In his posthumous life of Herbert, Herbert’s early biographer Izaac Walton gave the following portrait of the poet’s musical activities:

Walton records that Herbert not only enjoyed listening to music but was also an accomplished viol-player and lutenist who composed not only poems but also musical settings for those poems. Walton’s artfulness is on display in such passages, here transforming Herbert’s musical interests into symbols of the poet’s sanctity: he presents us with Herbert the prayerful auditor, attending choral evensong; and Herbert the sociable musician, refreshing himself and moderating excessive religiosity by participating in entertaining musical evenings in town.

Herbert inherited his interest in music from his family, who were at the centre of the musical culture of early modern London. His childhood home resounded with music: every Sunday, the Herberts sang the psalms together as a household,² and his mother, Magdalene Herbert, nurtured the musical abilities of her children. In the short period covered by her surviving household accounts (11 April to 4 September 1601), a number of musicians and dancers were paid to provide evening entertainment; and on several occasions some of the most significant names in contemporary musical circles dined in the Herbert household, including the composers John Bull and William Byrd. Byrd, living in Stonden Massey in Essex at the time, may have stayed overnight as a guest. These household accounts give us a glimpse of only a few weeks, during which the Herberts enjoyed the company of some of the most famous names in English music-making of the day: how many more unrecorded visits might have taken place? ‘It is tempting to wonder’, writes Amy Charles, ‘whether [Bull or Byrd] performed on the harpsichord or lute or viol when they appeared in this household in which at least two of the brothers [George and Edward] were to be known as accomplished musicians’.³ ‘William Heyther’ (or Heather), a lay clerk at Westminster Abbey (and later Gentleman of the Chapel Royal and founder of the chair of music at Oxford University that bears his name), also dined with the family during this period; when the household began to disperse for the summer, Heather was paid forty shillings to take charge of the education of George and his brother Richard, ‘perhaps partly for instruction in music’, Charles speculates, ‘though it is clear that George would also work on his Latin’.⁴

When Herbert left the family home to attend the University of Cambridge, his musical activities continued:

And, according to Walton, it continued to offer solace through to the end of his days:

During his life, Walton has told us, music had been Herbert’s ‘Heaven upon Earth’; now, as Walton’s saintly Herbert prepares finally to leave earth, it is symbolically in song that he finds his fullest mode of expression. Walton’s hagiographical impulses are clearly on display here, translating Herbert’s music into aesthetic emblems of a godly life drawing to its end, and we may question the historical accuracy of such scenes. After all, the trope of the poet’s exemplary musical death is not unique to these passages, echoing in particular Walton’s account of the death of Donne.⁷ On his final sickbed, Walton records, Donne wrote to Herbert and composed his ‘Hymn to God, My God in My Sickness’:

Walton offers exemplary, almost saintly accounts of these deaths, certainly; but if there is biographical embellishment on his behalf, it is not completely fanciful. As Jessica Martin notes, these aesthetic symbols of sanctity ‘are not originally Walton’s, however congenial he finds them. They belonged to Donne and Herbert first. That is why they are there.’⁹ The words they quote and sing are their own,¹⁰ and the practical ability and interest in music-making are already present in the life and writings of Walton’s subjects.

George was not alone among his siblings in developing a proficiency in music. His brother Edward, later first Lord Herbert of Cherbury, was a skilled lutenist. He, like George, turned to music during his time at university to refresh his mind after his studies.¹¹ During continental travels, Cherbury collected music: some of the printed volumes he purchased are preserved in the library of Jesus College, Oxford;¹² the lute music he collected during his travels is anthologised (along with music by English composers, including eight compositions by Cherbury himself) in his manuscript lute book,¹³ and he is known also to have written music for the viol. Examining Cherbury’s poetry, we find evidence that he, like George, wrote lyrics intended for musical setting – in Cherbury’s case, often with continental melodies in mind.

That there should have been this familial fascination with music – that, moreover, this fascination should be expressed in the work of George and Edward Herbert in musico-poetic terms – should come as little surprise when their work and interests are placed in the context of their extended family, the aristocratic cousins with whom George and his family maintained strong links.¹⁴ Because they were related to the Herberts of Wilton and (through the marriage of Henry Herbert, second Earl of Pembroke, to Mary Sidney) to the Sidney family, we can situate the musico-poetic practices of George and Edward Herbert within the genealogy of a much wider aesthetic sensibility.¹⁵ Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, is known to have played the lute; her son William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, is familiar not only as a poet whose verse was set by leading contemporary composers, but also as a patron of literature and music; her brother Sir Robert Sidney had singing lessons while at Christ Church, and his support of music was such that he accepted John Dowland’s invitation to act as godparent to his son Robert; he would later receive from his godson the dedication of the lute miscellany A Musicall Banquet (London, 1610). Sir Philip Sidney, writing from abroad, encouraged his brother Robert in his musical education: ‘Now sweete brother take a delight to keepe and increase your musick, yow will not beleive what a want I find of it in my melancholie times.’¹⁶ Robert’s daughter Mary (later Lady Mary Wroth) learnt to play the lute and the virginals, and could sing and dance.

For Sir Philip Sidney, the cultural figurehead of the family, music and poetry were exceptionally closely intertwined. Prompted by an intellectual, scholarly, and humanist agenda that looked back to the unification of word and tone in the Classical world, Sidney and his contemporaries sought to reclaim something of this quality of ancient song in early modern poetry, with the result, Gavin Alexander explains, that

For Philip, the process of composing poetry was in a very fundamental way a musical act: as he famously explained in ‘The Defence of Poesy’, the poet ‘cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well enchanting skill of music’.¹⁸

There is, then, a substantial quantity of evidence to suggest a close-knit relationship between verse and music in the cultural lives of the Herbert-Sidney family in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries – evidence suggesting both a practical and a theoretical understanding of the ways in which words and music engage with each other to produce a rich and deeply felt (if intellectually prompted) intermediated aesthetic.¹⁹ These poets were musicians; they could understand and conceive their creative acts in musical terms; they not only wrote poetry, but often sang it too. When they write poetry for music or poetry about music, it is upon this combined practical, theoretical, affective, and intellectual experience that they draw.

Music in The Temple

It is no surprise that Herbert’s ‘chiefest recreation’ should have an impact on his verse. The Temple resounds with an astonishing variety of musical images: the tolling of bells, the stretching and vibrating of lute and viol strings, the raising of voices in both praise and despair. Elsewhere, the ensemble performance of the consort is complemented by the individual music of the solo singer. And music comes in many forms. At times, music can be for Herbert the ‘Sweetest of sweets’ (Church-Musick’, line 1); at others, it is of the most dissonant and discordant character, ‘Untun’d, unstrung’ (‘Deniall’, line 22) – and even the ostensibly a-musical sounds of sighs and groans can be transformed by Herbert’s aesthetic into the finest ‘musick for a king’ (‘Sion’, line 24). We encounter the sacred music of the church; but we also hear a brasher, more secular sound-world, ‘countrey-aires’ (‘Gratefulnesse’, line 23) and the rustic pastoral songs of the shepherds, as well as a more refined, courtly music (which is not always necessarily preferable). His poems draw on forms and genres associated with liturgical music – metrical psalmody, hymns, verse anthems, antiphons – as well as on the prosody of the secular lute song.

Herbert scholarship has long been aware of the important place of music in The Temple. Several of the major early voices of modern Herbert criticism noted Herbert’s musical tastes. In the first critical piece to pay serious attention to Herbert’s music, a chapter on music in George Herbert: His Religion & Art (1954), Joseph Summers makes a discerning comment about the way in which changes in musical culture since Herbert’s day now make certain demands upon the modern reader: ‘Herbert’s [musical] allusions are so much those of a familiar practitioner of early seventeenth-century music that we need a musician’s aid.’²⁰ Musical culture has changed so significantly, Summers points out, that literary criticism must be reinforced with musicological study. Hollander developed these ideas in The Untuning of the Sky (1961). His brief but insightful discussion of The Temple embedded Herbert’s verse in a larger narrative about the development of ideas of music in English poetry between 1500 and 1700.²¹ Hollander’s argument describes what he sees as the divergence of literary and musical disciplines over the course of two centuries: ‘music and poetry … have become utterly different as human enterprises … [modern] practitioners of the two arts are less able to understand each other’s work, and even less acceptable to each other as audiences, than ever before. Expertise in one practice seems today to rule out knowledge of even the fundamentals of the other.’²² Hollander may polemically overstate the case here, but it is an argument that again forcibly reminds us of the essential work that modern readers of The Temple need to undertake in order to regain a proper sense of the important role played by early modern musical culture in Herbert’s verse. Hollander’s study, however, is explicitly concerned with ‘certain beliefs about music rather than music itself’²³ (my emphasis) and of how early modern English poetry expressed and employed this idea of music. Music becomes a byword for a transcendent ideal, synonymous in Herbert’s verse with prayer. Herbert employs ‘musical imagery to stand for personal, spiritual utterance’, Hollander writes; and, citing the passage from Walton’s life of Herbert that opened this introduction (above) posits the image of the cloistered poet, ‘playing and singing in secluded retirement’.²⁴

Yet, while Herbert’s private music-making is certainly important, this is in fact precisely not what Walton is trying to say about music here: ‘though he was a lover of retiredness’, writes Walton, ‘yet his love to Musick was such, that he went …’ (my emphasis). Walton stresses here that music specifically offsets Herbert’s introspective tendencies, taking him out into the world and not retreating from it. Nevertheless, Hollander’s reading of Herbert’s secluded music reveals the pervasive nature of musical ideas in Herbert’s verse, presenting it as a unifying and harmonising feature of Herbert’s poetic, ‘as if the image of music were always running along beneath the surface of all of Herbert’s poems … exercising always an informing, nourishing function … in general, music is the substance, and often the subject, of the poems themselves’.²⁵

Diane Kelsey McColley takes this insight into the pervasive presence of music in Herbert’s verse still further to propose that Herbert’s poetic language is profoundly and intrinsically musical: ‘He practiced – perhaps invented – a form of language analogous to polyphonic music sung in pure intonation, in which linear arrangements of words form vertical consonances whose overtones, as well as fundamental meanings, are in tune.’²⁶ Herbert thus ‘fine-tunes’ his language, she suggests; he is as sensitive to the resonant properties of words as he is to their fundamental semantic content, attentive to the way in which ‘the partials or secondary meanings – puns, etymologies, allusions, and the like – are in tune as the partials of natural tuning are’.²⁷ McColley brings musical parallels from the solo and choral literature that he could have heard during his time at Cambridge to bear on Herbert’s poems in order to make them more richly understood. With a particular interest in the form of his poetry, her chapter on Herbert’s music ends in a generously open-ended manner with an invitation to further examination: Herbert’s musical poetic, she concludes, ‘proves a harmony in which there is always more to find’.²⁸

The first steps towards exploring in historical detail Herbert’s practical musical culture were made by Rosemond Tuve in her important study of Herbert’s ‘A Parodie’.²⁹ In recognising that the poem was composed as a contrafactum (that is, the writing of new words to existing music, in this case a secular song by his aristocratic cousin William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke), she indicated, for the first time, something of the close interplay between Herbert’s poetic and contemporary secular musical culture, though her valuable study considers only one instance of musical influence on Herbert’s verse. Amy Charles’s extensive archival work continued in this vein, with a more decidedly biographical focus, uncovering much-needed historical detail concerning Herbert’s musical activities.³⁰

Yet we lack both Herbert’s original musical settings and any settings that can with certainty be attributed to Herbert’s lifetime which he may have heard or performed. Confronted with this lacuna, some critics have considered Herbert’s verse within the context of both general surveys of seventeenth-century music-making, and in the more specific discussions of the major genres of the day, including lute song, sacred and secular part song and polyphony, and declamatory song.³¹ Other critics, like Helen Wilcox, have turned instead to posthumous, near-contemporary musical settings of Herbert’s verse to look for evidence of how early modern musicians responded to Herbert’s musical aesthetic.³² Wilcox’s study articulates a powerful sense of the breadth of the musical culture within which we ought properly to situate the music of The Temple – considered appropriate, in the years after his death, for both the elite musical aesthetic of composers like Henry Lawes, Henry Purcell, and George Jeffreys and the less sophisticated tastes of the congregational ‘shouter’ of metrical psalms. There is a need, now, to bring together this work on Herbert’s practical experiences of musical culture with a closer reading of the musical currents that run through his verse: one of the purposes of this book is to bring together these two strands of criticism – the idea of music and the practice of music – into a fuller understanding of the hermeneutic implications of musical culture on Herbert’s verse.

Such a reading is important for historical-critical reasons – it gives us a better sense for the context of Herbert’s verse – but it also has important consequences for how we interpret that verse and understand its meaning. One of the pervasive emphases in critical studies of Herbert has been to stress the cloistered nature of his verse and the introspective nature of Herbert’s lyric ‘I’. Music played an important role in reinforcing this image, since music was often interpreted in light of an ideal in which music becomes emblematic of the soul’s interior communion with God. Yet for Herbert and his contemporaries music could be both a private, isolated activity (inviting analogies with contemplation) and a participatory, sociable affair. In giving such close consideration to the idea of music during the early modern period, critical attention has thus often been distracted from the conditions in which those musical ideas were grounded and flourished, conditions that involved not only cloistered retirement but also larger ensemble performance. As a result, when we read Herbert’s use of music in the context of musical culture as well as in the context of ideas about music, we find ourselves re-evaluating also the significance and meaning of the lyric first person. If the poet who sings in Herbert’s verse does so in the context of a group rather than in their private chamber, how does this alter our perception of the poet’s voice? How does the social and sociable context of singing and music making alter what we now take for granted about the lyric voice as such?

Herbert and Early Modern Musical Culture

One of the purposes of this book, then, is to bring the work of musicologists and social historians interested in the study of early modern musical culture to bear on the reading of Herbert’s verse. One of the major strands of this historical work, and an important influence on this book, has been the examination of not just of the elite, ‘high art’ musical culture that has survived in the canon of Tudor and Stuart music, but also an important reassessment of a more extensive popular, vibrant, and at times perhaps rather rough-edged musical culture.

Walter Woodfill’s Musicians in English Society from Elizabeth to Charles I (1953) paid attention to the ordinary musicians who performed in the towns, court, church, and domestic sphere, presenting a wealth of material that helped us to investigate for the first time the kind of sociable, amateur music-making in which Herbert’s contemporaries would have been involved.³³ David Price, challenging some of Woodfill’s conclusions about the prevalence of musical literacy, continued to extend our understanding of English musical culture in Patrons and Musicians of the English Renaissance (1981), with a particular focus on the private patronage that supported the professional life of musicians that developed in the post-Reformation period and that in turn helped to kindle and sustain a culture of amateur recreational music-making.³⁴ Importantly, for the purposes of this study, Price was struck by the vital mutual interdependence of the secular and devotional spheres. Herbert’s anxieties about the proper relationship between sacred and secular art are a commonplace of Herbert criticism. To read his verse in the context of his participation in early modern musical culture throws important new light on this commonplace: we are forced to confront the ways in which music and musicians negotiated (successfully or otherwise) the contested and difficult terrain between secular and devotional art.

Nicholas Temperley’s survey of the Music of the English Parish Church (1979) expanded our sense of liturgical music-making beyond the elite religious institutions – the cathedrals, abbeys, and royal chapels which supported ancient choral foundations – to examine the music-making that took place under the more modest auspices of the local parish church.³⁵ Temperley’s study is invaluable not just for the portrait it drew of what was then a neglected area of musicological study, but also for the sense it gave of the participatory musical culture of the parish church – raising awareness of the democratic and popular singing of metrical psalmody that has since been the focus of important studies by Rivkah Zim, Hannibal Hamlin, and Christopher Marsh.³⁶

This more recent work by historians of musical culture has continued this revisionist trend. Christopher Marsh’s Music and Society in Early Modern England (2010) argues that ‘levels of [musical] aptitude and accomplishment in early modern England were impressively high’ and suggests the ubiquity of early modern musical culture at all levels of society. At the heart of Marsh’s thesis is the contention that there is no simple, clear dividing line to be drawn between learned and popular culture – an argument he derives from the study of musical culture but suggests applies more broadly to all aspects of culture.³⁷ Marsh proposes as the emblem of his approach the analogy of the lute, with each of its six strings representing ‘the basic socio-cultural polarities that helped individuals to understand their world and to locate themselves within it: gentle/common, male/female, old/young, clerical/lay, urban/rural, and native/foreign’.³⁸ Rejecting the idea that these are simple oppositional polarities, Marsh proposes instead that we attempt to think in terms of a spectrum or a musical gamut. Marsh’s emblem suggests a way of viewing the history of the period ‘in terms of continuous dialogic tensions rather than as a series of seismic and seemingly conclusive shifts’,³⁹ and allows us better to understand the pressures exerted upon the individual within society. On the one hand, Marsh writes, early modern musical culture ‘marked the many divisions that separated individuals or social groups from one another … On the other hand, musical culture also mitigated commonplace divisions by allowing the continual interplay of conflicting tendencies and even drawing them, however temporarily, towards unity. Good music, according to a range of commentators, comprehended all things.’⁴⁰ Not only does Marsh’s analogy of early modern culture as a lute resonate directly with Herbert’s own frequent allusions to the instrument in his verse (‘Stretch or contract me … This is but tuning of my breast/To make the musick better’: ‘The Temper (I)’, lines 22–24); it also helps us to understand more clearly one of the key concerns of this book: to elucidate the way in which we can think about Herbert’s active musical life not as an isolated, secluded practice but in terms of the individual participating in the social and cultural world around them – and, in terms of Herbert’s devotional understanding of his musical practice, taking part in a divinely ordained creation that, like Marsh’s musical model, Herbert understood ‘comprehended all things’.

In this way, the present study contributes to the growing body of scholarship in recent decades challenging the old image of the saintly Herbert secluded from the world, acknowledging instead his interaction with the society and world in which he lived. Cristina Malcolmson, Jeffrey Powers-Beck, and Michael Schoenfeldt have all drawn renewed attention to the way in which Herbert’s sacred verse is implicated and inflected by the political and cultural pressures that surrounded him: politically active on behalf of the cause of international Protestantism and participating in the literary activities of Wilton House, his poetry displays the (often manipulative) dynamics of courtly interaction.⁴¹ In his role as Public Orator at the University of Cambridge, Herbert came into contact with the royal court and gave speeches before King James and other important dignitaries; he would later serve (briefly) as Member of Parliament for Wilton under the patronage of his aristocratic relation William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke. His decision to be ordained deacon in 1624 is commonly identified as the moment Herbert’s ‘Court-hopes’ died,⁴² but more recently this reading has been revised: Herbert owed his position at Bemerton again to the patronage of either the third Earl of Pembroke or his brother and heir Philip; and Ronald Cooley has argued that Bemerton should be seen not as the end of Herbert’s career, but as a step on the ladder of ecclesiastical preferment.⁴³ Herbert’s vicarage is situated halfway between the Pembroke estates and Salisbury, where he must have felt the twin, antagonistic pull of both the ecclesiastical centre of Salisbury Cathedral and the political centre and cultural life of Wilton House.

The study of seventeenth-century musical culture contributes an invaluable perspective to our understanding of this more ‘worldly’ Herbert. Early modern musical culture spanned the breadth of the socio-political spectrum, and for many, including Herbert, it played a significant role in both worship and in secular entertainment beyond the walls of the church. In contemporary musical culture, Herbert encountered an aesthetic practice that could navigate the apparently incompatible tensions on which his devotional poetic was founded. Attending to Herbert’s participation in early modern musical culture roots his devotional poetic in his lived experience of the world. Scott Trudell identifies a comparable dynamic at work in Sidney’s thinking:

It is this connection between the ‘lived experience’ of music and its more abstract, speculative ideals that has the most significant ramifications for our understanding of Herbert’s devotional verse. That is to say, the study of the musical practices of early modern England has significant implications for one aspect of Herbert scholarship in particular: his theology.

The theological implications of attending to the sound-world of early modern England have so far been set down in greatest detail by Arnold Hunt in a study not of musical culture but of homiletic practice, The Art of Hearing (2010). Hunt’s emphasis is on the important relationship between faith and sound for both preachers and particularly their listening congregations, founded on the Pauline principle that ‘faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God’ (Romans 10:17).⁴⁵ Hunt argues that ‘Fides ex auditu … was a precept that Protestant commentators took very literally, believing that saving grace was mediated through the ear and not through the eye.’⁴⁶ Certainly Herbert’s mentor John Donne, one of the greatest preachers of the period, seems to confirm Hunt’s assessment, placing emphasis on the salvific importance of hearing the Word: ‘There is no salvation but by faith, nor faith but by hearing, nor hearing but by preaching.’⁴⁷ For preachers invested in this idea that faith comes by hearing, sound could transform the letter of text into an inspirited living Word with powerful salvific potential, as St Paul also suggested: ‘the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’ (II Corinthians 3:6). This art of hearing was also in many ways an art of memory: embracing the mnemonic properties of patterned and rhetorical speech, sermons were expected to be memorable events, and advocates of this art of hearing emphasised the importance of those present repeating and rehearsing the central argument of the sermon to oneself and one’s family, incorporating the public sermon into the private devotions and meditations of the individual and their family.⁴⁸ In such ways, these commentators argued, the sounded living Word of God was intended to ‘sound out’ its auditors and penetrate into the hearts, minds, and lives of the congregation.

Herbert’s own position on this matter is typically nuanced: his poem on preaching, ‘The Windows’, at first seems to give primacy to the visual faculties, ostensibly validating the sense of sight rather than the voice of the preacher in its central conceit of the stained glass window, and in its concluding concern that sound can just as easily fail to grasp the attention as sight: ‘speech alone/Doth vanish like a flaring thing,/And in the eare, not conscience ring.’ (lines 13–15). Herbert’s point is, though, that ‘speech alone’ is insufficient: the poem’s overriding visual conceit of stained glass is summoned to cast light on Herbert’s conviction that the ideal preacher will bring the Christian ‘storie’ to life in words and actions, and that only ‘through [God’s] grace’ can they become both inspired and inspiring. As Thomas Ward has argued in an important essay on what he calls the ‘metaphysical slipperiness of the voice … the extralinguistic element which enables speech phenomena’ in Herbert’s Temple, ‘speech alone’ is associated in the poem with an illusory ideal of the voice as a transparent medium. Herbert takes issue, Ward suggests, not with the voice as a medium per se, but with those who undermine the voice’s power by aiming for this kind of transparent speech – the self-effacing kind of ‘plain style’ encouraged by Calvin and favoured by reformers in some branches of the English church. Ward contends that, far from dismissing the role of the preacher’s voice, the conclusion of the poem argues for the vital transformative nature of the vocal medium when the aim is not transparency, but a heightened register of language even as it brings the vocal medium itself to our attention:

When preachers accept the full rhetorical potential of their voices, their words will ring deeply in the conscience of the congregation, not in the ears alone. As Herbert himself would pray before he preached, ‘O make thy word a swift word, passing from the ear to the heart, from the heart to the life and conversation.’⁵⁰ Herbert’s prayer is for this grace so that his words, entering the body of his congregation through the ear, will be more thoroughly internalised and memorised, and will seed a transformation within the heart and life of his auditors – so that, in turn, they too will be able to speak and converse in a similarly gracious, life-giving, and transformative manner.

As Hunt’s and Ward’s work suggests, thinking about early modern literature in terms of the sounded voice has drastic implications for our sense of the way in which early modern texts communicate. My study of Herbert’s experiences of early modern musical culture participates in an important strand of scholarship that has emerged over recent decades, exploring the soundscape of early modern literature by (among others) Bruce R. Smith, Gina Bloom, Adam Fox, Katherine Larson, and Jennifer Richards. This body of work helps to critique a number of persistent preconceptions about the nature of early modern literature – chief among them that reading is, more often than not, an activity founded on a silent encounter with the visual page – that have shaped our critical discourse and response to these texts. As Jennifer Richards (citing the Elizabethan schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster, writing in 1581) notes, this is an anachronistic understanding of what it meant to read in the early modern period: ‘“Reading is a thing so familiarly knowne, as there needeth no great proofe, that it exerciseth the voice” … But what was obvious to Mulcaster then seems unfamiliar to historians of reading now.’⁵¹ Reading was profoundly bound up with the literal sounding of the voice, so that the communicative technologies of the written word and oral media were not so easily separated and divided as they are today. These scholars argue the need to supplement our visually informed understanding of early modern literature with a more historically aware sense of the way in which early modern writers, trained in the art of oratorical performance, conceived of the potential for sounding their texts, reading them aloud or performing them dramatically or musically.⁵²

Much of this work emerges from and responds to Walter Ong’s influential argument describing the shift he perceived from a largely oral culture to a literary one in the early modern period.⁵³ He attributed this movement from the ear to the eye to the technological development of the printing press, an innovation that, he argued, encouraged the rise of (silent) literacy. Though Ong’s account recognises the transitional nature of this movement from oral to literate culture over the course of the early modern period, his work is seemingly established on a fundamental and reductive binarism between the two, and a valorisation of a kind of teleological progress towards silent literacy which he claims is still borne out in our modern age (in spite of the technological developments of sound recording and other new media that have enabled what he calls an age of ‘secondary orality’). Ong’s argument has been contested, and more recent scholarship has drawn a more nuanced picture of the relationship between ear and eye: as Adam Fox has argued, ‘In practice, most societies are characterized by a dynamic series of interactions between spoken and written forms of communication and record.’⁵⁴ Fox argues against the myth of literacy as the ‘antithesis or nemesis’ of oral culture, describing instead early modern England as a society in which ‘three media of speech, script, and print infused and interacted with each other in a myriad ways … If anything, the written word tended to augment the spoken, reinventing it and making it anew, propagating its contents, heightening its exposure, and ensuring its continued vitality, albeit sometimes in different forms.’⁵⁵ Such challenges to Ong’s opposition between orality and literacy have important ramifications for the study of Herbert’s musical practices: the intention of this book is not simplistically to excavate what Ong would describe as the ‘oral residue’ of Herbert’s musical culture;⁵⁶ instead, it is to think about the complex negotiations between the written and sounded word that we encounter in Herbert’s verse.

To think in this way requires what Bruce Smith has termed a ‘cultural poetics of listening … a phenomenology of listening, which we can expect to be an amalgam of biological constants and cultural variables’.⁵⁷ In The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (1999) Smith attempted to delineate some of the defining features of this cultural poetics of listening. As with Ong’s argument, the writing of such ‘acoustic history’ runs the risk of isolating sound from other modes of sensory experience and essentialising its qualities. Herbert, for one, was evidently aware that sensory experience is more complex than this: take, for example, the extraordinary mingling and commingling of sensory experience in ‘The Odour’:

The poem’s synaesthetic conceit – merging sound, scent, and taste, allied with the receptivity of the mind to this ‘curious broth’ of sensation and the reciprocal mental activity of entering into and understanding this phenomenon, all communicated here via the visual medium of the written page – may represent an extreme instance of the admixture of sensory experience, but it also acknowledges that we never encounter the world through one sense alone. For such reasons, in recent years Smith and others have modulated this concept of ‘acoustic history’ into the attempt to write instead ‘historical phenomenology’ – remaining historically aware of the way in which cultural contexts shape and transform our understanding of our sensory experiences, and alert to both the distinctive qualities of particular senses and to the intermediated ways in which they work and combine together to build up our perception of the world. As we will see (particularly in the discussion of the ‘visual music’ of Herbert’s verse in Chapter 3), Herbert’s sense of sound is never completely separable from other modes of perception: his musico-poetics is informed by a richly intermediated and dialectical sense of how sound and sight might both complement and sit in tension with each other as modes of poetic communication.

Bearing in mind the risk of privileging sonic experience over other modes of sensory perception, Smith’s attempt to describe what is distinctive about sound nevertheless continues to provide helpful coordinates for reading Herbert’s verse in the context of his musical practices.⁵⁸ Firstly, Smith notes, sound is pervasive. Sound surrounds us, coming at us from all directions, extending up to the ‘horizon’ of our hearing. It helps to orientate us in our environments, placing our selves at the centre of an acoustic sphere that opens up around us and stretches all the way out to the acoustical limits of hearing. Even in apparently silent circumstances, we are surrounded by sound, and it is impossible to shut our ears: even when we put our fingers in our ears, we do not experience absolute silence. Herbert writes of this pervasive, even invasive quality of sound in ‘Prayer (II)’: ‘how suddenly/May our requests thine [God’s] ear invade … Thou canst no more not heare, then thou canst die’ (lines 2–3, 6). There is an important distinction to be drawn between hearing and attentive listening, however. We can choose to listen with differing degrees of attention: separating out noise into background and foreground, for instance, or making sense of a series of phonemes as speech, or understanding a series of discrete tones in melodic and harmonic terms as music. In selecting what we attend to, we are also of course choosing what to ignore and what to filter out – a fact that allows us to recognise the terror at the heart of Herbert’s poem ‘Deniall’: ‘When my devotion could not pierce/Thy silent ears,/Then was my heart broken, as was my verse’ (lines 1–3). If sound is pervasive, the fact that Herbert’s devotions cannot be heard suggests a range of possibilities, all of them concerning: perhaps (most unlikely) the ears of God simply do not work; perhaps his ‘silent ears’ are too distant, too far removed to hear Herbert’s voice; or – most worryingly – perhaps God is choosing to ignore his devotions, choosing to listen elsewhere.

The opening of Herbert’s ‘Deniall’ also draws attention to another important characteristic of listening, the way in which sound ‘pierces’ the ear. Not only is sound pervasive; it is also deeply immersive. Sound is able to permeate and penetrate apparently solid boundaries – as Herbert, describing a congregation shouting the psalms, puts it, ‘No door can keep them out’ (‘Antiphon (I)’, line 10). This is related to another important feature of sound – its ability to ‘sound out’ those spaces into which the sight cannot penetrate, to register and sense something of the invisible interiority of objects, their reverberative potential. It is thus not just church walls that become porous when confronted with sound: our bodies too are opened up, as we make sounds and are in turn sounded out. From the perspective of the listener, the immersive and permeating quality of sound has significant implications for our experience and conception of the relationship between self and the world around us. Sounds seem to exist both ‘out there’ (where the sound is being produced) and somehow also ‘in here’, penetrating and registering within the mind and body of the listener. As a result, attending to the world through sound significantly affects our sense of self: both affirming a sense of interiority and individual experience, and at the same time placing that reverberative sense of self in a complex and ambiguous relationship with the sound-world that surrounds and permeates it. When our experience of the world is guided by sound, we find ourselves participating subjects, immersed in the world.

We gain, in other words, a very different sense of our self through sound, a sense of self that might best be thought of, as Smith puts it, in terms of our ‘personhood’. The Latin word ‘persona’ (like its Greek counterpart, prosopon, from which we derive the figure prosopopoeia, personification) designates the mask worn by actors on the Classical stage; but as Smith points out, the term can suggest not just a visual but also a sonorous conception of personation, the voice that speaks through the mask: ‘A “person” like you is, after all, a “through-sounding,” a “per-sona”.’⁵⁹ This idea of the sounded and sounding persona has profound implications for the way in which we read lyric verse like Herbert’s, filled as it is with musical sounds, voices, and fictive impersonations. The mask of the persona and the voice that speaks through its mouth together afford us the opportunity to re-evaluate the sense of self that this poetry imagines and projects, and to reassess what it means for both the poet and the reader when this verse speaks with the lyric ‘I’. What happens to our sense of this lyric ‘I’ when we take seriously the full implications of Sir Philip Sidney’s description of such verse as ‘speaking pictures’,⁶⁰ and instead of allowing our eyes to rest on the surface mask of persona, we also think with sound through that mask? Does sound help to penetrate the fiction of the mask, to reveal a hidden and more authentic interiority? Or does it, perhaps, reveal more profoundly this fictive construction of identity, disclosing little more than a sonorous and empty cavity within? (Certainly Herbert, always ready to undercut sincerity with irony, was prepared to acknowledge this latter possibility, noting in one of his ‘Outlandish Proverbs’, ‘Emptie vessels sound most.’)⁶¹ The immersive quality of sound, in which voice is somehow experienced both outside and within the body and mind of the listener, blurs any easily conceived sense of a boundary between subjects and objects, between the speaker and the listener. Ensemble music-making drives such insights even further: to perform together with good intonation requires each performer constantly to both sound and listen with intense sensitivity to both themselves and their fellow musicians, experiencing the expressive simultaneity of the individuality of their own musical contribution and the coherent whole of the musical enterprise. For a poet as attuned by his musical activities to the experience of sound and the sonorous potential of the lyric address, the sounding of the lyric subject provides for a generously ambiguous sense of ‘I’, which can assert individuality while at the same time admitting something of the porous nature of that sense of personhood, not isolated and detached by its individuation but incorporated into a shared and intimate communicative community. It is an understanding of the lyric ‘I’ that comes very close, this study will argue in its concluding chapter, to the one we find in that archetypal book of devotional lyric song, the Book of Psalms.

Music and the Lyric Mode

To think with sound, then, is to rethink some of the fundamental conceptions of the lyric. ‘The historical connection of the lyric with song’, Jonathan Culler has argued recently, ‘might prove a salutary corrective model for thinking about this literary form … The duration of a reading is the lyric event, which one should keep in view, perhaps especially in an academic study of poetry.’⁶² A critical practice informed by sound-thinking and music reorients our relationship to and understanding of the ways in which poems communicate – especially in the context of a musico-poetic culture like that of early seventeenth-century England in which orality and aurality played significant roles in the production, communication, and reproduction of lyric verse.

In recent decades, literary criticism has become increasingly sensitive to the ways in which texts proliferate and change as they are reproduced and circulate in manuscript and print culture. This sense of the instability and mutability of texts has grown ever more significant as literary critics pay increasing attention to the fact that many texts were also communicated through the more intangible and evanescent medium of the voice. As Gina Bloom, critiquing aspects of the recent materialist turn in early modern studies, has argued, early modern texts (particularly dramatic texts) were alert to the unruly, unstable potential of the voice: ‘Historical matter … often takes on the illusion of stability, as if the study of material objects will give modern scholars access to some realm of the real, some graspable “thing” … Voice dispels such illusions. Invisible yet substantial, ephemeral yet transferable, voice destabilises any easy assumptions about the category of matter.’⁶³ Scott Trudell and Katherine Larson have continued to develop this line of thinking: they draw attention to what they both term the ‘evanescent’ quality of the spoken and sung text, what Larson describes evocatively as the ‘airy matter of song’.⁶⁴ ‘Lyrics exist through time’, Matthew Zarnowiecki has recently argued in Fair Copies, his study of the circulation of Elizabethan poetry by pen, press, and the voice: ‘rather than being single, static instantiations, they vary and mutate when reproduced’.⁶⁵ Thinking (as Zarnowiecki does) with the ear as well as the eye helps draw attention to the historically contingent and provisional features of lyric verse.

Revealing the lyric’s intrinsic relationship to time, and especially the passing of time, such historical awareness of the sounded lyric could be read in terms of privation and loss: ‘There is a pathos in the occasional’, writes Angus Fletcher, ‘by commemorating the moment, the poet insists on its loss. Every occasional poem is a tomb’.⁶⁶ But there is also opportunity in resisting critical inclinations informed by the apparent fixity of a text, and the temptation of an encounter with the page to form a critical certitude of interpretation – after all, as Herbert himself puts it, ‘We say amisse,/This or that is’ (‘The Flower’, lines 19–20). In Unwritten Poetry, Trudell has drawn attention to the way in which the early modern song culture that formed an important part of Sidneian poetics foregrounds what he calls the ‘intermedia proclivities of early modern poetic culture more broadly’ – that is, the complex overlap and interplay between the various media that might constitute the act of making and communicating poetry.⁶⁷ Trudell’s concept of ‘intermediation’ – the idea that poetry was not confined to the medium of the page, but could communicate through a range of media, whether written or performed – offers a model that can articulate the way in which Sidneian poetics was open to the processes of change, adaptation, and experimentation that constitute the defining principle of poesis as an act of making. ‘As Sidney argues in the ‘Defence’ and elaborates elsewhere’, Trudell explains, ‘poetry is defined not in terms of writing, versifying, or any particular medium but as fictive “making” that moves its audience to action. This redefinition of poetry is predicated not on a stable literary tradition but on a community of poets, composers and vocalists invested in poetic and musical adaptation.’⁶⁸ Thinking about the intermediations of early modern song in this way encourages a hermeneutic mode that pays attention to the poem as event; it allows us to embrace a richly suggestive sense of the ambiguity and resonant possibilities of poetic language without collapsing into indeterminacy, and can interpret and make sense of words without the illusive certainty of asserting ‘This or that is’.

When Herbert’s poetry is viewed in these terms, with renewed attention to the sounded and musical aspects of Herbert’s verse, we are prompted to make an important reappraisal of the assurance and religious conviction that a number of influential critical voices have identified in the poetry of Herbert and his contemporaries. Herbert has certainly received his fair share of critical readings that have attempted to determine from his poems precisely what he meant and what he believed – in part because of what is now starting to be understood as a problematic emphasis on the importance of the written word over the heard word. Barbara Lewalski’s hugely influential formulation of early modern poetics in Protestant Poetics (1970), for instance, contended that the poetry of Herbert and his contemporaries is founded upon ‘an overwhelming emphasis on the written word as the embodiment of divine truth’. Lewalski’s portrait of Protestant poetics is grounded on the rejection of ‘ineffable and intuited divine revelation’ in favour of the certitude and confidence derived from ‘its written formulation in scripture’.⁶⁹ Yet to think of the lyric as sounded event, to accept its temporal contingency, necessarily forces us to question such guarantees of assurance and certainty.

These questions have most recently been addressed by Gary Kuchar, whose invaluable study of the role of mystery in Herbert’s Biblical poetics appropriately culminates in an important examination of the role of sound in The Temple. Arguing, like Hunt, for the importance of the Pauline precept ‘faith cometh by hearing’, Kuchar offers the concept of ‘hearkening’ as a corrective to any overly assured reading of Herbert’s poetics. To think in terms of ‘hearkening’, Kuchar contends, allows us to discover instead ‘a broader disposition toward faith as grounded on a notion of divine mystery as an unfolding action in time’.⁷⁰ Associated with the shifting processes of correction and revision that many critics have identified as a hallmark of Herbert’s style, the notion of ‘hearkening’ helpfully offers a critical approach to his verse that can better capture a proper sense of the ‘generous ambiguity’ of Herbert’s poetry.

To listen and to ‘hearken’ in this way to Herbert’s musical culture thus not only situates Herbert’s lyric art in the context of an analogous historical aesthetic practice; it also forces us to rethink how lyric poems communicate. It is to recognise the poem’s potential as sounded event and to reassess the way in which poems and readers construct and interpret meaning. Listening and hearkening suggest that rather than thinking about lyric in terms of a static, immutable hermeneutic that the act of reading ‘decodes’, we understand the act of reading as a communicative process. To listen to Herbert’s verse, to ‘Hearken unto a Verser’ (‘The Church-Porch’, line 3), is to discover in his conception of the lyric a comparable straining towards meaning, a reaching from a historically limited vantage point towards a better understanding of an eternal and infinite divinity.

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Chapter 1 explores the way in which early modern musical practice was grounded in a sophisticated theoretical and theological understanding of what it meant to play an instrument or to sing. Herbert’s theology, like that of many of his contemporaries, was shaped by his reading of Augustine’s works, but the influence of Augustine’s De musica on Herbert’s understanding of music has yet to be fully explored. For both Augustine and Herbert, I contend, theory and practice are closely related: music is not simply a theoretical figure for a model of an ordered and harmonious cosmos, but yields theological insight through what this book characterises as the double motion between the idea of music and its practice. Augustine, like Herbert, bases his theoretical model of music on his lived experiences of musical performance, moving from the ‘corporeal to the incorporeal’ in his analysis of musical metaphysics. He offers readers of Herbert a sophisticated musico-poetics that does not simply seek a form of harmonious resolution, but is able also to comprehend dissonance and discord within its conception of musical harmony. In De musica, Augustine proposes that music can help to tune the individual, tempering the often strained and opposing impulses of the body and soul. This means that musical practice is not simply an aesthetic act but also an ethical practice, a process both Herbert and Augustine describe as ‘right measurement’: an attempt to understand how to sound one’s proper note in the great universal song of God’s creation.

Chapter 2 places Herbert’s work in the context of the musical culture at Wilton House surrounding his aristocratic kinsman William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke. Pembroke was a patron of poets and musicians and a lyric poet in his own right, whose verse originates within a coterie of musical and literary enterprise. It has long been recognised that Herbert’s own poetry participates to some extent in the musico-literary culture surrounding Pembroke: Rosemond Tuve recognized in 1961 that in ‘A Parodie’, Herbert wrote new sacred words for a secular song by Pembroke.⁷¹ This chapter explores in more detail the musical culture supported by Pembroke’s patronage by examining the posthumous edition of Pembroke’s Poems (1660), a volume in which the voices of poets and musicians associated with Wilton mingle and combine. Poems (1660) displays the complex dynamics of musico-poetic patronage in Pembroke’s coterie at Wilton. From the start of The Temple, Herbert’s ‘Dedication’ situates his verse within the environment of such courtly patronage poetics: it establishes the verse that follows within the context of a sacred singing contest, a sacred consort in which the voices of Herbert’s poems ‘strive … [to] sing best thy name’ (line 4).

In Chapter 3, I turn to another collaborative contemporary enterprise, the Stuart court masque. These extravagant secular entertainments are an unusual context against which to set Herbert’s often modest devotional poetic, though Herbert can hardly have been ignorant of the genre: members of his extended family were closely involved in their performance and production. This chapter explores the synaesthetic ‘visual music’ of these performances: the way in which aural ideas of harmonious proportion could be expressed visually through the stage’s elaborate perspectival sets, and through the moving human medium of dance. The masque offers a vivid contemporary emblem of a kind of music manifested to the eyes, which helps modern readers to recognise the musical ideas that inhere in Herbert’s visually conceived pattern poems.

In Chapter 4, George Herbert’s interest in music is set in the context of the music-making of his eldest brother, the philosopher Edward, first Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1582–1648). Like his younger brother, Cherbury was a keen lutenist who composed music and wrote lyrics to be sung. Yet studies of Cherbury’s work have tended to sideline his music-making. This chapter traces the way in which music plays a vital role in shaping Cherbury’s thought and his cosmopolitan view of the world. In his philosophical treatise De veritate (1624), ideas of harmony play a key role in understanding what he considers the analogical and sympathetically resonant nature of truth. For Cherbury, music best expresses the harmonious relationship between the microcosm of the individual and the macrocosm of the world. Cherbury’s ideas about music do not remain abstract and theoretical: evidence suggests that in the compositions in his lute book he attempted to realise these ideas in sounded musical form. Though Herbert and Cherbury reach different philosophical conclusions, Cherbury’s music represents, then, an important example of one of the central premises of this book – that the practice of music, for Herbert and his contemporaries, embodied theoretical ideas about the nature of the world, and could help attune the microcosm of the self to the music of the macrocosm. In this way, the study of music discloses important sympathetic resonances between the work of Herbert and his brother: resonances that are heard again, in the conclusion of the chapter, in the brothers’ shared interest in writing sacred echo songs.

Turning from ideas of active participation in music-making to the more receptive attention of the auditor, Chapter 5 examines Herbert’s attendance at the sacred choral liturgies of the church, and his experiences of listening to church music. In thinking about this more receptive, attentive figure, this chapter examines Herbert’s poetic in terms of developments in this repertoire of liturgical choral music. It sets Herbert’s aesthetic anxieties about ‘plain’ style and ‘trim invention’ (‘Jordan (II)’, lines 3, 5) in the context of early modern debates about the beauty of holiness and the role of music in the worship of the early modern English church, revealing analogies between Herbert’s verse and contemporary polyphonic styles. Listening to scripture set to music becomes for Herbert a devotional technology, an art of holy attention that prepares for prayer and communion with God.

The final chapter draws together these strands, offering the Book of Psalms as the archetype of the sort of devotional song we encounter in Herbert’s verse, a template for his musico-poetic acts of devotion in The Temple. In seventeenth-century psalm culture, we are presented with a model for the intermediated devotional aesthetic that this book has explored through the musical and literary activities of Herbert and his family. In the Biblical Book of Psalms, and in the widespread practice of psalm translation, we find the voices of poets and musicians engaging with each other in collaborative devotional song. The psalms, too, offer a model for the ‘visual music’ explored in Chapter 3 – explored, in this final chapter, in terms of the musically and spatially aware sequence of psalms known as the ‘Psalms of Ascent’, Psalms 120–34. Above all, this chapter finds in psalmody a living, vital tradition that – appropriately, in the context of this survey challenging disciplinary boundaries – transcends limitations, contesting a restricted human understanding of time and space to gain perspective on the nature of the divine. In the constructed first-person singular of the psalmist’s ‘I’, Herbert finds his words combining with those of other poets, musicians, and Christians, engaging with an ancient body of musical verse that escapes the limits of the historical moment in which it was written or sung to offer a voice for all people and for all occasions.