Watch carefully, now, as George Herbert uses sensory images to lead you into a carefully-laid trap IN WHICH IDEAS, AND NOT FEELINGS (as in the first stanzas) STILL REIGN SUPREME - THOUGH THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE TWO REMAINS INTACT: So, there you have it: a pastoral setting and an opportunity for risqué punchlines.īut near the end of the Tudor Era, Europe started to come of age, and so while writers like Herbert stressed an Edenic sound morality and intellect - nature and wit - other authors were growing cynically sophisticated, like Donne before he was converted in his deep malaise. That through the green cornfields did pass So early Shakespeare is full of Eden-like natural settings in which wit ruled the roost: (But let’s first take a look back to the early Renaissance before the Reformation clicked into high gear.)Īt that time, artists heartened back to the classical ideal of the Whole Human Being - “mens sana in corpora sano.” But the intellect was always their watchtower. I think he’s right, and I’ll use one example from this book to show you the prelapsarian (in a literary sense) genius of George Herbert. Eliot, the term perfectly characterizes that moment in history when poetic writing became split into a Cartesian duality - ‘A disassociation of sensibility.’Īnd that, he says, happened back in the late Renaissance. What’s that mean? Well, for the great poet T.S.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |