George Herbert

The word "meta" means to occupy two positions. In Herbert's poetry, as well as many other metaphysical poets, applying natural law to abstract thought was a technique used to bring forth more...

George Herbert's poem "Aaron" is a reflection of Herbert's ordained role in the Church of England and his struggles with a faith-related calling. In the poem, the speaker comments on the clothing...

The metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century broke away from the Elizabethan poets. Elizabethan poetry is characterized by regular meters and rhyme schemes, as well as easily accessible...

"The Pearl" refers to the Biblical passage Matthew 13.45-46. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchantman, seeking goodly pearls: who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went...

In "Jordan II," Herbert writes of the difficulty of writing poetry. In the first stanza, he describes how beautiful his words, lines, and metaphors seem to him when they first roll off his quill....

Herbert, in this poem, creates a sense of cohesion by writing cyclically, beginning and ending with the same idea: that God, having put so much time and energy into His creation, Man, should come...

In attempting to understand the poem, it's necessary to know what Herbert means by "mortification." Essentially, he's referring to the conscious suppression of our bodily desires and appetites. We...

John Donne and George Herbert are two of the greatest religious poets in the English language. As might be expected, their religious poems reveal a number of similarities, including the following:...

In the first stanza, the narrator describes the astronomer who studies the planets and stars, working to understand them on an intellectual level. He watches them and studies their movements, as...

Herbert's "Jordan (I)" is very difficult to understand because understanding the poem depends completely upon understanding the allusions that pepper the poem, the allusions that are scattered...

In "A Dialogue," Herbert presents a conversation between man and his saviour where man argues that because he is so full of sin that he is not worth being loved by his God. From man's perspective,...

George Herbert (1593-1633) was a metaphysical poet who wrote in the 1600s along with John Donne (1572-1631). Metaphysical poems have certain characteristics, one of which is extended sometimes...

In "Prayer," Herbert juxtaposes a series of images and allusions to spirituality and the Christian Church. Beginning with the first line, the "banquet" implies a feast which has a variety of...

The title of this poem reflects a vision of God as somebody who carefully works on humans to prepare them for heaven. The word "temper" refers to the way that metal is improved by heating and...

In this stanza, George Herbert uses a seventeenth-century poetic device known as a metaphysical conceit. A conceit is any extended metaphor or simile that is extreme but genuine. They are often...

One similar theme that the poems share is the hope of Christ. In "Easter Wings," it is the resurrection of Christ who provides the speaker with eternal hope. Although Adam's sin "foolishly" lost...

When the young George Herbert, then a student at Cambridge University, sent his mother a New Year’s gift of two sonnets he’d written, he made a vow to her in the accompanying letter. In that...

In the Christian religion, mortification refers to the deliberate suppression of our bodily appetites, passions, and desires. In doing so, it is hoped that the individual believer may turn from the...

Paraphrasing serves two purposes. The first purpose may be to summarize a text or poem for discussion or for studying the meaning, underlying metaphor and theme, etc. The second is to aid in...

They are not controversial. In fact, it was rather typical, in Herbert's time, for authors to write about spiritual journeys that included moments of backsliding into sin, doubting one's faith, and...

Both of these excellent poems use the central conceit of comparing the speaker to a flower to describe their relationship with God and the way that God tends and nurtures them, as if he were a...

This is an interesting topic you suggest. Baroque (1600-1750) poets George Herbert (1593-1633, England) and Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664, Germany) wrote on such vastly different subjects that...

This is a love poem, but it is about the love of God. Love called to me, yet I was reluctant (my soul drew back), the author says. What drew him back was the guilt of his sin. But Love (God) drew...