East­er is round the cor­ner once again so it’s per­haps time for a themed blog, and this week I’m tak­ing a look at the “shaped” poem East­er Wings by 17ᵗʰ cen­tu­ry poet and the­olo­gian George Her­bert. “Shape” poet­ry, AKA “con­crete” poet­ry or “pat­tern” poet­ry, is a form of visu­al poet­ry in which the words are arranged into a rel­e­vant shape, mim­ic­k­ing the poem’s sense. For exam­ple, in Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land, Lewis Car­roll includes a quirky poem fea­tur­ing a mouse, shaped into the tail of a mouse (and known, pun­ning­ly, as The Mouse’s Tale):

On the face of it, shape poet­ry is indeed “quirky” and clear­ly lends itself to kids’ poet­ry or to some light-heart­ed test­ing of one’s cre­ative met­tle. How­ev­er, the con­cept dates to way, way back: the Renais­sance brought to light sev­er­al poems from ancient Greece of just such a genre, for exam­ple Sim­mias of Rhodes and his poem Wings (c. 300BC), arranged on the page to dis­play a pair of wings:

We assume that George Her­bert (1593–1633) would have been aware of the Sim­mias poem from the Greek Anthol­o­gy (a col­lec­tion of Greek poet­ry, wide­ly avail­able in schol­ar­ly cir­cles). His own attempt in Eng­lish, East­er Wings, was orig­i­nal­ly for­mat­ted sim­i­lar­ly to the above, i.e. writ­ten side­ways on fac­ing pages, which was the tra­di­tion of ancient Greek shape poet­ry, but now it’s com­mon­ly pre­sent­ed hor­i­zon­tal­ly so we can read it prop­er­ly.

Tech­ni­cal­ly, Her­bert has opened the poem with a stan­dard iambic pen­tame­ter line (5 “feet” or pairs of syl­la­bles, da dum), the sec­ond line is in tetram­e­ter (4 feet), the third trime­ter (3 feet), the fourth dime­ter (you get the idea)…then the lines build back up again to pen­tame­ter in the final line of each stan­za.

As for the sub­ject of the poem, the first stan­za deals with the Fall of Man in the first half (“lost”, “decay­ing”, “poore”), whilst in the sec­ond half the nar­ra­tor direct­ly asks God to draw him up (on angel’s wings?). The sec­ond stan­za is about the nar­ra­tor’s state of sin but also the con­cept of redemp­tion of human­i­ty through Jesus Christ, the route from alien­ation to sal­va­tion, iso­la­tion to com­mu­nion.

Lord, who cre­at­edst man in wealth and store,
      Though fool­ish­ly he lost the same,
            Decay­ing more and more,
                  Till he became
                        Most poore:
                        With thee
                  O let me rise
            As larks, har­mo­nious­ly,
      And sing this day thy vic­to­ries:
Then shall the fall fur­ther the flight in me.

My ten­der age in sor­row did beginne
      And still with sick­ness­es and shame.
            Thou didst so pun­ish sinne,
                  That I became
                        Most thinne.
                        With thee
                  Let me com­bine,
            And feel thy vic­to­rie:
         For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Afflic­tion shall advance the flight in me.