. It is known that Donne was a chamber poet, so
his clever readers were probably familiar with his imagery, but had his poetry ever passed
beyond his coterie during his lifetime, it is likely that the readers who would have read it then
would not have understood some of the images. This made his persona more isolated as a
person than Herbert‟s, because Herbert‟s imagery was more accessible to everyone.
“Donne absorbed himself in learning, . . . . [L]aw, medicine, astronomy, and other new
sciences provided material for his verbal creativity in poetry and prose” (Magnusson 183).
One of these new sciences was cartography, which is also an example of Donne‟s not so
evident choice of sources for his imagery. As was explained before, this art was flourishing in
the early modern period, and everybody knew about maps, but not everybody had held a map
in his hands or had looked at one. This was a privilege for the higher classes. In relation to
this, Donne also used the discoveries of new land as an important source of imagery. Again,
people had heard or read about these discoveries, but not everyone had had the possibility to
visit such a newfound land. These two sources of imagery occur in many of Donne‟s poems,
for example, in „Hymne to God my God, in my Sicknesse‟: “Whilst my Physitians by their
love are growne / Cosmographers, and I their mapp” (6-7), and “Is the Pacifique Sea my
home? Or are / The Easterne riches? Is Jerusalem? / Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltare”
(16-8). With this poem, Donne illustrates his knowledge of maps, and especially of travelling
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and of discoveries. Indeed, he had travelled to Cadiz and the Azores before he was married,
thus he knew how it felt to be far away (Post 8). Another source of imagery that Donne used
was one that was unusual for religious poetry, namely eroticism. There is, for example, a
connection between sacred and profane love in the Holy Sonnets. In „Holy Sonnet XIII,‟
Donne‟s persona draws an analogy between his address to God in the poem and his past
addresses to his “profane mistresses” (10) in his “idolatrie” (9). He seems to think that God
might appreciate his wit just like his “profane mistresses” did. These are not images that one
would expect in a religious poem. Furthermore, in „Holy Sonnet XVIII,‟ Donne calls the
Church Christ‟s “Spouse” (1), and says that she is most pleasing to him (Christ) “when she‟is
embrac‟d and open to most men” (14). This is a very erotic image, but it is used in a risky
way, namely to describe a Holy institution. Donne discusses the Catholic and Protestant
Churches in this sonnet by using imagery from a sphere that his readers do not expect. This
sonnet also forms a very good example of how Donne‟s persona is often an isolated person,
because in comparison with Herbert‟s personae, he is very daring, sometimes even frank,
strong, and independent.
With Herbert, this is much less the case because his persona is generally not as
provocating as Donne‟s. However, Herbert‟s imagery is generally also taken from different
domains. “Apart from the ever-present religious vocabulary, one of [his] chief sources of
words – and the one he uses most in his imagery – is everyday domestic life” (Austin 29). He
found his inspiration in everyday activities, for example, music, the household, cooking,
clothing, gardening, trade and commerce, the sea, sports, and occupations. Nevertheless, this
does not mean that he did not know about Donne‟s sources of imagery, for example
cartography and the discoveries, he just did not write about them. He had had a good
education, so he had learned about them, but he also heard a lot about foreign land by
listening to the stories of his oldest brother, Edward, and one of his best friends, Nicholas
49
Ferrar. Edward had been appointed ambassador in Paris in 1619, and Nicholas Ferrar had
travelled to the Continent, where he stayed from 1613 until 1618 (Slater lxvi). An example of
Herbert‟s sources of imagery can be found in his poem „The Pearl‟, which contains words that
come from the sphere of trade and commerce: “I flie to Thee, and fully understand / Both the
main sale, and the commodities; / And at what rate and price I have Thy love” (33-5). In these
lines Herbert compares his relation to God with a commercial relation. This way, he tries to
explain his feelings towards God in words that every human being should be able to
understand. His poetry is therefore often an “opening up through speech of the inner spaces of
the self,” in order to give advice about interiority to his readers (Schoenfeldt, Bodies and
Selves 102). In writing, and in using recognizable imagery, Herbert makes the hidden interior
of his persona visible. And again, the domains from which he took his imagery prove that
Herbert always placed himself, or his persona, in the social world.
C. Death, Sin and Suffering.
The relationship between formal aspects, poetics, and inwardness in the poetry of
Donne and Herbert has been discussed, the speakers of their poetry have been introduced, and
now the focus will be on what those speakers said. This chapter will reveal how they dealt
with death, sin and suffering, and the following chapter will illustrate how they saw their
relationship to God.
In the previous chapters, it was frequently mentioned that the people in the early
modern period believed that there was a connection between what was physical and what was
psychological. In relation to this, it was also explained that it was your own fault when you
were not healthy. If you had committed a sin, it could be that this caused you to suffer
physically. Committing a sin did not necessarily refer to something as bad as a murder, it
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could, but mostly it just meant that there was an imbalance of humours. For example, if you
were a very choleric person, you had too much yellow bile, and you easily became angry.
Being angry, you committed sins, because you said things that hurt other people, you maybe
even got violent, etc. Furthermore, when your humours were not balanced, you fell ill, and
needed purging or a change of diet in order to get better again. If you chose for a good diet,
you were “banquet[ing] the soul” by “starving sin corporeally” (Schoenfeldt, Bodies and
Selves 122). If you chose for purging, you made the substances that made you sick leave the
body physically, by bloodletting, vomiting, transpiring or excreting. For a Christian, however,
purging could also happen psychologically, namely by confession of sins. In Herbert‟s poem
„Confession,‟ he explains this:
Wherefore my faults and sins,
Lord, I acknowledge; take thy plagues away:
For since confession pardon wins,
I challenge here the brightest day,
The clearest diamond: let them do their best,
They shall be thick and cloudy to my breast. (25-30)
The speaker here acknowledges his sins and asks God to take his plagues away, “since
confession wins pardon.” He says that now that he has confessed, his breast is clearer than
“the brightest day” or “the clearest diamond.” Of course, these lines also include the
implication that God punished people for their sins. These punishments, however, were of a
psychological kind, for instance, making the sinner feel remorse, contrition, and regret.
Although the physical sickness was often also called a punishment from God, people knew it
was actually caused by humoral imbalance. Sarah Skwire explains that “[s]ickness and
suffering are the result of failure on our part, and they are intended to spur us to better
behaviour and understanding. „A naughty child is better sick than whole‟ because once he is
sick he has God‟s assistance in starting the long process of amendment” (15). God thus does
not punish his people to hurt them, but to help them, and to make them realize that they have
to change their way of life in order to be healthy. An example of this can be found in
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Herbert‟s poem „Affliction (1).‟ The speaker of this poem looks back into his past and
describes the change in his attitude towards God when his situation altered from a care-free
one to a troubled one, full of despair, suffering and questioning. He was someone who was in
God‟s service, and in the beginning, this made him happy: “When first thou didst entice to
thee my heart, / I thought the service brave: / So many joys I writ down for my part” (1-3).
However, he delighted in the wrong things, for example, in God‟s “fine furniture” (7), his
“glorious household-stuff” (9), etc. He was only enthralled by material things, and expected to
receive anything he wanted by God‟s grace: “thou gav‟st me milk and sweetnesses; / I had my
wish and way” (19-20). His attitude of taking everything for granted was of course not
appreciated by God, and additionally, it made sure that the speaker did not understand that he
could also experience sorrow and pain. When, over time, his “sorrow did twist and grow”
(23), he was amazed and bitter, and became a complaining sufferer instead of a happy servant.
Considering Herbert‟s stance as “a writer whose spirituality is frequently articulated in terms
of an unexpected but stunning corporeality,” it is not astonishing that the speaker‟s sorrows
are expressed in physical terms:
My flesh began unto my soul in pain,
Sicknesses cleave my bones;
Consuming agues dwell in ev‟ry vein,
And tune my breath to groans.
Sorrow was all my soul; I scarce believed,
Till grief did tell me roundly, that I lived. (25-30)
According to Sarah Skwire, “when Herbert thinks of illness, the illness that comes to mind is
ague” (14). In this stanza too, his persona speaks of “consuming agues [that] dwell in ev‟ry
vein.” The reason for this is probably that this is the disease from which he suffered himself
more than once. “The early modern usage of „ague‟ refers to a particularly severe fever, most
often malarial, that came and went in regular fits” (Skwire 2). Isaak Walton said in his rather
unreliable Life of Mr. George Herbert that Herbert suffered from ague around the year 1629:
“Mr. Herbert was seized with a sharp quotidian ague, . . . . In his house he remained about
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twelve months, and there became his own physician, and cured himself of his ague by
forbearing drink, and not eating any meat, . . . and by such a constant diet he removed his
ague, but with inconveniences that were worse; for he brought upon himself . . . a supposed
consumption” (357). It is known that this source cannot always be trusted, but there are also
accounts from Herbert himself that illustrate his poor health and his susceptibility to ague. In
a letter that was written around the year 1610, he wrote to his mother: “But I fear the heat of
my late ague hath dried up those springs by which scholars say the Muses use to take up their
habitations” (344). He was only seventeen years old when he wrote this, but was already
afraid that his fever had dried up the source of his inspiration. After the stanza in which the
speaker complains about his “sorrows” and “sicknesses,” he has the audacity to blame his
misery on God:
When I got health, thou took‟st away my life,
And more; for my friends die:
My mirth and edge was lost; a blunted knife
Was of more use than I.
Thus thin and lean without a fence or friend,
I was blown through with ev‟ry storm and wind. (31-6)
Instead of realizing that he himself is to blame for taking every gift from God for granted, he
blames God for taking everything away without a reason. He even accuses him of taking
away his support through difficult times, namely his “health” and his “friends,” which caused
him to be “thin and lean without a fence or friend.” What he also does not realize is that, if he
wants support and comfort, he has to turn to God, not away from him. Up to the penultimate
stanza, the speaker continues to blame God. Then he surrenders to God and wonders what he
will do with him: “Now I am here, what thou wilt do with me / None of my books will show”
(55-6). However, his real submission only comes with the final lines: “Ah my dear God! I am
clean forgot, / Let me not love thee, if I love thee not” (65-6). The double negatives in these
lines stress the fact that he does love God. The reader is left in the dark about the question if
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he realizes what he has done wrong, but his declaration of love for God in the final lines of
the poem are definitely a step in the right direction.
In the early modern period, there was thus a causal relationship between sin and
sickness, and as became clear with the poem „Affliction (1),‟ this relationship is also visible in
the poetry of George Herbert. It is the reason for his many suggestions for rules to live by in
his poems, for example in „The Church-porch.‟ As was already explained, this poem is full of
advice for keeping your passions under control and living a healthy life, for example: “Slight
those who say amidst their sickly healths, / Thou liv‟st by rule. What doth not so, but man?”
(133-4). Michael Schoenfeldt says about humoral theory that it “transforms each act of
consumption and excretion into an operation that determines the health of body and mind.
These intense physiological and moral pressures make a philosophy such as Stoicism . . .
enormously attractive, even though its emphasis on apathy tends to conflict with Herbert‟s
dedication to the idea of passion properly directed to God” (Bodies and Selves 111). Herbert
indeed was a stoic in some ways. He needed the self-control in order to stay healthy, but did
not believe in a self that was completely void of emotion. As Schoenfeldt said, the “passions”
had to be “properly directed to God.” A person therefore had to avoid all passions that could
disturb the humoral balance, but could allow all positive emotions, namely the ones that he or
she felt when thinking of, or talking to, God. This is the reason why his poems, which are
mostly conversations with God, are often charged with emotion. These emotions can be
positive ones, like love, longing, and joy, or negative ones, like despair, anger, and fear. Even
when his poems deal with passions of the mind, as negative emotions were called in the early
modern period, Herbert connects them to a positive message. When people have to endure
suffering, this can deepen the roots of their faith, as in „Affliction (5).‟ In the last stanza of
this poem, Herbert writes:
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Affliction then is ours;
We are the trees, whom shaking fastens more,
While blustring winds destroy the wanton bowers,
And ruffle all their curious knots and store.
My God, so temper joy and woe
That thy bright beams my tame thy bow. (19-24)
The speaker here compares himself and his fellow Christians to trees that can resist all sorts of
weather conditions. The worse the weather is, the better they are rooted in the ground. His
argument is that this is the same with Christians. The worse their affliction is, the stronger
their belief in God gets. They know that they can rely on God, because he will temper any
affliction.
This linking of suffering to a more positive message is something that is also visible in
the devotional poetry of John Donne. As Michael Schoenfeldt explains, “[early-seventeenthcentury] writers, and Donne in particular, imagine pain as constitutive rather than destructive
of the subject. . . . Where we imagine selfhood to reside in the experiences, memories, and
desires that produce the quirks we call personality, [they] imagine such quirks as
encrustations that must be purged if true selfhood is to emerge” („That spectacle of too much
weight‟ 566). An example of this longing for affliction in order to be purged can be found in
the following lines from „Holy Sonnet XIX,‟ which is also called „Oh, to vex me, contraryes
meet in one‟:
In prayers, and flattering speaches I court God:
To morrow I quake with true feare of his rod.
So my devout fitts come and go away
Like a fantastic Ague: save that here
Those are my best dayes, when I shake with feare. (10-4)
With these lines, Donne‟s persona illustrates that on some days he is acting as if he is devout,
like in line 10, but on other days he really is devout, because he fears God‟s afflictions, like in
line 11. He compares his fickleness in being devout to a “fantastic ague,” so just like with
Herbert, he sees a link between the physical and the psychological. What is also remarkable is
that he describes his best days as the ones when he is shaking with fear, and his worst as the
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ones when he is feigning to be devout. For Donne, the notion of punishment was especially
important because in real life, he constantly had to worry about two kinds of punishment. On
the one hand, living in Protestant England, he had to watch out for severe corporeal sanctions
against Catholics. Donne had even witnessed this in his own family, because he was a
descendant of the martyred Sir Thomas More, his parents appear to have been lifelong
Catholics and his brother, Henry Donne, was imprisoned for harbouring a Catholic priest and
died in jail (Shell and hunt 70). Donne himself had also been a Catholic for a long time, and
even after he had converted to Protestantism, he still sometimes said or wrote things that
tended to be Catholic. On the other hand, he risked eternal damnation in hell because he had
committed apostasy. This fear of landing in hell because he had committed a sin is in itself
also Catholic, because the Church of England “upheld a strict Calvinist doctrine of double
predestination – in which every human being was divinely predestined to heaven or hell,
regardless of their own actions – and saw this as one of the central tenets of Christian
orthodoxy” (Shell and Hunt 69). Having converted to Protestantism, he thus knew that he was
not responsible for his own salvation, even though he had committed sins. However, his
Catholic roots did still make him fear Judgement Day sometimes. In „Holy Sonnet VII‟ („At
the round earths imagin‟d corners‟), for example, his speaker utters this kind of fear: “if above
all these, my sinnes abound, / „Tis late to aske abundance of thy grace” (10-1). These lines
indicate that the speaker thinks that he can still influence God‟s judgement, even though “[his]
sinnes abound.” A bit further, he says “[t]each mee how to repent; for that‟s as good / As if
thou‟hadst seal‟d my pardon, with thy blood” (13-4). Nevertheless, lines like these do not
occur often. Donne‟s speakers mostly utter a Protestant view with regard to their sins, namely
that they feel guilty about them but cannot change what God has planned for them. Most of
Donne‟s Divine Poems express “a Calvinist sense of human depravity and the irresistible
power of God‟s grace, which cannot be earned or merited” (Guibbory 141). In Herbert‟s
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poetry, this Calvinist view was also abundantly present, for instance, in his poem „The
Sinner.‟ It has already become clear that the work of Herbert and Donne both had a distinctive
quality, namely the typical social aspect of giving advice in the case of Herbert, and in the
case of Donne, the fact that he always gave his speakers a sense of isolation. As mentioned
above, Herbert‟s distinctive quality also came to the surface when his poetry dealt with sin
and suffering. This is the case with Donne as well, because the typical isolation of his
speakers also becomes visible when his poetry deals with these subjects. The sense of
sinfulness in his devotional poetry is so great that his personae insist it will take extraordinary
efforts on God‟s part to save them: “I turne my backe to thee, but to receive / Corrections, till
thy mercies bid thee leave. / O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee” („Goodfriday,
1613. Riding Westward,‟ 37-9). They present themselves as “the worst of sinners,” and
because of this, they isolate themselves from other people, and even from other sinners
(Guibbory 141).
To make the transition from sin and suffering to death, Donne‟s poem „Hymne to God,
my God, in my Sickness‟ is very suitable, because it includes all three:
Since I am comming to that Holy roome,
Where, with thy Quire of Saints for evermore,
I shall be made thy Musique; As I come
I tune the Instrument here at the dore,
And what I must doe then, thinke here before
Whilst my Physitians by their love are growne
Cosmographers, and I their Mapp, who lie
Flat on this bed, that by them may be showne
That this is my South-west discoverie
Per fretum febris, by these streights to die,
I joy, that in these straits, I see my West;
For, though theire currants yeeld returne to none,
What shall my West hurt me? As West and East
In all flatt Maps (and I am one) are one,
So death doth touch the Resurrection.
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Is the Pacifique Sea my home? Or are
The Easterne riches? Is Jerusalem?
Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltare,
All streights, and none but streights, are wayes to them,
Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Sem.
We thinke that Paradise and Calvarie,
Christs Crosse, and Adams tree, stood in one place;
Looke Lord, and finde both Adams met in me;
As the first Adams sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adams blood my soule embrace.
So, in his purple wrapp‟d receive mee Lord,
By these his thornes give me his other Crowne;
And as to others soules I preach‟d thy word,
Be this my Text, my Sermon to mine owne,
Therefore that he may raise the Lord throws down.
According to Isaak Walton, this poem was written during the last days of Donne‟s life, but it
could also have been written during one of his other “illnesses, in 1623, 1625, and 1630”
(Parfitt, 103). In any case, most sources agree that Donne wrote this poem during an illness,
so there seems to be only a very thin line here between Donne and his persona. It could thus
be that the writing of this poem had a therapeutic effect on Donne. Lynne Magnusson says
about this that “for Donne, the abundant flow of words is a testimony of life: „in bodily, so in
spirituall diseases,‟ he writes in one sermon, „it is a desparate state, to be speechlesse‟” (183).
In any case, this spiritual poem deals with a speaker who is ill, and the central focus is on his
body. In the first stanza, he finds himself at the door of heaven and says that his body is made
the instrument for God‟s music. The second stanza forms an example of a typical Donnian
conceit. The speaker compares himself, lying flat on his bed, to a map, and his physicians to
cosmographers. The doctors thus read his body for symptoms of disease. He then says that
these cosmographers will show his “South-west discoverie,” which means that they will show
that he will die during this ague: “Per fretum febris” is Latin for “through the straits of fever.”
The third stanza, then, shows that these straits are actually possible routes to heaven. The
speaker says that through his fever, he can already see his West, which is a symbol for his
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death, because it is the place where the sun sets. However, his death will not hurt him,
because if you lay a map of the world around a globe, West and East touch, so his death will
touch his resurrection. The East is namely a symbol for the resurrection, because it is the
place where the sun rises. The fourth stanza sums up possible straits or places that can take
the speaker to heaven. In the fifth stanza, the legend is discussed that says that Christ‟s cross
stood in the region where the tree with the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden had also
stood. The speaker says that “both Adams met in [him],” and that the sweat of the first Adam
would be wiped away by the blood of the second one, namely Christ. This sweat of the first
Adam is a symbol for the speaker‟s sins, because Adam committed the first human sin. The
speaker‟s sins will thus be erased by Christ‟s sacrifice. In the final stanza, a transformation
from physical sickness to a spiritual state is included, because the speaker asks God to receive
him in heaven, now that he has been purged by Christ‟s blood.
„Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness‟ is an exceptional poem in Donne‟s
devotional poetry, because his speaker does not seem to fear death in it, or want to battle
death. Normally, however, we find other “preoccupations about death and the afterlife” in
Donne‟s work, namely “an urge to battle death directly; a desire to take death into one‟s own
hands; a loathing of the separation of body and soul; an overwhelming concern for the
material decay of the corpse; an anxiety about the mixing of remains in the grave; a longing
above all for resurrection” (Targoff 217). These “preoccupations” show that Donne spent
much of his time thinking about death. What they also illustrate, is that he was primarily
afraid of the potential nothingness after death. If you are alive, you are a person, you have a
sense of self, and an interiority. However, after you have died, it is not sure what happens
with your self. Maybe this could be another explanation for Donne‟s interest in punishment.
Of course, when the speaker in his poetry was asking to be punished by God, he wanted to be
freed from his sins. However, Donne‟s own interest in punishment could be partly caused by
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the fact that, when you are being physically punished, you are more aware of yourself and of
being alive than ever, and it is also recognized that you are a person with a sense of self. The
people that are torturing you consider you a strong person and believe that there is a reason to
suppress you. Considering the fact that Donne was not really an inconspicuous person
himself, he probably would have seen this as the only (and almost negligible) upside of
punishment. In addition to the fact the Donne was afraid of the potential nothingness after
death, he also feared the time that his body spent in the grave. Donne believed that the body
began to putrefy immediately when the soul had departed it. In relation to this, he said the
following in one of his sermons: “But fall we from incomprehensible mysteries; for, there is
mortification enough, . . .in this obvious consideration; skinne and body, body and substance
must be destroy‟d; And, Destroyed by wormes, which is another descent in this humiliation,
and exinanition of man, in death; After my skinne, wormes shall destroy this body” (471). The
utterance of this fear comes back in many of his sermons, and in some of his Songs and
Sonnets, for example „The Relique,‟ and „The Funerall,‟ but not explicitly in his Divine
Poems. What does occur several times in his Divine Poems, though, is the utterance of his
longing for resurrection. The resurrection is the moment when God delivers him from death,
and of course, delivers his body from putrefaction. The longing for it is verbalized in two
ways in Donne‟s poetry: sometimes he refers to Christ‟s resurrection, for instance in
„Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward,‟ and sometimes to his own, like in „Resurrection‟:
“May then sinnes sleep, and deaths soone from me passe, / That wak‟t from both, I againe
risen may / Salute the last, and everlasting day” (12-4). In Donne‟s poems about death, the
sense of isolation of his speakers which has been mentioned more than once, is something that
also becomes visible. His fear of death does not really have to do with an extreme attachment
to life, but with the insecurity of what happens after death: the putrefaction of the body, the
separation of body and soul, and the resurrection. Other people cannot give him the answers
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to his questions, because they know as little about death as he does. Only God can help him,
and this is why he blocks out all possible relations, except the one with God. He hopes that in
his conversations with Him, he will discover the truth about death.
The notion of death had a different impact on Herbert than it had on Donne. Herbert
saw it as something that could make people enjoy life more, while they still could. When
Herbert tells his readers in a poem to hold on to life, and to enjoy it while they can, they do
have to keep his others poems in mind as well. There are enough poems that convey the
message that a person may enjoy life, but in moderation, for instance „The Church-porch.‟
This shows that one single poem by Herbert does not provide all the answers. The Temple
should be read as a whole, because otherwise, some poems could be misunderstood. In his
poems about death, however, he did want to give the advice of carpe diem. This is why he
wanted to make people aware of death, and show that it was present all around them, even in
the most beautiful things. Curtis Whitaker describes this as follows: “with Herbert‟s writing
one always has this heightened awareness of life in the midst of death in natural images” (95).
His poem „Virtue‟ illustrates this very well. The first three stanzas show the transitoriness of
everything alive, and the inability to escape mortality. Here is the second stanza as an
example:
Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye:
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die. (5-8)
It happens often in Herbert‟s poems that he contrasts the “sweet”ness of nature with images of
death. This juxtaposition illustrates best the temporality and fragility of life, and the finality of
death. Death thus finalizes life on earth, but of course, Christians still have the prospect of
resurrection. This is what makes a Christian different from other living beings in nature. They
are at the same time “part of nature and apart of it” (Whitaker 92). They are part of nature
because they are mortal living beings, but they are also apart of it because they can get
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salvation. According to Herbert‟s speaker in „The Reprisal,‟ people can already experience
death by thinking about Christ‟s sacrifice:
O make me innocent, that I
May give a disentangled state and free:
And yet thy wounds still my attempts defy,
For by thy death I die for thee. (5-8)
Christ‟s sacrifice is also what made death less awful for Christians. In Herbert‟s poem
„Death,‟ he explains that before the Passion, death was “an uncouth hideous thing, / Nothing
but bones, / The sad effect of sadder groans” (1-3). However, “our Saviour‟s death did put
some blood into [death‟s] face” (13), which made death “[m]uch in request, much sought for,
as a good” (16). After Christ‟s sacrifice, people realized that when they die, “souls shall wear
their new array” (19), and they were very much comforted by this. To conclude, death was
thus not such a fearful prospect for Herbert‟s speakers as it was for Donne‟s. His belief in
God and Christ helped him not to be too afraid of it, while Donne seemed too much
overwhelmed by his insecurities about it.
D. Relationship of Donne and Herbert to God.
In their relationship to God, Donne and Herbert are most alike. Religion was called
“[t]he supernaturall food” by Donne, and it meant the same to Herbert (188). They were both
looking for the same kind of relationship with God, but the difference lies in how they
presented that relationship. Both of them felt the need to confide in him, to look for his
answers, to be accepted by him, to receive his salvation, to have a sense of communion with
him, etc. In order to achieve all these things, they let the speakers of their poems engage in
conversations with God, but these conversations are not presented to the reader in the same
way. It has been illustrated several times that the speakers of Donne and Herbert were
different kinds of persons, because Donne‟s personae were more isolated than Herbert‟s. This
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is also visible in their relationship to God. In Donne‟s devotional poetry, there is always one
man talking to God. He utters his requests, his deep devotion, his intense anxieties and fears,
and his strong feelings to him. This makes his poetry heavily charged with emotion and
makes sure that the reader feels like an outsider who is watching the speaker, or is listening to
him. The reader senses immediately that he is witnessing, and maybe even disturbing,
something that strictly includes the speaker and God, but nobody else. With Herbert, this is
very different. In his poems, the reader is sometimes addressed explicitly, and if he is not, he
feels that he may participate in the poem, or that he may come closer to its scene. He is drawn
into the poem by accessible imagery, for example, when the speaker compares his relationship
to God to another kind of relationship that is familiar to most people. The reader has the
feeling that he is welcome to learn from the speaker‟s conversation with God, and often even
gets advice that is related to spiritual struggles, friendship, suffering, sickness, sin, death, etc.
The conversational form that is used in the poems of Donne and Herbert is not really
dependent on strict conventions, while other forms that are used to talk to God are. In prayer,
for example, there are fixed expressions and forms, and the language is more formal. In the
conversations in the poems of Donne and Herbert, this is not the case, which makes it the
ideal form to confide in God, because there is less distance between the speaker and God than
there is in prayer.
During these conversations with God, the speakers of Donne and Herbert often engage
in self-scrutiny. This is not surprising, because it has already become clear that, when you
lived in the Renaissance, you could not really trust others, and this made you turn to yourself
more easily. The inwardness of others was not easy to grasp. In the early modern period
especially, you could never really know a person, because of the many reasons that were
summed up in part II of this paper. You were never sure if people told the truth about what
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they were thinking or feeling. They could just as well be playing a role to protect themselves.
The stanza from George Herbert‟s „Giddiness‟ that was quoted before sums this up very well:
Surely if each one saw another‟s heart,
There would be no commerce,
No sale or bargain pass: all would disperse,
And live apart (21-24).
In relation to this, Katherine Eisaman Maus says that Renaissance religious culture privileged
inwardness while also seeing it as elusive (11). On the one hand, turning to oneself was
something that was especially promoted in Reformed England, because it promoted, for
example, an individual reading of the Bible. On the other hand, there was the problem of not
being able to know the hidden interior of others. Debora Shuger says there is something like a
“Christian selfhood,” which is “a divided selfhood gripped by intense, contradictory emotions
and an ineradicable tension between its natural inclinations and religious obligations”
(Schoenfeldt, „That spectacle of too much weight‟ 563). This is how you get a discrepancy
between what is outward and what is inward. In Donne‟s poem “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding
Westward,‟ the speaker portrays such a Christian selfhood. On Good Friday in the year 1613,
Donne‟s speaker is riding towards the West. However, on this day on which devotion is very
important, he knows that he should be looking towards the East, because this is where Christ‟s
Cross stood many centuries before: “I am carryed towards the West / This day, when my
Soules forme bends towards the East” (9-10). These lines show that what is going on inside
the speaker is not the same as what he is actually doing. Towards the end of the poem,
however, he explains why this is the case. Looking at Christ hanging on the cross would be a
“spectacle of too much weight” (16) for him. He feels unworthy to look at God, or his son,
because he has sinned, and wants to be purged before he can look at him:
I turne my backe to thee, but to receive
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee,
Burne off my rusts, and my deformity,
Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace,
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That thou may‟st know mee, and I‟ll turne my face. (37-42)
This illustrates why early modern Christians wanted to be punished by God. The physical or
psychological suffering that is the result of God‟s punishment will make them repent, will
reinforce their sense of self, will free them from their sins, and will strengthen the roots of
their faith. Michael Schoenfeldt says about this that, “[b]oth Catholic and Reformed writers
emphasize the immense importance of welcoming the fashioning afflictions of God” („That
spectacle of too much weight‟ 566). Additionally, early modern Protestants were dependent
on God‟s judgement for their salvation. Considering the fact that God knew the hidden
interior of his people, it was useless for them to try to hide their sins. This is also visible in
„Goodfriday 1613. Riding Westward.‟ In this poem, Donne‟s speaker is not afraid that God
will see his sins, because he knows that he can. The only thing he is afraid of, is that God will
turn his back on him. This is why Christians in general believed (and hoped) that if they
showed God that they had remorse, and that they were willing to be punished for their sins, he
would be kindly disposed towards them, and give them their salvation.
Donne‟s main inspiration for his devotional writing was fear, and especially fear of
death. In his previously discussed „Holy Sonnet XIX‟ („Oh, to vex me, contraryes meet in
one‟), Donne had written: “Those are my best dayes, when I shake with feare” (14). Fear of
death, in particular, occurs many times in his Sermons and Devotions Upon Emergent
Occasions, and of course also in his Divine Poems. It was also the main reason why he needed
conversations with God, because God was the only possible addressee who had the answers to
his questions. Thus, all other relations became unnecessary for Donne. In God, he had found
the interlocutor that he was looking for. „Holy Sonnet I‟ is a good example of this:
Thou hast made me, And shall thy worke decay?
Repaire me now, for now mine end doth haste,
I runne to death, and death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday;
I dare not move my dimme eyes any way,
Despaire behind, and death before doth cast
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Such terrour, and my feeble flesh doth waste
By sinne in it, which it t‟wards hell doth weigh;
Onely thou art above, and when towards thee
By thy leave I can looke, I rise againe;
But our old subtle foe so tempteth me,
That not one houre my selfe I can sustaine;
Thy Grace may wing me to prevent his art,
And thou like Adamant draw mine iron heart.
This sonnet is a fairly straightforward one, in which the speaker, one of God‟s creatures, is
afraid that he will decay. He utters his fear of dying and his despair, and says that his
sinfulness weighs his weak flesh towards hell. The only thing that can make him rise again is
looking up, towards God. However, the devil keeps on tempting him. Luckily, God‟s grace
can support him enough to resist the devil. It can draw his solid heart towards him like a
magnet, because “Adamant” is a hard metal that draws by magnetic attraction. In this sonnet,
the question if God‟s work (the speaker) shall decay depends on God‟s will to save his
creation. There is thus a relation of dependence between Donne‟s speaker and God, and an
obvious hierarchy. This is not always the case, because sometimes Donne lets his speaker
threaten God, or question him. In any case, because every other relation was rejected, the
relationship of Donne‟s speaker to God was often portrayed as one of profane love. In „Holy
Sonnet XIV‟ („Batter my heart, three person‟d God‟), for example, the speaker declares his
love to God: “dearely‟I love you,‟and would be loved faine, / But am betroth‟d unto your
enemie” (9-10). These lines could also have come from a tragedy by Shakespeare, or even
from a modern soap opera, because they portray the ups and downs of a profane love
relationship. In the Holy Sonnets, Donne‟s speaker “both attempts to control God (thus
preserving his individual separateness and autonomy) and seeks an intimate union with God
that would erase his separate identity” (Guibbory 142). Profane love is thus a means for
Donne to portray and explain his speaker‟s relationship relation to God.
As mentioned above, every Holy Sonnet by Donne is composed of a combination of
reason and emotion to make his reader participate in the poem. However, to get God‟s
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attention, Donne uses several other ways as well. “Although each of the speakers in the Holy
Sonnets is „but a voice,‟ they combine to command, inquire, threaten, rationalize, imagine,
and expostulate their way into God‟s attention, whether by groans or trumpet blasts” (Wilcox
152). Nevertheless, almost every Holy Sonnet seems to have the same goal, namely, being
accepted by God and receiving his salvation. This is where the clash of Donne‟s Catholic
roots and his later adopted Protestantism comes most clearly to the fore. In relation to
Donne‟s religious position, some sources say that he had renounced Catholicism but was still
on some level attached to it, while other sources posit that he had cut himself off from
Catholicism completely and that he had left it behind him. Alison Shell and Arnold Hunt
choose for the golden mean: “[e]ven if we see his conversion as motivated by genuine
conviction, not merely expediency, the image may still persist of Donne as a man who
allowed his head to govern his heart, and who argued himself into the Church of England for
intellectual rather than emotional reasons” (68). In any case, both Catholicism and
Protestantism are present in Donne‟s work. „Holy Sonnet XVIII‟ („Show me deare Christ, thy
Spouse‟), for example, illustrates Donne‟s search for the true Church. The Church is
personified as Christ‟s “Spouse, so bright ad clear” (1) in this poem, and it is full of questions
about which religion is the true one. “[I]s it She, which on the other shore / Goes richly
painted?” (2-3) refers to Rome and the Catholic Church, “or which rob‟d and tore / Laments
and mournes in Germany and here?” (3-4) refers to the Lutheran and Calvinist Church, and in
the question “Doth she, and did she, and shall she evermore / On one, on seaven, or on no hill
appeare?” (7-8), the “one” refers to the hill where Solomon built the Temple of the Jews, the
“seaven” refers to the seven hills of Rome and thus to Roman Catholicism, and the “no hill”
refers to Geneva, the center of Protestantism. In the end, the reader gets no answer. He does
not get to know which Church is the right one for Donne‟s speaker. He just wanted to include
all religions that mattered in early modern England. In „Holy Sonnet IV‟ („Oh my blacke
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Soule!‟), Donne brings up one of his doubts that originated from his double religious
background. The speaker of this poem does not know if he is responsible for his own
salvation or not: “Yet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lacke; / But who shall give thee that
grace to beginne?” (9-10) These lines illustrate a form of doubt about Protestant
predestination. The speaker wonders if he can influence God‟s judgement about him or not.
This sonnet was an example of Donne‟s religious doubts, but sometimes, his sonnets even
include utterances that are explicitly Catholic. In „Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward,‟ for
example, Donne mentions the Virgin Mary, which is something that was completely rejected
by Protestantism:
If on these things I durst not looke, durst I
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,
Who was Gods partner here, and furnish‟d thus
Half of that Sacrifice, which ransom‟d us? (29-32)
In these lines, Donne‟s speaker sounds very Catholic, because he emphasizes the importance
of Mary, while utterances like these were labelled as Mariolatry by Protestants. The Divine
Poems that are being discussed here were written by Donne, a “Protestant” early modern
English writer, and were read in early modern Protestant England. Thus, these Catholic
elements in Donne‟s poems again give his speaker a sense of isolation, because they were
unusual, and above all, risky.
Herbert, however, who was a Protestant all his life, also was not spared from
utterances of idolatrous worship. Having a closer look at his poem „The British Church,‟ for
example, shows that he also paid attention to the “outward shows” of devotion that were so
heavily rejected by Protestantism (Maus 15). The church is personified in this poem as
“Mother,” and the church Herbert describes here is portrayed as the middle way between an
overly ceremonial Roman church and a plain and austere Reformed church. He writes about
the “perfect lineaments” (2) of his church, and the “hue”(2) that is “[b]oth sweet and bright”
(3), the “[o]utlandish looks” that “may not compare” to his church (10), the “painted shrines”
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(16) that “shine” (17) in it, etc. For Herbert, this is the perfect form of devotional “dressing”
(20) for a church. Thus, his religious position, just like Donne‟s, cannot always be pinned
down as easily. Nevertheless, he himself was very sure about it. He declared his loyalty to the
Church of England, but he just did not always seem to agree with every one of its policies.
Thus, in Herbert‟s view, the ornaments in a church should not be overdone, but there may be
some. In the last lines of „The British Church,‟ he even suggests that this middle way is also
the way that is most pleasing to God. He is still addressing “Mother”, the church, when he
writes: “Blessed be God, whose love it was / To double-moat thee with his grace, / And none
but thee” (28-30). He thus suggests that his church has God‟s blessing, while none of the
other ones has. It must be mentioned that „The British Church‟ is not the only poem in which
Herbert displays his attention for (at least some) outward shows, because he also shows it in
„The Church-floor,‟ „Church-monuments,‟ „The Windows,‟ etc.
Considering the fact that Herbert‟s only theme was religion, and more specifically the
Christian experience, and that it runs through all his writings, it goes without saying that the
source of his inspiration was his religious faith. With Herbert, even the simplest and humblest
actions could be given a religious significance if they were approached in the right frame of
mind. “He had, in his short life, wide acquaintance in the great world, and he enjoyed a happy
marriage. Yet it was only in the Faith, in hunger and thirst after godliness, in his selfquestioning and his religious meditation, that he was inspired as a poet” (Eliot, George
Herbert 18-9). Herbert wrote this about himself as well when he was only seventeen years
old, in a letter to his mother: “my meaning, dear mother, is in these sonnets to declare my
resolution to be that my poor abilities in poetry shall be all and ever consecrated to God‟s
glory” (344). He declares here that all the poetry he was ever going to write was going to be
devotional. This letter ended with an untitled poem which was addressed to God. It included
lines like the following: “Why are not sonnets made of thee?” (5), “Cannot thy love /
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Heighten a spirit to sound out thy praise?” (6-7), “since thy ways are deep, and still the same,
/ Will not a verse run smooth that bears thy name?” (10-1), and “Sure, Lord, there is enough
in thee to dry / Oceans of ink” (15-6). These lines show his inability to understand, and his
despair about, the fact that so many poems were written about profane love, and so little about
God, while the thought of God was the only one that occupied his mind. In his poem „The
Forerunners,‟ Herbert brings out very clearly the tensions that he felt between the life of a
Christian and the life of a poet. His speaker is found meditating on his white hairs, which are
“harbingers” (1) of death, and worrying about the effect that his advancing age will have on
his mental powers, particularly on his ability to continue writing poems that are worthy of his
divine subject. Although he realizes that all that really matters is that his faith remains
steadfast, this poem shows that Herbert valued his literary gifts very deeply. He used them to
express his inner being, and saw them as a consolation for all the disappointments of real life.
As the poem „The Quiddity‟ already made clear, the act of writing brought Herbert in
touch with himself as well as with God. This is why Herbert‟s poems can be seen as
embodiments of the bridge between God and man. As was mentioned above, God could enter
the inner spaces of the self and was able to access the hidden interior of his people. This made
God the only one who knew who you really were, except for yourself of course. Because of
this, Herbert wanted to give his soul over to God, and to become one with him. Helen Vendler
says that Herbert addresses “a God who, though sometimes seeming to reside above the poet
in an eternity inaccessible to human thought, more often resides (in the horizontal plane) not
only within the poet‟s room but inside his heart, and, in an extraordinary way, inside poetry
itself” (4). God does not only enter the interior of his subjects through the heart, though, he
also does it by way of the Eucharist. When people eat the body of Christ, they let him enter
their bodies. This way, they can become one with God. The version of Herbert‟s poem „The
Holy Communion‟ that was included in The Temple illustrates this very well:
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Not in rich furniture, or fine array,
Nor in a wedge of gold,
Thou, who from me wast sold,
To me dost now thy self convey;
For so thou should‟st without me still have been,
Leaving within me sin:
But by the way of nourishment and strength
Thou creep‟st into my breast;
Making thy way my rest,
And thy small quantities my length;
Which spread their forces into every part,
Meeting sins‟s force and art. (1-12)
In these stanzas, Herbert‟s speaker explains that God does not approach his people by “rich
furniture, or fine array, / Nor [by] a wedge of gold,” but “creepst into [their] breast,” “by the
way of nourishment and strength.” Because God chooses this way to approach his people, he
can avoid “[l]eaving within [them] sin.” In the following stanza, the speaker explains that the
forces that enter the body by eating the bread which symbolizes the body of Christ cannot get
into his soul, but that they can temper his passions:
Yet can these not get over to my soul,
Leaping the wall that parts
Our soul and fleshy hearts;
But as th‟outworks, they may control
My rebel-flesh, and carrying thy name,
Affright both sin and shame. (13-8)
He says that God‟s forces can enter the “fleshy hearts” and can control the “rebel-flesh” of the
speaker by functioning as “outworks” or fortification. These “outworks” will scare “sin” and
“shame” away. The next stanza illustrates the fact that God is the only one who can access the
hidden interior of his people:
Only thy grace, which with these elements comes,
Knoweth the ready way,
And hath the privy key,
Op‟ning the soul‟s most subtle rooms;
While those to spirits refin‟d, at door attend
Dispatches from their friend. (19-24)
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God is the only one who “[k]noweth the ready way, / And hath the privy key” to “op‟[n] the
soul‟s most subtle rooms.” In the following three stanzas of the poem, the speaker continues
to focus on the body-soul opposition. Michael Schoenfeldt says the following about this: “The
entry of God into his mortal subject through the medium of food at once delineates the border
between matter and spirit and proceeds benevolently to transgress it” (Bodies and Selves 98).
However, the speaker also suggests that God can bring body and soul closer to each other
while also keeping them both from corruption. In the final stanza, the speaker says that the
Eucharist offers him enough sustenance:
Thou hast restor‟d to us this ease
By this thy heav‟nly blood;
Which I can go to, when I please,
And leave th‟ earth to their food. (37-40)
The Eucharist makes sure that he is able to drink the wine which symbolizes Christ‟s blood,
and this gives him a sense of “ease.” He can drink it whenever he pleases, because there are
many celebrations of the Eucharist, and this offers him all the sustenance he needs. God can
“leave th‟ earth to their food,” because he has enough by drinking Christ‟s “heav‟nly blood.”
Eating the body, and drinking the blood of Christ can thus give the Christian a sense of
community with God. This is also the case in the poem „Love (3).‟ In this poem, the speaker
also ends up eating God‟s “meat” and experiences a sense of community with him. However,
before he sat down and ate, he was not as docile as the speaker of „The Holy Communion.‟ In
„The Holy Communion,‟ the speaker was full of admiration of, and praise for, God‟s works
and abilities. He accepted God into his heart and soul without a second thought. In „Love (3),‟
this is not the case. In this poem, the speaker is at first very hesitant to accept God‟s offer for
a heavenly banquet because he thinks that he has sinned too much. He is thus at first opposed
to God‟s plan, but finally he submits to him. This is again a good example of Herbert‟s quality
of giving advice. He wants his readers to know that they should not be afraid of God, even
though they may have sinned. God will accept them any way. The different attitudes that were
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mentioned; accepting, opposing, and submitting to God, all three appear several times in The
Temple. Nevertheless, when the speaker opposes or defies God, this happens less harshly than
with Donne, and it is also mostly only temporary. The attitudes that dominate in The Temple
are acceptance and submission, because these two allow a community with God, and that is
what Herbert wants. However, “[c]omplete absorption in God is possible only in heaven.
Herbert‟s poetry is about a Christian life on earth, where there are only intimations of what it
would be to live in God” (Reid 125).
IV. Conclusion.
This paper discussed inwardness in the religious poetry of John Donne and George
Herbert, two poets who lived and wrote in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.
Their portrayal of inwardness is typical of the early modern period. Donne and Herbert often
expressed the interiority of their personae in corporeal terms, showed that body and soul were
connected, demonstrated that there were correspondences between the macrocosm and the
microcosm, illustrated that their religious background had an effect on their portrayal of
inwardness, and used poetry as a means to express their feelings, emotions, and thoughts.
Nevertheless, creating a hidden interior was not really a modern idea. It was something that
was strongly present in a modern time, but the idea itself was traditional, because it was part
of the medieval worldview of correspondences.
Because Donne and Herbert both came from the higher classes and had friends in high
places, they did not reflect all the characteristics of inwardness that were mentioned in part II
of this paper. For example, one thing which was exceptional about Donne was that for him,
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the fact that he lived in the age of exploration was not really a negative thing. He had had the
possibility to travel abroad and see the world, and used his knowledge of cartography and the
discoveries as sources for his imagery. As, for example, became clear in the discussion of
„Hymne to God my God, in my Sicknesse,‟ Donne often used his knowledge to develop an
elaborate conceit that helped to prove his point. The body of his speaker is a map of the world
in this poem, and this conceit enables Donne to work towards the message of this poem,
namely that people do not have to fear death because it will also bring their resurrection. For
many other people in Donne‟s days, though, travelling abroad was impossible because they
were poor, did not have the right connections, or did not live in the right place. These people
did not always consider the age of exploration a positive thing, because the knowledge that
the outside world was larger than they thought made them feel insignificant and small. For
them, early modern developments like the discoveries, the explorations, and the rapid growth
of the cities, meant that it became more difficult to find a place that was their own. This was
their major reason to create a hidden interior and turn to their own inner selves when they
needed some time alone. Donne thus did not really need a hidden interior as a shelter from the
seemingly ever growing, endless world outside, but remember that he did need one for other
reasons, for example his double religious background, his provocating nature, etc.
Unlike Donne, Herbert did not often portray his knowledge in his poetry. He also
knew about the discoveries and cartography because of his education and the accounts of his
brother Edward and his friend Nicholas Ferrar, but preferred to extract his imagery from every
day domestic life. This quality already illustrates that Donne and Herbert were different as
poets. However, there is a more important difference as well. With Donne, the focus is always
on the individual in his poetry, while with Herbert it is on community. For Donne the relation
between self and community does not really seem to matter. His personae are always
individuals who do not need other people. They only need their regular conversations with
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God to feel satisfied. Herbert‟s personae are deeply embedded in the religious community,
thus his speakers are always clearly placed in that community in his poems. This
characteristic makes Herbert the poet who fits a little better into the Protestant early modern
tradition than Donne, because Herbert‟s personae need the creation of a hidden inner self
which is typical of that period, while Donne‟s personae sometimes seem to be able to live
without it because they already are isolated figures.
Practically, the sense of isolation with which Donne endowed his speakers could
originate in different ways. It could come with the strong, independent and sometimes even
sceptical mind that he gave his personae. It could also be caused by Donne‟s rather
extravagant style and pugnacious temperament, which together expressed an individual selfconsciousness. Furthermore, the imagery that Donne used could also enhance the
individualism of his speakers, because it was extracted from spheres that were unusual for
religious poetry, or spheres that were not accessible to everybody, for example profane, erotic,
and violent images, or images that were related to cartography and the discoveries. The
isolation of Donne‟s speakers was also sometimes caused by the way in which he let them
deal with death, sin and suffering. He always portrayed them as the worst of sinners, and his
fear of death made sure that the only relationship that his speakers could have was the one
with God. God was the only one who could help Donne‟s insecurities about death disappear.
Other people could not do this because they knew as little about it as he did. Donne‟s speakers
were also isolated because of their unusual religious position. While most of his poems were
written in the Protestant tradition, some poems include utterances that are explicitly Catholic,
for instance, „Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward.‟ Finally, the isolation of Donne‟s speakers
was also caused by the fact that the conversations in the poems strictly included the speaker
and God, and nobody else. All these factors show Donne‟s preference for focusing on the
individual in his poems, not the community around it.
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Herbert also used different ways to make clear what he focused on in his poems. He
always placed his personae in a context of the social world and make them recognizable and
accessible. He often wrote “we” instead of “I” in his poems, he addressed his fellow
Christians in his poems, and he looked for social analogies for his speakers‟ relations to God.
His speakers had conversations with God, but still paid attention to the world around them
while they were speaking with him. Herbert wanted his speakers to set examples for his
fellow Christians, and that is why he made them so accessible by using everyday imagery. He
let his speakers give advice about how to lead a healthy life, how to deal with sin and
suffering, how to be a good Christian, etc. In Herbert‟s view, a person may enjoy life, but
always in moderation. This is why he also has his speakers emphasize the ubiquity of death,
because he wanted his readers to realize that they had to enjoy every moment while they still
could. The relation of his speakers to God also illustrates that they are less isolated than
Donne‟s speakers. They leave room for the reader to participate in the poem, or to come
closer to its scene. In „The Church-porch,‟ for example, Herbert often gives direct advice to
his readers. This way, the reader constantly has the feeling that he is welcome to learn from
the speaker‟s conversation with God.
Thus, Herbert‟s speakers are less isolated than Donne‟s. This illustrates very well the
different ways in which both poets prefer to portray inwardness in their poetry. For Donne,
inwardness is something that includes only yourself and God, while for Herbert, it is
something that you can also share with others. However, despite the fact that there are
differences between Donne and Herbert as poets, their poems provide two different examples
of how people in the early modern period dealt with inwardness, and show that this included
medieval as well as (early) modern attitudes.
76
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