George Herbert’s metaphysical poem The Collar shows the speaker narrating his struggle with what it means to serve his Lord. Herbert masterfully expresses the speaker’s doubt in his faith and his feeling of being trapped by his priesthood through use of religious metaphysical conceits. The nuanced tone, which changes at various points in the poem, is a key device that drives the speaker’s argument and results in the conclusion of the poem being tremendously powerful. The use of retrospect and the past tense is another poetic strategy used by Herbert that contributes to the great success of this poem as a whole.
The most well known work of Herbert is however not The Collar, but Easter Wings. While they are both religious in subject matter, these are two very different poems. Easter Wings shows man’s suffering and misery due to his sins and his redemption through God and his salvation through devotion to God. While The Collar closes with direct references to God, Easter Wings opens with “ Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store” (1). The Collar is a far more personal poem than Easter Wings and it is that subjectivity and use of retrospect that makes it a powerful metaphysical poem. Easter Wings on the other hand is more generalized. For example, the lines “With thee/O Let me rise/As larks, harmoniously,” (6-8) Herbert describes man, not an individual, giving himself to God and declaring his devotion in the hope that he will once more be able to flourish as he once did. Easter Wings also differs from The Collar in that it is a shaped poem, with the structure of the poem taking the form of bird’s wings. Furthermore, The Collar makes use of violent free verse with rhyming elements to show the speaker’s religious crisis, whereas E...
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...f religious conceits alone that makes The Collar metaphysical. A seminal aspect of Herbert’s poetry that defines it as metaphysical is the role that the speaker, or rather the poet’s, personality is revealed. These lines that show the speaker lamenting his life as “all wasted” (16) and bemoaning the fact that he has achieved nothing praiseworthy and has not been congratulated on any successes (“Have I no bays to crown it?” (14)) indicates that the speaker is someone of particularly fine feelings. While he is undoubtedly angry at his plight, shown through diction such as “blasted” (15) and “wasted” (16), unlike the raging struggle of Donne’s religious poetry (Wilmott, 9), Herbert’s The Collar remains restrained in the first sixteen lines, with an element of forced rationality as one would see in someone who is desperately trying to remain composed in an argument.
Everett, Nicholas From The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Ed. Ian Hamiltong. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Copyright 1994 by Oxford University Press.
Edward Taylor’s Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children and Upon a Wasp Chilled with Cold are similar in their approach with the illustration of how beautiful and magnificent God’s creations are to humankind. However, each poem presents tragic misfortune, such as the death of his own children in Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children and the cold, enigmatic nature of human soul in Upon a Wasp Chilled with Cold. Both poems create an intriguing correlation between earthly life and spiritual salvation while maintaining the element of how cruel reality can be. Both poems manifest a correlation between earthly life and spiritual salvation, which is how you react to the problems you face on Earth, determines your spiritual karma and the salvation that God has in store for you.
“Half-hanged mary” by Margaret Atwood is a poem about a woman named Mary whose circumstances causes her to redefine not only herself, but her beliefs. For several hours, Mary struggles to hang on to her life and her will, as she grapples with her faith in God. Atwood’s use of imagery, sound devices, diction and form, transform the poem into an extended metaphor that highlights the standards of religion which correspond closely to the downfall of society during that time period.
A recurring theme in the poetry of Richard Wilbur is one of God and Christianity. Biblical references can be found throughout his work, even in poems that have little to do with religion. However, this theme is quite prominent as there are several poems contain more than passing references. Wilbur provides in these poems ideas that Christians can identify with, either in the Christian lifestyle or straight from the Bible.
...hing “bad” happened they found a way to rejoice in the suffering. The Puritan believers were selfish with sharing their faith. A plantation missionary stated that sharing the gospel to slaves would “promote our own mortality and religion.” However the gospel and religion the masters shared with their slaves did not remain the same. The slaves were able to apply their faith to their lives, their work, and their future. The faith the slaves possessed was rich in emotion and free from preexisting regulations. In this class we focus on the many faces and interoperations of Christ that change with the seasons of history. The slave faith represented in Jupiter Hammon’s poem shows a high level of integrity and selfless, personal application of faith. The emotion and need for Christ the slaves had during this time created a new realm of relationship in the evangelical era.
Edward Taylor’s Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children and Upon a Wasp Chilled with Cold are similar in their approach with the illustration of how beautiful and magnificent God’s creations are to humankind. However, each poem presents tragic misfortune, such as the death of his own children in Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children and the cold, enigmatic nature of human soul in Upon a Wasp Chilled with Cold. Taylor’s poems create an element of how cruel reality can be, as well as manifest an errant correlation between earthly life and spiritual salvation, which is how you react to the problems you face on earth determines the salvation that God has in store for you.
The ordinary, but shepherd-like and curious enough to look realistically at the nature, Speaker of this poem shall be married; this much realizing the subtle fears and emotions of a "married ear" and sympathizing with it.
This poem also grasps the concept of religion and how it plays a role in this work. The character sets himself on religion and makes that as his "sanctuary" from the sea. "Thus the joys of God are fervent wit...
One of the most interesting aspects of Victorian era literature reflects the conflict between religion and the fast gathering movement aptly dubbed the enlightenment. Primarily known for its prude, repressed, social and family structure beneath the surface of the Victorian illusion many conflicting, perhaps even radical, ideas were simmering and fast reaching a boiling point within in the public circle. In fact writers such as Thomas Hardy and Gerald Manly Hopkins reflect this very struggle between the cold front of former human understanding and the rising warm front know only as the enlightenment. As a result we as readers are treated to a spectacular display of fireworks within both authors poetry as the two ideas: poetics of soul and savior, and the poetics of naturalism struggle and brutality, meet and mix in the authors minds creating a lightning storm for us to enjoy.
Many people find theology a very esoteric field of study, and Christian doctrine regarding the life of the soul can seem quite difficult to comprehend for non-Christians and Christians alike. The conceit in “A Drop of Dew,” which employs common images and processes straight from the natural world, enables Marvell to sum up a commonly held view of the soul’s journey with creativity and cleverness. Its symbolic elements also help Marvell to evade avoid sounding either preachy or pedantic. It is this mastery of the conceit and other devices of figurative language, so delicately and feelingly demonstrated in “On a Drop of Dew,” that has made Marvell an enduring figure in the world of poetry.
...ow. George Herbert successfully redeems this fact with his writing. Even if he wants to do something else and will “freely” be allowed to follow this path, he knows there is authority over him that put his life in order of how it should be. George Herbert, a seventeenth century poet, wrote “The Collar” as a complaint, a rebellious act, but knows that he is powerless under higher authority and can only submit to their will.
Living in a period of important religious and cultural flux, John Milton's poetry reflects the many influences he found both in history and in the contemporary world. With a vast knowledge of literature from the classical world of Greek and Roman culture, Milton often looked back to more ancient times as a means of enriching his works. At other times, however, he relies on his strong Christian beliefs for creating spiritually compelling themes and deeply religious imagery. Despite the seemingly conflicting nature of these two polarized sources of inspiration, Milton somehow found a way of bridging the gap between a pagan and a Christian world, often weaving them together into one overpowering story. The pastoral elegy Lycidas, written after the death of a fellow student at Cambridge, exemplifies this mastery over ancient and contemporary traditions in its transition from a pagan to a Christian context. Opening the poem in a setting rich with mythological figures and scenery, then deliberately moving into a distinctly Christian setting, Milton touches upon two personally relevant issues: poetry and Christian redemption. In this way, Lycidas both addresses the subject of being a poet in a life doomed by death and at the same time shows the triumphant glory of a Christian life, one in which even the demise of the poet himself holds brighter promises of eternal heavenly joy.
In George Herbert’s Man, Herbert gives homage to God, and the centrality of man. The main point of the poem assumes that since God is the greatest being of all, and God created humanity, then human beings are great as well - greater than credit is given. It focuses on the concept that man is a microcosm, or a small-scale model of the world, and that every part of the body has a facet of the world of which it is equal.
During the time-period when they authored this essay, the commonly held notion amongst people was that “In order to judge the poet’s performance, we must know what he intended.”, and this notion led to what is termed the ‘Intentional fallacy’. However, Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that the intention, i.e., the design or plan in the author’s mind, of the author is neither available nor desirable for judging the success of a work of literary art. It is not available because the author will most certainly not be beside the reader when he/she reads the text, and not desirable because intention as mentioned already is nothing but the author’s attitude towards his work, the way he felt while writing the text and what made him write that particular piece of writing and these factors might distract the reader from deciphering the meaning from the text. This method of reading a text without any biographical or historical background of either the poem or the poet practiced by the New Critics was known as ‘Closed Reading’. This stemmed from their belief in the autonomy of the text.