George Herbert
George Herbert’s volume of devotional lyrics, The Temple (1633), is the most obvious model for Pulter’s devotional lyrics, both this one and those listed as comparisons in another Curation for this poem, “Devotional Lyrics.”
The Temple was enormously widely read in the seventeenth century, and it was very popular with women, who read, copied, recommended, and imitated the volume. Helen Wilcox describes:
‘You that Indeared are to Pietie:’ Herbert and Seventeenth-Century Women
Evidence of women’s involvement at all stages of the transmission and reception of a text: copying the original manuscript, recommending the printed work and distributing copies of it, being advised that it was appropriate reading matter for women, reading it or having it read to them, learning from its spiritual authority or through adaptations of its moral phrases, selecting and copying parts of it into a commonplace-book, echoing its aesthetic and its language in their own poetic writings. This is a remarkable range of activities, but what do they have in common? I would suggest that they share a sense that the devotional mode of The Temple could be made their own, whether in writing lyrics on the love of God or woman, or absorbing phrases and attitudes into the texts of their own lives.
Wilcox expands her discussion of women and George Herbert’s poems in “Entering The Temple: Women, Reading, and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540-1688, ed. by Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 187-207.