Topic 7: George Herbert + Andrew Marvell
October 28th, 2022
George Herbert
Another 17th-century English poet that is well known for religious themes and formal innovation
– one of his most well-known poems is “Easter Wings”
● You have to read it flipped horizontally – then, you will see the wings!
● You are seeing a pattern at first glance rather than the words. This poem is changing how
we approach poetic form – the words aren’t just meaning, but their arrangement on the
page clearly matters a lot.
Easter Wings
Places humans in a position of submission to God.
● The poem opens with a longer line and each line gets shorter until it expands once more
(expansion is worshipping God)
○ Condensing both visually and verbally a lot of these ideas.
● The form of the poem reflects the spiritual process that is being evoked in this poem.
○ The correct number of syllables, but the syllables don’t take up enough space.
Herbert’s “The Altar” is shaped like an altar.
Prayer (I)
This poem is a sequence of metaphors – it’s a list! It’s the spiritual form of prayer.
● The church’s banquet, God’s breath returning to man, etc.
● This is also a sonnet! It’s 14 lines!
This poem is one sentence – there’s only one period!
● In the place of conjunctions, we have adjacencies (things following other things)
● The poet never tells us what prayer is – it’s a verbless poem.
Herbert probably isn’t talking directly about the European empire – the land of spices stands in
for something…
● A treasure cove? Perhaps he is likening contact with the divine to the land of spices.
● It is certainly meant to signal the exotic – it represents wonder. The land of spices is
something beyond our understanding – something we can barely grasp.
“To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell
Manipulative male sexual predator – by calling her coy, he is implying that if she says “no,” then
she is just playing around and still wants to have sex.
● blason – typically a French poetic form that dismembers the female body – he talks about
her eyes, her forehead, her breasts, and the rest.
● Intense anxiety about time and temporality.
● “You’re going to miss out! So we better go to it! Or else we can’t have sex!!”
“Thus, though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run.”
October 28th, 2022
George Herbert
Another 17th-century English poet that is well known for religious themes and formal innovation
– one of his most well-known poems is “Easter Wings”
● You have to read it flipped horizontally – then, you will see the wings!
● You are seeing a pattern at first glance rather than the words. This poem is changing how
we approach poetic form – the words aren’t just meaning, but their arrangement on the
page clearly matters a lot.
Easter Wings
Places humans in a position of submission to God.
● The poem opens with a longer line and each line gets shorter until it expands once more
(expansion is worshipping God)
○ Condensing both visually and verbally a lot of these ideas.
● The form of the poem reflects the spiritual process that is being evoked in this poem.
○ The correct number of syllables, but the syllables don’t take up enough space.
Herbert’s “The Altar” is shaped like an altar.
Prayer (I)
This poem is a sequence of metaphors – it’s a list! It’s the spiritual form of prayer.
● The church’s banquet, God’s breath returning to man, etc.
● This is also a sonnet! It’s 14 lines!
This poem is one sentence – there’s only one period!
● In the place of conjunctions, we have adjacencies (things following other things)
● The poet never tells us what prayer is – it’s a verbless poem.
Herbert probably isn’t talking directly about the European empire – the land of spices stands in
for something…
● A treasure cove? Perhaps he is likening contact with the divine to the land of spices.
● It is certainly meant to signal the exotic – it represents wonder. The land of spices is
something beyond our understanding – something we can barely grasp.
“To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell
Manipulative male sexual predator – by calling her coy, he is implying that if she says “no,” then
she is just playing around and still wants to have sex.
● blason – typically a French poetic form that dismembers the female body – he talks about
her eyes, her forehead, her breasts, and the rest.
● Intense anxiety about time and temporality.
● “You’re going to miss out! So we better go to it! Or else we can’t have sex!!”
“Thus, though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run.”
