The Temple of George Herbert: A Rhetorical Reading

By C. S. Lim

Professor C. S. Lim had a fondness for the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. A devout Christian, he loved the poetry of Donne, Marvell, and especially George Herbert. Lim found the poems beautiful, and he had a fascination for the themes of God and death and love. He began a dissertation in 1973 as a postgraduate student at the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. Lim died from cancer in 2011, and his wife, Rema Lim, published this little-known thesis that offers a rhetorical reading of Herberts The Temple and contributes to the understanding of the man himself.

Praise for The Temple of George Herbert

C.S. Lims remarkable study of George Herberts poetry goes a long way in reaffirming the importance of rhetoric in the literary world of seventeenth-century poets. Written forty years ago, it exhibits a kind of scholarship and insight that has become rare these days. Professor Lims analysis of the poems in The Temple shows the depth of Herberts rhetorical studies and also provides important insights into the nature of poetic language in the English Renaissance. The work also touches upon John Wesleys adaptations of Herberts poems.

Professor Amlan DasGupta, Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata 700032, India

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Sep 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543747874

C. S. Lim

C.S. Lim earned a masters in philosophy degree in English literature from Oxford University and was a professor of English literature at the Universiti Malaya. He specialized in seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry. Lim died in 2011.

Book preview

THE TEMPLE OF

GEORGE HERBERT:

A RHETORICAL

READING

C. S. Lim

43346.png

Copyright © 2018 by C. S. Lim.

ISBN:            Hardcover            978-1-5437-4785-0

                     Softcover             978-1-5437-4786-7

                     eBook                  978-1-5437-4787-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

www.partridgepublishing.com/singapore

Contents

Dedication

Foreword

Preface

A Note on Spelling

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 Alliteration in the Temple

Chapter 3 Metaphor in the Temple

Chapter 4 Wesleyan Adaptations of the Temple Poems

Chapter 5 Glossary of Rhetorical Figures

Bibliography

Scholarship is like reaping. The reaper first sweeps the field. Then come the gleaners who clean the field. Last come the geese which find a stray grain or two and go cackling home, content. We are the geese.

ANONYMOUS

Having and using as great helps as were needful, and fearing no reproach for slowness, nor coveting praise for expedition, we have at the length, through the good hand of the Lord upon us, brought the work to that pass that you see.

THE TRANSLATORS TO THE READER,

Authorized Version of the Bible

Dedication

In memory of my late husband, Professor C. S. Lim a true scholar

Rema Lim

Foreword

My late husband, Professor C. S. Lim embarked on this dissertation in 1973 as a postgraduate student at the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. He had just acquired a post as tutor at the English Department, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at that university which involved teaching a few undergraduate classes and writing a thesis to obtain his Master of Arts degree.

He had always had a fondness for the metaphysical poets of the 17th century. Being a devout Christian himself, he loved the poetry of Donne, Marvell and Herbert because he found their poems beautiful and he had always had a fascination about the themes of God and death and love.

When the two year period of his tutorship ended, the thesis was not yet ready to be submitted. The need for money for his living expenses and the job freeze that gripped Malaysia around this time put tremendous pressure on him. He was a meticulous scholar but also subject to bouts of discouragement now and then. In 1975, he completed his thesis while taking on small parttime jobs that were available at the time.

His external examiner, Professor Molly Mahood gave him an excellent report. And he was awarded the Master of Arts in 1976. A year later, he obtained a lectureship at Universiti Malaya where he worked until July 2009.

Almost two years later, Professor Lim passed away from cancer. I will never know whether he would have published this. But I decided to do this in honour of his memory. This is a little-known thesis, a gem of a work, unknown to so many because it was written so early in his life. To save money, he typed it himself on his typewriter almost forty two years ago. When I saw the thesis a few years ago, I began reading it and was astonished at the quality of the work produced by a very young man who did not even come from an English speaking background.

I am confident that now it will become more known to both students and academics and seminarians who love George Herbert And of course that though forty two years have passed, it will contribute to a deeper understanding of George Herbert.

I also want to deeply acknowledge the encouragement and the help I received from Professor Amlan Dasgupta of Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India; and his team of Kawshik Ananda Kirtaniya, who came up with the beautiful cover design, and Medha Mukherjee, who did the excellent copy-editing.

Amlan became a very good friend of my husband at Oxford University where they were postgraduate students in English Literature in 1981. A friendship which continued until 2011. He had read this work many years back and said he was delighted to look through it again. He painstakingly read through the thesis and I really owe him a great debt.

Lastly, a thank you to a few donors who wish to remain anonymous who helped with the huge cost of publication.

Rema Lim

Preface

In a field as well-researched as the Metaphysical poets, Herbert has had more than his fair share of scholarly attention. I have felt keenly the burden of the past, to use W. Jackson Bate’s phrase. There are surely many gaps in my knowledge. I only hope that these gaps are not so gaping that it is impossible for another man to walk by the path I have picked through the field.

The dissertation is merely a rhetorical reading of The Temple and by no means the rhetorical reading. For me to canvass every quiddity thereof is idle. But my reading does begin with the text and deal with what is generally agreed to be there in the poetry or with the so-called objective characteristics.

The first chapter forms the introduction in which I try to trace the tradition of the art of rhetoric in a brief survey of its history. I then examine the role of rhetoric in the education of Herbert and close the chapter with a section setting forth the relationship between rhetoric and poetry.

Chapter II arose out of a reaction against a claim of one of Herbert’s greatest editors. G.H. Palmer’s work has put students of Herbert forever in his debt. In his monumental edition of Herbert’s English works, he committed himself to the claim that Herbert neglected alliteration. My chapter on alliteration in fact shows that Herbert relished the figure. The chapter begins with Herbert’s revisions for alliteration and this is followed by two sections on what I call consanguineous and antithetical alliteration.

Chapter III touches on a well-worked field. My short chapter therefore seeks merely to cast some more light on the structural use of metaphor in Herbert.

Chapter IV seeks to reinforce the contention of the preceding chapter that Herbert’s strength with metaphor resides in its use in whole poems. Wesley’s adaptations of about a third of The Temple poems are used to set off Herbert’s strength in the use of metaphor as well as of the other figures.

The last chapter, which devoured many research hours, serves the modest function of a glossary for the names of the rhetorical figures used in the preceding chapters. A good number of the figures listed are not referred to in the other chapters. These are included to buttress my case for a rhetorical reading.

I gratefully acknowledge my deep debt to my supervisor, Mr. A.W. Price. Over the period of my work on this dissertation, he has been of great help to me in drawing my attention to important sources and in loaning me some important books. I remain thankful for his generous gift to me of Tuve’s Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery, for his constant encouragement and his scholarly criticism of my work. I must add that the errors which remain are mine and remain against his counsel.

I am also grateful for the generous approval of countless requisition slips for books, theses, microfilms and other material by Professor Lloyd Fernando and Mr. E.N. Dorall over two years. I doubt my work has justified the expenditure on these items. But I am consoled by the thought that the University of Malaya Library is now better equipped for research on Herbert and rhetoric should a better mind decide to explore these areas again.

My thanks are also due to Mr. Beda Lim, the Librarian, and Mr. Soong, of the Acquisitions Department, for many favours and kindnesses. I also thank Professor Maurice Baker of the University of Singapore for his cordiality and help during the period of research reading I spent on the University of Singapore campus in August 1974, the staff of the Singapore Trinity Theological College for similar favours, the staff-members of the English Department for their longsuffering during two graduate seminars when I read two draft chapters of the dissertation, the Menons for the hospitality of their home on numerous occasions and not least my friends who suffered me over endless games of chess which helped to relieve the tedium of typing my own thesis.

Lim Chee Seng.

A Note on Spelling

There is a certain quaint delight in the original spelling of the period which I was tempted to retain. However, it seems wrong to allow Shakespeare and the Authorized Version to sound more modern than Bishop Andrewes and King James. I have therefore modernized the quotations used in the text of the dissertation. The spelling of the titles of works cited is retained only to avoid bibliographical confusion. Herbert himself is nevertheless quoted from Hutchinson’s standard definitive edition and therefore in the original spelling. To modernize him would for me at least have been curiously odd. The inconsistency is acknowledged as arbitrary.

Chapter I

Introduction

dum Rhetorici satagam.

- Herbert

Rhetoric, writes C.S. Lewis, is the greatest barrier between us and our ancestors…In rhetoric, more than in anything else, the continuity of the old European tradition was embodied…through all the ages not the tyrant, but the darling of humanity.¹² In our own age, however, T.S. Eliot has remarked that rhetoric has become a pejorative term, "a vague term of abuse for any style that is bad, that is so evidently bad or second-rate that we do not recognize the necessity for greater precision in the phrases we apply to it. The modern sense of the term is undoubtedly pejorative³ but in Europe from the time of the Greek Sophists till well after Herbert’s time it was a term denoting an art which was customarily practised and given prominence.⁴

The Renunciation of Rhetoric

The beginnings of the renunciation of rhetoric are at least as early as Socrates. His denunciation of the art as practised by Gorgias is well-known – this art could hide the truth or worse, be used to defend lies or the worse cause.⁵ This started a long line of similar accusations. But Plato, in reporting Socrates, it must be noted, used rhetoric supremely to denounce rhetoric. His writings are generally not without ornament which in some places tends towards the poetic.⁶

In 1642 Thomas Fuller noted the condemnation in some quarters of rhetoric as the mother of lies.⁷ The Royal Society did much to further depress the fortunes of rhetoric. It urged the rejection of all amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things, in almost an equal number of words. Its historian, Bishop Thomas Sprat, in 1667 condemned rhetoric with rhetorical eloquence:

Who can behold, without indignation, how many mists and uncertainties, these specious Tropes and Figures have brought on our Knowledge? How many rewards, which are due to more profitable and difficult Arts, have been still snatch’d away by the easie vanity of fine speaking? For now I am warm’d with just Anger, I cannot withhold my self, from betraying the shallowness of all these seeming Mysteries; upon which, we Writers and Speakers, look so big. And, in few words, I dare say; that of all the Studies of men, nothing may be sooner obtain’d, than this vicious abundance of Phrase, this trick of Metaphors, this volubility of Tongue, which makes so great a noise in the World.⁸

Locke in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding declared somewhat later that "we must allow, that all the art of Rhetoric, besides Order and Clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the Judgement; and so indeed are perfect cheat."⁹

Of more moment are later charges against rhetoric. Benedetto Croce in his Aesthetic¹⁰ has been a seminal and authoritative voice in this regard. The very nature of aesthetic activity according to him damns the art as this activity "does not lend itself to partition; there is no such thing as activity of type a or type b, nor can the same concept be expressed now in one way, now in another."¹¹ To Croce then rhetoric should be consigned to the waste paper basket for attempting to isolate what is inextricably bound together – form and content.

Another