Image (top): Tomb-monument of Lord Stourton (photo: Mike Searle), via. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. Continue to explore the world of Metaphysical poetry with our short overview of the life of George Herbert and our pick of John Donne’s greatest poems. If you’re looking for a good, affordable edition of George Herbert’s work, we recommend The Complete Poetry (Penguin Classics). Man should be ‘rich and weary’ – rich not only in a financial but in a moral and spiritual sense, too, we assume. We suppose one way of looking it is to say that God is advocating hard work as its own reward, and justifying having just one day of the week as a ‘day of rest’ on which to worship Him. Work is important so that man should worship the God who made Nature, rather than Nature itself. One of Herbert’s most widely acclaimed lyrics, ‘The Flower’ uses the metaphor of greenness and life returning to plants and flowers in the spring to convey the return of the poet’s strong sense of God.Ī Creation poem, this, which imagines God making man and bestowing all available attributes upon him – except for rest. The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring. Love is more powerful than fear of punishment.Īre thy returns! even as the flowers in spring Okay, he may falter occasionally, but he does so in his attempt to please God and reach heaven and God’s ‘throne of grace’. Herbert is fully amenable to God’s will, and will consent to whatever God wishes.

his anger) and instead to ‘ake the gentle path’. In this poem, Herbert asks God to use love rather than punishment when dealing with him, beseeching God to throw away his ‘rod’, the instrument used to inflict punishment, and his ‘wrath’ (i.e. ‘Love’ here, as in so much of George Herbert’s finest poems, is more or less synonymous with God. In this poem, which begins with the famous line ‘Love bade me welcome’, Love is personified as a host inviting Herbert in to dine with him as a guest. Yet my soul drew backīut quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack So the movement from one line to next forms a chain: the first line ends with talk of ‘deservèd praise’, so the second line begins by talking about ‘praise deservèd’ this second line in turn ends ‘unto Thee I give’, leading into the third line which begins ‘I give to Thee’ and so on, until we end up where we started, with ‘a crown of praise’ returning us to the first line of the poem, ‘A wreathèd garland of deservèd praise’.

The progression of its lines, and its rhyme scheme, both reflect the wreath’s circularity, a symbol of totality and connection.

Since this poem is about a wreath, Herbert creatively suggests the shape of a wreath through the rhyme scheme of his poem.

A priest to the temple george herbert