III

(English religious poetry after the Reformation was a long time

in revealing a distinctive note of its own, Here as elsewhere, Protestant poetry took the shape mainly of Biblical paraphrases or dull moralizings less impressive and sombre than the Poema Morale of an earlier century. (Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas's Weeks and Days eclipsed all previous efforts and appealed to Elizabethan taste by its conceits and aureate diction.) Catholic poets, on the other hand, like Robert Southwell, learned from the Italians to write on religious themes in the antithetic, 'conceited', 'passionating' style of the love poets of the day. His Tears of St. Peter, if it is not demonstrably indebted to Tansillo's Le Lagrime di San Pietro, is composed in the same hectic strain and with a superabundance of the conceits and antitheses of that and other Italian religious poems of the sixteenth century:

Launch forth, my soul, into a main of tears,

Full-fraught with grief, the traffic of thy mind;
Torn sails will serve, thoughts rent with guilty fears;
Give care the stern, use sighs in lieu of wind:
Remorse thy pilot; thy misdeeds thy card;
Torment thy haven, shipwreck thy best reward.

His best poem, The Burning Babe, to have written which Jonson 'would have been content to destroy many of his ', has the warmth and glow which we shall find again in the poetry of a Roman convert like Crashaw. It is in Donne's poems, The Crosse, The Annuntiation and Passion, The Litanie, that the Catholic tradition which survived in the Anglican Church becomes articulate in poetry; and in his sonnets and hymns that English religious poetry becomes for the first time intensely personal, the record of the experiences and aspirations, not of the Christian

as such merely, but of one troubled and tormented soul. But the Catholic tradition in Donne was Roman rather than Anglican, or Anglican with something of a conscious effort; and Donne's passionate outpourings of penitence and longing lack one note of religious poetry which is audible in the songs of many less complex souls and less great poets, the note of attainment, of joy and peace. The waters have gone over him, the waters of fear and anguish, and it is only in his last hymns that he seems to descry across the agitation of the waves by which he is overwhelmed a light of hope and confidence:

Swear by thyself that at my death thy Son

Shall shine as he shines now and heretofore;
And having done that thou hast done,

I fear no more.]

The poet in whom the English Church of Hooker and Laud, the Church of the via media in doctrine and ritual, found a voice of its own, was George Herbert, the son of Donne's friend. Magdalen Herbert, and the younger brother of Lord Herbert of Cherbury. His volume The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, By Mr. George Herbert, was printed at Cambridge in the year that a disorderly collection of the amorous, satirical, courtly and pious poems of the famous Dean of St. Paul's, who died in 1631, was shot from the press in London as Poems, by J. D., with Elegies on the Author's Death. As J. D. the author continued to figure on the title-page of each successive edition till that of 1669; nor were the additions made from time to time of a kind to diminish the complex, ambiguous impression which the volume must have produced on the minds of the admirers of the ascetic and eloquent Dean. There is no such record of a complex character and troubled progress in the poetry of Herbert, It was not, indeed,

altogether without a struggle that Herbert bowed his neck to the collar, abandoned the ambitions and vanities of youth to become the pious rector of Bemerton. He knew, like Donne, in what light the ministry was regarded by the young courtiers whose days were spent

In dressing, mistressing and compliment.

His ambitions had been courtly. He loved fine clothes. As Orator at Cambridge he showed himself an adept in learned and elegant flattery, and he hoped that, as his predecessors, he might in time attain the place of a Secretary of State'. When he resolved, after the death of 'his most obliging and powerful friends', to take Orders, he 'did acquaint a court-friend' with his resolution, who persuaded him to alter it, as too mean an employment, and too much below his birth, and the excellent abilities and endowments of his mind'. All this is clearly enough reflected in Herbert's poems, and I have endeavoured in my selection to emphasize the note of conflict, of personal experience, which troubles and gives life to poetry that might otherwise be too entirely doctrinal and didactic. But there is no evidence in Herbert's most agitated verses of the deeper scars, the profounder remorse which gives such a passionate, anguished timbre to the harsh but resonant harmonies of his older friend's Divine Poems:

Despair behind, and death before doth cast

Such terror, and my

feeble flesh doth waste

By sin in it, which it t'wards hell doth weigh.

Herbert knows the feeling of alienation from God; but he knows also that of reconcilement, the joy and peace of religion:

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:

So I did sit and eat.

Herbert is too in full harmony with the Church of his country,
could say, with Sir Thomas Browne, 'There is no Church
whose every part so squares unto my Conscience; whose
Articles, Constitutions and Customs, seem so consonant unto
reason, and as it were framed to my particular Devotion, as
this whereof I hold my Belief, the Church of England':
Beauty in thee takes up her place,
And dates her letters from thy face,
When she doth write.

manner.

A fine aspect in fit array,

Neither too mean, nor yet too gay,
Shows who is best.

But, dearest Mother, (what those misse)
The mean, thy praise and glory is,
And long may be.

Blessed be God, whose love it was
To double moat thee with his grace,
And none but thee.

It was from Donne that Herbert learned the 'metaphysical'
} He has none of Donne's daring applications of
scholastic doctrines. (Herbert's interest in theology is not
metaphysical but practical and devotional, the doctrines of
his Church-the Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection, Trinity,
Baptism-as these are reflected in the festivals, fabric, and
order of the Church and are capable of appeal to the heart.
But Herbert's central theme is the psychology of his religious
experiences. He transferred to religious poetry the subtler
analysis and record of moods which had been Donne's great
contribution to love poetry. The metaphysical taste in conceit,
too, ingenious, erudite, and indiscriminate, not confining itself.

to the conventionally picturesque and poetic, appealed to his acute,
if not profound mind, and to the Christian temper which rejected
nothing as common and unclean. He would speak of sacred.
things in the simplest language and with the aid of the homeliest
comparisons:

Both heav'n and earth
Paid me my wages in a world of mirth.

Prayer is:

Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,

The milky way, the bird of Paradise.

Divine grace in the Sacramental Elements:

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.

Night is God's 'ebony box' in which:

Thou dost inclose us till the day

Put our amendment in our way,

And give new wheels to our disorder'd clocks.

Christ left his grave-clothes that we might, when grief
Draws tears or blood, not want an handkerchief.

These are the 'mean' similes which in Dr. Johnson's view were fatal to poetic effect even in Shakespeare. We have learned not to be so fastidious, yet when they are not purified by the passionate heat of the poet's dramatic imagination the effect is a little stuffy, for the analogies and symbols are more fanciful or traditional than natural and imaginative. Herbert's nature is generally 'metaphysical',-'the busy orange-tree', the rose that purges, the 'sweet spring' which is a box where sweets compacted lie'. It is at rare moments that feeling)