John Donne’s and George Herbert’s Employment of Secular Language and Images in Their Religious Poetry
Abstract
Recent studies in Herbert and Donne show that most critics focus on the study of theological or biblical aspects of Herbert’s and Donne’s poetry. This argument is more accurate as far as Herbert is concerned because he inspires the reader’s mind as he approaches spiritual life by means of pure simplicity of language and thought. But when it comes to Donne, this argument becomes less accurate, or needs a bit more investigation. Before he decides to write religious poetry, Donne wrote many secular poems mainly about love, yet secular images do not disappear completely in his religious poetry, but rather create a very controversial poet who struggles between his secular and religious character. However, Herbert uses many images, devices, and metaphors of popular love poetry. Herbert’s intermingling of secular love images with his serious divine theme does not affect his religious voice in his religious poetry. Rather, this excellent technique of intermingling helps express Herbert’s divine themes very effectively. The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of secular love images and devices in the religious poetry of Herbert and Donne. This should help us to decide whose poetry reveals a more religious view of life and more faith than the other.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Daalder, J. (1986). Herbert’s Poetic Theory. George Herbert Journal, 9(2), 17-34.
Freeman, R. (1963). Poetry as a literary form: George Herbert and Wilfred Owen. Essays in Criticism, 13, 307-322.
Guibbory, A. (1993). John Donne. In T. N. Corns (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to English literature. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hutchinson, F. E. (Ed.) (1941). The works of George Herbert. Oxford: Clarendon.
Jasper, D. (1988). Two or three gathered in his name. Reflections on the English pastoral tradition in religious poetry. Christianity & Literature, 38(1), 19-32.
Mollenkott, V. R. (1972). George Herbert’s Epithet-Sonnets. Genre, 5, 131-137.
Ribs, P. (1996). John Donne: Holy Sonnet XIV or the plentitude of metaphor. In S.G. Fernández-Corugedo (Ed.), Sederi VII. (pp.164-168). Universidade da Coruña.
Rivkin, J., & Ryan, M. (2004). Stranger to ourselves. In J. Rivkin & M. Ryan (Eds.), Literary theory: An anthology. Maldin: Blackwell.
Somerville, C. (2008). John Donne’s poetry. Retrieved November 11 from http://great-writers.suite101.com/article.cfm/john_donnes_poetry
Taylor, I. E. (1957). Cavalier sophistication in the poetry of George Herbert. Anglican Theological Review, 39, 229-243.
Whalen, R. (2000). “How shall I measure out thy bloud?,” or, “weening is not measure”: TACT, Herbert, and Sacramental Devotion in the electronic temple. Early Modern Literary Studies, 5(3), 1-37.
Wordsworth, W., & Coleridge, S. T. (2007). Preface to lyrical ballads. In M. Mason (Ed.). New York: Personal Longman, 2007.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/8830
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
Copyright (c) 2018 Sameer Mohammad Alshraah
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Online Submission: http://cscanada.org/index.php/sll/submission/wizard
Reminder
How to do online submission to another Journal?
If you have already registered in Journal A, then how can you submit another article to Journal B? It takes two steps to make it happen:
1. Register yourself in Journal B as an Author
Find the journal you want to submit to in CATEGORIES, click on “VIEW JOURNAL”, “Online Submissions”, “GO TO LOGIN” and “Edit My Profile”. Check “Author” on the “Edit Profile” page, then “Save”.
2. Submission
Go to “User Home”, and click on “Author” under the name of Journal B. You may start a New Submission by clicking on “CLICK HERE”.
We only use three mailboxes as follows to deal with issues about paper acceptance, payment and submission of electronic versions of our journals to databases: caooc@hotmail.com; sll@cscanada.net; sll@cscanada.org
Articles published in Studies in Literature and Language are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).
STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE Editorial Office
Address: 1055 Rue Lucien-L'Allier, Unit #772, Montreal, QC H3G 3C4, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org
E-mail: office@cscanada.net; office@cscanada.org; caooc@hotmail.com
Copyright © 2010 Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture