Herbert's "Easter Wings" is part of a fascinating tradition in poetry whereby poets attempt to add a visual or  spacial dimension to their work to combine sound, meaning and form in one whole.

Herbert plays a central role in the seventeenth century group of poets called the Metaphysicals, noted particularly for their combining of the passionate and the divine.  As an extension of the kinds of intellectual or sensual associations that poetry encourages, here Herbert sets up a simple image of wings (viewed sideways, which is the way the poems were originally printed) to evoke the full range of symbolic association of freedom, flight or power that he links to Christ's Easter sacrifice.

Some students, have also noted that while the stanzas seen one way are wings, seen the other way they are hourglasses.  Some critics have suggested that was an intentional layer of association set up by Herbert.  The hourglass, after all, is perhaps the most potent image we have of time fleeting, and thus of our own mortality.  Those sands are always running, until the very moment that our time is up.  It is only a small step of imagination to move from images of  our own mortality to questions about the disposition of the human soul afterwards.

He combines the image associations with the themes of man's collapse through original sin ("most thin" to the redeeming moment of crucifixion and the accompanying flapping of wings through the vigorous "f" alliteration at the end of each stanza and the freeing rise of spirit (Christ's,  man's and the bird/angel), "then shall the fall further the flight in me."

The danger with visual, or shape, poems is that they tend to be trite; to invest so heavily in the image that the rest of the poem might suffer, or, at worst, appear contrived.  Herbert avoids that weakness by aiming at a shape with symbolic resonance that actually enhances the embedded themes in his poem.  The image becomes a  simple and direct symbolic trigger for the personal and religious contexts of his poem. 

What are the symbolic associations of  "wings"?  How  are those associations modified by the word Easter?

What condition or state of mind is located at the beginning of each stanza?  How  does that change as the lines get shorter and narrower?

What change of condition accompanies the fall and rise of the lines and what specific (literal) event is Herbert mapping in his poetry?

Click here to go back to the discussion on Donne.  Click here to go on to look at a more sensual kind of rhetoric in Marvell´s Coy Mistress.