2009- 3- 30
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#11
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أكـاديـمـي نــشـط
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رد: ماده الشعر سنه اولى
Themes
The Transience of Earthly Beauty
Repeatedly, throughout the sixteen lines of "Virtue," Herbert asserts beauty's transitory nature. His warning is not that people themselves must die but that the things that delight people while they are alive must pass away. The word "thou," repeated in the last line of each of the first three stanzas, serves as an address to each of the day, the rose, and the spring. The word does not refer to the poet himself or to the reader, even if one hears associative and suggestive echoes in those directions. Consequently, Herbert's poem does not assume the character of a threat. It serves, rather, as an instrument devised to wean both poet and reader off dependence on the visible world for joy and spiritual nourishment in order to redirect both poet and reader to the inner cultivation of virtue.
The Interconnection of Life and Death
Besides expressing the impermanence of natural phenomena in "Virtue," Herbert also reveals the interconnection of the realms of life and death. The earth, which represents impermanence, and the sky, which represents eternity, are joined (by the day) in union in the second line of the poem. Similarly, the seventh line shows that a root, a source of life, and a grave, a tomb for life, share the earth as a common location. In the Christian story, Jesus's temporary journey into earthly death assures humankind of the existence of a way into eternal life.
The Power of Christian Virtue to Overcome Mortality
The last stanza reverses the despair built up in the first three, by expressing the notion that salvation is achieved through the cultivation of a "sweet and virtuous soul." Such a soul is formed, Herbert suggests, through appreciation of the beauty of nature, with the understanding that those natural objects, which indeed exercise a positive influence on the soul, must perish. The soul that is shaped by the appreciation of the sweetness of natural beauty — as long as that beauty is seen to be transient — can itself become sweet by refocusing its appreciation on the beauty of virtue, sacrifice, and the eternal afterlife.
Nature
Despite his poem's focus on the transience of earthly beauty and of the experience of earthly rapture, Herbert delights in the depiction of nature and natural phenomena. He brings the reader into the English countryside in springtime, to be dazzled by the light of day, the hue of a rose, the scent of the earth, and the dew-covered fields at evening, as well as by the music of the poet's appreciation of these things. Herbert introduces natural images into his verse not as ends in themselves but as a means of carrying out the religious instruction to which the poem is devoted.
Faith
An implicit theme of "Virtue" is faith. Although what is visible to humankind in the poem is the transience of earthly delight and the decay of nature, the poem ultimately conveys what cannot be seen and must instead be felt: the existence of a quality, the soul, which exists in eternal delight in a dimension other than the one in which our bodies live. The first three quatrains show what the poet can actually see; the fourth refers to what he knows by virtue of the vision granted to him by his Christian faith. Faith allows him to see what is invisible to the eye
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