Commentary

The timing of Whitsunday (also known as Pentecost) is probably related, like other Anglican church festivals, to pre-Christian celebrations - in this case, marking the start of Summer. It was natural and convenient for traditional holidays and festivities to be adopted for the religious calendar and, to this day, many ancient fairs and customs occur during Whitsuntide. Other religions have similar events in their calendar.

For Christians, Whisunday effectively celebrates the foundation of their church - the revelation of the Holy Spirit to the disciples, giving them the power to preach in many tongues. It is one of three special Sundays marked by George Herbert with an individual poem - the others are 'Easter' and 'Trinity Sunday'. 'Whitsunday' was almost certainly revised at Bemerton; in the earlier Williams manuscript, the opening three stanzas are substantially the same as this published version, but the following three are entirely different. However, Herbert's overall message is common to both versions - a plea to re-energise the church's zeal in spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The dove has long been associated with Whitsun as representing the Holy Spirit, and is used by Herbert in the first stanza to demonstrate how much he yearns for his soul to be uplifted like those of the apostles. The second stanza bemoans what he sees as the falling away of the energy which drove them following the divine revelation of Whitsun. He stresses that the word was then spread far and wide ('all comers') and implies that the church subsequently sat back and lost its enthusiasm for bringing Christianity to others.

In the third and fourth stanzas, Herbert's metaphysical credentials are on show. He prays in aid the earth, the stars and the sun to illustrate how significant the work of the apostles was in enlightening the world about Christianity. And as he does in many of his poems, he uses the 'sunne/son' pun to reinforce his message.

But in the fifth stanza, Herbert identifies the martyrdom of the saints as the reason for the dimming of the flame and reflects that, in persecuting Christianity, the world had cut itself off from divine Grace. He uses the symbolism of Christ's side pierced on the cross to demonstrate the significance of the loss.

And now, in stanzas six and seven, Herbert transitions to one of his typical conversations with God and, as so often, it takes the form of a complaint followed by a plea. Clearly he feels that the confession and absolution of sins, while important, do not provide sufficient day-to-day evidence of God's investment in mankind, and he begs for a return of the type of blazing revelation that motivated the apostles. This, he believes, would once again fire up the church's evangelical furnace.

Some commentators have seen this poem as reflecting and foreshadowing 'The Church Militant', the third part of 'The Temple'. In Herbert's view, the church must not rest on its laurels but must constantly strive to expose the wider world to the Christian message. Here, he takes the dramatic events of Whitsuntide as a way of emphasizing the point.