Herbert’s shape poems, “The Altar” and “Easter Wings,” are notorious not only for describing their titles’ subjects, but mimicking them visually with geometric formatting. The spectacle is memorable enough to cause “a flash of recognition” among readers, “even outside the community of Renaissance scholars.”[1] Nevertheless, a sizable pool of commentators trivialize the visual novelty as “a mere gimmick” that “seems to cheapen the poem.”[2] Joan Bennett, for instance, dismisses “The Altar’s” structural shape as “a naïve device” that springs from “a child-like quality of mind”: Herbert simply “ liked word games.”[3] Louis Untermeyer, following a similar grain of mind, deems the poems “shaped whimsies.”[4] Paul Fussel, taking a more theoretical stance, contends that they have an “artistic disadvantage”: their “structure directs itself more to the eye than to the ear” so that “the two dimensions are not married” and “one is simply in command of the other.”[5] John Drury, in his biography of Herbert, calls “The Altar” and “Easter Wings” “heartfelt,” but his exclusion of any serious consideration of them suggests they are trifles that “gave Herbert a bad name.”[6] Even among early modern critics, there are few defenders of shape poems aside from George Puttenham.[7] Ben Jonson derides the genre as “A paire of sizers and a Combe in verse,”[8] and Gabriel Harvey adds that no verse is “so absurd and fruteles” as this one, which “beinge once taken upp shall have sume imitatoures.”[9] Admittedly, since “The Altar” and “Easter Wings” already verbally describe their title images within their respective texts, a visual emblem seems, at best, a superfluity.
Yet the visual architecture of these poems does more than translate the title into a geometric emblem: in each case, the poem’s shape also provides visual cues for a circular and mirror-like logic. To show you what I mean, let us consider the “The Altar” from a bird’s-eye view:
A1. Lines 1-2: 10 syllables per line
……..B1. Lines 3-4: 8 syllables per line
…………….C1. Lines 5-8: 4 syllables per line
…………….C2. Lines 9-12: 4 syllables per line
……..B2. Lines13-14: 8 syllables per line
A2. Lines 15-16: 10 syllables per line
What we discover is a crisscrossing scheme—ABCCBA—known as chiasmus, in which formal elements in the first half of the poem are repeated in the second half, but in reverse order—as if gazing through a mirror. Scholars in the line of Harvey[10] and Nänny[11] have observed Herbert’s frequent use of chiasmus on the sentence level: His poetry is never “of deserved praise” without also being “of praise deserved” (“a Wreath”).[12] Yet in line with the large-scale chiasms of the Bible, Homer, and the English folk ballad tradition,[13] Herbert also constructs large-scale mirror poems in which the thematic content, by ironic reversals, matches the stanzas’ metrical circularity. Lyrical arguments that we assume are linear are, in fact, helix-like, spiraling with rings of concentric circles.
The significance of these chiastic structures cannot be overstated since they alter our logical points of comparison when reading. When confronted with a circular form—ABCCBA—we expect the content in the second half of the poem to both repeat and invert the content of the first half. We assume, additionally, that each letter pairing shares a causal link: surely the final A section both repeats and reverses thematic elements of the first A section, and so on with the B and C pairings. While a linear reading follows a chronological path—comparing line one with line two—a chiastic reading compares lines and stanzas as if they were concentric rings. Reading “The Altar,” we would not necessarily think to compare the thematic content of lines 3-4 with lines 13-14, but the fact that both passages have eight syllables—that they are the second and second-to-last sections of the poem—invites us to do so.
When we read Herbert’s shape poems with this circularity in mind, we find there is a paradoxical opposition: Although the sentence-level diction is simple and direct, the large-scale arrangement is surprisingly complex and ironic as mirror-like contraries weave together parallels and reversals at the same time. To show how this is the case, I will read “The Altar” and “Easter Wings” under the logical and ironic guidance of their chiastic structures. I will then compare them with several other large-scale chiasms within Herbert’s corpus—“Man,” “Antiphon I,” and “Antiphon II”—to demonstrate how Herbert relies on the formal scheme to govern the ironic logic of his poems even when they lack the visual spectacle of a geometric emblem.
Now that we are aware of the chiastic division of syllables in “The Altar,” let us consider how Herbert arranges the thematic content in a circle:
A1. Lines 1-2: Contrition and Sinner’s Sacrifice
……..B1. Lines 3-4: God alone creates and is supreme
…………….C1. Lines 5-8: God alone creates and is supreme
…………….C2. Lines 9-12: Praise God
……..B2. Lines13-14: Praise God
A2. Lines 15-16: Sanctification and Christ’s Sacrifice
Comparing the A sections, both depict the speaker’s heart as an altar of sacrifice.
A1. A broken Altar, Lord, thy servant reares,
……..Made of a heart, & cimented with teares. (1-2)
A2. Oh, lett thy blessed sacrifice be mine,
……..And sanctify this altar to be thine.[14] (15-16)
This metaphor is somewhat involved since Herbert combines the notion of a broken heart with the biblical trope of a sinner’s stony heart: the heart is meant to be an altar, a place of sacrificial worship, but the stone-hearted sinner, by his own self-worship, suffers the grief of self-destruction. The heart’s altar, thus “broken,” must be recreated, a process which begins with heart-cementing “teares” of contrition and ends with the sorrow of Christ’s “blessed sacrifice” on the cross (1-2, 13). In the end, the solution to sin’s self-sacrificing destruction is, ironically, a self-giving destruction: the immolated Christ who heals the wounded heart by taking on wounds Himself. The poem, thus, swivels from a broken and ungodly altar held together by penitent tears to a new altar sanctified by Christ’s atoning blood.
Continuing to the B and C sections, the thematic parallels between the first and second half of the poem are more difficult to discern. B1 and C1 (lines 3-8) emphasize God’s singular creative powers and supremacy:
B1. Whose parts are, as thy hand did frame;
……..No workemans toole hath touch’d the same.
C1. ………….A heart alone
………………Is such a stone,
………………As nothing, but
………………Thy pow’r doth cut. (3-8)
Whereas their mirroring counterpart (lines 9-12) seeks to praise God perpetually:
C2. …………Wherefor each part
………………Of my hard heart
………………Meets in this frame,
………………To praise thy Name:
B2. That, if I chance to hold my peace,
……..These stones to praise thee may not cease. (7-12)
Yet when we recollect the sin-to-atonement arc of the A sections, we find that the above passages have a cause-to-effect continuity. The first BC section suggests the sinner’s need for God’s creative powers. Since man did not create himself (“No workemans toole hath touch’d the same”), he cannot regenerate his sin’s losses, but must rely on God to do so (4). The second BC section, on the other hand, responds to this need with prayer. Because God alone has the power to create, he is supreme and exists prior to all, so that the only proper end of worship is to praise Him. If the speaker undid himself by the self-worship of sin in section A, in the center of the poem he finds a will and a way to seek regeneration in a worship-worthy God. If his heart will be “hard” from sin, he might at least put that hardness to new use as an altar, albeit a tear-cemented one, and if his altar must be lowly, it is by lowliness that Christ humbled himself unto death on the cross.
The poem, in the end, does not simply have a linear progression; it has a cyclical one with circular points of reference. Recollecting Augustine’s tripartite division of the soul (knowledge, memory, and will),[15] it begins with a knowledge of sin’s destruction, turns to a memory of God’s creative supremacy, pivots to a prayer-willed reunion with God, and ends with a plea for sanctification. Cleverly, Herbert founds this chiastic cycle upon a series of mirrored contrasts between man and God: the injustice of man’s self-destruction (A1) is repaired by the mercy of Christ’s self-sacrifice (A2); man’s contrite sorrow (A1) finds a salvific resolution in the sorrow of the cross (A2); and man’s lack of creative powers (B1, C1) gives him cause to bend his knee to a creative God (B2, C2). Paradoxically, the speaker is exalted by debasing himself, and the result of his self-wounding contrition is apparent to the eye: for the visually intact altar that the speaker requests, we find, is the poem.[16]
Like “The Altar,” Herbert conveys the chiastic structure of “Easter Wings” through a circular gradation of even-numbered syllables. In the first half of each stanza, each proceeding line loses two syllables, whereas in the second half, each successive line gains two syllables. The result is a chiastic waning and waxing of line length.
A1. Line 1: 10 syllables
……..B1. Line 2: 8 syllables
…………….C1. Line 3: 6 syllables
……………………D1, Line 4: 4 syllables
…………………………..E1, Line 5: 2 syllables
…………………………..E2, Line 6: 2 syllables
……………………D2. Line 7: 4 syllables
…………….C2. Line 8: 6 syllables
……..B2. Line 9: 8 syllables
A2. Line 10: 10 syllables
This tapering and thickening not only shapes each stanza into a pair of wings; it mimics the Fall-to-redemption cycle of the poem. Fallen man, as a result of sin, gradually loses his existence, only to regain it through the ever-expanding gradations of repentance and redemption.
The first stanza emphasizes God’s superabundant creation of earth, an act that finds a counterweight in the final line in which the repentant sinner hopes he will rise to Heaven’s new creation:
A1. Lord, who createdst Man in wealth & store,[17] (1)
A2. Then shall the fall further the flight in mee. (10)
As much as the Fall corrupts existence, it is, for the repentant, a “fortunate fall,”[18] since it results in resurrection—the re-creation of the body-soul union in heaven, which “further[s]” man’s “flight” on an eternal scale (10). The poem, thus, begins and ends with creation’s “wealth & store,” but the phrase takes on two contrary senses (1).
The interior lines of the stanza chart man’s Fall (B1) and redemption (B2):
B1. Though foolishly he lost the same, (2)
B2. And sing this day thy Victories. (9)
Herbert develops this reversal at the poem’s center by describing the effects of the Fall (i.e. death) in terms of poverty (C1, D1, E1) and the effects of repentance in terms of a rising lark (C2, D2, E2):
C1. Decaying more & more,
……..D1. Till he became,
…………….E1. Most poor,
…………….E2. With thee
……..D2. O let me rise
C2. As Larks, harmoniously,
The wealth-to-poverty reversal is itself reversed by the lark’s falling-to-rising arc. Taken as a whole, the stanza is a microcosm of salvation history. In it, earth mirrors heaven, sin mirrors redemption, and temporal death mirrors eternal life:
A1. Earth’s Creation
……..B1. Discord and Defeat: Man’s Fall
…………….CDE1. Effect of the Fall: Temporal Death
…………….CDE2. Effect of Repentance: Eternal Life
……..B2. Reharmonization and Victory: Resurrective Rising
A2. Heaven’s New Creation
None of these reversals are, in themselves, particularly complex or original, but compounded together they result in a symmetrical network of ironies: if the corruption of creation leads to creation’s renewal, defeat leads to victory and discord leads to harmony. As much as sin impoverishes man, his lowliness is, through humble repentance, his greatest “wealth & store” (1). The more possessions he loses, the less self-reliant he is; he has more liberties to radically depend upon God’s re-creative powers.
In the second stanza, Herbert repeats these appeals to humility and repentance, but he replaces the poverty image with a medical one: the sinner’s sickness is ironically cured by humility’s healing wounds. This time, instead of beginning with man’s creation, he opens with a lamentation of man’s fallen birth, and instead of ending with a healthy bird who rises with Christ, he ends with a wounded bird who must entirely rely on Christ’s Easter wings to rise:
A1. My tender age in sorrow did beginne
……..B1. And still with sicknesses and shame… (11-12)
……..B2. For, if I imp my wing on thine,
A2. Affliction shall advance the flight in me. (19-20)
“Affliction,” in the end, “advance[s]” the speaker’s eternal “flight” because mortality betrays man’s inability to recreate himself—man, by sickness, experiences his own lack of divinity (20). His afflictions are, thus, bounties in disguise: if he cannot depend on his own losses, he has more reason to stake his hopes in the resurrective cycle of Christ’s healing wounds.
Herbert prepares the reader for this Christ-the-Divine-Physician turn by frontloading the bodily effects of the Fall. Man, we learn, was born to die as a just punishment for his sins (B1-E1):
B1. And still with sicknesses and shame
……..C1. Thou didst so punish sinne,
…………….D1. That I became
……………………E1. Most thinne. (12-15)
Like the first stanza, we would expect the next line itself to die by disappearing unto utter non-being, except that humility turns the body’s affliction into a spiritual remedy:
…………………………..E2. With thee
……………………D2. Let me combine,
…………….C2. And feel thy victorie:
……..B2. For, if I imp my wing on thine,
A2. Affliction shall advance the flight in me. (11-20)
If man by Adam was born to die, by Christ he dies to be reborn. The justice of the Fall is, thus, paradoxically fulfilled by the mercy of Christ’s resurrection, as the death of a guilty offender is reversed by the death of an innocent victim.
If Herbert’s pattern poems are not merely cheap visual spectacles, but chiastic word riddles—despite their plain-handed appearance—then we should not be surprised that he applies the structural arrangement to lyrics outside of the “pattern poem” genre. Such is the case with “Man,” a poem that consists of nine six-line stanzas that each follow the same chiastic division of syllables:
A1. Line 1: 6 syllables
……..B1. Line 2: 10 syllables
…………….C1. Line 3: 8 syllables
…………….C2. Line 4: 8 syllables
……..B2. Line 5: 10 syllables
A2. Line 6: 6 syllables
The fact that each stanza is, metrically, a self-contained mirror suggests the possibility that the thematic content shares a like circularity. Indeed, the first and last stanza both compare man to a “stately habitation” (2):
A1. ……………………My God, I heard this day
……..That none doth build a stately habitation,
……..……..But he, that meanes to dwell therein.
……..……..What house more stately hath there bin
……..Or Can be, then is Man? to whose Creation
……..……..……..……All things are in decay.[19] (1-6)
A2. ……………………Since then, my God, thou hast
……..So brave a Palace built, O dwell in it,
……..……..That it may dwell with thee at last.
……..……..Till then afford vs so much witt:
……..That, as the World serve vs, wee may serve thee,
……..……..……..……And both thy servants bee. (49-54)
Whereas the first stanza praises man’s supremacy on earth’s Chain of Being (compared with man, “All things are in decay”), the last stanza appeals to God’s supremacy (6). Man, we find, is supreme on earth not to convert the world into a palace, but to furnish himself (and “the World”) as God’s palace: ironically, man best demonstrates his earthly supremacy when he humbles himself before his heavenly Maker.
This punch-line ending is particularly unexpected because the interior stanzas exclusively praise man as the summation and summit of creation. First, stanza two presents man as a microcosm of all living beings since, as the Aristotelian-Platonic argument goes, he possesses the powers and faculties that all plants and animals share:[20]
B1. ……………………For man is eur’y thing,
……..And more: He is a Tree, yet beares no fruit;
……..……..A Beast, yet is, or should be more:
……..……..Reason & speach wee onely bring.
……..Parrats may thank vs, if they are not mute,
……..……..……..……They go vpon the score.
Man “is a Tree” because, although he “beares no fruit,” he has vegetative powers of growth and reproduction, and he is “A Beast” because, like all beasts, he possesses sense perception.[21] Not only does man contain in himself all the powers of the world’s sundry beings, but he is further ennobled by his higher “Reason,” which allows him to speak (and, thus, teach “Parrats … speach”) (10-11). In reflexive fashion, Herbert repeats his praise of man’s comprehensiveness in the conclusion of stanza eight (B2): “Oh mighty Love! Man is one world, & hath / Another to attend him” (47-48). Not only is man superior, but earth conveys its inferiority by serving man.
The C and D stanzas further develop this theme, describing various reasons for man’s superiority (C1, D1) and contrasting these with evidence of the earth’s inferiority (C2, D2):
C1. Stanza 3: Man’s Symmetry
……..D1. Stanza 4 : Man’s Dominion
……..D2. Stanza 6: The Heavens Serve Man
C2. Stanza 7: The Earth Serves Man
Man’s superiority is apparent to the eye: it is implied in the beauty of his body’s “Symmetry” and his limb’s “proportions,” in his ability to hunt and capture “prey,” in his capacity to discern “the highest starre,” and in his skill to “Cure” his “Flesh” with “Herbs” (13-14, 20-21, 23). The earth, too, offers visible testaments of its inferiority: the “starres,” the “Night,” and the setting “Sunne” attend man’s slumbers; “Below” the waters administer him “drink,” and “above” the land and sky provide animals for his “meat”; and because man’s castles, palaces, and cities tower over the world, the primacy of his “habitation” is “Distinguished” (31, 39-40). The conclusion of these contrasts is the center stanza that acts as the hinge of the entire chiasm (E1):
……………………For vs the winds doe blow,
……..The earth doth rest, heauen moue, & fountaines flow.
……..……..Nothing wee see, but meanes our good,
……..……..As our delight, or as our treasure.
……..The whole is, either our Cubbord of food,
……..……..……..……Or Cabinet of pleasure. (25-30)
God made creation and the harmonious balance of its four elements (“wind,” “earth,” the fiery “heauen,” and watery “fountains”) to be man’s “treasure” and “pleasure” (25-26, 28, 30).
To the threshold of the last stanza, the poem coaxes the reader into believing man was meant to be treated like a god, only to replace the mirror of man’s bodily symmetry with the mirror of earth’s likeness to heaven: man, since he is made in God’s image, may indeed reign superior on earth, yet in Heaven he is infinitely inferior to God. The nobility of God and man, in this manner, are both parallel and contrary, just as the poem itself is a symmetrical mirror of repetitions and oppositions, both formal and thematic:
A1. God built man, like a stately palace, to be inhabited
….B1. Stanza 2: Man is a little world
………C1. Stanza 3: Man is superior on earth (Symmetry)
……………D1. Stanza 4: Man is superior on earth (Dominion)
…………………..E1. Stanza 5: Creation was made for man
……………D2. Stanza 6: Creation is inferior to man (Heavens Serve Man)
……….C2. Stanza 7: Creation is inferior to man (Earth Serves Man)
….B2. Stanza 8: Man is a little world and has a world to attend on him
A2. Man ought to humble himself to become God’s dwelling place
The advantage of this circularity is that it allows Herbert both to affirm and deny man’s superiority, not for the sake of contradiction, but for the sake of paradox: man is a superior inferior, since he was endowed with an earthly superiority to exercise his heavenly inferiority through humility’s submission.
These are, of course, not the only chiastic lyrics Herbert composed. “Antiphon I” has a crisscrossing frame that compares where man prays (B1) with the method of his prayer (B2):[22]
A1. Chorus: Let all creation praise God
……..B1. Verse I: Place of Worship (heaven vs. earth)
……..……..……..No place is too noble or too base to worship God
…………….C1. Chorus: Let all creation praise God
……..B2. Verse II: Method of Worship (external vs. internal)
……..……..……..Let the church pray loudly, let the heart pray silently
A2. Chorus: Let all creation praise God
Just as Heaven is never too noble a place to worship, a church is never too loud; and just as earth is never too lowly a place to worship, the heart is never too silent. In fact, this latter parallel suggests the lowliness of silent prayer is its greatest strength: we ought to lend interior prayer the “longest part” of our time since silence, set apart from public displays of vanity, disposes man to humility (12).
In a similar vein, “Antiphon II” juxtaposes God’s mercy and justice:[23]
A1. Chorus I & II: Praise the God of love and mercy
……..B1. Chorus III & IV: God defends & provides (God’s mercy)
……..B2. Chorus V & VI: God destroys the wicked (God’s justice)
A2. Chorus VII & VIII: Let us magnify our praise of the unifying God
As much as God “brake[s]” his “foes in pieces,” he also “hath dealt his mercies” to “his foe[s]” (6, 13). Man may experience God’s justice and mercy in separate moments, but the two are not contrary as much as they are paradoxical: the sinner may justly perish, but the very fact that he lived was a mercy; and even the justly punished sinner, when he lives, has the hope of repentance. God, in this sense, mercifully unites the “two folds” of the goats and sheep, even while he justly separates the saved from the damned (23).
If we read “The Altar,” Easter Wings,” “Man,” “Antiphon I,” and “Antiphon II” in a linear fashion alone, we miss the aesthetic experience of their larger-mirrored designs and the full extent of their ironic implications. With an awareness of their concentric architecture, we adjust our expectations to the form’s logical frame: we assume the second half of the poem will, in some manner, reverse the thematic content of the first half; we assume that stanzaic letter pairings (A1 and A2, B1 and B2, etc.) have a symmetrical or inverted logical correspondence; and we engage in circular back-reading, revisiting earlier stanzas with a revised awareness of how contraries are later reversed. More often than not, we find these reversals themselves are reversed in a final punch-line, and we begin to expect that second plot twist. If Herbert’s ultimate goal, as Hayes suggests, was “to make the outward form of each poem representative of its inner meaning,” then chiasmus is a most fitting vehicle for his paradoxical themes.[24] Like an image doubled in a mirror, there is a continuous tension between the parallel repetitions and inverted oppositions that inhabit the same space at the same time: a chiasm always expresses sameness through the lens of contrariety. If form ought to match content rivet by rivet, then Herbert sensibly pairs the irony of chiasmus with the irony of salvation—that Christ articulates the strength of his divinity through the weakness of man’s humility. Repeatedly, the speaker of Herbert’s chiastic lyrics is exalted by lowliness, healed by affliction, enriched by poverty, renewed by sacrifice, reborn by dying, brought high by falling low, and brought to mercy by the just punishments of sin. As the crosses of these thematic ironies are themselves crossed by the ironies of the meter, we are left with a figura crucis that, if it does not look like a shape poem, at least reads like one.
Bibliography
Bennett, Joan. Five Metaphysical Poets: Milton, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964.
Brown, C. C., and W. P. Ingoldsby. “George Herbert’s ‘Easter-Wings.’” Huntington Library Quarterly 35, no. 2 (1972): 131–42.
Cruickshank, Frances. “Broken Altars: The Work of Form in George Herbert’s Temple.” Christianity and Literature 66, no. 1 (2016): 18–35.
Drury, John. Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Fussel, Paul. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. New York: Random House, 1979.
Harmless, William. Augustine in His Own Words. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010.
Harvey, Andrew James. “Chiasmus in English Renaissance Literature: The Rhetorical, Philosophical, and Theological Significance of ‘X’ in Spenser, Donne, Herbert, and Browne.” PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001.
Harvey, Gabriel. The Works of Gabriel Harvey. Edited by Alexander B. Grosart. London: Printed for private circulation, 1884.
Hayes, Albert McHarg. “Counterpoint in Herbert.” Studies in Philology 35, no. 1 (1938): 43–60.
Herbert, George. The Temple: A Diplomatic Edition of the Bodleian Manuscript (Tanner 307), edited by Mario A. Di Cesare, 281–82. Binghamton, NY: Renaissance English Text Society, 1995.
Jonson, Ben. The Conversations of Ben Jonson with William Drummond of Hawthornden. Edited by Philip Sidney. London: Gay and Bird, 1906.
Lund, Nils Wilhelm. Chiasmus in the New Testament: A Study in the Form and Function of Chiastic Structures. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1992.
Nänny, Max. “Chiastic Structures in Literature: Some Forms and Functions.” Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 3 (1987): 75–96.
Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. Edited by Edward Arber. London: Alexander Murray & Son, 1869.
Untermeyer, Louis. Treasury of Great Poems, English and American. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955.
Citations
- Jarrell D. Wright, “Altar of Print, Altars of Stone: George Herbert’s ‘The Altar’ and the Fabric of the English Reformed Church,” Anglican and Episcopal History, vol. 91, no. 1 (2022): 1. ↑
- Ibid., 22. ↑
- Joan Bennet, Five Metaphysical Poets, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 63–64. Bennett concludes that Herbert’s verse “leaves the impression of an unsophisticated mind.” Ibid., 63. ↑
- Louis Untermeyer, “Play in Poetry: The Henry Ward Beecher Lectures Delivered at Amherst College”; October 1937 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938), 28. ↑
- Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), 185-186. ↑
- John Drury, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 314. ↑
- “[T]hose trifles are come from many former siecles unto our times, vncontrolled or condemned or supprest by any Pope or Patriarch or other seuere censor of the ciuill maners of men, but haue bene in all ages permitted as the conuenient solaces and recreations of mans wit.” George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, 1589), 85. ↑
- Ben Jonson, Execration against Vvlcan (London: J. Okes, 1640), 2, line 38. ↑
- Gabriel Harvey, Letter-book of Gabriel Harvey, A.D. 1573–1580, vol. 33 of Publications of the Royal Historical Society, ed. Edward John Long Scott (Westminster, UK: Camden Society, 1884), 100. ↑
- Andrew James Harvey, “Chiasmus in English Renaissance Literature: the Rhetorical, Philosophical, and Theological Significance of “X” in Spenser, Donne, Herbert, and Brown,” PhD. Diss., (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001). ↑
- Max Nänny, “Chiastic Structures in Literature: Some Forms and Functions,” Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, vol. 3 (1987): 75-96. ↑
- George Herbert, “A Wreath,” The Temple: A Diplomatic Edition of the Bodleian Manuscript (Tanner 307), from the Renaissance English Text society, ed. Mario A. Di Cesare (Birmingham, NY: 1995), 281-282. All subsequent Herbert quotations derive from this edition. ↑
- See Nänny (Ibid., 77-78) for an introduction to chiasms in Homer and English/Scottish folk ballads. For an introduction to biblical chiasms, see Nils Wilhelm Lund, Chiasmus in the New Testament: a Study in the Form and Function of Chiastic Structures (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Pub., 1992). ↑
- George Herbert, “The Altar,” 39. ↑
- See William Harmless, Augustine in His Own Words (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 298. ↑
- Frances Cruickshank argues that the poetic altar’s “shape is in fact imperfect, full of gaps and cracks, because it is ‘made’’ of words.” However, Herbert’s hand-written “Altar” within the Dr. William’s Manuscript (Dr Williams’s Library MS Jones B. 62) is particularly symmetrical with justified formatting and tightly-bound words. If we read the poem cyclically, as its structure implies, there is no incongruity between the altar described at the end of the poem and the altar we witness with our eyes. See “Broken Altars: The Work of Form in George Herbert’s Temple.” Christianity and Literature 66, no. 1 (2016): 26. ↑
- George Herbert, “Easter-Wings,” 61-62. ↑
- Brown, C. C., and W. P. Ingoldsby, “George Herbert’s ‘Easter-Wings,’” Huntington Library Quarterly 35, no. 2 (1972): 135. ↑
- George Herbert, “Man,” 134-146. ↑
- For the historical development of this idea, see Kurdiałek, Marian and Hugh McDonald. “Medieval Doctrines on Man as Image of the World.” Roczniki Filozoficzne / Annales de Philosophie / Annals of Philosophy 62, no. 4 (2014): 205–46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43410543. Also Norford, Don Parry. “Microcosm and Macrocosm in Seventeenth-Century Literature.” Journal of the History of Ideas 38, no. 3 (1977): 409–28. https://doi.org/10.2307/ 2708672. ↑
- See Aristotle, De Anima 2.3.414a32-b 19; De De l’Âme (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1966); On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, tran. W. S. Hett (London: W. Heinemann, 1936). Christian Neo-Platonists and sixteenth century humanists commonly promoted the idea. As Pico della Mirandola contends in his Oration on the Dignity of Man, God formed man “according to a general image with faculties and qualities common to the rest of creation, so that we are bound by no limit” but are “free to rise toward divinity or fall to animality [or vegetative passivity].” As quoted in Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (New York, 1964), 85. ↑
- George Herbert, “Antiphon I,” 77. ↑
- Ibid., “Antiphon II,” 136-137. ↑
- Albert McHarg Hayes, “Counterpoint in Herbert,” Studies in Philology 35, no. 1 (1938): 44. ↑