Virtue for 9th std

“Virtue” is one of the poems in a collection of verse called The Temple (1633), which George Herbert wrote during the last three years of his life. By then, he had taken holy orders in the Anglican Church and become rector in Bemerton, England, near Salisbury. Herbert's poems are lyrical and harmonious, reflecting the gentle voice of a country parson spreading the Christian message. He appreciates the beauty of creation not only for its own sake but also because he sees it as a mirror of the goodness of the Creator. Yet, despite Herbert's sense of the world's loveliness, his poems often reflect the transience of that beauty and the folly of investing it with any real value. In “Virtue,” he presents a vision of an eternal world beyond the one available to sense perception.

Line by line explanation

The circle of life pertains to all living things, including plants, animals, and humans. All things grow from virtually nothing into fully realized beings, and then they eventually grow older and die. This is a natural process. In George Hebert’s Virtue, the author evokes nature imagery as a metaphor for the circle of life. By comparing human life to the day, roses, spring and timber, Hebert makes a statement about how life and death are connected to one another, and about how this cycle is part of nature itself.

The first stanza is the poet author’s opinion of the day. This day is idyllic - he describes it as being “so cool, so calm, so bright”. With a few carefully chosen words Hebert allows the audience to envision a grand, unfolding landscape of trees, grass and puffy clouds as the sun glimmers in the midday sky. This is Hebert’s view of life. It is like the perfect day - bright, calm, and ideal. The day is so perfect, in fact, that it is “the bridal of the earth and sky”. Hebert compares the day to a joyous occasion – a wedding (ideally, a joining of two well-suited partners - in this case the earth and sky). Weddings are a part of the circle of life for many people. The small droplets of dew on the grass and plants can easily be compared to tears. The tears of “dew” are an appropriate transition from the joyous “bridal” of the day (tears of joy are common at weddings) to the “fall to-night”, as the fall to-night symbolizes death (tears are also quite common at funerals). Night is the natural opposite day, as death is the opposite of life.

The second stanza utilizes plant imagery to reinforce the life and death cycle. The rose is easily pictured in one’s mind, with its red petals and green, thorny stem. Hebert does not state that the flower is red, but the audience knows this by the description of the hue being “angry and brave”. These are qualities typically associated with the colour red. This rose commands the viewer to “wipe his eye”. The beauty of the rose is undeniable. However, “thy root is ever in its grave” implies that everything, even the beautiful rose, eventually withers and dies. The plants grow from the soil, and everything, including human beings, return to the soil after death. This implies that all life is connected (or “rooted”) to death.

The third stanza states that spring

is “full of sweet days and roses”. Spring encompasses all those things previously mentioned by the poet author. The days of spring are calm and bright. Spring is typically a time of rebirth, where plants (such as roses) and trees begin to grow again after their deaths in the winter, and animals come out of hibernation and start reproducing. The seasons are therefore representative of the circle of life. Spring implies birth and new life, however, spring always turns into summer, and then fall, and then finally winter, when all the plants die and animals go into hibernation.

The final stanza compares the “sweet and virtuous” soul to “seasoned timber”. Trees, while living, are constantly expanding and growing, while giving off seeds for new trees. However, the reference to the dried timber implies that the tree is already dead. The soul lives on after the body is dead, and trees live on after they are dead as the timber that we use. It is a different incarnation of the same substance, just as the soul is a different incarnation of humanity.

Day always turns to night. Seeds grow into beautiful flowers and then always wither and die. Spring always turns to summer, then fall, and finally winter. Trees live on after they die as the lumber we use to build things with. All living things will eventually die. Hebert’s Virtue implies, however, that the soul lives on after death, just as timber does. This reflection on the circle of life celebrates the joy of life despite an awareness of impending death, and positively reinforces that in some incarnation, life may continue after death.

Implicit in “Virtue” is a delicately expressed struggle between rebellion and obedience. The understated conflict lies between the desire to experience worldly pleasures and the desire—or as Herbert would insist, the need—to surrender to the will of God. The battle waged between rebellion and obedience can be seen more clearly in one of the best-known poems in The Temple, “The Collar.” Therein, the poet “raves” against the yoke of submission that he must bear until he hears the voice of God call him “child”; then, he submissively yields, as the poem ends with the invocation “My Lord!” This conclusion indicates that what the narrator feels about the experience of the natural world is of less authenticity than an inner voice of authority that directs him toward God.

Herbert's poetry displays a conjunction of intellect and emotion. Carefully crafted structures, like the first three quatrains, or four-line stanzas, of “Virtue,” all of which are similarly formed, contain sensuously perceived content, like depictions of daytime, nightfall, a rose, and spring. Such a combination of intellect and emotion, in which the two forces, expressed in bold metaphors and colloquial language, struggle with and illuminate each other, is most apparent in the poetry of one of Herbert's contemporaries, John Donne, and is called metaphysical poetry. In “Virtue,” an example of this combination of the intellectual and the sensuous can be seen in the second line of the third quatrain, when the spring is compared to a box of compressed sweets.

In “Virtue,” which comprises four quatrains altogether, Herbert reflects on the loveliness of the living world but also on the reality of death. Building momentum by moving from the glory of a day to the beauty of a rose to the richness of springtime, while reiterating at the end of each quatrain that everything “must die,” Herbert leads the reader to the last, slightly varied quatrain. There, the cherished thing is not a tangible manifestation of nature but the intangible substance of “a sweet and virtuous soul.” When all else succumbs to death, the soul “then chiefly lives.” Not through argument but through an accumulation of imagery, Herbert contrasts the passing glories of the mortal world with the eternal glory of the immortal soul and thereby distinguishes between momentary and eternal value.

“Virtue” and many other poems from The Temple can be found in Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry, edited by Alexander M. Witherspoon and Frank J. Warnke and published by Harcourt, Brace & World, in 1963.