Recreating the Eye of the Beholder: Technopaegnia, Encrypted Reading, and a New Version of "Easter-wings"

Abstract:

George Herbert's "Easter-wings" is perhaps the best-known shape poem in the English language. As such, it has been the subject of intense and sustained scholarly scrutiny. With very few exceptions, however, critics have shown surprisingly little interest in contextualizing the poem in light of the Hellenistic tradition of shape poetry from which the Renaissance figure poem ultimately descends. In particular, no previous scholarly examination of the poem has taken into account the genre's penchant for encrypted reading and plural signification. In doing just this, the present essay uncovers another semantically coherent, arresting, "new" version of "Easter-wings" that has been hiding in plain sight all along, a combined "Easter-wings" that remains visible today in the poem's two surviving manuscript sources. Enlisting qualitative and quantitative approaches to analyzing Herbert's corrections in the palimpsestic backdrop of the only authorially supervised manuscript copy of The Temple, it finds that these authorial revisions exist with the primary (and hitherto unrecognized) purpose of better supporting a combined reading of the poem. Finally, by discussing some of the more pressing challenges facing future editors of The Temple, this essay also draws on and contributes to ongoing scholarship in textual criticism, material texts, and the history of the book.