Abstract: The Fourth Triennial Conference of the George Herbert Society was held in Phoenix, Arizona – more specifically at the Doubletree Inn, located in Tempe, a suburb of Phoenix – on October 16-18, 2014. The Society gratefully acknowledges the assistance in organizing the Conference supplied by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) through its Director, Robert Bjork. Special thanks to Michele Peters for her indefatigable work in making the Conference run like a train.The Valley of the Sun is known for its summer heat, but happily the last 100 degree day was behind us, and we enjoyed warm, dry air for the duration. In fact, the triennial banquet was held outdoors on Milagro’s Patio. Twenty-six ... Read More Keywords: Religious poetry, English; Bible.; Herbert, George,; Lok, Henry; Spiritual direction PubDate: 2016-07-27T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In The Country Parson, Herbert describes two states of a Christian, the “military” and the “peaceable.” The peaceable “is, when the Devil for a time leaves us, as he did our Saviour, and the angels minister to us their own food, even joy and peace and comfort in the Holy Ghost.”1 In his notes on Valdesso’s Considerations, Herbert writes of an “assent to the promises of the Gospell” that “filleth the heart with joy and peace” through “the spirits bearing witnesse with our spirit” (p. 309). But when we search for this “peaceable state” in the lyrics of the Church, it is elusive. Of course, it is not surprising that Herbert does not write much about the tranquil but dull stretches when he dined with angels, if, as ... Read More Keywords: Religious poetry, English; Bible.; Herbert, George,; Lok, Henry; Spiritual direction PubDate: 2016-07-27T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: If one thinks of the qualities that define a successful pastor or priest, the ability to compose anagrams is perhaps not the first thing that comes to mind. Nevertheless, in colonial America, Cotton Mather eulogized the seventeenth-century preacher and poet John Wilson, who baptized him, by noting that Wilson’s “care to guide his flock and feed his lambs” was shown in “words, works, prayers, psalms, alms, and anagrams”:Seventeenth-century writers expended great effort and ingenuity on anagrams and acrostics. One extreme example by a poetic descendant of George Herbert, Edward Taylor, memorializes the second president of Harvard, Charles Chauncy, with “A Quadruble Acrostick whose Trible is an anagram.”2 Chauncy died ... Read More Keywords: Religious poetry, English; Bible.; Herbert, George,; Lok, Henry; Spiritual direction PubDate: 2016-07-27T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: As we take up the thorny topic of George Herbert’s relationship to anti-Semitism, consider this anecdote that will help us to reflect on what exactly we mean by the term. A best-selling Christian writer named Philip Yancey was invited in 1998 by Jeffrey Katzenberg of Dreamworks SKG Studios to preview their first animated feature, the eventual screen success The Prince of Egypt, retelling the story of Moses and the Exodus. Katzenberg, along with David Geffen and Steven Spielberg, were anxious that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim clergy and opinion leaders would vet, and if possible endorse, their film. After a screening, Yancey very much liked the movie, and was impressed both by its cinematic quality and by its ... Read More Keywords: Religious poetry, English; Bible.; Herbert, George,; Lok, Henry; Spiritual direction PubDate: 2016-07-27T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: By centering his meditation on the superiority of day over night, the speaker in George Herbert’s “Even-song” raises the question of how and when God’s grace intervenes in the life of the believer. Evidently, this intervention is continual, since with each new day, God puts “our amendment in our way / And give new wheels to our disorder’d clocks” (ll. 23-24).1 This striking image of the metaphorical human clock and its need for adjustment recalls Francis de Sales’s comparison of regular times of prayer in the daily life of a Christian to a mechanical clock’s need for consistent repair:No clock, no matter how well-made, can avoid needing to be wound or adjusted twice a day, morning and evening. Then beyond that, at ... Read More Keywords: Religious poetry, English; Bible.; Herbert, George,; Lok, Henry; Spiritual direction PubDate: 2016-07-27T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: From Izaak Walton’s Life of Herbert, we learn that in 1629 George Herbert, visiting his brother, Henry, cured himself of fever, says Walton, by “forbearing drink, and not eating any meat.” Yet curing one problem, however, gave way to another. Walton adds, “by such a constant diet he removed his ague, but with inconveniences that were worse; for he brought upon himself a disposition to rheums and other weaknesses, and a supposed consumption.”1 As Walton tells us, Herbert left his brother to find “choice air” in Dauntsey in Wiltshire, in the company of Lord Danvers, where he sought cure again, this time with better effect, through a “spare diet, declining all perplexing studies, moderate exercise, and a cheerful ... Read More Keywords: Religious poetry, English; Bible.; Herbert, George,; Lok, Henry; Spiritual direction PubDate: 2016-07-27T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Prevenient grace is a notion that divine grace comes before any human initiative towards his own salvation. According to The Oxford Dictionary of English, it is “the grace of God which precedes repentance and conversion, predisposing the heart to seek, previously to any desire or motion on part of the recipient.”1 Scriptural supports for the doctrine can be found in such texts as Psalm 59:10 (“The God of my mercy shall prevent me; God shall let me see my desire upon my enemies”) and 2 Timothy 1:9 (“God hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus, before the world began”).Herbert must have been ... Read More Keywords: Religious poetry, English; Bible.; Herbert, George,; Lok, Henry; Spiritual direction PubDate: 2016-07-27T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: A generation before Herbert began working through the challenges of “outstripping Cupid” and writing a true hymn, Henry Lok made a grand, initial attempt at defining and solving the challenges of devotional verse. Lok was the son of Anne Lock, who presumably wrote the sonnet sequence published in 1560 based on Psalm 51.1 Henry Lok published the first edition of his sonnet sequence, Sundry Christian Passions, in 1593, the same year George Herbert was born. Lok was responding to the initial fervor of the Elizabethan sonnet craze, hoping to impress potential patrons with over two hundred devotional sonnets, roughly divided into poems of “meditation, humiliation, and prayer” and “comfort, joy, and thankesgiving.” He ... Read More Keywords: Religious poetry, English; Bible.; Herbert, George,; Lok, Henry; Spiritual direction PubDate: 2016-07-27T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: It is fitting that “Love unknown” is among George Herbert’s most analyzed poems, since it is about analysis itself; namely, how Christians make spiritual sense out of the misfortunes (or seeming misfortunes) that befall them. The poem’s story is told colloquially, beginning, “Dear Friend, sit down, the tale is long and sad.” By the poem’s conclusion, the sadness of the tale has been upended, as the listening Friend offers his own counterintuitive interpretation of events.Previous scholarship has focused heavily on the influence on the poem of the emblem tradition, allegory, and biblical sources.1 The structure of the poem’s narrative has not received much attention, except as a vehicle to string together the ... Read More Keywords: Religious poetry, English; Bible.; Herbert, George,; Lok, Henry; Spiritual direction PubDate: 2016-07-27T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: As you yourself, superior to all Flatland forms, combine many Circles in One, so doubtless there is One above you who combines many Spheres in One Supreme Existence, surpassing even the Solids of Spaceland. And even as we, who are now in Space, look down on Flatland and see the insides of all things, so of a certainty there is yet above us some higher, purer, region … some yet more spacious Space, some more dimensionable Dimensionality.Considering George Herbert’s propensity for visually revelatory lyrics, “The Church” contains surprisingly few straightforward descriptions of the sight of God. Vision is one of Herbert’s favorite motifs, but in “The Church,” glimpses of God are more sought for than apparent: “Where ... Read More Keywords: Religious poetry, English; Bible.; Herbert, George,; Lok, Henry; Spiritual direction PubDate: 2016-07-27T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In “Sinne” (II), Herbert contemplates the problem of how we are to confront our sins:It is a poem that bravely articulates a desire and need to know our sinfulness, while at the same time acknowledging the immense difficulty of such an exercise. To see a sin is, for Herbert, a seemingly impossible task – not only because of the abstract, conceptual nature of sin, but because to do so would be an overwhelming experience. The devastating effects of confronting our sins squarely seems akin to the trauma Donne feels when gazing on the crucifixion, “That spectacle of too much weight for mee,” from which he turns away to ride westward on Good Friday, 1613.2 Yet Herbert does not, like Donne, turn his back completely on ... Read More Keywords: Religious poetry, English; Bible.; Herbert, George,; Lok, Henry; Spiritual direction PubDate: 2016-07-27T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In John Drury’s biography of George Herbert he describes his interpretive strategy in terms of his subject’s inward and outward worlds:The circumstances of a poet’s life and times are the soil in which the work is rooted – not just the outward and material circumstances but also, and still more, the inward patterns of thought and feeling prevailing in the poet’s world. (emphasis added)1This essay proposes a reading of Herbert’s Easter poems that will emphasize Herbert’s relationship with other contemporary poets; the ways in which his Easter poems reflect his consciousness both of what he picks up from these other poets, and what he gives back. While Herbert undoubtedly hoped his poems would reach a wider audience ... Read More Keywords: Religious poetry, English; Bible.; Herbert, George,; Lok, Henry; Spiritual direction PubDate: 2016-07-27T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Like most early modern religious verse, The Temple expends a lot of verbal energy expressing various kinds of physical and emotional suffering. “The Sacrifice” is the extended complaint of a god who suffers horribly at the hands of his creatures. It concludes, moreover, with a statement of the uniqueness of his suffering that emerges via the chilling syntax of threat: “Onely let others say, when I am dead, / Never was grief like mine.”1 The volume has five poems entitled “Affliction”; the speaker of “Affliction (IV)” complains that he is “Broken in pieces all asunder,” and “tortur’d in the space / Betwixt this world and that of grace” (ll. 1-6). The poem “Confession” laments thatThese tortures, moreover, are aimed ... Read More Keywords: Religious poetry, English; Bible.; Herbert, George,; Lok, Henry; Spiritual direction PubDate: 2016-07-27T00:00:00-05:00
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