"You that Indeared are to Pietie": Herbert and Seventeenth-Century Women

Abstract

Helen Wilcox "You that Indeared are to Pietie": Herbert and Seventeenth-Century Women Sometime in the last decade of the seventeenth century, somewhere in the south of England, Dame Sarah Cowper, an avid keeper of commonplace-books and diaries, chose to write out in one of her notebooks a selection of quotations which she headed "Precepts out of Herbert's Poem."1 Her next seven pages are full of snippets from The Temple, George Herbert's sequence of religious poems on divine love, human affliction and the mediating role of "sweet phrases."2 Sarah Cowper's favorite phrases seem to have come from "The Church-porch," as this is the poem most extensively quoted, beginning with the sturdy moral advice "Stay at the third glasse" from the seventh stanza. Extracts from eighteen different Herbert poems follow, but only two of these, "Jordan" (II) and "The Method," are given in full, and only one, "Conscience," is identified by its title. The Herbert selection is followed immediately by extracts from four poems by Christopher Harvey, whose Synagogue professed to imitate The Temple and was bound with it in several seventeenthcentury editions. What does this isolated piece of manuscript evidence tell us? At the very least, it identifies Sarah Holled, daughter of a London merchant, wife from 1664 of the baronet and M.P. for Hertford borough, Sir William Cowper, as one of the many readers of Herbert's Temple in the first seventy years after its publication. It is thus part of a complex tapestry of reception history which can significantly add to our understanding of both the poet and the century. But Sarah Cowper's commonplace-book is of particular interest because it offers a relatively rare insight into the way an early woman reader responded to Herbert's work. It makes clear that this reader regarded the Temple as a source of moral "precepts"; this is 202Helen Wilcox also confirmed by the index to her common-place book as a whole, which offers a list of moral qualities illustrated by her chosen quotations. The title given for the Herbert extracts — "Precepts out of Herbert's Poem" — not only draws attention to her culling of wise and memorable sayings out of The Temple, but also suggests by its singular "Poem" that Cowper regarded the whole work as a unity rather than an assembly of shorter lyrics or sub-sections. The extracts appear in the order of their occurrence in the sequence, conveying a sense of Cowper working her way through The Temple and picking out her favorite lines. However, there was probably also an element of remembering rather than copying, since Herbert's line breaks and stanza forms are not observed. This, in turn, would seem to emphasize the significance of meaning (rather than lyric technique) for this earnest seventeenth-century reader. Most interesting in this respect are Sarah Cowper's alterations to, or intrusions into, the original text, often freeing short passages from their immediate Herbertian context and thus making them available for an autobiographical application by Cowper. There are several signs that she rendered the text personal by means of apparently negligible changes — for example, in her citing (p. 354) of the first four lines from "The Answer": My comforts drop and melt away like snow: I shake my head, and all the thoughts and ends, Which my fierce youth did bandie, fall and flow Like leaves about me. Herbert's original reference to "my fierce youth" in the third line is altered by Cowper into "my fine youth," "fine" perhaps being a more seemly adjective than "fierce" for a female speaker to employ in describing her own younger days. This brief taste of "The Answer" is immediately followed in the commonplace-book by the opening of "The Elixir," Teach me, my God and King, In all things thee to see, which in The Temple is nineteen poems distant. Cowper's chosen juxtaposition of the two extracts (without an intervening title) implies that she wished to learn to perceive God's presence — the plea in Herbert and Seventeenth-Century Women 203 "The Elixir" — even in the bitter loss of "comforts" described and brought close to home in the opening...

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