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مشرفة سابقة
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رد: ENDLISH STUDENT LEVEL 5 >> 3rd year first semester
و هذا جزء من الكللام اللي منزلته د.حصة للشعر بالياهو
George Herbert Life & Art
George Herbert was born in Montgomery, Wales, on April 3, 1593, the fifth son of Richard and Magdalen Newport Herbert. After his father's death in 1596, he and his six brothers and three sisters were raised by their mother, patron to John Donne who dedicated his Holy Sonnets to her. Herbert was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. His first two sonnets, sent to his mother in 1610, maintained that the love of God is a worthier subject for verse than the love of woman. His first verses to be published, in 1612, were two memorial poems in Latin on the death of Prince Henry, the heir apparent.
After taking his degrees with distinction (B.A. in 1613 and M.A. in 1616), Herbert was elected a major fellow of Trinity, in 1618 he was appointed Reader in Rhetoric at Cambridge, and in 1620 he was elected public orator (to 1628). It was a post carrying dignity and even some authority: its incumbent was called on to express, in the florid Latin of the day, the sentiments of the university on public occasions.1 In 1624 and 1625 Herbert was elected to represent Montgomery in Parliament. In 1626, at the death of Sir Francis Bacon, (who had dedicated his Translation of Certaine Psalmes to Herbert the year before) he contributed a memorial poem in Latin. Herbert's mother died in 1627; her funeral sermon was delivered by Donne. In 1629, Herbert married his step-father's cousin Jane Danvers, while his brother Edward Herbert, the noted philosopher and poet, was raised to the peerage as Lord Herbert of Chirbury.
Herbert could have used his post of orator to reach high political office, but instead gave up his secular ambitions. Herbert took holy orders in the Church of England in 1630 and spent the rest of his life as rector in Bemerton near Salisbury. At Bemerton, George Herbert preached and wrote poetry; helped rebuild the church out of his own funds; he cared deeply for his parishoners. He came to be known as "Holy Mr. Herbert" around the countryside in the three years before his death of consumption on March 1, 1633.
A Priest to the Temple (1652), Herbert's Baconian manual of practical advice to country parsons, bears witness to the intelligent devotion with which he undertook his duties as priest. Herbert had long been in ill health. On his deathbed, he sent the manuscript of The Temple to Nicholas Ferrar, asking him to publish the poems only if he thought they might do good to "any dejected poor soul."3 It was published in 1633 and met with enormous popular acclaim—it had 13 printings by 1680.
Herbert's poems are characterized by a precision of language, a metrical versatility, and an ingenious use of imagery or conceits that was favored by the metaphysical school of poets.3 They include almost every known form of song and poem, but they also reflect Herbert's concern with speech--conversational, persuasive, proverbial. Carefully arranged in related sequences, the poems explore and celebrate the ways of God's love as Herbert discovered them within the fluctuations of his own experience.2 Because Herbert is as much an ecclesiastical as a religious poet, one would not expect him to make much appeal to an age as secular as our own; but it has not proved so. All sorts of readers have responded to his quiet intensity; and the opinion has even been voiced that he has, for readers of the late twentieth century, displaced Donne as the supreme Metaphysical poe
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Andrew Marvell – A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body
This poem addresses the dichotomy between a person’s Body and Soul, using strong, elegant rhetoric and vivid imagery. Soul and Body are portrayed in a state of mutual entrapment, both being subject to each other’s whims and needs. Marvell alters the conventional structure for poems dealing with this dichotomy by giving the final lines to the body, rather than the soul. The ambiguity in these lines ensures we are left without a clear sense of a victory for one side or the other.
The Soul’s incredibly visceral, visual self-portrait as a tortured prisoner in Stanza 1 provides an affecting introduction to its argument. The idea of the Soul strung out, ‘manacled in hands’ and ‘fettered’ by feet, is made even more stirring by sound effects in the line. The alliteration that links ‘bolts’ and ‘bones, ‘feet’ and ‘fettered’, and the repeated ‘an’ sound stressed in ‘manacles’ and ‘hands’, reflect the image described through thee idea of pairs – each part of the soul has an equivalent part of the body, which connects to it and fastens it down. The effect continues through the stanza with ‘blinded’ and ‘eye’, ‘deaf’ and ‘drumming’. The wonderful, graphic line ‘Of nerves, and arteries, and veins’ is fragmented by caesura into a symmetrical pattern of 1 foot, 2 feet, 1 foot – suggesting the entwining of strands of thread, or the rigid form of the body cutting up the shapeless soul. The stanza ends with a rhetorical flourish, demonstrating confidence and wit. The iambic tetrameter is altered by a spondaic substitution that emphasizes ‘vain head’. This pairs with ‘double heart’ to give a conclusion that sounds decisive and satisfying. The ending encourages us to unpick the meaning of ‘double heart’ – it implies both ‘excessive amounts’ – uncontrollable feeling, and being prone to changes of mood’, as in two-faced.
The Body’s lament of Stanza 2 takes a similar argument. The connotations that attach the word ‘tyrannic’ put in motion a whole set of images in the readers’ mind – political might and oppression, rebellion and violent punishment similar to the torture described in stanza 1. We notice throughout the poem that both entities use the same arguments against each other. On a deeper level there is a lack of clarity about which human traits are accountable to which part of the human. The meanings suggested by ‘double heart’ seem to reproach the Body for over-feeling – yet here in Stanza 2 the ‘heat’ of passionate emotion is ascribed to the Soul, which ‘warms and moves this needless frame’. On a fundamental level, Marvell suggests that there is unity between these two seemingly opposite forces, such that their respective actions are inseparable form one another.
The final lines of Stanza 2 play on religious and superstitious imagery to demonstrate wit and mastery of rhetoric. Line 18 echoes but inverts the theological paradoxes found in devotional works of Herbert and Donne, which state that a person must die (in a spiritual sense) in order to live. Lines 19 and 20 portray the Body as a troubled spirit, forced to stalk the earth, ‘never rest’, as a result of being ‘possessed’ by a soul. There is irony in the fact that the soul is a person’s access to heaven, yet here it keeps the body grounded in a kind of purgatorial state. The transition to the third Stanza, with the Soul’s questioning of ‘magic’, goes almost unnoticed after the Body’s discussion of ‘spirits’ and being ‘possessed’. The fact that Soul and Body adopt one another’s images and manners of speaking is further suggestion that the two voices come from the same fundamental source.
The Soul’s ironic presentation of sickness in Stanza 3 pivots on the idea that the soul is on a journey to heaven – as seen in Marvell poems such as A Drop of Dew, the soul feels uncomfortable on earth. Therefore for the Soul every bodily sickness hurts double – first in sympathy for the pain of the body, and then in frustration after restored health ‘shipwrecks’ the Soul’s efforts to reach heaven through death. The body then twists the idea of sickness again, casting all emotions as forms of disease. The steady accumulation achieved through listing is strengthened by the lack of enjambement, maintaining the crisp rhetorical sound, and giving the effect of a doctor’s formal list of diagnoses. The resultant view of human life that emerges is as an impossible struggle against the pain of emotion, a siege of paradoxes and an inner battle between the elements of a person. It’s strange that such a chaotic picture should emerge from such ordered, controlled verse.
Even stranger is the enigmatic final image. Spoken by the body, it could describe the Soul (the ‘architect’) breaking and shaping the Body (the ‘tree’ or ‘forest’), in order to ‘build [it] up for sin’. Yet the intelligence suggested by ‘architect’, and the symmetry and beauty suggested by ‘square’, leave us with a sense of order and creation as well as brutality and destruction. The line could be read as a distillation of the process described by the rest of the poem – that by being subjected to the awkward contraries of life, a person is prepared for the building of something new
The Altar
http://www.thingsrevealed.net/altar1.htm
by George Herbert
A broken ALTAR, Lord thy servant rears,
Made of a heart, and cemented with teares:
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workmans tool hath touch'd the same
A HEART alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow'r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy Name:
That if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
O let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
And sanctifie this ALTAR to be thine.
since it's shape echo's the meaning of the verse. It has been noted that it was only eighty years after Herbert's composition that Joseph Addison made the judgment that such a shape poem was "garish and silly." Yet Herbert was a man of an earlier century and really another era. Up until the sixteenth century the western European view of the world was characterized by what Michel Foucault has called the "doctrine of signatures" described below:
Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them. (Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 17, (New York: Vintage Books, 1970))
No wonder that Addison could not appreciate Herbert's shape poems. Addison had actually entered the eighteenth century, while Herbert's style reflected that of the sixteenth century. With such a poetic device there was a complementary resemblance between the form of the text and the theme of the poem. In The Altar there even seems to be an internal visible structure that complements the externally implied meaning. When we isolate the capitalized words from the poem we see the poetic theme in outline form.
ALTAR
HEART
SACRIFICE
ALTAR
It has been said that George Herbert's poems are actually a record of his private devotional life. Thus the altar metaphor should provide insight to his personal relationship to God. The most elementary Biblical definition of an altar is as follows: A structure for offering a sacrifice to worship and serve God. To "reare" a structure is to raise it up on end which is far more difficult when it is "broken." This brokenness appears to be an expression of a heart felt sense of inadequacy. In line two we learn that the metaphorical altar is actually the poet's heart. A servant often is called upon to render service to his Lord in spite of personal pain, and so he attends to the task with tears. Yet there is reason to believe that this servant recognizes the need to bind together his brokenness using tears as the binding cement. Tears are often the metaphorical binding element in personal relationships. A funeral is a time to mourn the loss of a loved one, but also the time to cement together the lives of those who care enough to weep with us. This calls to mind the shortest verse in the Bible expressed at the grief of Mary for the death of her brother Lazarus. It is simply recorded that, "Jesus wept" (John 11:35). Herbert, with tears like Mary, "reares" the altar of his heart to his Lord. The tone of these introductory lines is one of emotional brokenness.
A heart is something created by God with natural inclinations, desires, and passions. This led the psalmist to say, "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139:14). Only the hand of God can frame a man. In contrast to this conception of the heart is the word "workman" in which is compounded the idea of man's work. Herbert's altar has not been framed by the work of man's tools. Some of Herbert's ideas on the nature of an altar seem to be an allusion to, and interpretation of certain Old Testament ideas. One of the first incidents associated with an altar was the murder of Abel by his brother Cain. One of the direct descendants of Cain was Tubal-Cain, "who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron" (Genesis 4:22). The stigma associated with Cain's faithless offering was passed on to his descendants who symbolically continued his self righteous work through their tools. Therefore, when God later gave a commandment concerning the making of altars he sought to make it evident that true worship was based on faith and not the works of man.
'If you make an altar of stones for me, do not build it with dressed stones, for you will defile it if you use a tool on it.' (Exodus 20:25)
Herbert is not a "self made man" and thus, he offered up what God had already made.
The stone described by Herbert was a homely metaphor familiar to everyone of his time. A stone may be large or small, heavy or light, hot or cold, but whatever else it may be, it is dead. This understanding would also be true for the Old and New Testament scriptures. The Biblical view was that after The Fall, man's spiritual heart was dead like a stone. The heart was originally conceived to be alive to the will of God, but through Adam's sin it died. There is a paradox that it was with such a broken and dead stone that Herbert sought to build an altar for worship. And further, it is with the heart that God required true worship. Therefore, the heart desired by God can not be one natural to man, but one cut by the hand of God. The paradox was resolved by God as promised in the scriptures.
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. (Ezekiel 36: 26,27)
Only God's power can "cut" a true heart.
In lines nine through sixteen there is a change of tone which can be called trusting hope. This change is due to his confidence that God can change his heart. Herbert realizes that the parts of his once "hard heart" are still the same, but now they are directed toward a new end. The heart's natural parts now meet in his unified frame to praise the name of God. The frame metaphor probably should be understood as descriptive of his personal makeup. Herbert finally extends his stone metaphor to the place where he has fulfilled the symbolic words of Christ concerning the stones. That is to say, we may have an allusion to the words of Christ at his Triumphant entry to Jerusalem. At that time when the "crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen ... some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, "Teacher, rebuke your disciples!" Jesus replied, "if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out" (Luke 17:37-40). So it was with Herbert. If he happened to hold back the words that should rightfully glorify God the previously stony parts of his heart would rise up to praise Him who changed them.
The Lord will look with favor on a man's offering if it is one from the heart. This is beautifully illustrated by David in his penitential psalm.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. (Psalm 51:17)
Brokenness of spirit is the opposite of worldly pride. Jesus said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:3). Such a humble life will be in fullest possible submission to God. Therefore the kind of sacrifice that God desires and that which He will bless is a life in submission to the will of God. The apostle Paul explained the ultimate goal of Biblical sacrifice.
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God--this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:1,2)
With such devotion Herbert is faithfully expectant that God will sanctify the altar of his heart. God can and will set apart a life that is in submission to Him as though it were His very own. The altar metaphor has indeed provided insight to George Herbert's personal relationship to God.
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