‘something understood’: Spiritual Experience and George Herbert’s Sonnets

By analyzing George Herbert's seventeenth-century devotional poems, particularly his shape poem 'The Altar' and his sonnets, this essay argues that deliberately choosing formal constraint can foster a spiritual experience. Herbert's sonnets, such as 'Prayer,' 'Love,' and 'Redemption,' pair key religious concepts with the attentive demands of poetic form, challenging passive notions of Christian experience. The poems demand careful attention and neurological intensification, a quality of religious experience, transforming readers' conceptual understanding of Christianity. Herbert's sonnets become poetic chapels where readers may encounter 'something understood,' reframing religious experience through the constraints of poetic form.

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Abstract

Drawing from The Temple, a seventeenth-century volume of devotional poems written by George Herbert, this essay sets out to unfold how deliberately choosing constraint can lead to a spiritual experience. Beginning with a formal analysis of Herbert’s shape poem “The Altar” to demonstrate how form and content simultaneously create meaning in lyric poetry, the remainder of the essay focuses on Herbert’s most formally constrained poems: the sonnets. Using Herbert’s treatment of the sonnet form as evidence of deliberately choosing constraint, Herbert’s poetics transform our conceptual understanding of the elements that make up a Christian religious experience. Titled by the same words that provide the foundation for Christian spiritual experience, the sonnets “Prayer”, “Love”, and “Redemption”, among others, renew our understanding of religious experience by refocusing our attention via the constraints of the poetic form. By pairing together key religious concepts with the constrained attentive demands of poetry, Herbert’s sonnets challenge notions of passivity and call instead for a renewed understanding of the Christian experience. Characterized by the need for careful attention and neurological intensification—a specific quality of religious experience—Herbert’s sonnets become rooms, or perhaps, poetic chapels, where readers have the chance to experience the spiritual ultimacy of “something understood”.