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    A Study Guide for George Herbert's "Virtue"
    A Study Guide for George Herbert's "Virtue"
    A Study Guide for George Herbert's "Virtue"
    Ebook28 pages25 minutes

    A Study Guide for George Herbert's "Virtue"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for George Herbert's "Virtue," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 26, 2016
    ISBN9781535842174
    A Study Guide for George Herbert's "Virtue"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for George Herbert's "Virtue" - Gale

      1

      Virtue

      George Herbert

      1633

      Introduction

      Virtue is one of the poems in a collection of verse called The Temple (1633), which George Herbert wrote during the last three years of his life. By then, he had taken holy orders in the Anglican Church and become rector in Bemerton, England, near Salisbury. Herbert's poems are lyrical and harmonious, reflecting the gentle voice of a country parson spreading the Christian message. He appreciates the beauty of creation not only for its own sake but also because he sees it as a mirror of the goodness of the Creator. Yet, despite Herbert's sense of the world's loveliness, his poems often reflect the transience of that beauty and the folly of investing it with any real value. In Virtue, he presents a vision of an eternal world beyond the one available to sense perception.

      Implicit in Virtue is a delicately expressed struggle between rebellion and obedience. The understated conflict lies between the desire to experience worldly pleasures and the desire—or as Herbert would insist, the need—to surrender to the will of God. The battle waged between rebellion and obedience can be seen more clearly in one of the best-known poems in The Temple, The Collar. Therein, the poet raves against the yoke of submission that he must bear until he hears the voice of God call him child; then, he submissively yields, as the poem ends with the invocation My Lord! This conclusion indicates that what the narrator feels about the experience of the natural world is of less authenticity than an inner voice of authority that directs him toward

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