![]() Rather wonderfully, the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert was – or believed himself to be – a distant descendant of his namesake George. Then shall the fall further the flight in me.Īffliction shall advance the flight in me. Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store, George Herbert’s Easter Wings, for instance, has two stanzas set out by the typographer to resemble the shape of a dove’s wings. ![]() The middle eight lines are considerably shorter than those before and after them. ![]() It is a shape poem, meaning that the lines of text are arranged on the page to form an image. The word ‘imp’ in the last lines, by the way, means to graft… ‘ The Altar’ by George Herbert is a sixteen line poem that is contained within one stanza of text. Here each stanza shortens its lines towards a terse bisyllabic centre, from which they then expand outwards again to complete the pair of wings, an image of the potential (God-assisted) human state, of the wings of angels, perhaps of the contracting and expanding of the human heart. It is a fine example of ‘pattern poetry’ or shaped verse, in which the lines assume a form that illustrates and expresses the meaning of the poem. These stanzas give new meaning to the phrase, A pictures worth a thousand wordsor, in the case of 'Easter Wings,' 96 (yes, we counted). No same-old left-aligned vanilla-flavored poems in Herberts Easter basket. For Easter Sunday, here is Easter Wings, from the great religious poet and all but saintly priest George Herbert. So the most obvious thing about the form of 'Easter Wings' is that it actually has a physical form. ![]()
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