조지 허버트의 신앙과 모형시

Abstract

George Herbert described his poetry as "a picture of the many spiritual Conflicts that have past betwixt God and my Soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus My Master." He profited from every aspect of John Donne's style, but he always adapted it to his own temperament, and employed more than one hundred stanza forms, many of them extremely complicated. In "Easter Wings" and "The Altar" Herbert made the poems visual hieroglyphs to create them in a shape which formed an immediately apparent image relevant both to content and structure, whereas in "Aaron," "The Church-floore," and "Paradise" the patterns are valuable as contents, that is, they are used as the objects which crystallize the meanings of the poems, and the poems could be constructed as formal hieroglyphs which mirrored the structural relationships between the natural hieroglyphs, the poems, and the individual's life. Finally in "The Collar" Herbert ventured in hieroglyphic form. The object of imitation is the disordered life of self-will. He has given a formalized picture of chaos in the elaborate anarchy of the patterns of measure and rhyme. But the poetry of Herbert is so intimately bound up with his faith as a Christian and his practice as a priest that those who want to enjoy the poetry without sharing his faith may well feel some presumption in attempting to define the human, as distinguished from the specifically Christian, value of his work.