Herbert’s use of imagery in his poems

George Herbert is one of the most important metaphysical poets, was known for his saintly life and intense devotion to god his poems, not really intended for publication, reflect his sincere religious feeling. He was influenced by John Donne and the new metaphysical ideas such as metaphysical conceit. However George Herbert was not forced by John Donne’s style and developed his own. Herbert’s poems were also quite musical and included many different forms of song and

poem, but they also reflect Herbert’s concern with speech- conversational, persuasive, and proverbial.

Herbert’s poetry is marked by concreteness even thought he deals with abstract ideas. It is one of the achievements of Herbert that he conveys abstract religious ideas to use by concrete imagery, so that his ideas create a deep impression on our minds. His imagery is almost tangible, almost every image having a stamp of reality. Through his images we are able to visualize whatever he has to say. Most of his imagery is of the familiar, everyday kind although Herbert came from an aristocrat and highly cultured upper-class family, he had an ingrained sense of the common life of the English people.

Like Donne, Herbert is a realist in literature. He shows a preference for homely illustrations, analogies, and metaphors. His poems contain plenty of learned allusions, but he also draws his analogies from carpentry, gardening, and everyday domestic activity. Much of Herbert’s imagery is Biblical, as was bound to be the case in the writings of a man who had chosen priesthood as his vocation. The Biblical character of his imagery lends to it familiar and concrete quality in the eyes of the Christian reader. Through his poetry, echoes of the Biblical psalms, proverbs, and parables are to be found. He also draws many of his images from architecture and music.

In Easter Wings the poet wishes to share Christ’s victory over death and through this participation to achieve a closer relationship with Christ. So the poet gives us the picture of himself rising upwards like a lark and another picture of new feather being engrafted in his damaged wing to enable him to fly with greater speed. Both the metaphors- one of the poet rising upwards like a lark, and the other of the engrafting of feathers are perfectly concrete, even though the idea of spiritual elevation which the poet seeks is itself abstract.

In the poem called Redemption, Herbert employs an even more familiar kind of image. He borrows his metaphor in this case from the market place and the world of the tenant-landlord relationships. Herbert regards himself as a tenant in search of his landlord, namely Jesus Christ, because he wants to have the agreement about the lease to be revised. To this business-image is added a biblical

image, the Christ in the midst of a hostile crowd of thieves and murderers who are about to put him to death. The point of the poem is that Christ redeemed mankind by his martyrdom and this point has been established by means of familiar and concrete imagery.

From the above discussion, we can conclude that Herbert’s characteristic is that he expresses everything by imagery, and tries above all, else to be concrete. To express some abstract ideas, through concrete and visible symbols constitute his merit as a metaphysical poet and at the same time a defect, because it sometimes, leads him to draw an idea.