Comparing and Contrasting John Donne and George Herbert's Poetry

Through the ages, John Donne and George Herbert have been known as one of the best metaphysical English poets, and despite the fact that they had different styles and taste for poetry, both coincide in their art of mirroring their emotions to the rhythm, the meter and the rhyme scheme of their works, adding greater meaning and value to their masterpieces.

John Donne’s Batter My Heart and George Herbert’s The Collar are very similar in meaning because in both poems, the poets struggle with their faith, and although they have different conflicts, both end up submitting to the Lord.

At the beginning of the poem Batter My Heart, metaphysical poet John Donne declared his desire to be made new by God, even though he knew perfectly that this implied his being torn into pieces.  Then, passionately, he described the atrocity of his sin and compared it to a “usurp’d town to another due” and described himself as “betroth’d unto your enemy”, that is, God’s enemy. He admitted that he was in great need of God’s redemption, therefore he asked Him to divorce him from sin, for he felt engaged to Satan. And finally, the poet admitted that he would never be pure nor free unless God made him so.

Similarly to the first poem, The Collar by George Herbert, is about a man who was in desperate need for God, but who on the contrary, did not acknowledge this necessity for Him. The weary poet expressed his desire to obey no more; he said: “I will abroad.” He was going to cease lamenting and wondering with regret what his life would have looked like had he not walked in the ways of the Lord. All his life he had always been an obedient, submissive sheep, but now he regretted the times when he had had wine before him and did not try it; he remembered there were merry times, but he wasted them.  The poet was utterly convinced that his life was boring and full of forbearance from all the pleasures of this world, so he said: “Recover all thy sight-blown age On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute Of what is fit, and not. Forsake thy cage, Thy rope of sands.” He decided he was going to delight on double pleasures and forsake the ways of the Lord to whom he had devoted his life before. Joan Bennett comments on the meaning of this poem and says: “The Collar, which is this poem's title, is an emblem of servitude. The poem moves through rebellion against his Master to the sudden recognition that the freedom he is claiming is freedom from God's love: ‘But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild At every word, Me thought I heard one calling, Child! And I replied, My Lord.’ His poetry is not the record of quiet saintliness, but of continual wrestling and continual submission; the collar is not easily worn.”¹ 
            Despite the different approaches, we see that these poems are very similar in meaning. However, when it comes to vocabulary, emotion and tone, the poems display striking differences. In the poem Batter My Heart we are taken aback when in the last two sentences Donne expresses two strong paradoxes regarding the same subject. He says: “Except you enthral me, never shall [I] be free” which makes sense because human nature is always  slave to something, either to sin, or to righteousness (God).. Therefore the only way that we can be free from the bonds of Satan is if God makes us His slaves. The second paradox is yet more perplexing, for written with the same purpose and expressing the same idea, it has a deeper connotation, and at first glance appears repulsive. It says: “nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” Undoubtedly, Donne’s poems were meant to make a very strong impression on its readers.

The poem The Collar is evidently very rich in vocabulary as well, but instead of employing paradoxes, Herbert uses elaborate puns that we encounter even before the first line of poetry: in the very title. In the most basic line of meaning, a collar is a band that one uses to chain animals. In this poem, the poet is the animal being held captive in a cage and by a collar. However, the collar could also stand for a clerical collar that priests use to identify them as such. This should not surprise us because Herbert was a priest. But there is a greater meaning behind the title that we must uncover. The title “The Collar” could be re-written as “The Caller” or “the Calling” that God makes to draw him back to himself, displaying that he is not a divine lawgiver, but a tender, loving father.

Moreover, when scanning the poems there is a great contrast between Donne’s and Herbert’s style. For example, when scanning John Donne’s Batter My Heart we can see that he writes some words that are meant to be read slowly and emphatically such as “heart, Three-person’d God”,  “knock, breathe, shine” and “break, blow, burn.” Regarding these frequent instances of consecutive stressed words Josephine Miles says: “All these active verbs, these references to time and good, to body and soul, these addresses, these metered and firmly rhymed exhortations, make up the woof, the basic weave, of Donne's poetry. His theme of love, both earthly and divine, is given a body and a duration and a value by the explicit argument of the verse.”² Needless to say, Donne is using this emphatic rhythm to allude to the title “Batter My Heart” because these stressed words sound as if someone were actually stroking his heart repeatedly with a bat. These repetitions give the poem an emotional connotation, for he is mimicking, with the sound of the verse, what is actually happening to his soul, and this is precisely the action that must take place so that he can be made new.

In contrast to Batter My Heart, Herbert does not use a rhythm that resembles almost onomatopoeically the sound of the words, but instead, Herbert uses the rhythm in The Collar to resemble his ideas. The simplistic two-foot lines appear when he is pondering “all wasted?”or stating simple things like “I will abroad” and “away; take heed.”

When comparing and contrasting the rhyme scheme, we notice that the first part of the poem Batter My Heart is quite orderly. The poem is certainly made up of approximate rhymes; however, it follows a pattern of A-B-B-C-C-D-D in the first stanza. Then, in the second stanza, everything becomes mindless of rhyme until it reaches a strikingly perfect G-G rhyme at the end. Doubtless, this structure was made intentionally to portray the author’s emotions from within as he moves in a transition from his desire to be made new, the despicability of his sin, and his helplessness that finds an answer in God.

            Regarding rhyme scheme as well, I personally divide the poem The Collar into three separate parts. When Herbert is describing his dilemma, there is chaos in the rhyme scheme, which certainly resembles his troubled mind. Then, when he is making up his mind to break the chain that has held him captive to the ways of God, his rhyme scheme is still a disaster, however, we see that his lines are almost in steady meter. Finally, after he appears completely armed with every possible argument to apostate the divine law, he suddenly gives up as he remotely hears God calling him “child”, thus the poem ends with perfect iambic meter and an A-B-A-B regular, rhyme scheme.

In respect to meter, not surprisingly, the two poems coincide in almost everything as the authors are trying to portray the restlessness of their souls. Like a genuinely troubled person, the author of Batter My Heart did not do the slightest effort to write the poem in iambic pentameter. In fact, almost half of the poem is submerged into what I would call a mess in meter because there are lines with three and a-half feet, four and a-half feet, and five and a-half feet. And there are only a few lines that are written in decent iambic pentameter. This irregularity in meter is even more evidence of the parallelism between the meaning of the poem and the structure of the poem itself.  And, as expected, in the last two lines we can appreciate perfect meter which attests to the fact that the author is back in harmony with his soul because he rests assured that God will answer his plea. There is no doubt that the arrangement in meter throughout the poem is intentional.

Regarding meter in the poem The Collar, we see that despite the fact that it initiates with a few anapests such as “as the road” and “but a thorn” the poem turns out to be basically iambic. However, we should not be surprised that when Herbert starts to uncoil his line of reason, the poem structure also breaks down into chaos. No longer do we see iambic pentameters, but we encounter two-iamb foots almost every other line starting from the second stanza all the way to the very end.

To be sure, both poems are divided into three main parts. The first is somewhat orderly in rhyme scheme, meter and rhythm, then the second part is complete chaos, but the third part is peaceful. This was how the brilliant metaphysical poets John Donne and George Herbert decided to structure their poems and how, despite their differences in style, they successfully breathed life into their works.

Works Cited Page

1.      Joan Bennett, Four Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, 2nd ed. [book on-line] (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1953, accessed 28 November 2011), 54; available from Questia, http://www.questiaschool.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=34662703; Internet.

2.      Josephine Miles, Eras & Modes in English Poetry [book on-line] (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1957, accessed 28 November 2011), 23; available from Questia, http://www.questiaschool.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=165121; Internet.

i>Qu � a / ` G x�G 10 Dec. 2011.

Roy Walker, The Time Is out of Joint: A Study of Hamlet (London: Andrew Dakers, 1948) 19, Questia, Web, 11 Dec. 2011.

W. Thomas MacCary, Hamlet A Guide to the Play (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998) 83, Questia, Web, 11 Dec. 2011.

div;bo? � : o ` G x�G 1.0pt;mso-border-alt: solid white .25pt;padding:0cm 0cm 0cm 31.0pt;margin-left:-36.0pt;margin-right: 0cm'>

G. L. Kittredge 1939, xviii-xix, cited in  Coursen, H. R. Macbeth A Guide to the Play. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. Book on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questiaschool.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=15348086. Internet. Accessed 16 September 2011.

Coursen, H. R. Macbeth A Guide to the Play. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. Book on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questiaschool.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=15348086. Internet. Accessed 16 September 2011.

Bloom, Harold, ed. William Shakespeare''s Macbeth. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Book on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questiaschool.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=98109508. Internet. Accessed 16 September 2011.