spring as desirable and then devaluing them in demonstrating their impermanence, Herbert fosters in the reader a desire for something worthy and permanent. Thus, by breaking, in the fourth stanza, the pattern that governed the first line of each of the first three stanzas, beginning with the word "only," Herbert resolves his poem's tension. The structure of his rhetoric naturally wins the reader to his position, even if only momentarily.

When he composed "Virtue," Herbert was writing for a like-minded audience. He was a pastor, and he was communicating a common belief among his followers, in a form intended to delight them and reaffirm what they knew. He was speaking not only to those in his small village, who could hear him preach his sermons on Sundays, but, indeed, to members of his religion throughout England. The poems in The Temple, of which "Virtue" is but one of many, are sermons, or lessons for the faithful. They are designed to strengthen faith by addressing resistance and celebrating acquiescence. This sort of verse is called "devotional poetry." For the poet, the verse exists as a testament of his faith; for faithful readers, it sings of their spiritual condition and offers the lyrical pleasure of dwelling in a familiar abode, as comforted by the reiteration of a common belief.

What, then, does "Virtue" offer to readers nearly four centuries later? The answer seems self-evident. For readers who share Herbert's belief, "Virtue" simply reinforces what they already feel and, as it did centuries ago, offers the consolation of a familiar and fundamental belief sweetly restated. For readers who do not share Herbert's belief, "Virtue" can be dismissed as old-fashioned piety not to their taste, or it can, perhaps, be enjoyed and esteemed as an aesthetic object. In either case, the apparent simplicity of the poem may present the greatest difficulty to contemporary readers of whatever persuasion. Whether read by those who agree with it or by those who do not, "Virtue" can be given a cursory glance and dismissed as a pretty set of verses. Scholars, certainly, can offer plenteous evidence to the contrary. They can show the poem's complexity and resonance through analyses of terms like "dew," "fall," and "seasoned timber." Dew can signify the presence of Christ. The word "fall" invokes the biblical story of the Fall of humankind in the Garden of Eden. "Seasoned timber" may suggest the soul that has been cured of its naive and youthful devotion to the manifestations of divinity in nature, allowing it to focus its devotion on divinity itself. The term may also refer, perhaps, to the cross upon which Christ was crucified. Such extensive analyses, however, do not make "Virtue" any more striking as a poem, rather making it only more doctrinal or obscure than it first appears.

The demands that "Virtue" makes on a twenty-first-century reader are different from the demands it made on seventeenth-century ones. In essence, it demands an aesthetic readjustment, which a responsible reading of the poem will help foster. That is, for the contemporary reader, "Virtue" is less about faith in a world hereafter than about the quiet contemplation of the present world in a gentle and penetrating spirit. Herbert's original intention, as revealed in the poem, was to show the impermanence of earthly delight. As the poem highlights the melancholy aspect of earthly experience by dwelling upon what is disappearing, it compels the reader to in turn dwell upon the words of the poem. This compulsion comes about not because the words are complex or have scriptural resonance but because their pace is one of rhythmic slowness. For the contemporary reader, "Virtue" is as much about embedding oneself in the poem's present as it is about the deceptiveness of temporality.

After the image of the "sweet day" is first invoked in the poem's opening, it is extended by the languorous triple modification, "so cool, so calm, so bright." Implicit in the repetition is a rhythmic instruction to the reader: read this slowly. The tempo is adagio—leisurely, contemplative, slow, and balanced. As the short line proceeds, this implicit tempo marking is reinforced by the hard k sounds of "cool" and "calm" and by the opening and closing consonants of "bright." The opening b of "bright" prevents any elision, or sliding together of sounds, with the o of the preceding "so," which an opening vowel would have allowed. Similarly, the t at the end of "bright" forces the reader to stop, making the line a self-contained unit despite the lack of a verb. Only with a new intake and release of breath can the reader attack the second line's first word, "the," which is followed with another b barrier, in the word "bridal."

This pattern of forced retardation continues in the third line and recurs in the succeeding stanzas. In the first line of the second stanza, "sweet rose" forces the reader to negotiate the trill between the two words. Following immediately is the hurdle of h's presented by "whose hue"; the reiterated oo sound also delays the reading. At its end, the line skids to a halt with the v sound in "brave." Over the next lines, many of the same sounds from the first stanza are employed, like the b of "bids" and the th of "thy." Even when new sounds are introduced, they have the same effect of keeping the tempo of the poem slow.

Only in the final stanza does the rhythmic pattern change. The opening vowel of "only" begins what in the context of "Virtue" is a forward tumble of sounds: The reader is propelled by the easy connection between the t of "sweet" and the succeeding "and," as well as by the elision of "virtuous" and "soul," through the blending of the final s of "virtuous" and the initial s of "soul." The second line of the fourth stanza, unlike lines 2, 6, and 10, presents no pause, instead offering a continuation of the first line: "Only a sweet and virtuous soul / Like seasoned timber." The l of "soul," with which the first line terminates, reappears immediately as the initial sound in the first word of the second line, "like." Similarly, the d of "seasoned" merges with the t of "timber."

This kind of minute examination of the most basic elements of "Virtue," the individual letters of individual words, illuminates the way in which Herbert achieved certain aesthetic effects. Indeed, simply undertaking such an examination disciplines the reader to pay attention to the smallest details of objects of the senses and to the process of perception itself. Thus, while the primary notion expressed in the poem is that the phenomena of the natural world are transient and ought not distract one from the eternity of the supernatural world, the poem itself contradicts that notion by demanding a focused and steady attention to its most minute details and, consequently, to its mechanics and to the images represented within it.

Thus, in a sense, "Virtue" seems to be separated from its author's apparent intention: rather than warning a reader not to become fixated on the created world, it stands as a work of human creation demanding absorbed attention. The poem itself is not transient but endures as an object worthy of contemplation across the boundaries of time, as confirmed by succeeding eras. Somewhat paradoxically, while "Virtue" warns against attending to day, rose, and spring as if they were permanent, it demands the reader's lingering attention to itself. Yet, in truth, no contradiction exists. At the core of this earthly, aesthetic object, a mortal creation, is what Herbert believed to be an immortal truth; indeed, "Virtue" instructs the reader in Christian dogma. Moreover, in contemplating the poem, the reader is not truly contemplating that transient something, essentially an artifact of nature. Rather, the reader is contemplating the transformation, by the poet's art, of the transient into the permanent, as the poem itself tempers the way in which the reader perceives the world. What makes something eternal is not only its duration in time but also the depth of people's consciousness, their perception, of it. In this respect, intensity is as much a dimension as time. When it succeeds, that is, when a reader yields to its demands, "Virtue" acts as a vehicle for the expression of the eternal. The poem also compels the reader to reside in and as such create an aspect of permanence, rather than allowing that reader to yield to the hurry and inattentiveness that endow an experience with an aspect of transience.

Source: Neil Heims, Critical Essay on "Virtue," in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

In the following essay, McDonald argues that "Virtue" is an Easter poem celebrating the dual nature of Christ, as both a temporal and an eternal figure.

At the literal level, George Herbert's lyric poem "Vertue" has a self-evident and incontrovertible meaning: it juxtaposes earthly transience and mutability with the immortality of the true Christian soul. In addition, though, there seems to be both internal and external evidence to suggest an added dimension concerned with the dual nature of Christ, both mortal and divine, as we encounter this paradox through the events of Easter. This should not altogether surprise us. As one commentator has remarked, "a glance at Herbert's table of contents will show how many of his poems are subsumed under the series Advent, Nativity, Ash Wednesday and Lent, Holy Week, Easter, Ascension, Whitsun, and some special days like Trinity Sunday and All Saints; also, many more of the poems are Lenten or Holy Week poems than we have recognized." External evidence for this surmise is provided by implicit biblical allusions incorporating imagery which has fixed meanings outside the immediate context of the poem, while internal evidence is provided by the strategic choice of these images in "Vertue," and the occurrence of similar words and images throughout the fabric of The Temple. The literal and metaphoric modes are not, of course, mutually exclusive, since both views derive from the same source: it is the Fall which brings the decay of nature and of earthly beauty, and hence the need for Christ to assume flesh and to die. If we see the poem in the light of Christ's death and resurrection, rather than viewing it merely as an account of nature's corruption and the survival of the upright soul, then some of its perceived difficulties and peculiarities will disappear, and its richness and pathos will be enhanced.

The poem's most suggestive line is the second, where the day is described as "the bridall of the earth and skie" (l. 2). The implications of this are clear: the earth and sky are united by the day, and not, as has been suggested, that the stanza depicts the deflowering of an innocent bride. Rather, it is the concept of marriage itself which is present: it is in the day itself that the earth and sky are joined. There is little to hinder the natural extension of this image to include the person of Christ, who, in spite of his divinity, assumes man's flesh, accomplishing in himself that which Herbert attributes to the day: the union of heaven and earth. The scriptural and patristic resonance which surrounds the notion of "bridall" is strong, including such universal commonplaces as the marriage of both the earthly church and the individual soul to Christ the divine bridegroom. That the day represents Christ is likewise a commonplace, since the sun, by its perpetual rise and fall, is a constant symbol of Christ's birth, death and resurrection, a topic most famously explored and developed in Donne's "Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward" and Milton's "Nativity Ode." The first stanza may therefore contain an implicit suggestion of the Easter pattern inherent in the concept of the fall of the day and of the sun.

Other poems in The Temple, and the structure of the work itself, support this approach. "Vertue," for instance, is immediately preceded by "Lent," a fact to which I shall have occasion to return. Looking further afield, however, other poems in The Temple employ the same vocabulary and imagery to focus on the central paradox of the Easter celebration. "Sunday," for instance, which has for one of its major themes the significance of Sunday in the Easter cycle ("This day my Saviour rose" [l. 36]) opens with a line comparable to the first line of "Vertue") "O Day most calm, most bright") and Sunday is presented as "Th' indorsement of supreme delight, / Writ by a friend, and with his bloud" (ll. 3-4). Moreover, Christ is again depicted as a source of light: "The week were dark, but for thy light: / Thy torch doth show the way" (ll. 6-7). "Sunday" is concerned most centrally with the Resurrection. By implicitly invoking its first line, "Vertue" maintains the association, but shifts it from the triumph of Easter Sunday to the pathos and paradox of Good Friday. "Self-condemnation," another poem which deals with the events surrounding the Passion, sees Herbert prefiguring "the last great day" (l. 19) when the light of truth and justice "shines bright and cleare" (l. 23). In "The British church" the Word made flesh is described as "sweet and bright" (l. 3), and again, in the alchemical poem "The Elixir," God is the tincture who will make all things like unto himself, "bright and clean" (l. 16).

Following this apparent equation of Christ with the day comes the reference to dew, another scripturally charged image, in part because in the Old Testament divine visitations can be in the form of dew, a concept utilized in the celebrated anonymous fifteenth-century lyric "I sing of a maiden …" In the Bible, dew is evidence of God's grace and blessing in such texts as Genesis 27:28 ("God give thee of the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth") and Deuteronomy 33:13 ("Blessed of the Lord be his land, for the precious things of heaven, for the dew …"), a correspondence which Herbert invokes in the third stanza of "Grace." Dew is the manifestation of God's word in Deuteronomy 32:2) "My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distil as the dew") but, most significantly, it is associated with types of Christ and with prophecy concerning his death and resurrection. Gideon learns that he is to save Israel, just as his antitype, Christ, will save mankind, when God directs the dew to cover, and then avoid, the fleece (Judges 6:36-40). In Isaiah 26:19, revitalizing dew is directly associated with the resurrection of the dead: "Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust: for thy dew is as the dew of herbs …" Similarly, in Hosea 14:5-7, "I will be as the dew unto Israel: he shall grow…. They that dwell under his shadow shall return; they shall revive as the corn." And in Micah 5:7, "the remnant of Jacob shall be in the midst of many people as a dew from the Lord, as the showers upon the grass…." However, the dew in "Vertue" is not simply a possible representation of God's Word made man, or of God's blessing contained within Christ's death. The most appropriate of all biblical references is Psalms 133:3) "As the dew of Hermon, and as the dew that descended upon the mountains of Zion: for there the Lord commanded the blessing, even life for evermore") where the dew of Hermon is conventionally glossed as the community of saints. Here, almost certainly, is the dew which weeps for the death of Christ, who, as the second Adam, must suffer his own "fall" in order that mankind may be saved from the consequences of the first Fall.

Having used the day as one trope for Christ, Herbert employs a second in the "sweet rose" whose hue is "angrie and brave" (l. 5), a conjunction of adjectives which has perplexed and irritated many commentators. How can the reader reconcile sweetness, anger, and bravery in a flower which should represent, in the conventional interpretation of the poem, the transience of earthly beauty? I would suggest that, as with the earth and the sky, these adjectives meet in the person of Christ and his sacrifice. Although, admittedly, the majority of allusions to roses in The Temple suggest the deceptiveness of worldly beauty and its temptations, other forms of denotation are also present. "Church-rents and schismes," for instance, opens with the phrase "Brave rose" to describe the Church, Christ's bride and the antitype of the rose of Sharon (Song of Solomon 2:1). In lines 12-13 it is Christ's blood which is specifically stated to have given the rose its hue, in keeping with the traditional iconography in which the rose is not only the flower of the Virgin Mary, but also of the martyrs. At the poem's conclusion Herbert, sorrowing over a falling Church, desires "to lick up all the dew, / Which falls by night, and poure it out for you!" (ll. 29-30).

"Angrie" and "brave" are not unprecedented adjectives in The Temple. "Angrie," aside from its common dialect meaning of "inflamed," is not, perhaps, readily associated with Christ and the New Law, but Herbert employs it in "Bitter-sweet") "Ah my deare angrie Lord, / Since thou dost love, yet strike" (ll. 1-2). The "brave rose" of "Church-rents and schismes" is paralleled by an early version of "Easter" in the Williams MS, where Herbert writes that "The Sunn arising in the East…. Can not make up so brave a feast / As thy discoverie presents" (ll. 23-26), a poem which, in addition to presenting Christ as a "brave feast," reiterates, in its first stanza, the importance of the Christ/day relationship. The equation of Christ with the rose of the second stanza of "Vertue" provides a more plangent explanation of the second line, where the sight of the crucified Christ is more likely to move the gazer to tears than the commonplace (and conventionally amorous) representation of a beauty which must fade.

The emblem of the rose whose "root is ever in its grave," usually interpreted as further suggesting the inevitable decline of natural beauty, lends itself equally well to the notion of Christ's ordained destiny on earth to fulfil the predictions of the prophets, a destiny which necessarily involves his own death. Apart from the fact that Christ is conventionally the Root of Jesse and the Root of David, biblical images of the root are frequently associated with the resurrection of the dead, since, for example, though it "wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; Yet … it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant," just as "man lieth down" until "the heavens be no more …" (Job 14:8-12). Herbert expresses similar sentiments in his poem "The Flower," where the "shrivel'd heart," renewed by grace, is likened to the flower and its root.

   Who would have thought my shrivel'd heart
   Could have recover'd greennesse? It was gone
   Quite under ground; as flowers depart
   To see their mother-root, when they have blown;
   Where they together
   All the hard weather,
   Dead to the world, keep house unknown.
                                        (ll. 8-14)

Here the heart, having suffered its own death, experiences its own resurrection, while in "Vertue" the type of this process is implied in the depiction of the Christ-rose which, its root in the grave, encompasses not only the sorrow of Christ's inevitable sacrifice, but the joy of the equally inevitable resurrection to follow.

After the "sweet day" and the "sweet rose" have exemplified Christ, and been described in suggestive detail, both are subsumed into the "sweet spring, full of sweet dayes and roses" (l. 9). At the beginning of this interpretation, I pointed out the significance of the placement of "Vertue," immediately following the poem "Lent." Lines 25-27 of the latter poem clearly indicate that, whatever connotations spring may carry of a natural beauty which fades, its ecclesiastical significance is highly pertinent.

   Then those same pendant profits, which the spring
   And Easter intimate, enlarge the thing,
   And goodnesse of the deed.
                                        (ll. 25-27)

Just as the spring marks the Annunciation and the Passion, the key images of the dew and the rose possess a dual function in designating aspects both of the Virgin Mary and the Annunciation, and of Christ himself, bringing into one nexus spring, Easter, Annunciation, and Passion.

Following this series of liturgical and biblical images, however, Herbert unsettles the reader by relating spring, days, and roses to the vexed "box where sweets compacted lie." Despite critical attempts to equate this mysterious box with a box of perfumes or an anachronistic musical box, its true identity almost certainly lies within The Temple itself, this time in the poem "Ungratefulness." Here Herbert describes "two rare cabinets full of treasure" (l. 7), the first being the Trinity (the "statelier cabinet"). More importantly, though,

   all thy sweets are packt up in the other
   Thy mercies thither flock and flow:
   That as the first affrights,
   This may allure us with delights;
   Because this box we know.
                                        (ll. 19-23)

This other box is the Incarnation. I would suggest, moreover, that in "Vertue" it also signifies, by analogy, the box which contains the Communion host, types of which are the Ark of the Covenant and, in particular, the sepulchre of Christ. If this is so, then the introduction of the Eucharist) the sharing by all of the results of Christ's sacrifice) marks a shift in the poem from the specific to the general. The specific is represented by a preponderance of demonstratives ("the bridall," "the dew," "the gazer") which imply the particular ("sweet day," "sweet rose"), as do the possessives ("thy fall," "thy root"). The general, though, is inaugurated by "a box" (italics added), the introduction of the poet himself ("my musick") and the corresponding change in the refrain. Even though all must die, the reference to the Eucharist, which brings about this change, lessens potential sorrow, since, as the final stanza indicates, it also represents a release from death.

Even in Herbert's music, references to Christ's suffering and resurrection are inescapable in yet another commonplace, the comparison of the tortured Christ on the cross to a musical instrument, emitting divine melody at the hands of his tormentors, an allusion which Donne incorporates in the first stanza of "Hymne to God My God, in My Sicknesse." In "Easter" Herbert sings the praises of the risen Lord, whose "crosse taught all wood to resound his name" (l. 9), and whose "stretched sinews taught all strings, what key / Is best to celebrate this most high day" (ll. 11-12). Moreover, "since all musick is but three parts vied / And multiplied" (ll. 15-16), in the context of the poem Herbert asks the risen Christ) his "blessed Spirit") to join his "sweet art" to the music of Herbert's awakened and consorted lute and heart. "Easter" is one of several poems relevant to "Vertue" to make significant use of the word "sweet," repeated here in reference to Christ's entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday: "But thou wast up by break of day, / And brought'st thy sweets along with thee" (ll. 21-22). Likewise, in "The Sacrifice," Christ comments that the ointment was "not half so sweet as my sweet sacrifice" (l. 19), and in "The Flower" the Lord's "Returns" are "sweet and clean … as the flowers in spring" (ll. 1-2). In "Faith" the incarnate Christ "sweetly took / Our flesh and frailtie, death and danger" (ll. 23-24), and, as already indicated above, the Incarnation becomes a box of sweets in "Ungratefulness." Especially remarkable, however, are "The Odour" and "The Banquet"; the most cursory reading reveals the complete domination which "sweetness" holds over them. The former is based upon 2 Corinthians 2:15-16) "For we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ, in them that are saved, and in them that perish: To the one we are the savour of death unto death; and to the other the savour of life unto life." Although "sweet" appears only once in the biblical text which I have proposed as central to "Vertue," it is the basis of Herbert's entire poem, as adjective, adverb, and noun, with various guises and significations. In "The Banquet," which has for its subject the bread and wine of the Eucharist (a motif clearly important for "Vertue" as an Easter poem), Herbert employs "sweet" and "sweetnesse" as part of the structural development of the first three stanzas, compares the sweetness of flowers to that of Christ's sacrifice, and dwells on the sweet taste of the Communion wine.

In the final stanza, images of Christ's Incarnation and death are replaced by the knowledge not only of his resurrection, but, with the continuation of the new suggestion of community which surfaced in the preceding stanza, with the guaranteed resurrection of all Christian souls. Christ's resurrection and its consequences are implicit in the entire image skein) in the day, the dew, the root, and the rose. For the country parson, the rose is a purge, one of the "home-bred medecines," in contrast to exotic spices, which he "condemns for vanities, and so shuts them out of his family." In an analogous sense, in "Providence" the "rose, besides his beautie, is a cure" (l. 78), and in its figurative sense in "Vertue," Christ's cure for the primordial sin of Adam and the contagion of eternal death. The images of the first two stanzas hence unite the whole preordained cycle of Christ's life) Annunciation, Passion, Resurrection) and the perpetual significance of his life and sacrifice is contained in the diurnal cycle and the atemporal "gazer."

The "season'd timber" of this final stanza is therefore an unmistakable reference) one is tempted to say the most explicit of the entire poem) to the cross as a synecdoche for the crucifixion and its consequences, a mercy which never fails or "gives." Moreover, it is the type of the Christian soul, tempered by suffering, which remains upright until its ultimate vindication, when the final result of Christ's suffering is made apparent and "the whole world turn[s] to coal" (l. 15).

Source: Suzanne McDonald, "George Herbert's 'Vertue': An Easter Poem?" in George Herbert Journal, Vol. 17, No. 1, Fall 1993, pp. 61-69.

In the following essay, Swaim argues that the "season'd timber" of "Virtue" is a reference to charcoal and in opposition to the coal mentioned in the poem's penultimate line.

George Herbert's much anthologized and annotated "Vertue" has been generally recognized as what Arnold Stein labels it, "one of the purest lyrics in the language," and as "Herbert's poetry at its best" in the words of Louis L. Martz. Its deliberate architecture has been much praised. For M. M. Mahood its form of three statements plus a counter-statement makes it "essentially a poem in which anticipation dominates over discovery, in which our pleasure is to find all so well expressed"; for M. L. Rosenthal and A. J. M. Smith "its four tiny prophecies" are founded upon a "process of elimination"; and more recently Barbara H. Smith has called attention to the poem's architecture as modifying the norms of closure in favor of a fourth stanza which "has the effect, entirely appropriate to its theme, of a revelation—that which is known beyond what can be demonstrated logically."

There is an exquisite shapeliness to the art and thought of this lyric, in its progression from "thou" to "all" and from "die" to "lives"; in its shift from the diurnal rhythm of stanza 1—day/night—to the eternity of its conclusion; in the major imagery development of vegetative context (earth, sun, dew), to rose (singular) and root, to roses (plural), both sweetly growing and sweetly compacted or preserved for later seasons, and to the larger vegetative category of trees, this too plural and this too preserved in the form of usable timber; and in the secondary imagery of the third lines of the stanzas, especially the "weep" and "fall" of stanza 1, the "root" and "grave" of stanza 2, the "closes" both musical and mortal of stanza 3, and the apocalyptic transformation and reversal of stanza 4. The development of size and range and the reversal of stanza 4 fill out the poem's shape. My purpose in this note is to enhance our appreciation of both Herbert's metaphysics and his graceful artistry by closely attending to the concluding conceit.

The climactic stanza of "Vertue" reads thus:

   Onely a sweet and vertuous soul,
   Like season'd timber, never gives;
   But though the whole world turn to coal,
   Then chiefly lives.

F. E. Hutchinson paraphrases the meaning thus: "While the day and the rose and the spring come to a natural end, virtue alone survives the general conflagration at the end of the world, which reduces all else to 'coal' (i.e. cinder, ashes)." Several anthologists supplement this usual gloss of "coal" with a citation of II Peter 3:10, which reads in the King James Version:

But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.

"Coal" is sometimes amplified to "glowing coal" or "red-hot coal" or attention is called to man as "a quick coal / Of mortall fire" in Herbert's "Employment."

"Season'd timber" too has come in for a share of special attention, most frequently as a unit in the artistic structure, as for example a confined resemblance that becomes a wide-ranging metaphor or as "an arbitrary symbol" in contrast to the images of the other stanzas. In the most fully developed study of the poem, Arnold Stein reads "season'd timber" as a natural object that "achieves its purpose after death—not as a tree but as wood"; for him it is a deliberate illustrative comparison, a simile, a product of human creation, in contrast to the symbols of the earlier stanzas, but a notably limited comparison which will barely allow us to stretch our imaginations to include the possibility that "seasoned timber burns well and has a kind of second life in its coals." Such glosses on the final stanza do not allow the full meaning and thus the full shape of the poem to emerge. In the words of Helen Vendler, "The real question is not what accommodations we can make post-hoc to the image but what made Herbert think of seasoned timber in the first place, and what effect this note, sounded at this point in the poem, has on the poem as a whole."

The limitation of the verbal glosses on the fourth stanza of "Vertue" is that, although they recognize some of the meanings of coal, they do not recognize that coal may also include "charcoal," and that coal thus contains the contrast between that which fire destroys and that which fire purifies or creates. For the most part Herbert's "coal" is black carbon fuel, the non-renewable resource deposited in earth strata. Such OED meanings of "coal" as "a piece of carbon glowing without flame" and "a piece of burnt wood, etc., that still retains sufficient carbon to be capable of further combustion without flame; a charred remnant" are not wrong; they are merely not sufficient for Herbert's range of meaning. His larger climax requires a contrast with "season'd timber."

"Charcoal" captures that greater range. Charcoal too is a carbon residue resulting from the imperfect combustion of animal or vegetable matter. It is, in the OED's fourth meaning of "coal," "Fuel prepared from wood by a process of smothered combustion or 'dry distillation,' whereby the volatile constituents are driven off, and the substance reduced to a more or less pure carbon." The chief difference between "cinder" and "charcoal" is in use or intention. A cinder or ember is an accidental residue of a completed or nearly completed process, still retaining some of the heat of its combustion, but waning toward cold ashes. Charcoal, on the other hand, has been deliberately prepared through the manufacture of its imperfect combustion in order that its impurities may be removed and it may be ready to fulfill its larger destiny, of burning with not waning but enhanced intensity. Some etymologies of "charcoal" emphasize the work invested in its preparation, noting that its first syllable echoes "chore" or "char" (as in "charwoman"). Even when we turn to a strictly technical account of charcoal the details suggest meanings we may employ to explicate the spiritual thrust of Herbert's lyric. Thus before modern technology, charcoal was normally manufactured in kilns or by placing a quantity of wood upright with bottom air vents and a central air shaft, then covering the whole with moistened earth, and igniting it at the bottom. Depending upon the rate of combustion, the process reduces the wood in the ratio of two to one or even four to one, and the product itself burns at between 300 and 700 degrees, thus generating very high heats for use in metallurgy.

The vocabularies of economics, chemistry, and physics all illuminate the rightness and richness of Herbert's chosen image of "season'd timber," and the fusion of multiple layers of meaning generates and reinforces the powerfully felt climax of "Vertue." Along with distinctions of combustion, the melting away of the elements with fervent heat from II Peter 3:10 and the burning up there of the earth and human works certainly contribute to the meaning of Herbert's stanza. In the final total conflagration, only the properly prepared soul shall survive. Purified by fire, the soul's sweetness and virtue not merely survive the destruction of earthly matter, but are intensified to the point of transcendence. Then, though the whole world turn to "coal" in the sense of cinders, the soul will turn to "coal" in the sense of charcoal—then chiefly living.

Source: Kathleen M. Swaim, "The 'Season'd Timber' of Herbert's 'Vertue,'" in George Herbert Journal, Vol. 6, No. 1, Fall 1982, pp. 21-25.

In the following essay, Vendler compares "Virtue" with other poets' rewrites of Herbert's original and analyzes the original in an effort to understand the pattern of Herbert's thought in writing it.

Vertue
   Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
   The bridall of the earth and skie:
   The dew shall weep thy fall tonight,
   For thou must die.

   Sweet rose, whose hue, angrie and brave,
   Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye:
   Thy root is ever in its grave,
   And thou must die.

   Sweet spring, full of sweet dayes and roses,
   A box where sweets compacted lie;
   My musick shows ye have your closes,
   And all must die.

   Onely a sweet and vertuous soul,
   Like season'd timber, never gives;
   But though the whole world turn to coal,
   Then chiefly lives.

For at least one of Herbert's critics, the poem 'Vertue' is the touchstone by which one enters into Herbert's feelings and truly senses his poetry; anthologists (following Coleridge's taste) have felt the poem to be peculiarly expressive of Herbert's spirit; John Wesley adapted it for the common Christian worshipper to sing at services. Though it seems an 'easy' poem, I do not find it easy to reconstruct Herbert's process of thought in writing it. Almost every line in it surprises expectation, though few poems in English seem to unfold themselves with more impersonality, simplicity, and plainness.

When a reader attempts to imagine himself composing the poem, suddenly he finds his confidence in its simplicity quite gone. What, he wonders, led the poet to see the day as a bridal, and call the rose's hue an angry one; why did the poet gratuitously introduce a rash gazer; why should the music of the poet himself (since he has so far maintained his anonymity) provide the conclusive proof of the necessary ending of spring; and finally (a problem which has been reluctantly taken on by every critic of the poem) how did the seasoned timber make its appearance? There are other difficulties, but these perhaps first strike a reader trying to reconstruct the creation of the poem.

Critics have reached two extremes in accounting for the surprising elements in conceits. One is expressed by Dr Johnson in his suspicion that metaphysical poets were simply striving for effect, while the sympathetic extreme, in Rosemond Tuve for instance, finds conceits often appropriate granted certain special canons of decorum (the grotesque, for example, can be in certain contexts 'decorous'). But both of these solutions seem inapplicable here. The poem is really anything but flashy, so little do its rather startling conceits disturb its harmonies of tone; and since the decorum ought to be one of praise (of the limited sweetness of nature and the unlimited sweetness and virtue of the soul), that decorum supports with difficulty either the angry hue of the rose or timber-like qualities of the soul, the latter seeming so awkward in its modification of something 'sweet' as well as virtuous.

There have been some post-hoc attempts to get round the seasoned timber: Arnold Stein has insisted on the formal nature of the simile, 'like season'd timber', by which, he argues, the quality compared in soul and wood is strictly limited to a fugitive resemblance, and Joseph Summers makes somewhat the same point in speaking of the 'limitation' of conceits: "'Season'd timber" is limited to its one point of resemblance of the "vertuous soul" that it "never gives".' This seems a weak acquiescence to the famous stanza. The real question is not what accommodations we can make post-hoc to the image but what made Herbert think of seasoned timber in the first place, and what effect this note, sounded at this point in the poem, has on the poem as a whole. I believe that Herbert is not arbitrary or wilful in his comparisons, that they rather tend to arise from a motive appearing perhaps sotto-voce in the development of the poem, but which helps to guide the poem from the beginning.

Mary Ellen Rickey has remarked that 'Vertue' is a carpe diem poem in reverse, quoting the precedent that A. Davenport has shown in Ovid for a conclusion in praise of virtue rather than in praise of seizing the day. However, the difference in tone between this poem and its erotic predecessors (a difference occurring not only at the end, as we shall see) seems to remove the poem almost entirely from its parent genre. That is, we would, if we were sufficiently responsive, sense from the beginning that this poem could not possibly end with a call to gather the roses of today, any more than it could end, as the passage in the Ars Amatoria does, with a total rejection of all natural solace.

The high resignation of the first stanza of 'Vertue' sets the initial theme, which, though it is ostensibly the death of a day, seems rather, metaphorically speaking, to be the immortal theme of the death of a maiden, etherealized into a virginal day. Herbert is struck, not by the sunny, earthly beauty, of the day, but by its remoteness, its spiritual stillness; it is so cool, so calm, that it seems more heavenly than earthly, an appearance which engenders Herbert's metaphor making the day a bridge to the skies; it is, in short, the most innocent and celestial of earthly beauties. We can scarcely doubt that 'bright' suggested 'bride': the Spenserian adjectives—'so cool, so calm, so bright'—could only suggest a bride, but the suggestion is abstracted into a bridal, presumably to avoid confusion of the fall of night with the marriage-bed. But the weeping dew (it is of course the falling dew, or the night-fall, which led to Herbert's invention of day-fall) reminds us of what is usually meant by the 'fall' of something innocent to which we respond by weeping—a fall into corruption, which is a premonition of the fall to death. A stanza, then, which is apparently about Time's destruction of a day is, by virtue of its metaphors, a stanza about the fall of bridal innocence. This fall has not very much to do with Time, but everything to do with intrinsic corruptibility or, to use theological terms, with sin. Herbert has seen this day-fall before, and so his verb is prophetic, not factual (a tone later imitated by Hopkins in 'Spring and Fall', with a sister-recognition of the intrinsic (and not caused by time) nature of the 'fall' we weep for). The dew is the elegist of the day, the witness and mourner of its fall in an unmixed sympathy, and therefore stands as Herbert's representative in the stanza, a helpless and grieving spectator, dwelling 'a weeping Hermit, there'. The emotions here are very pure and unalloyed, since the apparently 'natural' character of the day-fall clears the day of any logical 'guilt' in its descent into night.

If Herbert's representative in the first stanza feels only grief at vanished innocence, his representative in the second stanza is suffering from the smart of the sensual world. The hue of the rose, on which he has so rashly gazed (not glanced), irritates his tender senses and brings involuntary tears to his eye. The beauty of the rose (as Herbert will say explicitly in his poem of that name) is accompanied by qualities that make the flower physically harmful and therefore, in the emblematic universe of this poem, morally inimical to man. The weeping dew is rather a female figure, appropriate attendant to the bridal day, but the rash gazer is clearly masculine, and so is the rose, angry in hue. It is a small duel they engage in, in which the rose pricks the eye of the one so rash as to approach him. The mutually symmetrical relations between nature and the spectator in the first stanza (the falling day, the falling dew, the clear day, the clear dew) become, then, mutually antagonistic ones after a seductive beginning in the gazer's rash love; and though on the surface the hostility is quickly passed by, it is nevertheless present in the little drama of the flaunting rose, the gazer's love, and the rose's retort. Herbert immediately takes revenge on the rose in a chilling statement, not of prophecy as with the day, but of fact, in which he insists, in an image which has nothing temporal about it at all, on the simultaneous death-in-life of the rose, which is, in a sense, as much dead as alive, since its root is ever in its grave.

The Book of Thel and 'The Sick Rose' are the Blakean parallels to the first and second stanzas of 'Vertue', and we may say that Herbert's feelings are considerably more mixed in respect to aggressive passion than in respect to necessarily-vanished innocence. Or we may say that he prefers the more feminine manifestations of nature (including his own nature) to the more thorny masculine ones. There was no need to make the rose masculine (its Romance predecessors having been by gender feminine) except to insist on the principle of aggression and unexpected harm in the encounter with passion. In fact, the real question raised by the second stanza is why the rose is called 'sweet' at all. If a reader, unacquainted with the poem, were to be shown the stanza, with the first word missing ('―rose, whose hue, angry and brave', etc.) and asked to supply a plausible first word, the last adjective to come to mind, I presume, would be 'sweet'. Nothing else in the stanza supports the initial epithet, a fact especially striking because the sweetness of the 'sweet day' is so wholly borne out by the succeeding adjectives. Is, in fact, Herbert's rose sweet at all? Not, certainly by its angry hue, which is only a superior (because mobile) sort of thorn; not, certainly, by its entombed root; by its bravery, perhaps? But 'sweetness', in the conventional sense established by earlier poems on the sweet rose, and by the 'sweet' day and the 'sweet' spring here in the poem, is almost antithetical to 'bravery' in Herbert's sense. We are left with the notoriously unmentioned sweetness of the rose's perfume or nectar, what Herbert calls in another poem 'hony of roses'. No doubt this aspect of the rose is what Herbert includes in the next stanza with its 'chest of sweets', but all mention of perfume, the only thing that could make the epithet 'sweet' seem plausible, is suppressed in this second stanza. The rose, in short, is not praised as the day was.

Let us, in an apologetic experiment, rewrite the second stanza so that it becomes a 'praise' like the first, expanding its first epithet logically:

   Sweet rose, whose hue, so gently brave,
   Delights the gazer's tender eye,
   Thy root, alas, is in the grave,
   And thou must die.

The first thing necessary, in such a rewriting, is to change Herbert's bold rhythm (so noticeable after the placid sweetness in the rhythmic conduct of the first stanza, with its perfect and famous partition of stress among all the words of its first line, and its subsequent iambic regularity). The markedly irregular rhythm of Herbert's first two lines about the rose mimics the encounter of rose and rash gazer, with two head-on shocks 'hue: angry' and 'brave: bids') and one slighter one ('rash: gazer'): the subsidence of this stanza into iambic rhythm can occur only after the duel of hue and eye has ceased.

The third stanza, with its feminine rhymes, is always breaking into a dance meter, and here there is no difficulty at all about the initial epithet. Spring is indeed not only sweet but the quintessence of sweetness, at once its expansion and contraction, and Herbert's rush of responsive feeling betrays the passion underlying the poem, hitherto kept at an impersonal distance. For the first time Herbert himself enters the poem, and again he denies, as he had in the stanza on the rose, that dissolution is basically a temporal event. With the rose, death was co-temporal with life; with the spring, we discover that ending is, on this earth, of one essence with existing. It is not because music exists in time that it 'has its closes'; it is rather because the beginning seeks the end, and makes no sense without it. All unities are also separations from other things, and therefore all earthly essences, whether in life or in art, have limits.

Because 'Vertue' has been seen so often as a poem contrasting the corruptibility of the natural order with the incorruptibility of the soul, and, consequently, as a poem about nature's subjection to Time, it is worth remarking on the fate attending each of Herbert's instances. The lovely day will 'fall'—almost a gravitational matter coinciding with the setting of the sun, and implying no real change occurring in the essence of the day itself; the passionate rose lives in its own grave, and comes closest, but certainly not by a Time-process, to 'death' in our usual sense; the spring, like music, comes to a close in a 'horizontal' ending that implies neither a burial nor a fall from a height. In fact, 'death' is thrice defined in the poem, and the only grisly death (like the only equivocal 'sweetness') belongs to the rose. The day dies intact, as effortlessly as it has lived; spring, like music, has a dying fall; but these declensions are sweet ones. The poem is not occupied chiefly with the corruption of nature by Time, only with the eventual (and philosophically necessary) cessation of nature.

Similarly, though the temporal question can hardly be excluded from the poem (given the presence of some temporal words like 'tonight' or 'spring'—I except the words 'ever' and 'never' as being eternal rather than temporal), the subject of each stanza, as it appears in the two initial lines, is conceived of not temporally, but solely in spatial or visual terms. The day is a span between earth and sky; the rose sends forth its pricking hue to the gazer through the ether; the spring is a box full of days and roses. The word 'day', itself, normally a temporal one, is transformed into a spatial unit by its alliance with the word 'roses' in the phrase, 'Spring, full of … days and roses'; the oddity of the link is not seen until we create a similar pair, say, 'full of weeks and oranges', or something similar. An addition of dissimilar things tends to assimilate one of the pair to the other, and here 'day' is clearly assimilated to 'rose', since both are, in the poem, things that can be put into a box of compacted sweets. We might say, given the visual stress, that these are objects which vanish rather than events which end; the poem, once again, is concerned not with time but with cessation.

When we reach the famous final stanza, we realize that there has been an abrupt break in format. The principle of inertial movement, transferred to poetry, suggests that Herbert might have continued the poem in the strict framework of its repeated construction: 'Sweet―, thou must (or shall―'.The frame is one of direct address, coupled with prophetic statement about the future destiny of the thing addressed. If I may be forgiven another rewriting, a fourth stanza resembling the first three in syntactic form would give us something like:

   Sweet soul, thy vertue cannot rust,
   Like timber aged thou dost not give,
   And when the world will turn to dust,
   Thou'lt chiefly live.

The question I want to raise by this affront to the poem is not one of worth, but one of procedure. Why did Herbert depart from his 'Sweet X' format and his direct address? and why did he not put the future of the soul in the future tense? But I defer answers here in order to put another question.

If Herbert wanted to say that the soul was better than natural things, why did he not say that though natural things were sweet the soul was still sweeter? I again rewrite the final stanza:

   Only the sweet and vertuous soul,
   A honey'd spring perpetual gives,
   And when the whole world turns to coal,
   Then chiefly lives.

It is of course clear at once that the rewritten 'sweet' last stanza like the rewritten 'sweet' stanza on the rose earlier, is insipid in conception, and we must conclude that the smarting gazer, the angry-hued rose, and the seasoned timber have some common stiffening function in the poem. That stiffening function lies behind the pun present in the title of the poem: the rose has 'vertue' in the sense of power, and the soul must be given at least as much resistance as the world has power. The poem, then, centres on both power and sweetness.

The customary Christian view is that to the seducing sweetness of the world must be opposed a stern and resistant power of the soul. Herbert is not unwilling to see the truth of this view, but he does not wish to adopt it at the cost of placing the order of nature and the order of spirit in radical opposition to each other. He wants to attribute to the soul a sweetness too. But as we might have asked what justification there was for the epithet 'sweet' applied to the armed rose, so we may well ask what justification is offered us for calling the soul sweet. The only things we are told about it are that it 'never gives' and that it lives now but 'chiefly lives' after the Last Day. There are rather colourless phrases. Are we to conclude that Herbert is illegitimately counting on our extra-poetic assent to the soul's sweetness because we are good Anglicans? The sweetness of the rose, after all, is at least justified later in the poem by its implicit inclusion in the 'chest of sweets' of the elegiac third stanza, a ceremonial farewell to beauty paralleling the lines in 'The Forerunners':

   Lovely enchanting language, sugar cane,
   Hony of roses, whither wilt thou fly?

The soul, we think, needs its sweetness defined even more desperately, because it seems in so many ways opposed to the previous sweetness, of day, rose, and spring, found in the poem.

The soul, linked by the epithet which it shares with the other self-evidently sweet things, seems to be included as one member of the class of 'sweets'. However, it would be fatal to describe it, as I have done in rewriting the stanza, in terms of the sweetness of nectar, light, or perfume: it would then be in a natural subclass along with the day, the rose, and the spring. George Herbert Palmer, in his beautiful but sometimes misleading edition of Herbert, represents the subject of 'Vertue' as 'the perpetuity of goodness', and he adds that goodness is 'bright as the day, sweet as the rose, lovely as the spring, but excels them all in never fading'. Surely the emphasis of this paraphrase is mistaken: Herbert's poem is not one which says, 'O Vertue, thou art beautiful as the day' in the first stanza, and 'O Vertue, thou art lovely as the rose' in the second stanza, and then 'O Vertue, thou art sweet as the spring' in the third stanza. If the poem had done this, we should have no trouble in believing in the sweetness of the soul; it would have been demonstrated for us thrice over. Herbert, on the contrary, establishes first the absolute priority (in the development of the poem) of the sweetness of nature, allowing for the bitter-sweetness of the rose, and only then begins to talk of the soul. We cannot presume, as Palmer seems to do, a knowledge of the end of the poem in reading the first stanza.

The sweetness of the soul, then, is not precisely the sweetness of air, of perfume, or of nectar. What, then, is it? It is not the experienced sweetness of the felt ecstasy of the soul. That, for Herbert, is represented in 'The Banquet', where indeed the soul, to express its ecstasy, resorts to metaphors of melted sugar, sweetened wine, and the fragrance of 'flowers, and gummes, and powders', but with the qualification:

   Doubtless, neither starre nor flower
   Hath the power
   Such a sweetness to impart;
   Only God, who gives perfumes,
   Flesh assumes,
   And with it perfumes my heart.

In 'Vertue' the sweetness of the soul is not immediate or felt, but only remembered or inferred, and this memory or inference creates the pathos of the poem. It is a poem of faith, not of love. Therefore Herbert cannot say anything sweet about the soul (as Palmer implies he does): he can only say that it is sweet, and trust us to believe that he knows whereof he speaks, having so elaborately assumed his credentials as a connoisseur of sweetness by the first three stanzas. He then, without any elaboration of the adjective 'sweet', immediately begins to illustrate the virtue of the soul—the Holdfast, the staunchness, the unyieldingness of it. The anchor and the optick of 'Hope' are the emblems of this poem too, and having said so much, we are tempted once again to think that while the poem succeeds very well in realizing the beauties of spring, it succeeds less well in realizing their brother-and-antithesis, the staunch soul.

The answer to this problem lies partially in the second stanza, where a type of sweetness is shown to give a sudden smart in the 'tasting' (a meditation continued, as stated above, in 'The Rose'). Our relishing of the day and the spring is impeded only philosophically, by reflection on their brevity, but the relish of the rose is physically impeded by the after-smart—it 'biteth in the close', either visually or physiologically. If things which seem sweet are not, then things which seem not may be. If the soul is sweet, it is with a hidden sweetness rather resembling the hidden smart in the rose, an 'aftertaste' in the soul which comes on the Last Day.

In most carpe diem poems, the direct address is made by the lover to his mistress (or he may address himself and her together, as in 'To His Coy Mistress' and 'Corinna's Going A-Maying'). If instances of natural brevity are given as proof of mortality, they are given in the third person. This convention is so strong, that the thing addressed (in a poem reminding us, as 'Vertue' does, of the carpe diem genre) unconsciously becomes, whatever its logical function, the poet's 'mistress' and by extension himself, since carpe diem poems addressed to a mistress are likewise, as Marvell and Herrick saw, equally carpe diem poems addressed to oneself; the poet wants his mistress to seize the day because without her compliance he cannot seize it himself. (In the special case of the elder poet counselling the younger, the elder is regretting his own lost opportunities and therefore symbolically and a posteriori addressing himself.) In a carpe diem poem, in short, the poet might say, 'O Rose, thou shalt die', but he would be including himself or his mistress (his other self) implicitly in the statement: 'Since we are but decaying,' says Herrick. The profound object of commiseration is always really the poet himself.

The day, the rose, and the spring, then, are all figures which, to the extent to which he uses the tradition of direct address, Herbert means to represent himself: this seemingly so impersonal poem is in fact a miniature autobiography, which witnesses to the necessary cessation, in the order of Nature, of Herbert's original innocence, 'brave' passion, and rapturous youth. However, from the very beginning of the poem, the poet is also implicitly set against nature, not identifying himself in toto with it, though he certainly identifies elements of himself—his youth, his aggression, his passion—with it. The pathos of the poem comes as a result of this partial identification of himself with nature, but the strength of the poem comes from the means by which Herbert distinguishes other elements of himself from mortal nature. The day dies—but the dew of tears remains behind (with Herbert) to mourn its fall; the rose's root is in the grave even while it sends forth its angry dart—but the rash gazer, wiping his eye, remains behind (with Herbert) the wiser perhaps for his experience, to moralize on the eventual powerlessness of the rose's power; the spring dies—but Herbert's music remains behind (with Herbert) to exemplify the years that bring the philosophic mind. In each stanza, then, someone or something—the weeping dew, the rash gazer wiping his eye, a strain of music—stands outside the pictured death of nature, just as Herbert's voice, tender but stern in its prophecies, stands outside the events it foretells. This is a voice which 'never gives'. Though it yields to its own passion of regret in the rush of sensibility betrayed in 'Sweet spring, full of sweet dayes and roses, / A box where sweets compacted lie', it checks itself, recovers its equilibrium, and reverts, with the gravity of the seasoned soul, to the undeniable necessity for musical closes.

It is truly the voice of the sweet and virtuous soul which has been speaking to us all through the poem—sweet in its instant emotion of kinship towards all other sweet things (even to the point of being hurt by its own precipitancy) and virtuous in its response to the encounters with sweetness. It loves other beings of innocent sweetness and weeps their disappearance; it chastises itself for rashness after an encounter with the bitter sweetness of passion; and it acknowledges the philosophical necessity for all sweetness' coming to an end. The sweetness of the soul, however, is rather baffled by the end of the poem. It has watched the day die, the rose wound, and the spring disappear, and has reacted virtuously; but what to do with its sweetness when the whole world turns to coal? There is nothing left for the natural sweetness of the soul to turn congenially to; springs, days, and roses are gone; it is time for it to call on its other qualities, and to be staunch, to be stoic, to be seasoned timber. No image of sweetness would do in this all-consuming end. There can be no natural appeal to sweetness in the fire which 'solvet saeclum in favilla'.

Why this energetic holocaust at the end? Herbert is perhaps cavalier, we may think, in his over-severe 'punishment' of the beautiful, in burning up, in his penultimate line, the 'little world' of his poem. It is his day and his rose and his spring which he burns to coal, deliberately. His conflagration raises the very old question of the possibility of 'natural' virtue. Is unreflecting virtue, 'innate' virtue, we might say, virtue at all? As Newman put it later on, what has gentlemanliness, or sweetness, to do with holiness? What is the relation between natural virtue and 'real' virtue? Is it possible to do good without the intention of doing good? (Such is the 'virtue' that goes forth from herbs.) Shakespeare thought a flower could be said to be, in this sense, all unconsciously 'vertuous':

   The summer's flower is to the summer sweet,
   Though to itself it only live and die.

The notorious ambiguity and bitterness that surround this statement in the Sonnets betray the difficulties of founding an ethic on beauty or sweetness or 'vertue' of the natural sort.

A possible stiffening, Shakespeare thought, can be added to sweetness by way of truth:

   O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
   By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!

Herbert hints at the deceptiveness of beauty in the 'untruth' of the rose, with its root hidden in death (though it is uninvaded by Shakespeare's canker or Blake's worm). But it is not deceptiveness in worldly beauty which is Herbert's main difficulty. The day he gives us is pure truth (unlike Shakespeare's 'glorious morning' which turns false under the 'basest cloud'), and Herbert's spring is a quintessence of pure sweetness with no lilies which fester in it. For Herbert, then, beauty does not so much need the complement of truth since it is so often of itself 'true'. It rather needs two other things: strength and usefulness. Beauty, for all Herbert's passionate sensibility, seemed frail to him; its action was no stronger than a flower, a 'momentarie bloom'. It needed some admixture of the masculine. When God first poured out his blessings on man, according to 'The Pulley',' Strength first made a way; / Then beautie flow'd, then wisdom, honor, pleasure'. Perhaps this list represents Herbert's own scale of worth.

Are we convinced, then, by the end of 'Vertue', of the necessity of adding strength to sweetness, and if so, how? Herbert has regretted, in the poem, the perishing of his innocence and his passion, the passing of his springtime. If the selves of spring—the innocent self, the importunate self, the self full of 'compacted' potential—are gone, who is the Herbert who is left, and does he have any continuity with these vanished selves? The problem is one we generally think of as Wordsworthian, but it is first of all a human problem, and certainly antedated Wordsworth. Is there a natural piety binding together the past and present selves of Herbert?

The word 'sweet', applied to the soul, is the only verbal sign of identity between the later and the earlier selves. That identity is partly submerged by the dominant duties or possibilities of middle age: to be staunch, not to give in, to be useful. In youth one is beautiful, innocent, energetic, ravishing; in middle age one is to be a support, a piece of seasoned timber supporting the fabric of the world, like the just Sundays in Herbert's poem of that name:

   Sundaies the pillars are,
   On which heav'ns palace arched lies;
   The other dayes fill up the spare
   And hollow room with vanities.
   They [i.e. Sundays] are the fruitfull beds and borders
   In Gods rich garden: that is bare
   Which parts their ranks and orders.

Pillars are here identified with the fruit which follows the springtime of blossoms; to be useful or fruitful is the function of the seasoned soul. But as it would be presumptuous to attribute fruit to oneself, Herbert forbears to attribute to himself in 'Vertue' anything but staunchness.

Two things survive Herbert's holocaust of his blossoms and his spring days: the 'vertuous soul', of course, exemplified not only in the last stanza but in the voice which speaks the entire poem and expresses its final attitudes toward day, rose, and spring; but also, the order of music, which Herbert distinctly separates from the perishing order of natural decay. Its logical function is superior to the function of natural order, and its harmony allows it a spirituality near to the soul's own. 'My music'—it is all that the speaker of the poem tells about his present self, that he has music. Each purely natural element in the poem is characterized by one deathlike attributed noun: the day by 'thy fall'; the rose by 'thy root … in its grave'; the spring by 'your closes'. The poet alone has a 'living' attributed noun: 'my music'. That music is part of the continuity of sweetness, contributing its sweetness to the virtuous soul, linking age and youth, and binding each to each.

If we now return to the earlier question of direct address, we realize that Herbert's delicacy forbids his making a blunt apostrophe to the virtuous soul. 'But thou, O soul'—it would seem his own soul he was invoking, and though he can tell us he has music, he will not tell us that he has a virtuous soul. On the other hand, neither will he use the usual form for abstract philosophical generalization: he will not say 'Onely the sweet and vertuous soul … never gives.' It seems that the indefinite article in such a case points usually to the speaker's having a particular case potentially in mind: that the indefinite article, in brief, attributes a superior reality-value to the illustration. The reality-value of the soul is also increased by the reiteration of the epithet 'sweet', which links it to those supremely real examples of sweetness we have already been given in the poem, and which compares the soul, under that rubric, with the day, the rose, and the spring. It is true that the poem exists primarily to differentiate the soul from these, that the poem is, as Rosemond Tuve says, a 'definition by differences'—but the soul would not need differentiation unless at first blush it looked to belong to the same order as the day, the rose, and the spring. What do we use differentia for if not to distinguish similar things? For this reason the soul must co-exist with its companions. It may indeed chiefly live after the last Day, but it certainly also lives a life of sweetness, like its companions, now. When Wesley rewrote the poem into a hymn, he not only effaced Herbert's metaphor of timber, with its attributions of staunchness and usefulness, but he also virtually effaced the soul from existence in natural life, as Elsie Leach has remarked, quoting Wesley's final stanza:

   Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
   When nature all in ruins lies,
   When earth and heaven a period find,
   Begins a life that never dies.

The firmness of the soul which, though subjected to the hammer-blows of life and death, never gives, is marked by Herbert's strong reversion to trochaic meter in his last stanza. If we cut the feet in iambics, the sense is badly served: 'A sweet / and ver- / tuous soul / like sea- / son'd tim- / ber nev- / er gives.' The more 'natural' way to read these lines is in trochaics, where the words fit easily into the feet: 'Onely a / sweet and / vertuous / soul like / season'd / timber / never / gives.' The repeated strokes and lifts show the firmness of the staunch soul under attack. The tone in Herbert's last stanza, then, is not triumphant as we might have expected, but rather grave and judicious, largely on account of the limiting word 'chiefly'. Wesley's version is a far more triumphant 'religious' paean, and shows us strongly, by its contrast with Herbert, how careful Herbert was to express dogma only in so far as he could make it real in his own feelings and therefore in a poem. The distinction between the hymn writer, versifying doctrine, and the poet, expressing feeling, is nowhere clearer than in Wesley's revisions of Herbert.

'Vertue' does not go on to the time when the intrinsic sweetness of the soul, so followed in life by the natural sweetness which it must see die around it, will find a correspondence in heavenly sweetness. We end in the deprivations of judgement, with the soul sternly more alive, but lonely in its solitary immunity to fire, its strength taking precedence, visibly, over its sweetness. We are accustomed to poems ending in stoicism; we know them well in Wordsworth. What Wordsworth could not write of was the recovered sweetness of the redeemed soul. Herbert could not write of it in this poem, either, but he is the author of the most exquisite poem in English expressing the state in which faith and hope, the necessary virtues of middle and old age, are dissolved, and pure sweetness returns and remains: 'Love bade me enter…. So I did sit and eat.' To write of the hoped-for future in the past tense, as Herbert does in 'Love', is only possible to a poet of a changeable temperament, who has already had the experience which he hopes to have again. If Herbert had not known so naturally the sweetness of the day, the rose, and the spring, and the different-but-similar sweetness of his own music and his own soul, he could not have imagined, in 'Love', the sweetness which, after the fire of the Last Day, should incorporate them all in a final banquet.

Source: Helen Vendler, "George Herbert's 'Vertue,'" in Ariel, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1970, pp. 54-70.