1. Izaak Walton, Lives , ed. George Saintsbury (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 63.

2. William Cowper, "Memoir of His Early Life" (c. 1752), in George Herbert: The Critical Heritage , ed. C.A. Patrides (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 164.

3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, letter to William Collins, December, 1818, in Critical Heritage , p. 168.

4. Lewes Bayly, The Practise of Pietie (London, 1613), p. 934; this lengthy handbook went through many editions in the Jacobean period.

5. Zacharie Boyd, The Last Battle of the Soul in Death (1629), ed. Gabriel Noel (Glasgow, 1831), p. 4.

6. Theodore Spencer, Death and Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 206.

7. Joseph H. Summers, George Herbert (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954), pp. 185-86. Compare Yeats's (or at least Jane's) conclusion about religion and poetry: "For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent" ("Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop").

8. Sermons , VI, 41. See also VIII, 78: "The last words that Christ speakes in the Bible (and amongst us, last words make deepest impressions) are, Surely I come quickly ."

9. Debora K. Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 105; Mark Taylor, The Soul in Paraphrase (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), p. 42.

10. Stanley Fish, The Living Temple (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978), p. 167. This dialogic aspect of both Donne's and Herbert's verse may also support the common impression that Metaphysical poetry echoes some of the complex effects of English Renaissance drama.

11. On the strong hints of male sexuality in Herbert's poems, see Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 230-70; Chana Bloch, Spelling the Word (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 111n; Helen Vendler, The Poetry of George Herbert (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 51, and Richard Strier, Love Known (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 252n63, 39n30, 48n45, and 89 with n16. Bloch's comments on the "inhibited" sexual responses of the speaker of "Love (III)" to "a gently loving, patient woman" (p. 111) are quite compatible with my reading of the oedipal tensions in Herbert's relationship to the nurturant figure who is at once his mother and his God. But it is important also to recognize, before putting too much weight on these figurations, that some of the phrases are conventional: the effort to pierce God's ears appears before Herbert in the Epilogue to Shakespeare's The Tempest , and a few years after in Sermons, Meditations, and Prayers, upon the Plague (London, 1637), sig. O4r: "that these prayers may ascend, and pierce thy Eares."

12. Walton, p. 262.

13. Walton, p. 264.

14. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love , trans. James Walsh (New York: Harper, 1961), pp. 164-68 (Chapter 61).

15. E. Pearlman, "George Herbert's God," English Literary Renaissance , 13 (1983), 100-101. The entire argument (pp. 88-112) is compelling if predictably controversial, and several of my subsequent instances appear in Pearlman's discussion of Herbert's conflation of mother with God and breastfeeding with worship. See also Herbert's remark, quoted by Walton, p. 308, concerning "my Mother, the Church of England."

16. Edward Herbert, Autobiography , ed. Sidney L. Lee (London: John C. Nimmo, 1886), pp. 3-4, on his father, and pp. 21-27, on his brothers.

17. Voltaire, "Lettre sur les auteurs anglais," in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire (Paris, 1879), XXVI, 482; cited and trans, by Eugene D. Hill, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury , Twayne English Authors Series (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987), Preface. D. P. Walker, Ancient Theology (London: Duckworth, 1972), pp. 164-93, argues for the revolutionary character of Edward Herbert's theology.

18. It is intriguing in this regard that Herbert's God seems to alternate between male and female gender, and between domineering violence and gentle nurturance (as in "The Flower"). It is also intriguing to compare Shuger's observation (p. 104) that Herbert "departs from contemporary Puritan theology . . . precisely because he has no sense of 'the brethren.'" For Shuger, this leaves Herbert lonely, except for God; I would add that he must similarly have been lonely among his biological brethren. On Herbert's apparently closer bond with his frail sister, see Amy M. Charles, A Life of George Herbert (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 76. Charles, p. 86, describes "Affliction (I)" in terms that clearly suggest Herbert's struggle to define his literary and religious achievements as a version of his brothers' military achievements.

19. Leah Sinanoglou Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978), p. 115, notes some interesting correspondences between Herbert's description of this institution and the characteristics of Magdalen Herbert's household. Herbert's tendency to assume a childlike persona in his lyrics may help to justify my inquiry into the childhood roots of those lyrics.

20. The Latin Poetry of George Herbert , trans. Mark McCloskey and Paul R. Murphy (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1965), p. 130; my translation of "Per te nascor in hunc globum / Exemplóque tuo nascor in alterum: / Bis tu mater eras mihi." Compare the way Vaughan, who so often worshipfully echoes Herbert, describes death as an interval during which the body "Shalt in thy mother's bosom sleep" ("Death: A Dialogue," 28).

21. On Ann Donne's role in drawing her husband into Christian fervor, see R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (London: Oxford, 1970), p. 328.

22. Latin Poetry , p. 119.

23. Cf. Latin Poetry , p. 145: "Root and staunchest rock you are to me, my mother; I am as polyps, fixed by tentacles to rocks."

24. If this is regression, it is precisely the kind Becker perceives in love-based sexuality, which "allows the collapse of the individual into the animal dimension without fear or guilt, but instead with trust and assurance that his distinctive inner freedom will not be negated by an animal surrender" (p. 42).

25. Latin Poetry , p. 137. On the historical likelihood that Magdalen Herbert breast-fed her own children, see n. 58 to chapter 5.

26. For examples of this replacement, see "Sion," "Employment (I)," "Deniall," and "Doomsday." For evidence that music was part of Magdalen Herbert's comforting of her son, see Latin Poetry , p. 127, where this "sweet moderating influence . . . seems as it were to be a tiny prelude of celestial music,'' and p. 143, where he wonders, "how can there be laurels for me, how nectar, unless with you I pass the day in song?"

27. Summers, p. 186.

28. Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley: University of California, 1972), pp. 156-223.

29. Cf. Heinz Kohut, How Does Analysis Cure ?, ed. Arnold Goldberg and Paul Stepansky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 18-19, on the way Bismarck's terror of personal disintegration allowed him to go to sleep only if he knew he was being constantly watched by a trusted aide.

30. Here again Herbert appears to be conflating his earthly caretaker with his God; compare the complaints of "The Collar" with Walton's remark that Magdalen Herbert "would by no means allow him to leave the University, or to travel; and, though he inclin'd very much to both, yet he would by no means satisfie his own desires at so dear a rate . . ." (p. 275).

31. Again, Donne's long passage about the divine gaze is relevant because, to keep from falling into the abyss, he relies on the proven care of this Creator, "who hath so often said to my soule, Quare morieris ? Why wilt thou die?" ( Sermons , V, 267).

32. Death appears momentarily near the beginning of the treatise, but only in a subordinate clause sharply circumscribed by references to life. The only other references appear in the brief "Authour's Prayer before Sermon," when the direct discourse about his duties is over; Herbert speaks of death only to God, not to his readers or parishioners. Even in this relatively private meditation, death appears only in its negation through Christ, and the grave is mentioned only once, in the middle of a list of things Christ overcame. This omission and subordination looks more like strategic avoidance than like triumphant disdain.

Since no recent edition of The Country Parson seems to be both fully reliable and widely available, I will take the text from The Works of George Herbert , ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), but will also provide the corresponding page numbers from The Country Parson; The Temple , ed. John N. Wall, Jr. (London: SPCK, 1981), and from The English Works of George Herbert , ed. George Herbert Palmer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915). The reference to death occurs in Hutchinson on pp. 227-28, in Wall on p. 57, and in Palmer on p. 214. Christ overcoming the grave appears in Hutchinson, p. 288; Wall, p. 113; Palmer, pp. 325-26.

33. Hutchinson, p. 281; Wall, p. 106; Palmer, p. 312.

34. Marc Bensimon, "Modes of Perception of Reality in the Renaissance," in The Darker Vision of the Renaissance , ed. Robert S. Kinsman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 260, 236.

35. Compare Browne's ecstatic use of Christianity to control and localize the extremes of time and space: "though my grave be England , my dying place was Paradise, and Eve miscarried of mee before she conceiv'd of Cain " (p. 132).

36. See for example Robert Higbie, "Images of Enclosure in George Herbert's The Temple ," Texas Studies in Literature and Language , 15 (4), 1974, pp. 627-38, which interprets this emphasis on enclosure ("walls, locked doors, houses . . . boxes and cabinets," p. 627) as both a reminder of the limitations of our unsatisfactory earthly prison, and an evocation of the divine embrace that promises to protect us from all evil. But clearly I disagree with his assertion that these poems finally insist on their own "enclosed nature . . . their tight confinement within strict forms" (p. 628). For me, the crucial fact about these poems is the way they leak at the bottom, and thereby escape the tombs where they seemed doomed to lie still forever. John J. Pollock, "George Herbert's Enclosure Imagery,'' Seventeenth Century News , 31 (2), 1973, p. 55, links the emphasis on enclosure to the quest for unified poetic structure and to the "interenclosure" of the Eucharistic sacrament.

37. Hutchinson, p. 494. Higbie, p. 629, cites examples of this agoraphobia in lines 139, 144, 150, 204, and 418 of "The Church Porch," as well as in "The Discharge," "Assurance," "Content," and "Holy Communion." Cf. William Bouwsma, John Calvin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), on the double fear of abyss and labyrinth.

38. William Baldwin, Beware the Cat and The Funerals of King Edward the Sixth , ed. William P. Holden (New London: Connecticut College, 1963), pp. 46-47 (the end of the second part of Maister Streamers Oration). Though it invites puns and speculation, the relationship between this necessary matrix and the mother seems to me less important in this regard than the struggle of the individual for a meaningful place in time and space. The infant's experience of the mother is doubtless connected, on the level of cognitive development, to this quest for universal orientation; but an effort to associate the desire for enclosure with a specifically oedipal desire for a return to the mother's womb, or (as Pearlman speculates on pp. 108-9) with "Herbert's identification with his mother as housekeeper," strikes me as less plausible and generative than the broader spiritual interpretation.

39. Higbie, pp. 629, 630.

40. This squares nicely with Higbie's observation, p. 633, that "as we move towards the poems of resolution at the end of 'The Church' . . . instead of asking God to let him out of his own imperfect enclosure, the poet is asking God to let him into God's perfect enclosure."

41. Harold E. Toliver, Pastoral Forms and Attitudes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 119.

42. Mark Taylor, p. 117, argues that "The notion of the incarnation, of the fleshly revelation of the Word, is in fact a promise of eternity, a signal that man will transcend the temporal limitations of mortality. Therefore, a poem about this transcendence, through its emphasis on a 'hieroglyphic' meaning that endures beyond the finite words in which it is couched, gains a life beyond itself." Herbert seems to find this paradox and this possibility extraordinarily compelling, and his "pattern poems" are the starkest examples of that compulsion.

43. Brewster S. Ford, "George Herbert and the Liturgies of Time and Space," South Atlantic Review , 49 (4), 1984, 19. Ford, p. 24, notes the way Herbert manages to encapsulate time within space, and space within our bodies, in "Church-Monuments": "The fleshe is but the glasse, which holds the dust / That measures all our time" (20-21).

44. Fish, Temple , p. 162. This theory strikes me as more applicable to "The Wreath" than to "The Altar," however.

45. For an interesting alternative example of concrete poetry as a defense against death, see the pyramid of words at the end of Niccols's Monodia (London, 1615). "Easter Wings," like "The Altar," goes outside the sequential (and hence terminal) flow of language, to become a whole object designed to outlast Herbert's death—to outlast even the death of the English language. Its graphic shape offers an objective correlative to its primary topic, namely, the idea that human beings can aspire to a redemptive flight even after (indeed, only because) a fall from grace threatened to crush them into earth. As the middle lines of each stanza shrink to two syllables, describing the decline of the species and the individual, the threat to biological survival and the threat to poetic continuity converge. The rest of those lines is silence. But by taking on the wings of praise that the Christian model offers, the speaker and his poem escape together. Furthermore, the correlation of spiritual ontogeny (stanza one) with spiritual phylogeny (stanza two) allows Herbert to redeem his individual experience from annihilation, by "imping" himself onto the generational and eschatological identity of his species. This is the divine comedy that edges toward blasphemous parody in Measure for Measure . Herbert's individual life participates in the biological cycle that renews the human race toward its eventual redemption. The physical shape of the two stanzas asserts their blessedness beyond the transiency of language, and the congruency of the two stanzas recaptures the cycle of wing-beats into a static image of immortal animation.

46. Mark Taylor, pp. 59-62, suggests the relevance of Augustine's solar analogies. Compare the escape from linear time in "Affliction (II)."

47. Hutchinson, p. 233; Wall, p. 63; Palmer, p. 225.

48. Cf. "Jordan (I)." If the efficacious deathbed conversion of these poems recalls Catholic theology, perhaps its agency—a redemptive personal intervention of the Word—is Reformed enough to put Herbert back on his characteristic middle ground.

49. Mario A. Di Cesare, George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 4

50. An earlier closural gesture, in the fifty-fourth stanza, had failed because the act of faith, and therefore the poetic line, remained incomplete.

51. Jacob Boehme, The Way to Christ (1622), trans. John J. Stoudt (West-port, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), p. 176 ( Theoscopia , II, 17).

52. Hutchinson, p. 283; Wall, p. 108; Palmer, p. 315. Toliver, p. 132, argues that Reformation theology could not permit the human request to cause the divine response: "the poet's suit must be granted even before he asks, for the asking itself will not change God's mind." "Redemption" would seem to bear out that theory, but generally Herbert seems willing to sustain a principle of limited and paradoxical condignity, even if it is only a necessary illusion in human life and poetic form. On the importance of humility as a preparation for hearing God's word, see parts 1 and 4 of Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana .

53. See, for example, Herbert's "Dulnesse"; the deathbed complaint of Mary Gunter (in my Epilogue); Claudio's complaint about becoming "a kneaded clod" after death (in Measure for Measure , 3.1.120); and (to combine the two words) Herbert's "Divinitie," line 3.

54. As the "passing-bell" of Herbert's "The Flower" demonstrates, the verb "to pass" could mean "to die'' or "to elapse" as easily as "to care." The only other place where Herbert could arguably be using the latter meaning—the reference in "Time" to people who "did passe" when visited by the Grim Reaper—connects plausibly to the former meanings as well. Cf. Mary Herbert Pembroke's 1592 translation of Philippe de Mornay's Discourse of Life and Death , ed. Diane Bornstein, Medieval and Renaissance Monograph Series, III, 1983, p. 66: "were it not of force we must passe, and that God in despite of us will doe us a good turne, hardly should we finde in all the world one, how unhappy or wretched soever, that would ever passe."

55. If Herbert is indeed concerned here with sustaining some expressive aspect of his identity against the approach of his mortality, then "The Forerunners" supports my general argument against a sea of troublesome historical and methodological objections. The emphasis on the privileged "I" that Herbert is so anxious to preserve—its uncontested inwardness and the fear of its erasure by mortality—contradicts New Historicist claims that the idea of continuous selfhood was barely nascent during Herbert's lifetime, and that Renaissance identities were entirely based in social role rather than in Cartesian self-consciousness. The same evidence also contradicts old historicist claims that Renaissance Christianity effortlessly precluded any concern about personal annihilation.

56. Quoted by Norman T. Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 86.

57. An analogue in modern American culture is the climax of the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind , in which the descended spaceship at last magnificently chimes in with the final note of a signature melody played out to it repeatedly in apparently futile greeting. Rather less anachronistically, Thomas Taylor, in a sermon republished in the same year as The Temple , asserts that when "with an Aprill showre of mournfull teares for thy sinne . . . thou hast prevailed against Gods silence; thou shalt heare a sweete and comfortable Answere in due season"; Three Treatises (London, 1633), p. 101.

58. Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 96. For a different perspective on Herbert's use of titles, see Mary Ellen Rickey, Utmost Art (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1966), pp. 92-102, 115-19.

59. Quoted by Gordon Braden and William Kerrigan, The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 99.

60. Mark Taylor, pp. 83-84, discusses the relationship between rhyme and homecoming in "Home." The same rhyme—"come" with "home"—concludes the rhyme-scheme of ''The Quip."

61. It is also worth noting, in this regard, that the preacher Thomas Taylor provides a perfectly contemporary analogue in describing mortal man: "the neerer he is to death, he is so much neerer home" (p. 143).

62. George Wither—a poet-preacher contemporary with Herbert, though on the Puritan wing—also wrote that "although the mysteries of the Gospell, of which the Psalmes treat, were not then fulfilled in act, in respect to us to whom they were to be manifested in Time : yet in regard to God, with whom all Times are present, they might be properly enough mentioned as things alreadie effected"; quoted by Heather Asals, "The Voice of George Herbert's 'The Church,'" ELH , 36 (1969), p. 525.

63. The Poetry of Robert Frost , ed. E. C. Latham (New York: Holt Rinehart, 1969), p. 255.

64. Stanley Stewart, George Herbert (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), pp. 57-82, discusses the effect of Ferrar's "Harmonies" on Herbert's Temple . On Western chronometrics, see Donald Wilcox, The Measure of Times Past , (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

65. Walton, pp. 316-17.

66. Donne, Letters , p. 106, jovially reports to Henry Wotton that the Paris executioner "swore he had rather execute forty Huguenots, then one Catholique, because the Huguenot used so few words, and troubled him so little, in respect of the dilatory ceremonies of the others, in dying."

67. See, for example, Barbara Hernnstein Smith, Poetic Closure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Robert Pack, Affirming Limits (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985); and Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (London: Oxford University Press, 1968).

68. Walton, p. 61.

69. Jonathan F. S. Post, building on the work of E.K. Chambers, has been studying the implications of this pun.

70. "More" works similarly as the last word of Herbert's "Providence," another poem that avowedly overflows its ending with praise. A precursor of Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Pied Beauty," "Providence'' culminates its admiration of the multiplicity of Creation by declaring that its own capacity for praise has been multiplied at the very moment it appears to be silenced.

71. Robert G. Collmer, "The Meditation on Death and its Appearance in Metaphysical Poetry," Neophilologus , 45 (4), (1961), p. 325, mentions "the theory that the best time to think on death was at the close of the day;" cf. "Repentance," lines 23-24, and the regenerative converse in "Martens."

72. As at the end of "Perseverance" in the Williams manuscript, "rest" suggests an end that is a waiting, an interregnum more full of promise than of doubt. For Herbert as for Donne, "rest" is a word laden with its Old Testament significance, promising an end of earthly wandering. But it also carries the promise of an escape from earthly time, rather than an ultimate submission to that pharaonic tyrant. Augustine concludes his Confessions by contemplating God's rest after seven days of Creation:

And in your Book we read this as a presage that when our work in this life is done, we too shall rest in you in the Sabbath of eternal life. . . . The rest that we shall enjoy will be yours, just as the work that we now do is your work done through us. But you, O Lord, are eternally at work and eternally at rest. It is not in time that you see or in time that you rest: yet you make what we see in time; you make time itself and the repose which comes when time ceases. (Augustine, Confessions , XIII, 36-37; quoted by Mark Taylor, p. 63)

Herbert's "Church" is designed to confirm that presage of heavenly repose. His book persistently subverts the illusion of chronological sequence running from title to last word of the lyrics, largely by abjuring his role in creating those words.

73. The speaker of Herbert's "A Parodie," afflicted and affrighted on a "stormie night" by his Savior's "eclipsed light" (14-16), thus escapes the burden of mortality in the final lines:

             O what a deadly cold
                          Doth me infold!
                          I half beleeve,
That Sinne sayes true: but while I grieve,
             Thou com'st and dost relieve.
(26-30)

In the Williams manuscript, "The Knell" begins with a tolling bell and ends with a plea that Christ's sacrificed blood "may bee / Julips & Cordials when wee call on thee / ffor some relief."

74. "The Bag." Bloch, pp. 240 and 270, comments on this transition.

75. The human speaker of "Dialogue" becomes so anguished by his unworthiness of the sacrifice Christ made for him that he interrupts the reassuring divine voice, ending (similarly) with "Ah! no more: thou break'st my heart." Here, as in "Grief," ending the poem in the speaker's own limited exclamatory voice corresponds to a threat of physical death in a state of spiritual despair—unless, of course, the breaking of his heart is exactly what will save him, enabling a merger with Christ's own pitying and pitiful voice (as in the Latin epigraph of Vaughan's Silex Scintillans , a work full of contemporary clues to Herbert's meaning). Herbert's speakers must learn to find success in such failures, enabled by and modeled upon the triumph that Christ achieved by accepting humiliation and destruction.

76. This is the threat narrowly averted by the shift of a single letter from the first line to the last in "Justice (I)"; the Lord works in subtle ways. Schoenfeldt, pp. 242-43, demonstrates persistent allusions to masturbation in "Sinnes Round"; presumably these relate to the inadequacies of any love, including spiritual love, that fails to discover its ultimate relationship to an object outside the self.

77. Summers, pp. 129-35; Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts , pp. 164-69.

78. Browne, p. 309; see also his p. 313. For a despondent materialist response to precisely the observation Herbert and Browne make piously, see Antonio's observation, in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi , that in a mined abbey,

                                   naked to the injuries
Of stormy weather, some men lie interr'd
Lov'd the church so well, and gave so largely to't,
They thought it should have canopi'd their bones
Till doomsday. But all things have their end:
Churches and cities, which have diseases like to men
Must have like death that we have.
(New Mermaids edition, ed. Elizabeth M. Brennan, 2d ed.
[New York: Norton, 1983], 5.3.13-19)

79. It is worth noting however, that the poem called "Employment" earlier in The Temple is among those that fall ominously short of completing their form. "Employment (I)" opens with a topos of mortality, and with a stanza that seems "Nipt in the bud" by those very words, until it can expand again into the volume of divine praise:

             If as a flowre doth spread and die,
             Thou wouldst extend me to some good,
Before I were by frosts extremitie
                          Nipt in the bud;

             The sweetnesse and the praise were thine;
             But the extension and the room,

Which in thy garland I should fill, were mine
                          At thy great doom.
(1-8)

The problem is what to do with the interims of silence—the wordless wait for poetic inspiration, the prayerless wait for spiritual renewal, the stuporous wait for the trumpet of final resurrection:

             Let me not languish then, and spend
             A life as barren to thy praise,
As is the dust, to which that life doth tend,
                          But with delaies.
(13-16)

Life without worship resembles death without redemption; the unredeemed man consists inwardly of the barren dust that will soon become his outward form as well. The only hope is that death will draw him to heaven instead of leaving him to push up daisies:

             I am no link of thy great chain,
             But all my companie is a weed.
Lord place me in thy consort; give one strain
                          To my poore reed.
(21-24)

If any song follows, it will have to be from God's own breath, playing through the speaker as wind through an Aeolian harp. Without divine inspiration, the rest is silence.

80. Beckett's title appears to be a parody of Simone Weil's Waiting for God (1950), a fact worth noting in this context because Well was heavily influenced by Herbert. So Beckett's critique of Weil's writing entails an indirect critique of the consolations commonly derived from Herbert's verse.

81. Shuger, p. 118. See also Strier, p. 143, on "the extraordinarily strong stress on individual inner experience in Herbert's poetry," which allies that poetry with Lutheran theology.

82. Patrides, p. 168n.

83. The dangerously misguided search for a localized savior receives more comfortable treatment in "Peace." As in "Redemption," the explicit story doubles as a parable about Christ's life and legacy. Both levels are important, because the allegorical level reflects back consolingly on the literal, as supernatural imagery must palliate our vision of natural death. The parable of Christ's saving powers is told in images that vividly evoke our fears, and then our hopes, about death. The three opening stanzas search for Peace in a cave of mere emptiness and negativity, in bright colors that disintegrate with the clouds, and in a "gallant flower" that has a devouring worm rather than Peace at its root (14). The parable then portrays Christ as buried and reborn as a sweet grain that thrives, and is praised, "Through all the earth" (32). Though the primary reference is surely to Christ's disciples and Communion, this story also associates the theological promise of salvation with a dispersal of our fears about burial, darkness, and vermiculation. In place of those fears it offers a promise that resembles Eastern as much as Western religion, Boehme as much as Luther: a promise of selfless participation in an ongoing natural world—the same emotional resource drawn upon by "The Flower." The search for peace can end satisfactorily only with the finding (and accepting) of the right sort of death.

84. Boyd, p. 4; cf. Drummond, p. 46: "Life is a journey in a dusty way, the furthest rest is death."

85. Marvin Morillo, "Herbert's Chairs: Notes to The Temple," English Language Notes , 11 (1974), p. 273, responds to the common assumption of a modern stationary chair by asserting that "The idea of the hearthside chair, the stationary resting place, seems directly contrary to Herbert's point that death is not a resting place but only a stage in the journey." My point is that the persona of the poem seems to share this error with most modern critics. "Chair" seems to have been a word in transition at the turn of the seventeenth century, and Herbert effectively exploits the ambiguity.

86. Stanley Stewart, "Time and the Temple," in Essential Articles for the Study of George Herbert , ed. John Roberts (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1979), p. 369, describes the correspondence between these final titles and Christian eschatology.

87. Patrides, p. 212, discusses the carpe diem legacy; Herbert's rewritings of such erotic conventions into Christian worship often resemble the process Harold Bloom describes in The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), whereby a poet attempts to portray a prior work as a misconceived or incomplete effort to write his later version.

88. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus 1604-1616: Parallel Texts , ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950).

89. Wall, 316n.

90. Cf. Daniel Donne, A Sub-Poena from the Star-Chamber of Heaven (London, 1623), p. 120: "wee shall at length bee brought by him who is Alpha and Omega the beginning and the ending , unto the beginning of that unspeakable Happinesse which shall have no ending ."

91. Fish, Living Temple , pp. 154-57, argues for the anti-closural properties of this long poem.

92. Schoenfeldt, p. 260, notes this "surprising recourse to 'the material bodily lower stratum'"; but it is less surprising if we recognize it as part of Herbert's response to his culture's need to associate bodily corruption with the devil, and thereby prevent a materialist reading of death.

93. Coleridge, in George Herbert: The Critical Heritage , p. 170.

94. Phase 25; quoted by Strier, p. xii.