‘ Frivolous Boyishe Grammer Schole Trickes ’
The two best-known pattern poems in English are ‘ The Altar ’ and ‘ Easter Wings ’ of the seventeenth-century devotional poet George Herbert , published in The Temple soon after his death in 1633 . Both poems consist of rhyming and scanning lines of verse arranged on the page to imitate their titular shapes — an altar , and two pairs of wings . The reader is therefore presented with a form of art that is at once pictorial and verbal .
The earliest readers of Herbert would know at once that this was not , at least in visual contrivance , something new , but a resuscitation of some famous Ancient Greek poems in exactly those two shapes , taken from of a small collection of six pattern poems that had travelled down the centuries as part of the classical tradition of pastoral and epigram . The pagan classical examples , however , were very hard to decipher , and what still strikes the reader about Herbert ’ s poems is their surface simplicity .
Early readers of Herbert would also know that he was not the first English poet to shape verse into altars and wings , and that he could equally have chosen to imitate the remaining classical forms of axes , pipes , or eggs . The heyday of such poetry really lay in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods ; if anything , Herbert came a little late to this kind of writing . As a fashion , it had crossed over from the continent in the early Elizabethan period in the person of a rather renegade Wykehamist , Richard Willes ( 1546 – 1579 ?). 1 Willes had attended Winchester College from 1558 , where he was heavily influenced by the schoolmaster and Neo-Latin poet Christopher Johnson ( c . 1536 – 1597 ). Willes proceeded to New College , but like many other Wykehamists of the old religion soon drifted abroad , where he was to be found first in Louvain , then Mainz , where he started
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