1 Are You There God?

Its Me, George: A Meditation on Herberts Style and Music When approaching the work of 17th century devotionalist poet George Herbert, we find an array of formal innovations and a continual tide of religious feeling in spiritual conflict with the Judeo-Christian God. How does a secular reader in the twenty-first century approach this work? The critic Helen Vendler has drawn attention to the way critics (from Coleridge to Auden) have emphasized the necessity of understanding the Christian allusions and framework in order to fully enjoy the work (4). Vendler also notes that perhaps the ideal reader for Herberts work is the reader with the secular background (4). In some ways, Herbert anticipates the secular viewpoint, writing How hath man parceld out thy glorious name, And thrown it on that dust which thou has made, While mortall love doth all the title gain! Which siding with invention, they together Bear all the sway, possessing heart and brain, (Thy workmanship) and give thee share in neither (Love I, 3-8)

But if Herbert so firmly decries secular poetry that gives all the title to mortal love rather than Gods glory, his work can still be appreciated by the secular reader as it confronts stylistic problems of how the self that is woven into the sense tries to write toward God (Jordon [II], 14). Our goal here is to learn how to let the poems teach us to how to read them, so that through the problem of plain/elaborate writing and the use of earthly/divine music, we might understand just what Herbert means by God, and what he means by man,the recurring Thou and I relationshipand what Herbert means in representing this relationship, and what representation itself can mean as both a problem and a solution. If style indicates world-view, Herberts preoccupation with style allows the secular reader into the world of his speakers heavenly and earthly conflict.

2 The Forerunners emerges not only as a powerful production of the stakes involved in much of the plainspoken humility of Herberts speakers but also as a dramatic invocation of contradictory attitudes toward language. The speaker, a poet, situates his confrontation with approaching death (or, alternately read, senility) in a series of addresses to God, to the harbingers of Death, and to the material of poetry. Unlike some of Herberts plainer verses, this poem rests on its sparkling notions with sweet phrases and lovely metaphors that are ultimately seen through as what they are: elaborate language acts that hurt thy self and him that sings thy note (4, 13, 24). The first confrontation with the possibility of losing language occurs in the first stanza where the speaker trembles to think of how the harbingers of death behold his head, and have his brain, and disimpark/ those sparkling notionsbut even deprived of these notions, the poets faith still resides in his God (1-6). The second stanza, addressing the harbingers directly, concludes with a surprisingly self-mocking couplet about Gods pleasure/satisfaction with that ditty (11). The order of words is odd, though: we would think that perhaps if he wrote fine and witty it might please God, but instead, the effect of pleasing God is given as a retroactive cause of the fineness and wittiness of his writing, evidenced in this witty couplet (11-12). But this levity towards writing unfolds into a solemn renunciation of sparkling notions and fine and witty workings. The poet becomes a semi-father figure to his sweet phrases, his lovely metaphors, who abandon him, ungratefully, even though he has devoted himself to bringing them to Gods house, Church, well-dressed and clad, i.e. a respectful and appropriate level of language to the occasion of attending Church. The fourth stanza reveals another shift; embellishment rises to our view, as he gives himself over to a sugaring and misting of his precious lovely enchanting language, sugar-cane,/ Honey of roses (19-20). Here we see that the language the poet chooses must retain a certain elevation

3 appropriate to Church and above the plainness of a sty (24-25), and these lines themselves demonstrate the level of desired diction. The danger of elaborate language is that like a lover, who can enchant with sugar-cane and honey of roses, it can lead one to ones bane, so that one soil[s] thy broidered coat and hurt[s] thy self and him (Christ, who sings thy note on your behalf). Speak too sweetly and find yourself in folly (27). But the fifth stanza problematizes the prior claims when the speaker makes a seemingly pocketable truisim about beauty that, in context, quickly takes on ambivalence: True beauty dwells on high. Ours is a flame/ But borrowed thence to light us thither;/ Beauty and beautuous words should go together. We should be suspicious by the forceful declaration of where true beauty dwells (notice that verticality is the rubric here: it must be on high, as opposed to resting on the soil of the earth) and what exactly true beauty is; how are we to read, tonally, this declarative moment against the fragility and tenderness, as well as firmness and playfulness, of earlier lines? What kind of presumption is in this seemingly triumphant declaration? This definitional concern over true beauty and this question of reading the declarative give way to the problem posed by the conclusion, Beauty and beauteous words should go together. Can we take this at face-value? Critic Stanley Fisher explicates this difficult moment by noting how on an initial reading (and perhaps on subsequent reads) the poems consistenty of convincing argument up until this point makes us ready to believe this confirmation of art and language, because we can feel how much of a stake [we] have in the extenuating justifications of language rehearsed here (220). But when the speaker declares Beauty and beauteous words should go together, we realize, stepping back, that the go is ambiguous, and made to tilt in the direction of go away when we read it in the terms of the beginning of the next stanza, which starts, Yet, if you go, I pass not (31). Herbert almost satirizes the ease with which one can

4 offer such a truism by performing the difficulty of it in a poem that feels, in its variety of imagery and complexity, more like an embroidered coat than the simple garb of his other poems. Implicit in this poem, then, is an indictment not only of the act of writing but of the act of reading. We see here a confirmation of Herberts belief in the burial of meaning that must be excavated through multiple rereadings. Against the seeming silence of the poems end the poem comes alive each time we reread it, as its density and syntax requires us to. This self-referential if sly performance of everlasting life is hinted at in the final line of the poem, where the speaker consents to let a bleak paleness chalk the door/ so all within be livelier than before (35-6)1. We can read this conclusion in mulitple ways. The first reading acknowledges the presence of death through its mark on the entrance to ones living space, a mark made so [that] all within the house be livelier than before, in 1) a sudden dramatic appreciation of life when death is so near, 2) a vision of the livelier afterlife. The second main way we can read the conclusion is as an allegory of attitude towards language. We might say the white chalk on the door represents a plainness of language at its bleakest and palest, the most sincere representation of a language that contains its honest doubts and anxieties about the proximity of death. The plain language the speaker arrives at and uses derives from the fact of the circumstance, and we can feel how the heaviness of the earlier enchanting language has lifted, and in its wake, pressed to the point of

We can also see Herberts emphasis on rereading in Coloss. 3.3 and The Church Monuments. The first requires reading a diagonally italicized line (one word italicized in each line so that when you read all the italicized words you find a sentence which must be reread in context of the nonitalicized lines). The second poem carries out its own destruction through disrupted syntax that begs multiple rereading attempts; Stanley Fishs reading of the line-to-line syntactic strangulations and erosions is particularly interesting because it highlights this performativeness and situates this performativeness within the context of how the reader experiences word-by-word this performance (Fish 167). Fish assumes the reader has a greater understanding of the Bible than a secular reader might, and so his reader in his readerresponse theorizing is not quite the reader were thinking of here.

5 no return, the speaker can only shortly and plainly declare: Yet, if you go, I pass not. Take your way (31)2. The language contains within its ambiguities the necessity of mulitple rereadings, a form of liveliness, against the death and silence implied by the closure of the poem, the silencing of the voice.3 We see then that one of the central stylistic questions posed in this poem is the level of elaborateness in the language one uses. These extended explication Ive conducted so far demonstrates how the secular reader can follow Herberts spiritual conflicts with God and debate on how to write because they point to each other; how to write is silkily intertwined with what to write. The level of language (plain or embellished) coincides with the speakers understanding not only of his own consciousness but the way in which his consciousness must approach not only Death but also Godin other poems, the emphasis rests on God in the outside world and in the mind, since Gods presence together with the speakers love and trust make[s] one place everywhere (27-8). The question of how to write towards God involves an exploration of the self and its complex relationship not only towards God but towards oneself and the multiple stages the self moves through in dismantling the barriers between the self and God, and the

The speaker begins the poem with declaratives, too (The harbingers are come. See, see their mark.) but by the time they recur in the final stanza, the emotional weight has increased and we feel the absence of the heavier syntactic constructions of When ye before/ Of stews and brothers only knew the doors,/ Thou did I wash you with my tears: and more/ Brought you to Church well dressed and clad (14-18). We could chalk this up to mere syntactic variety, but to do so would miss the staging in the poem of the plainness of the language against (or over) the complexity of the metaphoric thought. The sweet phrases and lovely metaphors appear with a certain weight of selfreferentiality that we no longer feel by the time we are letting winter have his fee, even though the final lines are, on a closer look, highly self-referential. But that we have to reread to note the self-referentiality indicates its depth. This is all to say that the level of the language here is not consistently plain, nothing like Love III which we will discuss later.
3

We might compare The Forerunners, with Wallace Stevens The Auroras of Autumn, particularly the second section which uses a similar framework of Farewell as well as a white color palette. Although a crucial difference is that Stevens writes Farewell to an idea [emphasis mine], a difference in prepositionality indicates a different relationship to farewell because of a different relationship to the fading object. This comparison is one of many we could make between Herbert and 20th century Englishlanguage poets if we were to stake out a lineage of possible influence.

6 barriers are made of words and the words are made of perceptions and understandings that participate in a system of relations, of barriers. This is not to say that one can or even wants to overlook the central agency of faith in these poemsindeed, the inclusion of faithful utterances (Thou art my god, My God My king4, etc) prevents us from missing the way the faith matters to Herbert5. This way of reading Herbert is valuable to those secular readers approaching Herbert for the first time and seeing what strikes their fancy, but it is also valuable, as a way to access

The plainness of these utterancesMy God, My King, unfolds within the rhetorical argumentation of Jordan I, where the speaker decries fictions onely and false hair that pass as verse and insists that not all good structure resides in a winding stair, and that painted chairs, are to be overturned, that verse must not be enchanted groves/ and sudden arbours that shadow course-spunne lines and that all must not be vaildthe reader does not need to read and always divine,/ Catching the sense at two removes (1-15). (Wallace Stevens would clearly have a day of fields with these lines). But how are we to respond to this seeming affirmation of the pastoral tradition, this affirmation of the shepherd as an ideal figure? Does it still make compelling poetry to a secular reader, if all the speaker is saying is My God, My king? What interests me here at least is the way the speaker rebukes the overelaborate style of fiction and turns to a plainness of faith as a solution, while this plainness of faith as solution loses its surefooting in The Forerunners, where lovely language chants and enchants.
5

In his reading of The Forerunners, Fish relies greatly on biblical knowledge and assumptions of the familiarity of that knowledge. He notes the ambiguity of the final stanza by establishing that ambiguity between the interpretations of the harbingers marks on the door (one a sign of soon-to-arrive Death, the other a confirmation of Life, passed over) to be evident by a typological reading between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Certainly the typological reading enriches our understanding of the poem, but its not necessary for a preliminary understanding and appreciation for the tones Herbert strikes. That we dont need to consult the Bible to understand the work can be read as an affirmation of the works strength, but the question lifts itself: how much work one should or needs to do to understand a poem? I will say that understanding does not have to (nor does it often) happen in a humongous dazzling all-atonceness, but can accrue in moments of perception and feeling. The poem Prayer [1] performs the difficulty of easy understanding (we will look at Prayer [I] later). I suppose that I am also implying that as the reader becomes more fascinated with Herberts work, she may or may not take it upon herself to research the biblical references and grounding. Throughout my work on Herbert, I have done as much, looking up The Passion for example, and other allusions, such as to the river Jordan. I primarily used the W.W.Norton anthology which includes Herberts work, and in this anthology the editors included many helpful annotations, in expectation that the audience (undergraduate readers, like myself) might not know the Bible the same way Herbert did. This assumption about knowledge tells us much but most relevant here is the attitude this creates in the reader in how, when looking at the page with a column of words centered on it, one sees many little numbers at the bottom with little sentences, presumably of items one might not know. Does the presence of footnotes contradict Vendlers insistence that one need not know the religious framework if the poem is very good? I dont think so. The presence of footnotes can only do so much for throwing into light some aspects of the Biblical, rather than providing a steady glow of background understanding which illuminates other poems more clearly religious in detail like The British Church.

7 Herberts particular lyrical strengths, one of which is his ability to sympathetically render the relationship between God and the speaker. A central element in this problem of style is the perceived or known omniptence of God and Gods relationship to the word. Writing at all becomes a difficult act when, as the speaker in The Flower notes in addressing God, Thy word is all (21). In other words, if thy word is all, then what could my word be? In what space does my word exist if thy word is all? The I and the thou here represent the tensions Herbert understands and represents to be constantly at play, two poles established between which much abounds and elastically shifts, but constantly toward an outward state manifested by the speakers perceptions of God. In The Temper, the I and the thou struggle is composed of painful distances that nonetheless transform through the speakers understanding of his own agency. First, the speaker cries out: O rack me not to such a vast extent;/ Those distances belong to thee./ The worlds too little for thy tent,/ A grave too big for me6 (9-13). Then, in the second-to-last stanza, the speakers resistance in this painful struggle gives way to an acknowledgment of Gods way which he is sure is best, and so gives God permission (as if God needed it) to stretch or contract me, thy poor debtor (21-24). This recognition of needing to make this permission known (to any force or form of life not immediately the speakers own consciousness) immediately finds connection to the form in which he is working, the poem: This [struggle of you stretching and contracting me] is but tuning of my breast/ To make the music better (23-24)7. Notice that the poem begins with

We previously identified Herberts burial of meaning, and here we can see such burial in a grave too big for me. How do we jump from God having a tent to that tent becoming a grave thats too big for me? We recognize here a strategy of rhetorical complexity that we often call merely density of languge, metonymy, association, etc., but in Herbert this rhetorical ploy is almost seemless because no coordinating conjunctions indicate a shift in thought, an absence of Herberts that Vendler identifies as common and a great contributor to shallow readings of the work (3). Herbert buries meaning in this grave so that it must be reread multiple times to be apprehended.
7

Here we see a vision of the artist suffering for his art, but it has none of the self-indulgent tremblings we might see elsewhere, because here the suffering is made legible and fresh.

8 wondering how to praise thee Lord and thinks of itself as an engraving of thy love in steel, whereas right before the finish of the poem, the poem represents itself not as a steel engraving but as music, a floating unfolding sequence of auditory signs that has, it seems, more power to represent the tone and struggle of the speaker by transcending the inadequacy of the written word. If Gods word is all, maybe the music is mine. And this music issues not from the voice (which is connected to the production of inadequate speech) but from the instrument of his breast which needs tuning (24). Indeed, the free-floating quality of music finds corresponding imagery in whether the speaker fl[ies] with angels, fall with dust,/ Thy hands made both, and I am there (25-26). The speaker emphasizes that wherever he is physically, he is constantly in reference to God: thy power and love coexists with my love and trust (26) and the lack of and between them means that both thy power and love, my love and trust collapse together into the oneness (of agency? Of place? Both?) described in the one place evry where (28)8. And this collapse, as do alternate aspects of this stanza, relies on music. Herbert packs the lines that end in an abab rhyme scheme with strings of alliterative and assonantial echoes: the th of whether, with, thy, both, there, thy; the l of fly, angels, fall, love, love, the e sound

In The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Craig Owens proposes that postmodernism concerns itself with the activity of reference. When the postmodernist work speaks of itself, it is no longer to proclaim its autonomy, its self-sufficiency, its transcendence; rather, it is to narrate its own contingency, insufficiency, lack of transcendence (80). The adequacy of this claim is of course up to debate, as are all claims that try to distinguish between Modernism and Postmodernism, since we can find these concern with activity of reference and ambition that must be perpetually deferred, in many works by modern writers. Rather than trying to argue that Herbert is a postmodern poet, (which he clearly cant be, because he was writing in the 17th century), I would say that a number of his poems can find aspects that can correspond to what Owens identifies as typical of the postmodern, which, whether or not this is what postmodernism will be understood to be in a hundred years, still intrigues me. In Prayer [1], the poem presents its own tightly-rendered vagueness as, in the final line, something understood, which thwarts our expectation (which so many of his other poems reward) of finding a tidy epiphanic conclusion (14).

9 that starts and ends the stanza in whether and everywhere, suggesting a contained place that includes all positions (flying and falling) the stanza itself describes in the last line. Does music, then, become the way to write towards God, and if so, is that all we need to know? The juxtaposition of these stanzas suggests that after one acknowledges first that Gods way is best, and then having understood oneself to be using music rather than engraved steel to praise thee Lord, finally we arrive at the revelation wherein the initial task of praise finally circles around in a sudden adequate articulation. Music frequently occurs as an image as well as strategy in Herberts work, but however musical the effects of his work, the working parts are still words, and with them come the complications of making both musical sounds and (unfortunately, perhaps) of being woven into sense. In Prayer [1], Herbert performs the inadequacy of speech under the guise of a list of somewhat recognizable religious images that seem to try to paraphrase a specific understanding of prayer (3). Formally, the poem uses the framework of a sonnet but as a whole it seems to refute the way a sonnet allows an argument to build in clear stages, rather than a series of metaphors. After the first six lines, Herbert envisions the Biblical creation of the world as a divine melody which has a unique power for life forms with consciousness: The six-days world transposing in an hour,/ A kind of tune which all things hear and fear (6-7). This turn to music as a metaphor unlocks a sequence of abstract nouns of great tingling feeling: Softness and peace and joy and love and bliss that settles down to man well dressed, (a similar image appears, remember, in The Forerunners) before jumping up the cosmic scale to the milky way, the bird of Paradise and in a move that questions the distinction Ive made between man well dressed and the milky way, the local and the cosmic, we suddenly behold an image that combines both levels: the music of Church-bells beyond the stars heard, which is punctuated with a colon to

10 implicate the souls blood, which breaks the line to behold, all of a sudden, a place, a Land of Spices, where we are situated against something understood, as if the understanding were the landing-place of the music of the bells (notice, too, that the b sound of bells repeats in the nearby bliss, best, bird bells, and blood, which rhymes with the final word of the poem, understood) (11). The primary effect of this dizzying derangement of scale for a secular reader might be simply that we feel something has been understood at best and at the very least, felt. In this way, we might say Prayer [I] is a necessary stage for Herbert for the withholding of meaning as triumphant and stable connection with God. The passive voice in the final phrase is significant because it positions the agent of understandingthe reader, the person performing the prayeras outside the picture, almost alienated by the experience the language has made possible as much as tantalized by the suggestiveness. The role of the reader is implicated in the fact of having read these vague phrases whose ability to be understood is called into question (is it necessary to understand?) but so is the writer. In moving from image to image as well as allusion to allusion, the writer is suggesting a certain inexhaustibility not only of the divine but of the writers power to make images in order to relate to the divine9 (Shullenberger 110). And the language of the poem is that of Heaven in everyday, and the plainness of softness and peace and joy and love and bliss, is linked to the plainness with which we can readily identify
9

Arent prepositions the most elegiac of the parts of speech? We might think of the twentieth century German poet Rainer Marie Rilkes Duino Elegies, in which the speaker, crying out to the hierarchy of angels, to see who can hear him, uses prepositions (the famous Rilkean beyond of the arrow gathered in the snap of release against the pounding Rilkean interiority of huge strange thoughts boarding within you) to implicate the distance between himself and what he imagines himself to address: God, the angels, and das Leere: the Void. Both Herbert and Rilke navigate this writing toward God (the awful rowing toward God, as American confessional poet Anne Sexton wrote). In the Duino Elegies, however, the seventh elegy marks the turning point from looking toward the angels for transcendence to, instead, recognizing the transformations of and in and with the physical world. Herbert uses the soil of the Earth as the horizontal axis to base his upward gaze.

11 these feelings when they occur in us. As William Shullenberger writes, Plainness makes sublimity possible, for the passage evocatively combines and mingles what we readily understandfood, stars, church-bellswith what we usually only faintly and fitfully apprehendHeaven, Paradise, providence, (111). If we expected prayer to be a form of three hail-marys, then we thought wrong. Herbert performs the psychic struggle within the act. Herberts awareness of writing and music is grounded in his understanding of speech and sense. As he writes in The Windows, speech alone/ Doth vanish like a flaring thing/ And in the ear not conscience ring (252). Is he denigrating the ear as a receiving space? He points out the ear as a target for speech, but is it not also the landing-place of music? Speech, in Herberts use of the word, does not reach the conscience, only the ear, unless it is animated by a poetic principle, not merely rhetorical, thatdost him afford/ This glorious and transcendent place (34). Implicit then is the inadequacy of speech that merely relies on sense, but sense, for Herbert, also must guide the poetic work. Jordan [II] articulates the stages of a poets thinking through how to write without decking the sense, as if it were to sell, how to clothe the sun and the joys that trample on [the suns] head (5, 11-12). The burden falls to the senses to apprehend all this teeming information, and the quickness of the poets thoughts correspond in the last stanza to flames that do work and wind when they ascend, a direction pointing toward God. These flames take on the intertwining power of how the poet can declare: I weave my self into the sense, (14). But this sense gets overturned again, when a friend (God? Jesus?) whispers to him that commonsense is better sense yet: how wide is all this long pretence! Furthermore the friend notes the readiness of the poets subject, love, and how its sweetness ready penned, almost writes itself, so that all the poet has to do is copy out that (13). It seems that Herberts rendering of sense and poetry here undermines the agency he elsewhere ascribes to the poet. But

12 theres a lightness to this admonition that prevents us from treating it as seriously as we do The Forerunners, where all humor has evaporated in the steam of approaching death. At the same time, its clear that Hebert has defined a range of tones to work in when confronting the problem of how to write. For however appealing are the luster of the lines he writes in which he mentions heavnly joys, Herbert directs himself to a plain approach more befitting the seriousness and degree of the task at hand. And yet if, as we noted before, Gods word is All and His, as The Flower suggested, then Herberts most famous poem, Love (III) offers a different view of a welcoming and gracious God in the form of Love. In many ways, the poem epitomizes the resolution of the issues weve considered here: speech and sense and music and style. The soul who has come before God speaks plainly and within the realm of basic sense and denigrates himself as unworthy, unkinde, ungratefull, in response to which Love reassures him that Who made the eyes but I? No music references appear in the poem, but the music of the poem itself is extraordinarily welltuned (notice the perfect scattering of ns in the first stanza in sinne, observing, entrance, in, nearer, questioning, any, thing, so that the tongue making the ng sound almost bows in supplication in the mouth (middle of tongue against the roof of the mouth, the tip behind the lower teeth)). But the metaphor of writing appears nowhere in this poem and the surface of the poem is so undisturbed (so contrary to Prayer [1]!) that I almost decided not to discuss it at all. But as Helen Vendler notes, the poem is clearly a response to St. Pauls definition of Charity whereby we are expected to be able to place this poem in the context of St. Paul, but doing so, as Vendler well knows, isnt necessary to an apprehension of this rather elegant poem. Love III resides in the same hall as the cry of My God, My King but does not rely on the same structure of rhetorical questions of Jordan I which lends to that poem an air of pride that

13 becomes the grace of sitting down to eat in Love III. If the calmness that concludes the poem the soothed soul, the appeased supplicantis so powerful, it is so, for the secular reader, in part of because it stands in utter contrast to the stylistic battles Herbert fought in order to achieve this winning gracefulness and affable, humorous temperament. For the calm, smiling, welcoming Love of Love III is not the immortal Love, author of this great frame, of Love I who is so involved in all the sway of wit and beauty and the game of singing praise and the task of writing of love (1, 14).10 Herberts poetry is in part remarkable because it seemingly effortlessly guides us across multiple stanzas into a satisfying (does this mean conventional?) conclusion where it seems Gods ultimate oneness rules and the speakers self has been tested and resolved. Stanley Fishs criticism is helpful in noting the stages of letting go and complicating those stages by conducting highly sensitive performative readings that enact from moment to moment how the reader responds (mute assent, confusion, surprise, not always in that order) to the given order of the words (158). But my analysis, though agreeing with some of the bigger end-game points as it regards the final vision the poems find themselves in, departs from hisIve emphasized a secular readership who can, I believe, move beyond the something understood (itself a valuable state) into a deeper regard for the sensitivity of the work and its surprising freshness. Clearly, whatever our theological background, the poems moods of humility, hestitation, selfcriticism and humor are inflected by the religious discourse but are not produced entirely by them: the emotional issues struggle very much in the air outside the glass windows of the church. But it is through the tracing of stylistic registers that we appreciate the magnitude of Herberts understated achievements, where the heart is faced with a variety of lights.

10

The fact that Love III closes The Temple and is the final poem in the sequence of poems entitled Love I, II, III suggests the success Love III held for Herbert.

14 Works Cited Fish, Stanley Eugene. "The Dialectic of the Self in Herbert's Poetry." Self-consuming Artifacts: the Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1998. Print. "George Herbert." Seventeenth-century British Poetry: 1603-1660: Authoritative Texts, Criticism. Ed. John P. Rumrich and Gregory Chaplin. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. Print. Owens, Craig. "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism." October 12 (1980): 67-86. JSTOR. Web. 15 Oct. 2011. Shullenberger, William. "Ars Praedicandi in George Herbert's Poetry." "Bright Shootes of Everlastingnesse": the Seventeenth-century Religious Lyric. By Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth. Columbia: University of Missouri, 1987. Print. Vendler, Helen Hennessy. The Poetry of George Herbert. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 1975. Print.