3. George Herbert, Man

Herbert’s poem Man, I think, perfectly demonstrates the main philosophic principle of the Renaissance - anthropocentrism, according to which  humans are the supreme purpose of the creation of the universe. Because the poem is rather simple I will only paraphrase it to foreground my understanding.

Addressing God, Herbert says that no one builds “a stately habitation” except those who are going to live there. He compares the creation of man by God to building a house, and there is nothing as beautiful in this world as a man, in whom God lives. Compared to man, “all things are in decay”, because “man is every thing”: a tree, a beast, and he also speaks. Thus man combines a vegetable, an animal and a spiritual nature. And parrots must thank man, because man taught them to speak.  Further, Herbert sinks into the anatomy of man. He glorifies man’s proportions, man is so neatly constructed, “one limb to another”, “for head and foot hath private amity”.

Man is so powerful, that “his eyes dismount the highest star”. Even herbs are created in order to cure  man. For man blow winds, “earth doth rest, heav’n move, and fountains flow”. All nature is either “our cupboard of food, or cabinet of pleasure”.Even stars and sun are created to serve us, even music and light. Waters are “our navigation”, “habitation”, “drink”, “meat”, or “cleanliness” depending on whether they are united or separated. Everything else in the universe is created for man. He has even more servants than he can “take notice of”, man even “treads down” those herbs that are created to cure him. In the last stanza Herbert glorifies God for creating such “a brave palace” and invites him to “dwell in it” so that a man could dwell in God too. And because man is “one world, and hath another to attend him”, Herbert asks God to “afford us so much wit” , that “as the world serves us” we may serve God. And both the world and man may God’s “servants be”.

    

Analysis:

     I did not notice that Herbert’s poetry generally suffers from the Renaissance anthropocentrism. Rather Herbert suffered from the instability of his own nature. For example, in The Windows Herbert says, “Lord, how can man preach thy eternal world? He is a brittle, crazy glass....”. In The Collar he “struck the board and cried ‘No more; I will abroad!”, by this expressing his unwillingness to serve God (maybe here we can witness the embryo of Herbert’s anthropocentrism, which will develop to its fullest in Man?). Yet, in the same poem, The Collar, Herbert ultimately returns to the right way: “But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild at every word, methoughts I heard one calling, Child! And I replied, My Lord.” In The Pulley he again proceeds to extol a man :”...So strength first made a way; the beauty flowed, then wisdom, honor, pleasure....”. 

     Despite the purely expressed religious character of the poem, we can trace in it the rudiments of a science, that developed during the Renaissance - astronomy. The line “his eyes dismount the highest star”, I would suggest, is a hint about a telescope, invented by the Italian Renaissance activist Giordano Bruno. (Although Bruno and Copernicus do not glorify the individual, but rather dissolve man in their pantheistic Universe; A.F. Losev argues that “all these directions of thought,  cosmographical and pantheistic, compared to the artistic individualism of the Renaissance, we can consider both a deviation from the mainstream Renaissance aesthetics and a particular modification of its aesthetics.” Oh well, it was just a lyrical digression). Yet this scientific discovery does not shake Herbert’s belief that even the stars are created for man, to “have us to bed”.

     The second stanza, however, alludes to Aristotle’s definition of “soul as form”: “A human soul is a form of a human being. Because the level  of transcendence changes we can say that there are different kinds of souls such as a vegetable souls (response), animal souls (sense knowledge) and human  (intellectual): capable of abstractions.”

     Herbert does not forget about other sciences that flourished during the Renaissance, such as geography (“waters united....[and] distinguished”), botany and medicine (“herbs gladly cure our flesh”), and anatomy (“one limb to another”).  In this poem Herbert appears as a true Renaissance humanist: very religious, he ventures into  freedom of thought, thus shaking off the ecclesiastical obscurantism of the Middle Ages, when man was not considered the essence of the Universe.