Who talks whose language? George Herbert and the reader’s world

Abstract

The poetic rhetoric of George Herbert, an outstanding explorer of the mental and emotional aspects of Anglican spirituality, seems particularly suited to the applications of cognitive theory. By what means does the poet centre his reader in a distinctive kind of mental space (to be termed ‘the heart-space’), reconciling Protestant anxieties about absolute dependence on God’s grace with the sense of a fully functioning, emotionally authentic human presence? Herbert’s use of deixis, metaphor and other space-structuring tropes constructs an implied reader who is both rooted in familiar experience and worldly wisdom and open to stress and surprise.